winning. Though his instincts cried out against it, he passed the dracolich and the beleaguered warmage by.
The smoke seemed to thicken. Then he realized it wasn’t smoke anymore, not over that bit of the city, but rather something damper and cleaner: fog.
But though the mist was easier to breathe, it was an even greater hindrance to sight, and he soon realized that others had discovered the same thing to their cost. Below him, just visible in the cloud, battered sellswords tended their wounded mounts.
Then he heard crashing, and a squat, drum-shaped tower swam out of the vapor and the gloom. Even if it hadn’t originally been intended as a bastion, it resembled one, and troops on Aoth and Shala’s side had taken refuge inside. They could probably have held off the warriors who’d surrounded the structure for a long time too, except for the thing that was smashing and tearing its way down to them from above.
Medrash couldn’t see it even when he was nearly on top of it, although its existence was apparent from the long, deep tears appearing as it clawed the wood beneath it. Not content merely to blind its adversaries with fog, it had wrapped itself in true invisibility as well.
And that, Medrash realized, meant he had no way of knowing when it was about to use its breath weapon. But fortunately the bat had its own ways of sensing and had probably fought dragons on Black Ash Plain. The animal flung itself sideways, and although the shriek that sounded an instant later was painfully loud, it didn’t do Medrash any actual harm.
He resolved to let his mount fly as it saw fit. At the moment it understood how it ought to maneuver far better than he did. He reached out to Torm and Bahamut and, grateful that his mystical strength had returned, drew cold fire down.
Then pain ripped through his skull. He almost lost focus and let the gift the gods had given him spill from his grasp, but not quite. Snarling, he pushed the clawing alien presence out of mind.
But by the time he accomplished that, new rips had stopped scarring the rooftop, and the rapidly disintegrating surface no longer bowed under an unseen weight. The dragon was on the wing.
The bat flung itself to the right then the left, swooping and whirling, dodging more attacks that Medrash couldn’t see. But its agility wouldn’t save it for long, not against a foe who could strike with fang and claw, a burst of sound, the hammering force of its will, and Torm only knew what other tricks.
Medrash had to end the fight quickly, and-he hoped-he still held the means shivering and burning like ice inside him. But how could he cast the power at an invisible mark?
He needed to sense Tiamat’s taint as he’d sensed it before. He reached out with his intuition or some faculty akin to it and thought he felt a sickening locus of vileness arcing through the air.
He stretched out his hand and shouted, “Torm!” A white blaze leaped from his fingers. The fog diffused some of its light, but the rest played across and half-revealed the serpentine form of a dragon.
The creature roared. Flailing its wings, it made a final furious effort to close with the bat and Medrash. Then, as he scoured it with the last of the holy light, it gave up that effort and its invisibility too. The glow of a burning building gleamed on scales like plates of polished emerald.
You’ve… restored me to myself, the dragon said, speaking mind to mind. The words were like a kettledrum throbbing and rumbling inside Medrash’s head.
“Then here’s how to thank me,” he replied. “My comrades and I need your help against Tchazzar and Alasklerbanbastos.”
I acknowledge a debt to you, dragonborn, and I’ll repay you if I can. But I’m no match for the Red Dragon of Chessenta and the Great Bone Wyrm. I’d only be throwing my life away.
“Like the rest of us,” Medrash said, “you’re no match for them by yourself. But I’m going to purge the other dragons too. As many as I can, until I run out of strength.”
The emerald dragon pondered that for a breath or two as it and the bat glided over the rooftops. Then it said, Don’t bother with the black. I doubt you can break the Great Game’s hold on him.
“I already guessed that. Does this mean you’ll help?”
Until I judge my debt is paid. The wyrm lashed its wings and climbed.
Alasklerbanbastos hissed words of power, and a shape like a huge, black sword appeared in the air. Someone else might have called it a shadow, but Aoth’s fire-kissed eyes recognized it for what it truly was: a movable wound slashed in the fabric of the world, a hole through which a man could fall into nonexistence.
The sword cut at him and Jet. The griffon swooped under the attack. It was bad tactics to give up the high air to the dracolich. But Aoth could feel how tired Jet was and that the familiar had been unsure of his ability to dodge the cut in any other way.
The shadow sword leaped at them again. Aoth rattled off a counterspell and jabbed his spear at the blade. Nothing happened.
Jet kept dodging, though the cuts were forcing him lower and lower. Aoth hurled fire at the black sword, and the flare winked out of existence as the two magics collided. The sword kept coming.
Aoth rasped words of power, spun his spear over his head, and thrust it at the magical threat. A shadow sword of his own, smaller but identical in every other way, leaped from the point and shot at Alasklerbanbastos’s creation.
The air, or a spherical portion of space itself, squirmed as the two manifestations of nothingness struggled to swallow one another. Bile burning in the back of his throat, Aoth averted his eyes. His instincts told him that if he didn’t, his truesight might discern something that would damage his mind.
Twisted and knotted together like fighting serpents, the blades vanished. But Jet’s claws were nearly brushing the cobblestones, and looming overhead, lightning dancing over his naked bones, Alasklerbanbastos had nearly completed another incantation, one that would rain thunderbolts down on the narrow, crooked street. The air smelled of the coming storm.
Aoth hurled darts of azure light from his spear. It was something he could do virtually instantaneously, but it was also a relatively weak spell. He knew it likely wouldn’t be enough to make the dracolich fumble his casting, and sure enough, it didn’t.
But something else did. A howl stabbed through the air and smashed Alasklerbanbastos’s crested skull to the side. The lich whipped his head back around, seeking the new foe who’d dared to strike him.
Aoth judged that gave him and Jet one chance to get out of Tchazzar’s view and catch their breaths. Perceiving what he wanted, the griffon touched down and charged at a door. Aoth pointed his spear and blasted the panel and much of the frame away with a pulse of pure force.
Jet leaped through and they found themselves in a chandler’s shop. Aoth smashed away a section of wall, and they raced on into a hatter’s establishment.
Alasklerbanbastos couldn’t see the impudent wretch who had struck him. But he heard leathery wings flapping as the coward beat a hasty retreat into the… smoke? It actually looked like it might be fog.
He spit a booming, blazing thunderbolt into the cloud. But nothing screamed or thudded to the ground afterward.
He hesitated, momentarily uncertain whether to go after the traitor or finish off Aoth Fezim, and the dithering cost him. When he looked back down into the street, the sellsword and griffon were gone.
Alasklerbanbastos snarled, then strained to put frustration aside and think. And when he had, he lashed his clattering wings, climbed, and looked around the sky for flashes of fire.
They led him to Tchazzar, who was chasing Jhesrhi Coldcreek. Plainly the wizard’s battle sense and the agility of her steed had thus far kept her alive in a confrontation with a vastly more powerful foe in much the same way that Fezim had survived his clash with Alasklerbanbastos.
But now Jhesrhi would have two ancient wyrms to contend with, and she was so busy fencing with Tchazzar that she might not even have noticed Alasklerbanbastos’s approach. He studied the eagle, discerned its true nature, and whispered words of unmaking.
The eagle vanished from underneath its rider. Jhesrhi plummeted between the tops of two buildings and
