him again and again. But he was alive. He must be because, whispering, Medrash was praying the silvery light of healing into his hands.
Khouryn shifted position to keep Biri from getting a good look. “He’s fine,” he said then turned to one of the Cadre warriors. “Get her back on the ledge.”
Biri shook her head. “I can-”
“You can’t do anything more until you at least catch your breath,” Khouryn said. “Now, both of you, move!”
The warrior helped her to her feet. Khouryn pivoted to find out-finally-what else was going on.
Though it was pretty much all raw, oozing burns and bloody wounds from end to end, the second purple worm was still alive and striving furiously to reach several Imaskari wizards perched on a ledge. One of them was Nellis Saradexma, who held his orb of dark crystal paled in one long-fingered hand and shifted it up and down and side to side. A ghostly, floating shield made of green phosphorescence shifted with it to block the worm’s attacks. Meanwhile, Nellis’s fellow wizards and the dragonborn and Imaskari warriors surrounding the lower portion of the beast assailed it furiously.
Unfortunately the diplomat’s defense wasn’t impenetrable. Khouryn gave a wordless little snarl when the green shield failed to jump quickly enough, and the worm snatched a mage off the shelf. Like Balasar and Biri before him, the Imaskari slid down the beast’s gullet in an instant-golden staff, long, black greatcoat, and all.
But despite that loss, it looked to Khouryn as if the worm’s foes were wearing it down. He couldn’t say the same about Gestanius.
At the moment the green dragon was primarily concerned with killing Praxasalandos, a duel that, because of the difference in sizes, reminded Khouryn of a dog fighting a cat. And the dog was winning. Prax had at least two serious wounds and several minor ones. The severed tip of his tail and a couple of the short horns from under his jaw lay on the cavern floor.
The wyrms were lunging, whirling, and striking so quickly that no human or dragonborn dared to venture close and risk a trampling or the bone-shattering flick of a lashing tail. Instead, warriors shot arrows and quarrels, missing as often as not despite Gestanius’s hugeness. When they did hit the mark, the shafts frequently glanced off her scales.
Attacking with blasts of frost and howls of focused noise, Jemleh Bluerhine and a couple other arcanists- thank the Luckmaiden that the knack for magic ran in the Imaskari blood-were inflicting somewhat greater harm. But it was not enough to make Gestanius falter.
Gestanius suddenly opened her jaws and, without any of the telltale preparatory movements that Khouryn had learned to watch for, spewed acid. The attack seemingly caught Praxasalandos by surprise as well, for the sizzling acid hit him straight on, and he shuddered, jerked, and burned helplessly.
Gestanius pounced the instant the acid dissolved, before even another dragon could shake off the punishment she’d just inflicted. She caught Praxasalandos’s neck in her jaws and reared onto her hind legs, so the frills at the back of her head brushed the ceiling. She bit down and clawed at her opponent’s chest at the same time.
Blood gushed and Prax splashed apart into streams and globs, which rained down from Gestanius’s fangs and talon to make a gleaming pool on the floor. The colossal green immediately dropped into the center of it and kept on clawing. Now she looked like a dog digging, and her efforts flung bits of the quicksilver dragon’s substance far and wide. One spattered right at Khouryn’s feet.
As it did, Gestanius wheeled to glare at Jemleh and his fellow mages. Without Prax-or someone-to keep her busy with close combat, she was likely to destroy the spellcasters in a couple of heartbeats.
Khouryn yelled as loudly as he could, raised his axe, and charged. He was keenly aware that if he was the only one who rushed in, he might well be living out the last few moments of his life.
For a heartbeat, as Gestanius spun in his direction, all the crossbowmen, archers, and slingers stayed right where they were. Then Vishva yelled, “Bahamut!” She dropped her arbalest, snatched her warhammer off the floor, and charged. Other members of the Cadre followed her example, and Imaskari soldiers did it too.
That didn’t distract Gestanius from striking at the one mad dwarf on the field. Her huge jaws plunged down at him, and his own momentum nearly consigned him to the same ignominious disaster that had overtaken Balasar. But somehow he managed to fling himself aside and even chop at the side of the dragon’s head, although he only nicked it a little. Still charging, he dodged a raking forefoot.
