Balasar grinned. “It sounds like we’re getting to the part where we get to have some fun.”
Khouryn snorted. “That’s one way of putting it. Majesty, I remember when you asked High Imaskar for help against the giants. They said they couldn’t give it because creatures out of the Purple Dust were attacking their lands. According to Alasklerbanbastos, that, too, is a part of the game. A dragon named Gestanius created the crisis to cut you off from help.”
“The same Gestanius who was Skuthosin and Tchazzar’s ally hundreds of years ago?” Biri asked.
Khouryn shrugged. “I’m no authority on dragons, but that would be my guess. The important thing is, Alasklerbanbastos told my friends where to find Gestanius, and Jhesrhi told me. If some of us go to High Imaskar, join forces with the locals, and kill her, the attacks will stop, freeing up the Imaskari to come to your aid in return.”
“So if everything works,” Medrash said, “Tchazzar loses an ally, and we gain one. And faced with such a radical shift in the balance of power, he ought to call off the invasion.”
“Even if he doesn’t,” Khouryn said, “you’ll be in a much better position to fight him. By the Twin Axes, even if only half the plan works, you’re still better off.”
Dokaan shook his head. It made the little steel antlers glint. “Majesty, I don’t like it.”
“Why not?” Tarhun asked.
“Because it’s all based on the presumption that Alasklerbanbastos, who isn’t just a dragon but an infamous, undead one, told Captain Fezim and his companions the truth.”
“They had the means to wring it out of him,” Khouryn replied.
“Are you certain of that?” Dokaan asked. “Do you truly understand the magic involved?”
Khouryn shook his head. “Not a bit of it. But Jhesrhi said she does, and that’s good enough for me.”
“And I trust your judgment,” Tarhun said. “It was sound during the campaign against the giants. Still, I understand why Dokaan is reluctant to see anyone dispatched on such a… speculative mission. We’re likely to need every warrior we have to stand against the invaders.”
“Maybe not every warrior,” Medrash said. “The soldiers of the Platinum Cadre fought well against the giants, but the rest of the army still doesn’t trust them very far. That could limit their usefulness on this side of the sea. So why don’t Khouryn and I take them to High Imaskar?”
“Dokaan,” Tarhun said, “do you agree that’s a reasonable plan?”
Dokaan shrugged. “Medrash is right. They fought pretty well. Still, if we have to excuse somebody from a fight with a dragon, it might as well be our company of dragon worshipers.”
“I ask to be excused too,” Balasar said. “Medrash, Khouryn, and I made a good team before.” He grinned. “I supplied the brains and panache, and they, the… well, I’m sure there was something.”
Tarhun snorted. “Fine, you can go too.”
“And me?” Biri asked.
Balasar turned back around to face her. “My lady, don’t you think you’re needed here? There aren’t many dragonborn mages, whereas High Imaskar is a land of wizards. When we get there, we’ll have all we need.”
“Yes,” she said, “when you get there. But I’m under the impression that every moment counts. And I have some power over wind and weather. I can ensure a speedy voyage.”
“That sounds good to me,” Medrash said.
“And to me,” Tarhun said. “Fetch Nellis Saradexma,” who, Khouryn recalled, was the Imaskari ambassador. “He can go too to speed things along when you reach your destination.”
Selune’s silvery light seemed incapable of penetrating the depths of the gorge. It was as though the aura of death and despair emanating from the bottom held it at bay.
There was power in that feeling, and if he were still wearing his old body, Alasklerbanbastos would simply have plunged into the crevasse to claim it for his own. Now, however, he had to consider the possibility that something else, something capable of harming the diminished creature his enemies had made of him, had gotten there first. And so, hating it, he crawled warily down the precipitous wall of the crevasse.
Like most undead, he could see in the dark, although not as far as a man could see by day, and he soon discerned that when the Spellplague raged and the earth convulsed, that crack had opened and swallowed a town. Most of the buildings lay broken and half buried at the bottom. Although, looking as if a breath would suffice to dislodge them, a few houses clung to the sides.
Something fluttered. Alasklerbanbastos looked around. Birds, or things like the shadows of the birds, were landing on the roof of the nearest house. They didn’t seem to be flying in from somewhere else so much as taking shape from the ambient gloom, and it was only the attitude of their bodies that told the dracolich they were looking back at him. He couldn’t pick out a gleam of eyes or a hint of feathery texture anywhere on their vague, almost flat- looking forms.
He considered blasting them with his breath. But so far, they weren’t doing anything hostile, and perhaps they wouldn’t. He was still a dracolich, after all, a being most creatures feared to provoke. So he simply continued his descent, and the ghostly flock simply kept pace with him, flying from one broken rooftop to the next.
When he reached the bottom, he could feel a gradation in the palpable memory of anguish. It festered on every side but was foulest in the direction of the fortresslike temple of Helm the Watcher, lying on its side. Alasklerbanbastos surmised that many of the townsfolk had fled there to pray for succor when the upheavals began, and there they’d perished when it never came.
Picking his way through rubble and bones, Alasklerbanbastos headed in that direction. The black birds divided. They still kept pace with him, but some flew and perched to the right, and the rest, to the left.
Then other creatures, similarly murky but somewhat manlike, came out of the dark. Those bearing scythes stalked from behind cover. Others simply flickered into view. All barred the path to the temple.
Once again, Alasklerbanbastos felt the urge simply to smite the impudent mites, and once again he held it in check. “Who commands here?” he asked. “I assure you, it’s in your best interest to parley with me.”
Yet another dark figure emerged from behind the others. But this one had scalloped wings like Alasklerbanbastos’s own sprouting from his shoulder blades, spindly horns like the points of a jagged diadem jutting from his head, and round, luminous red eyes. The dragon could just make out a few of the runes engraved on the blade of the newcomer’s scythe.
That was enough to confirm that the creatures were sorrowsworn, haunters of sites where mortals had perished in pain, in terror, and in quantity. Alasklerbanbastos had assumed as much, but the things resembled a number of other denizens of the netherworld, and it was always better to be sure.
“You’re intruding on a sacred place,” the deathlord said.
For an instant Alasklerbanbastos wondered what deity or quasi-deity the sorrowsworn served, then decided he didn’t care. “A useful place,” he replied. “I need to borrow it for a while.”
“No,” the deathlord said.
“I need to tap the kind of power a place like this provides. I promise to leave it as I found it.”
“No,” the red-eyed creature repeated, then hesitated, as though deciding how much more he wanted to say. “Something seeks to be born in the house of the fallen god. It was conceived forty years ago and must gestate undisturbed for twenty more. Leave now while-”
Alasklerbanbastos spit a crackling flare of lightning. The deathlord floundered backward, jerking in a spastic dance.
But when the lightning flickered out of existence, he didn’t collapse. Instead, his seared flesh smoking, he screamed a command in a language that even Alasklerbanbastos didn’t recognize.
The shadowravens instantly hurtled at the dracolich from all sides. By itself, each little peck of a beak or scratch of a talon would have been insignificant, but dozens every instant were a different matter. Worse, the birds flapping around his head all but blinded and deafened him, allowing the sorrowsworn to advance unopposed. Scythes sliced along his ribs, the blades bumping and catching on his bones.
He swept his head from side to side and burned shadowravens out of the air with an arc of lightning. Or rather, he tried. In his old body, he could have used his breath weapon several times before depleting it, but in his new one, he’d exhausted it with a single exhalation.
A shock ripped through the base of his neck. One of his foes-the deathlord, he suspected-had driven a scythe
