Still, for a while, Khouryn thought the struggle could go either way. Then, just as he was killing his current opponent with a cut to the guts, men started screaming. He glanced around to find out why and took advantage of the moment to catch his breath. Iron looked fearsome, even to him, when he was suddenly invested with a demonic aura of menace that even his size and bloodstained teeth and talons couldn’t explain.
Then dead men lurched up from the ground and stabbed and struck at the Chessentans, and that was finally too much. The attackers turned and fled, some flinging away their weapons and shields to scurry faster.
The sellswords didn’t run, but they, too, shrank back from the swaying, shuffling corpses. “It’s all right!” called a high, breathless voice. “They’re on our side!”
Khouryn pushed between two spearmen and saw a petite, snub-nosed girl astride a drakkensteed, of all things. He dimly recalled her from Aoth’s assembly of Luthcheq’s mages.
She remembered him too. “Khouryn Skulldark! You came back!”
“Of course I did,” he said, “and here on the ground, I’m in charge. In five breaths or less, tell me exactly what in the name of the Twin Axes is going on.”
There was no hope of avoiding Tchazzar’s fiery breath. Though it was a pitifully inadequate defense, Medrash raised his shield to protect Biri and himself.
Meanwhile, Praxasalandos had essentially the same idea. He couldn’t dodge the flame but managed to flip himself upward so it burned into his ventral surface and not the riders on his back.
Unfortunately, since his body was aligned vertically, Medrash started slipping from his back. Bellowing, trying to shout the weakness out of his muscles, he clutched at the dragon’s hide with fingers and knees. He prayed Biri was holding on too. He certainly couldn’t do anything to help her.
Prax continued his backward somersault until he was belly up. Then, his flesh still burning like dry wood, he plummeted.
Medrash looked down at the peaked roof rushing up from below.
He reached out to Torm, and a smaller surge of the deity’s power-all that he could gather and hold in his depleted state-shivered into him. He concentrated it in his clutching fingers, then passed it on to Prax.
Wings suddenly flailing, the dragon heaved underneath him. Prax couldn’t arrest his fall, but perhaps he slowed it, just as he twisted to drop feet first.
He also liquefied as he smashed down onto the rooftop, and maybe, to some degree, that cushioned the shock for his riders. Still, the jolt shattered Medrash’s thoughts into jangling confusion. By the time he snapped out of his daze, he’d nearly slid down the slope to the eaves, with rivulets of quicksilver streaming along beside him. He clutched at the shingles and anchored himself.
He looked around. Biri was higher up on the roof. She didn’t seem to be in any danger of rolling or sliding off, but he couldn’t tell if she was breathing.
Horribly, not all of Prax had turned to liquid metal. Some still on fire, body parts lay amid the globs and spatter.
Alarming as all that was, Medrash could barely spare it a glance because, yellow eyes burning, flames leaping from between his fangs, Tchazzar was swooping toward the rooftop.
Still shaky from the fall, keenly aware of the treacherous slope beneath his boots and the drop-off at his back, Medrash heaved himself to his feet. Realizing that at some point he’d dropped his lance, he snatched for his sword. He hoped he could at least land a cut before the red wyrm overwhelmed him.
Then Balasar and his bat hurtled at Tchazzar’s head, and the Daardendrien threw his lance at the dragon’s eye. He didn’t hit it, but the missile did stick in the creases of hide underneath.
Tchazzar struck back but the bat dodged, and the blazing jaws clashed shut on nothing. Balasar kept on flitting around the wyrm’s head. His arm cocked and snapped as he threw knives.
Leveling off, Tchazzar twisted his neck for another strike. Then the wind howled. Though Medrash felt only the fringe of the blast, that was enough to send him tottering backward before he caught himself.
Tchazzar took the full force of the gale. It slammed him sideways into a tower to smash the facade. He and chunks of broken sandstone fell down into the street together. Meanwhile, Balasar and his bat tumbled through the air but fortunately didn’t suffer a collision of their own.