He plunged into the shadow under the dragon’s belly and started chopping at a foreleg. The ceiling was too low for Gestanius to fly. If he could cut a couple of legs out from under her, it would immobilize her.
He created a couple of nice, deep gashes, deep enough to recapture her attention, apparently, for then she started stamping. She likely hoped to catch him squarely under her foot and squash him flat, but that might not be necessary. If she simply snagged him with a claw, she stood a fair chance of ripping him apart.
He dodged frantically and scrambled whenever Gestanius’s lunging and turning threatened to separate them. He swung the axe when he could manage it and, though intent on his own small part of the struggle, occasionally caught glimpses of the rest:
A swat from a leathery wing smashed an Imaskari spearman.
An umber-scaled dragonborn axeman ran to join Khouryn underneath Gestanius until the green’s jaws hurtled down and nipped away everything from the waist up. Gestanius spit out what she’d taken as she lifted her head again. The warrior’s eyes blinked once, seemingly at the sight of his severed legs toppling in front of him.
Cloudy with bits of dissolving flesh, steaming fluid poured down off Gestanius’s flanks. Jemleh or one of his colleagues was attacking her with acid.
Khouryn bellowed “East Rift!” and swung, burying most of the axe’s head in Gestanius’s flesh. When he wrenched it free, blood spurted, spattering his chest, beard, and flesh and blinding him till he sidestepped and swiped the gore in his eyes away.
Gestanius howled and snatched her foot off the floor, and Khouryn was ecstatic when it didn’t come stamping down again. She folded up her foreleg against her chest where he couldn’t reach it.
Khouryn barked a laugh and ran toward the rear of her body. If he could cripple a hind leg too, that would accomplish his purpose.
But before he could reach the limb, Gestanius roared a word that seemed to stab him through like a rapier. He fell on his face, and the sound hung in the air like the shivering note of a gong. It twisted and tore at him, and just as horribly, he somehow felt it twisting and tearing at the very structure of the world. It was magic so powerful and malign that it tortured reality itself.
Finally the sound faded. But Khouryn ached in every nerve and couldn’t focus his thoughts. When Gestanius sprang away from him, he almost didn’t realize that was a problem.
Almost but not quite. Gritting his teeth against a pang of sharper pain, he forced himself to lift his head.
Nearly as fast as ever despite her laming, Gestanius whirled to face him. He supposed it was an accolade of sorts that out of all the foes who’d been assailing her, he was the one she particularly wanted to dispose of.
And she very likely would, because when he glanced around, there didn’t seem to be anyone capable of distracting her from her purpose. The word of power had stunned everyone, warrior and wizard alike. Some folk lay entirely unconscious. A couple shuddered and rolled their eyes in ungovernable terror if not outright insanity.
Khouryn heaved himself to his feet and hefted his axe. “Try,” he croaked.
Gestanius opened her jaws, and a pale cloud gathered at the back of her mouth. The smell of acid suffused the air. Khouryn’s eyes watered as the air filled with noxious fumes.
Then a silvery waterfall poured down from the ceiling.
Or rather, it poured halfway. It gathered itself into a coherent shape in mid drop, and by the time it slammed down on top of Gestanius, it was Prax.
His weight drove the green down on her belly. He seized her neck in his jaws midway down and drove his foreclaws into her. She twisted her head and spit the acid she’d originally intended for Khouryn, but the angle was bad. Prax crouched low and the acid sizzled over his head. The talons on his hind feet raked deep, bloody furrows in Gestanius’s back.
But then the green whipped her neck and broke Praxasalandos’s grip on it, although his jaws came away full of flesh. She flipped over, crashed down on top of the quicksilver wyrm, and rolled. His claws ripped out of her back, and they tangled together, biting, tearing, each trying to coil around and immobilize the other.
And they continued to fight the same way when they fetched up against the cavern wall, like wrestlers, not pugilists or axemen. And that, Khouryn realized, meant that other, smaller combatants could get close to them
