Cera and the priests-proved lethal. Alasklerbanbastos roared, convulsed, and shattered like a piece of porcelain.
That left Aoth with nothing underneath him. But he released the magic bound in a tattoo quickly enough to turn a plummet into a slower descent. Bits of bone clattering beneath him, he drifted down into a cloud of dust and ash.
Caught in the midst of it, Balasar coughed and spat. “This is why I hate fighting the undead,” he panted. “You always get filthy.”
The twin strands of fire-the one streaming from Tchazzar to Jhesrhi and the one leaping from the wizard up into the sky-winked out at the same moment.
The sudden loss of all that brightness muddled Gaedynn’s sight. For a heartbeat, he imagined that the magic had stopped because Jhesrhi had killed or crippled the dragon. Then he saw that, although Tchazzar had shrunken into a wasted thing like the prisoner from the Shadowfell, with his gashed hide hanging loose on shriveled limbs, he was still on his feet. It was Jhesrhi who toppled with her body still wreathed in flame. Gaedynn couldn’t tell if that was a last, harmless manifestation of the magic she’d just worked or if she was in imminent danger of burning to death.
But he did see Tchazzar resume hobbling toward her, and he knew that if the red dragon reached her, she was going to die no matter what.
He sent Eider plunging to the ground. He tore at his safety straps and leaped off the griffon’s back. “Fly!” he shouted. Eider lashed her wings and sprang back into the air.
But Son-liin didn’t go along. She, too, swung herself off Eider’s back and snatched an arrow from her quiver.
His golden eyes burning as brightly as ever, Tchazzar glared down at the human and genasi who stood between him and the fallen wizard. “This is good,” he rumbled. “You’re another one I wanted to kill personally.”
“Shut up and die,” Gaedynn answered. He shot at the wyrm’s right eye. Son-liin loosed her shaft too.
Tchazzar tossed his head, and neither arrow hit an eye or any other particularly vulnerable spot, although Gaedynn’s did stick in the creature’s face. He reached for another of the few shafts left in his quiver, and the dragon advanced. His legs were so long that, even limping, he would come within reach of his foes with another stride or two.
Then Khouryn charged in on the dragon’s right. He bellowed, “East Rift!” and chopped at Tchazzar’s good foreleg with his axe. Armed with lances, Hasos and other warriors jabbed at the colossal creature’s belly. Meralaine and a white-scaled dragonborn hurled jagged blades of shadow and bursts of pale frost respectively.
Tchazzar reeled. But then, striking like a snake, hammering his wings up and down, swinging his tail like a flail, he scattered his new assailants and kept coming.
Shooting as fast as she could, the argent lines in her purple skin shining like white-hot metal, Son-liin pierced the red with arrows charged with lightning. Each balked him for maybe an instant but no longer.
Meanwhile, Gaedynn did something he almost never did. He took his time aiming.
He no longer had much hope of piercing an eye and the brain behind it. Tchazzar reflexively protected his eyes. But confident in his armor of scales, he sometimes disregarded attacks that mere human warriors aimed at other parts of his body.
That, Gaedynn resolved, was going to turn out to be a mistake because his recent dragon fighting had taught him where an artery lay close to the surface in the underside of a wyrm’s neck. He’d have to hit the spot exactly, and the loose, dangling skin would only make it more difficult. But if he did, even a living god should find the results unpleasant.
He loosed. The shaft hurtled from the bow. And maybe Tchazzar somehow sensed it was a genuine threat because he started to twist his neck. But he was too slow, and the arrow plunged deep into the mark.
Tchazzar stumbled then swayed. He sat back on his haunches, lifted his good forefoot, and swiped the arrow out of his flesh, but that only made things worse. Gouts of blood spurted rhythmically from the wound, and the red dragon collapsed onto his side.
But then he rolled halfway onto his belly and somehow contrived to drag himself forward. And as Gaedynn and Son-liin drew their bows, he flailed with his claws and forced them to scatter. Had they stood their ground, the stroke would have torn them apart.
Panting, Tchazzar visibly gathered his strength for one final heaving motion to drag himself within reach of Jhesrhi. Then Shala ran out of the darkness with a gory broadsword in her hand. She thrust it into the base of Tchazzar’s neck. The red wyrm shuddered, a tremor so violent that Gaedynn could feel it through the earth, then slumped motionless.
As soon as Gaedynn was sure Tchazzar was no longer a threat, he whirled and dashed to Jhesrhi. When he reached her, he didn’t know whether to feel horrified or relieved.
Fire still covered the unconscious woman from head to toe. It was hot enough that it took an effort of will to stand within a pace of her, and it had burned every thread of clothing away. But it wasn’t burning her. She didn’t have even a blister.
Phicos scurried through the cellars, grabbing a scroll here, an onyx statuette of Tiamat there, a five-headed wand elsewhere, and stuffing them into his satchel. Thanks to an enchantment, the bag was bigger inside than out, but it still couldn’t hold everything he and his fellow wyrmkeepers had used to equip and sanctify their shrine. Even if there were time to gather more, only the holiest and most powerful artifacts could go.
A footstep scuffed on the floor behind him. Startled, he spun and snatched for the dagger on his hip. He relaxed when he saw that it was Esvele who’d come up behind him.
To venture into the streets, the priestess had traded her vestments for nondescript clothing, including a hood to shadow her thin, sallow face with its pentacle tattoo. On such a terrible day, it was no longer safe for Luthcheq’s few surviving wyrmkeepers to look like what they were.
“Did you find out about Ferzath?” Phicos asked.
“Yes,” Esvele said. “He’s dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Chelnadatilar-the gold-killed him.”
Phicos cursed because it was an offense against the Dark Lady for any other being to kill a chromatic dragon but also because he and Esvele had hoped the black might help them escape the city.
“Well-” he began and, with a clinking and clattering of beads and pendants, someone else staggered into the multicolored candlelight. It was Halonya, with the layers of her grotesque, trailing costume muddy and askew.
The “high priestess” gaped at the satchel in Phicos’s hand. “What are you doing?” she shrilled.
“Running,” he answered. “Before Shala Karanok’s guards show up to arrest us.”
“No! I order you to stay and defend the temple!”
“Sorry,” Phicos said. “While Tchazzar lived, we deferred to you because he wanted us to. But now he’s gone.”
“He isn’t! He’ll rise again because he’s a god!”
“No,” Phicos said, “he wasn’t. We went along with his pretensions too since it was necessary to serve him and, through him, our true deity. But the time for that has passed as well.”
“Blasphemer!” Halonya screamed.
Phicos drew breath to deny the change, but Esvele said, “You’re wasting time we don’t have debating with a lunatic.”
And plainly she was right. Phicos pulled his knife from its sheath, stepped, and thrust. Mouth and eyes gaping wide, Halonya toppled backward, the sharkskin hilt jutting from her chest.
“Dangerous as the city is,” Esvele said, “I’m glad we lingered long enough for that.”