Roaring, Tchazzar rose with a lash of his wings that threw banging, clattering rubble in all directions. Then Jhesrhi Coldcreek swooped over him. To Medrash’s surprise, the sellsword wizard was riding a huge eagle, not a griffon.
He had little doubt that she’d conjured the wind, and Tchazzar apparently thought so too. He spit flame but missed the eagle as it raced on by. And since the street in which he’d landed was too narrow for him to spread his wings, he couldn’t immediately return to the air to chase it there. He snarled and bounded after it on foot.
Medrash had no way of following even had he wanted to, and he realized he still hadn’t checked Biri. Just as he scrambled up to her, she groaned and shifted her arm.
Then Balasar set his bat down on the roof and swung himself out of the saddle. “Are you all right?” he said.
“I think I’m just bruised,” said the mage. She tried to sit up, and Balasar crouched to help her. “Thanks to Prax.” She looked around the rooftop, and sorrow entered her voice. “He’s not going to put himself back together this time, is he?”
“I don’t think so,” Medrash said.
“So,” Balasar said, “I gather the exorcism didn’t work.”
“No,” Medrash said, and a bewildered anger welled up inside him. “And I don’t understand! Why would the Loyal Fury urge me to rush here if I can’t affect the outcome of the battle?”
“I’ll be a son of a toad if I know,” Balasar said. “It’s your superstition and your magic. But maybe there’s a reason. Think it through.”
Medrash gripped his gauntlet-shaped pendant as though he could squeeze inspiration out of it. “All right. I freed Prax but he was a metallic. Tchazzar’s a chromatic and it’s the chromatics who are really Tiamat’s people. Maybe I can’t channel enough power to break her grip on them.”
“But not all the dragons fighting on Tchazzar’s side are chromatics,” Biri said. “I spotted gem wyrms.”
“And if I can get them to turn on Tchazzar,” Medrash said, “or just go away, it will change the odds considerably. It might give Aoth and Shala Karanok a real chance to win.”
“Take the bat,” Balasar said. “You’ll need it to get close to your targets.”
“Thanks.” Medrash clambered toward the crest of the roof and the animal perched atop it. “Will you two be all right?”
“Fine,” Biri said. “I just need a moment to catch my breath, and then we’ll find a way down to the ground. I imagine Khouryn and his infantry can use an extra swordsman and wizard.”
Medrash touched his heels to the bat’s flanks, and the animal lashed its wings and soared upward. Resenting the dark, the eye-stinging smoke, and the taller structures, all of which seemed engaged in a conspiracy to deny him a clear view of the air around him, he looked for dragons.
The first one he spotted was Alasklerbanbastos, unmistakable even to someone who’d never seen him by virtue of his hugeness and the lightning flickering around his bare bones. According to Jhesrhi by way of Khouryn, Aoth had found a way to control the lich. But if so, the creature had slipped the leash, because he and his erstwhile master were fighting.
The Great Bone Wyrm spit a thunderbolt. Jet raised one wing and swept his rider safely to one side. Aoth hurled a rainbow of presumably destructive power from his spear. But Alasklerbanbastos didn’t even bother dodging, and the magic played over his skeletal form without doing any discernible damage.
Medrash wanted to go to the Thayan’s aid. Everything about Alasklerbanbastos outraged his sensibilities as both a paladin and a dragonborn. He could barely look at the lich without clenching and shivering with hate.
And besides, Aoth seemed to need help because at the moment there weren’t many other griffon riders fighting Alasklerbanbastos. Evidently the dragons were thinning them out, either by hurting them and their mounts or simply exhausting their supplies of arrows. It wouldn’t be long before there weren’t enough foes left in the air to keep the wyrms from turning their attention to the relatively helpless warriors on the ground.
And that, Medrash decided, was why he had to stick to his original plan. It offered the only real hope of
