Gestanius stalked several paces into the cavern. Then she stopped abruptly, as if she’d sensed something or wondered if she had.
“How much farther?” she asked. Buzzing sparks and tiny lightning bolts crawled and arced on the double- pointed horn on her snout and the hornlets on her brow ridges. For those who could see nothing else, beholding the flickering must be somewhat like looking at a dragon-shaped constellation in the night sky.
“We’re nearly there,” Praxasalandos replied. He’d told Gestanius that he’d killed intruders in the tunnels as he was supposed to but that one of them had turned out to be a gold dragon shapeshifted into Imaskari form. The blue was coming to see if she could see identify the body. “In fact, we are there.”
“What do you mean?” Gestanius asked, looking around in vain for torn and mangled corpses.
Biri whispered words of power and flicked her wand back and forth as though leading a band of musicians. Medrash gripped his steel-gauntlet medallion and breathed a prayer to Torm. Elsewhere in the chamber, Khouryn knew, other spellcasters were raising and shaping power in their own fashions.
And maybe Gestanius heard the whispering or simply felt magic smoldering in the air because she suddenly craned her neck and twisted her head one way then the other. “Something-” she began.
Prax whirled and blasted her with a silvery plume of his breath. The vapor washed across her eyes, and she roared in shock and pain.
At the same time, a golden shimmer abruptly filled the opening through which the dragons had entered, and crackling flames leaped up to fill the exit on the opposite wall. Floating orbs of glowing power popped into existence to provide additional light.
Warriors howled battle cries. Crossbows clacked and quarrels thrummed through the air. Some glanced off Gestanius’s scales but others stuck. Khouryn discharged his own arbalest then grabbed his axe, leaped to his feet, and charged down the steep slope that descended from the shelf to the cavern floor.
It was a reckless, sliding scramble, but Medrash, Balasar, and others rushed along right beside him. For the moment Gestanius was slow with amazement and dazzled and sick from the poisonous kiss of Prax’s breath. Her enemies needed to press the advantage while they had it.
An Imaskari wizard splashed yellow fire across the tops of Gestanius’s wings. A stray wisp of Praxasalandos’s breath weapon stung Khouryn’s nose and filled his mouth with a nasty, metallic taste. He twisted his head and spat without breaking stride.
Then the stone beneath him started shaking, knocking him off balance and making him stumble. For a moment he assumed that one of his wizard allies had cast a spell that was causing the quaking. Then he recognized the distinctive rhythm of the vibration.
He sucked in a breath to yell a warning. But before he could get it out, a purple worm burst up out of the floor, its emergence flinging bits of rock through the air.
It was hard to be sure with the back end of it still in the burrow, but the creature looked as huge as Gestanius herself. Rearing like a serpent, it swiveled its head this way and that. That head, though bigger than a dwarf or man, was small in proportion to its possessor’s thick, leechlike body, and it was all jaws, with protruding tusks above and below. But Khouryn knew the lack of eyes wouldn’t keep the beast from orienting on its prey.
He had time to wonder if, mistrusting Praxasalandos, Gestanius had commanded the purple worm to shadow them or if it was just exceptionally rotten luck that had placed the creature within easy reach of its mistress’s psychic call. He wondered too if the magical barriers emplaced to hold the blue in the killing box might now ensure the slaughter of every last dragonborn, Imaskari, and stray dwarf instead. Then the worm decided on its target and, jaws gaping wide, plunged down at him like a mudslide.
Alasklerbanbastos stalked through the tunnels and lava tubes under Dragonback Mountain, and his anger intensified with every stride.
Zombies and other guardians lay charred and ripped where Tchazzar had destroyed them on his way to the deepest vaults. Here and there, coins and even a gem or two lay amid the carnage, dropped when the red or his servants were hauling treasure out.
The latter warned Alasklerbanbastos what to expect at the heart of the mountain, so he considered not going there at all. But he wanted to see the empty chamber where, century after century, he’d amassed his hoard. He knew the sight would feed his hatred.
And so it did. In fact, it maddened him. Crackling, the flashes painting the walls, arcs of lightning danced across his flayed, decaying flesh. He raised his head and gave a roar that echoed away through the plundered lair.
He likewise felt compelled to look at the smaller chamber that had held his phylactery, even though there was no practical reason for that either. Perhaps he hoped to find some indication of how Tchazzar had found and opened it despite the layered illusions and wards. But there was nothing to see except black stains of soot on the walls.
Well, the violation at least didn’t matter. Alasklerbanbastos walked the earth and owned his own soul again despite the worst his enemies could do. True, he was a feeble thing compared to what he once had been, but he was about to remedy that because Tchazzar and any other scavengers who’d looted the vaults hadn’t stolen everything.
He stalked back to one of the larger chambers and fixed his eyes on the wall. Hissing an incantation, he used a talon to scratch runes on the floor. Sparks danced and sizzled on each of the runes as they did on his body.
Drawn by the accumulating power, petty spirits whispered to one another. White fungus grew across a section of the ceiling, and rudimentary faces took shape in the furry mass. The wall on which Alasklerbanbastos had focused his will grew soft as wax, and enormous bones slid out and dropped, clattering, to the floor.
The lair contained dozens of dragon bodies laid up against the day when he might need another. But before him was the best of them. Before Alasklerbanbastos engineered his demise, Faarinnjaallafon had been a blue as ancient and huge as himself, the terror of a land so distant that few folk in Faerun had ever even heard its name.
When the last bone had crawled forth, they all lay in a big mound on the floor. Alasklerbanbastos chanted different rhymes, and the sections of skeleton floated into the air one and two at a time. The truesilver and dark- iron hinges attached to the ends clinked and rang as they secured one bone to the next like the pieces of an enormous puzzle.
As the last bone locked itself to its neighbors, Alasklerbanbastos refocused his will. Up until then, the working had been easy enough for a necromancer of his caliber. The last part would be harder.
Moving with ceremonial slowness and exactitude, he set the shadow stone on the floor between the skeleton and himself. Then he resumed his chanting. He wasn’t trying to speak any louder than before, but the charge of dark magic in the words made them boom like thunder all by itself. The rock around him shook and cracked.
As the final word echoed, he spit his breath weapon.
But it wasn’t just lightning. He spewed forth himself: mind, magic, and the pure, raging essence of a storm all mingled together. Calabastasingavor’s husk collapsed behind him, and he hung, blazing and crackling, in the air.
Untethered from coarse matter, he felt the void tugging at him. A door had opened in the unseen architecture of the world, and Nature wanted him to pass through in the common fashion of the dead.
But Nature was weak compared to his will and his wizardry. He thrust himself forward and hurtled into the core of the shadow gem like an arrow driving into a bull’s-eye.
Once there, he was no longer conscious of having a ghostly, burning form or any form at all. He was simply consciousness suspended in emptiness. But that was all right. He was safe there and no longer felt death’s pull. He was free to catch his breath-metaphorically speaking-and prepare for the final stage of his transformation.
When he was ready, he reached out with a mode of perception that was neither squinting, blurry sight nor groping, fumbling touch but vaguely akin to both. He found Faarinnjaallafon’s skeleton and launched himself in its direction.
He took possession of the skeleton with the brightest flash and the loudest thunderclap yet, both blasting forth from the core of him. Others followed, one after another, fast as the beats of a racing heart.
Finally the flares and the cacophony subsided. He tried to spread his wings, and rattling a little, they
