responded exactly as they should. The meld of mind and physical form was perfect.
Perfect and intoxicating because he could feel that he was finally, truly the Great Bone Wyrm once more, every bit as strong as he had ever been. And how he would make his foes regret it!
The only problem, he thought with a twinge of humor, was deciding where to begin. For there were so many enemies whose deeds cried out for revenge.
Perhaps the way to choose was to assess how vengeance could best work in the service of his other goals. And when he considered his situation in those terms, he knew where to go next.
Khouryn leaped aside, and the purple worm’s fangs clashed shut in the spot where he’d just been standing. He stepped in, swung his axe, and gashed one of bulges that ran down the length of the creature’s body.
The riposte should have been safe. By rights, the worm shouldn’t have been able to twist the neckless nub of a head at the end of its thick form far enough to threaten him anew. But somehow it did. The jaws opened wide, revealing the fanglike protrusions that lined the mouth all the way back and on down the throat. The spikes heaved and rippled with a kind of peristalsis, and a hot, rotten stench poured forth.
The creature’s head jumped at him. Khouryn tried to dodge, and his boot landed on something slippery. He lurched off balance and felt a jolt of terror at the likely consequences. Then a hand clutched his shoulder and jerked. It was just enough to drag him out of harm’s way, and the enormous fangs grated as they once again snapped shut on empty air.
Medrash had let his sword dangle from its martingale to take hold of him. The paladin tossed his arm and caught the weapon by the hilt as it flipped upward. “Have you fought these before?” he asked.
“A couple times,” Khouryn said. “It takes a lot of cutting.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Balasar said, advancing on the creature with his buckler extended and his sword high. “Because there are two of them.”
Khouryn snarled an obscenity. He wanted to glance around and determine where the other worm had popped up-and determine what Gestanius was doing, for that matter-but then the first worm resumed moving, and he realized it could easily mean his death to look away.
The creature finished writhing out of its hole and struck at Medrash simultaneously. He blocked with his shield and must have channeled some of Torm’s power to do it, or the impact would have knocked him off his feet. Probably hoping to reach some vulnerable or tender part, he stepped in close and slashed at the inside of the worm’s mouth. The beast recoiled, jerking its head back, up, and out of the dragonborn’s reach.
But the creature immediately twisted and bit at one of the Platinum Cadre warriors. The fellow interposed his targe as Medrash had, and it saved his life. But the worm’s teeth clanged shut on the edges of the shield and wrenched it away. The jerk had surely either broken or dislocated the dragonborn’s arm, and he dropped his mace and reeled backward. The worm swallowed the targe.
“Squads!” Khouryn bellowed. “Flank it! Like fighting anything big! Like I taught you!”
Warriors scrambled to form up. Afterward they attacked the purple worm when its attention was elsewhere and fell back when the beast turned toward them. Meanwhile, wizards, including Biri, pierced it with darts of light and dropped nets of steaming, sizzling slime onto its back. The strands seared its flesh and left crosshatches of burns behind.
The accumulating wounds looked as if they ought to do some good eventually. But the worm wasn’t slowing down yet, and Khouryn wasn’t surprised. In his youth, he’d seen one of the behemoths split open from end to end and knew it scarcely had any vital organs as such. It was just a length of gut sheathed in muscle with a brain that was only a bump at the top of the spinal cord and a dozen hearts to pump its blood around.
Standing at the center of a wheel of floating, glowing runes, Medrash cut deep into the worm’s flank. Khouryn rushed in and did the same. As the beast twisted in their direction, Balasar darted forward to attack it from the other side.
The eyeless head jerked back in his direction, and caught by surprise, he couldn’t stop in time. His own momentum flung him into the worm’s mouth. The creature heaved its head high to swallow.
Medrash cried out and he and Khouryn both struck savagely. If Balasar was even still alive, his only hope was for his allies to slay the worm and cut him out of its body quickly.
Then Biri ran toward the struggle, which was wrong. She should have stayed on the ledge and cast her spells from a relatively safe distance. Khouryn drew breath to yell for her to go back. Then he noticed the five swords of crimson light hovering around her, the halo of coppery shimmer between the conjured blades and her body, and realized what she intended.
Medrash glimpsed her coming and opened his mouth. Most likely his first impulse, too, was to order her back.
“Let her come!” Khouryn snapped. He hoped that by so doing, he hadn’t assured the death of a second friend.
Medrash’s eyes narrowed. Then he pivoted, raised his bloody sword and his steel-gauntleted fist high, and shouted, “Torm, please, shield her!”
Points of silvery light started glinting amid the coppery shimmer. They might even have been shaped like hands, but they winked on and off too quickly for Khouryn to be sure.
Biri planted herself squarely in front of their colossal form. “Here, wormy, wormy, wormy!” she cried.
The great jaws swung in her direction. Then they hurtled down at her.
The white-scaled dragonborn gasped. She flinched back an involuntary half step but no farther.
The worm snapped her up, raised its head, and swallowed. Then it gave a deafening roar as it felt the flying blades slicing it from the inside.
Khouryn hoped that would distract it from external dangers. “Everyone!” he shouted. “Hit it! Now!”
The Cadre warriors rushed in from all sides. And the worm didn’t attack them, although the twisting, heaving convulsions of its colossal body threatened to crush them even so.
Fire blazed out of the beast’s mouth as, apparently still alive and capable of action, Biri unleashed incendiary magic.
Medrash spun his sword over his head with a flourish quite unlike his usual no-nonsense way of handling a weapon. The spin kindled a brilliant glow inside the blade, and when he attacked, the edge cut as though the worm’s thick hide and dense muscle were soft as melting butter.
The beast’s head toppled forward and thudded on the cavern floor. It convulsed for another few moments, then sprawled motionless.
“Get them out!” Medrash shouted.
Khouryn could guess Biri’s location. She should be just below the part of the worm that gave steaming, blistered evidence of having cooked from the inside. Using his axe alternately like a saw and a butcher knife, he ripped at the creature’s hide. Guided either by his deity’s prompting or simple inference, Medrash attacked a spot a few paces farther down. Cadre warriors scrambled to help them both. Khouryn was peripherally aware of the roaring cacophony and furious motion of the rest of the battle, of the fact that the ongoing violence could engulf the rescuers at any moment. But he still couldn’t afford to worry about it.
Gripping the head of the axe with one hand and its haft with the other, he sawed the hole he was making a couple of strokes deeper then, grunting, pulled the edges apart. A booted foot appeared amid the muscle, blood, and slime. He yelled, “Here!” Together, he and the dragonborn working beside him cut and tore the opening larger still then dragged Biri out into the open.
She came out, bleeding in a dozen places, but Khouryn judged that none of the cuts was serious. Torm’s blessing and her own power had protected her. Slippery with ooze, retching and coughing, she wheezed, “Nothing… to breathe.”
“You’re all right now,” Khouryn told her.
“Balasar,” she said.
Voices babbled behind them. By the time Khouryn looked around, Medrash and the cultists were pulling Balasar out of the worm’s body.
He was cut badly, indeed, covered in blood from head to toe. Ordinary armor of steel and leather hadn’t done enough to protect him as the purple worm’s countless internal teeth pierced and ground him and peristalsis crushed
