building.
Expecting trouble, perhaps, the city watch had cordoned off the streets for a few blocks around the senate seat. The streets were clear of innocent bystanders when the black firedrakes met the wemics and blood filled the middens.
Spells flared as Marek Rymiit’s wizards took to the streets. Wemics were burned or frozen where they stood, “some just disappeared in flashes of green and yellow light, or puffs of vile-smelling smoke.
Pristoleph burned his share of Red Wizards and black firedrakes as he made his way out of the cordoned area. The wemics pulled him along in a ring of fierce, barbaric warriors. Their weapons spilled blood and batted back spears. Acid burned them, only to be cooled by a splash of an enemy’s blood.
The watchmen at the edges of the safe area stepped aside when they passed, not even looking Pristoleph or any of the wemics in the eye. They didn’t seem to know or care who would be the victor that day, who would end up with the city-state in his grasp, so they had apparently decided not to anger either side. Most of them simply went home or holed up in a tavern or festhall. Many of them stayed at their posts, watching with a mix of horror and fascination. None of them fought.
The sun had already set by the time Pristoleph made his way out of the Chamber of Law and Civility, and though the black firedrakes made full use of the dark streets of the Second Quarter, in the Third Quarter, where the tradesmen lit their streets with lamps, Pristoleph started burning them.
The black firedrakes abandoned their human guises to swoop in at Pristoleph from the rooftops. The genasi turned his attention to the street lamps, shattering the glass with sudden bursts of heat and sending thin columns of white-hot flame lancing into the sky. The fire cut through one of the firedrake’s wings like a hot knife through butter, and the creature spiraled to a spine-shattering stop in front of a cabinetmaker’s workshop.
The wemics were as afraid of the fire as the drakes, and were further confused by the tradesmen and their customers scurrying through the nighttime streets, all wondering what manner of inhuman war had suddenly fallen upon them. Rain pelted the ground, making burned firedrakes sizzle on the streets. In the far distance, well to the northwest, lightning flickered on the horizon, and even over the din of the running battle, Pristoleph could hear the distant rumble of faraway thunder.
Pristoleph stopped, his back against the wall of a tannery, and scanned the confusion for Second Chief Gahrzig. He spotted the wemic, his arm cleared of fur, an angry acid burn still sending tendrils of pungent smoke into the air. The mercenary impaled a twitching black firedrake to the gravel street. The polearm he used to kill the firedrake was one Pristoleph had purchased from the Thayan himself. The sight made Pristoleph smile.
“Gahrzig!” he called, shouting over the dying scream of another black firedrake, and the agonized bellow of another burned wemic. “Second Chiefto me!”
The wemic yanked his weapon free of the quivering firedrake, which fell still when the blade came out of it with a gout of blood and a trail of slippery yellow-gray guts. The wemic, its claws kicking up gravel, dodged a falling firedrake as he made his way to the ransar’s side. Behind him, the fallen drake was ripped apart by two of Gahrzig’s tribemates, who swallowed the pieces they’d torn out with their vicious fangs.
“Make your stand here,” Pristoleph said. “I will find you again at Pristal Towers.”
“We will go together,” the wemic argued. “The plan was to-“
“No, my friend,” Pristoleph interrupted. “No. It has to be this way. Protect my house.”
“Where will you go?” the wemic asked.
Pristoleph smiled and shook his head, and the wemic returned his smile, his fangs glistening in the wild firelight. A black firedrake screamed as it was torn to shreds behind him.
Gahrzig turned back to the fight just in time to avoid a spray of acid from the roof aboveand the spray was answered by a volley of arrows that burned with a magical blue-green light, fired from a wemic on the other side of the street.
Pristoleph disappeared into the shadows of an alley that would take him away from Pristal Towers. He had more than one route in mind, and though it had been some time since he’d lived on the streets, he still knew Innarlith. He made his way as fast as he could to the Fourth Quarter, back to the streets from whence he came.
73
10 Kythorn, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR) The Canal Site
When the horse smashed into the twisted, freakish thing that once was Willem Korvan, Phyrea flew from the saddle, screaming. The horse went down, puffing out the air from both lungs. Willem was tossed underneath it, raking at the beast’s flanks as it slid over him, pushing him into the mud and driving shards of broken stone into his sandpaper skin.
Phyrea hit the ground hard but rolled with it, throwing one arm out to slow her fall then tucking it close to her side with the other as she rolled to a muddy, chilling stop on the rain-saturated ground.
The horse kicked and struggled, its sides quivering. Its mouth was open and its lips pulled back over its teeth. A twisted abomination of a man, which still shared enough of Willem’s features that Phyrea had no choice but to accept that it was indeed him, rose from behind it, lit by a flash of lightning.
Phyrea screamed.
Whatever she’d thought of Willem Korvan, and she’d changed her mind about him more than once in the years she’d known him, she’d always found him handsome. But whatever had happened to him to turn him into a vicious, monstrous, blindly violent killer, had disfigured him in ways that brought a tang of bile to the back of her throat.
Phyrea had to look away while Willem killed her horse. The animal didn’t have the air in its lungs to scream, but it kicked and rolled as Willem pounded it. The sound of its ribs breaking stung Phyrea’s ears. She clasped her palms against the sides of her head, but she could still hear it.
Someone touched her and she screamed and flinched away, striking out, but not hitting anyone.
“Phyrea,” Devorast said from right next to her. “Phyrea, it’s me.”
She tried to say his name, but her throat closed around it.
The sword, the voice said and something made Phyrea turn away from Devorast, even though at that moment she wanted nothing in the world more than just to look at his face.
Another ghostly figure stood in the pouring rain, a few paces from the dying horse. Phyrea blinked at first because she wasn’t sure it was really him, then she blinked away tears.
The sword, the ghost of her father said. Our family’s sword…It was the sword that made him this way.
“Phyrea,” Devorast said, pulling her to her feet. “What could possibly have brought you here?”
“Father?” Phyrea called, her voice squeaking.
And it’s the sword that will put him to rest, said Inthelph.
The man with the scar on his face screamed into Phyrea’s head with such a profound rage it made her knees fall out from under her. Devorast held her up, and began to pull her away.
“He’ll kill you,” she gasped when her head cleared and she saw the ruin of Willem Korvan, her horse’s blood washing off him under the relentless downpour, stalking toward them with so single-minded and burning a hatred she felt as though she was going to wither in the face of it. “He’ll kill you.”
“Run,” Devorast urged heralmost begged, if such a one as he could ever have begged. “Go, Phyrea. He’s here for me.”
He’s here for you both, Inthelph said.
Phyrea tore herself from Devorast’s arms and he pushed her away. She almost fell, but she slid a little and got her feet under her. Devorast ran in the opposite direction.
“Here!” he shouted, though Willem gave no indication that he even saw Phyrea. “It’s me you want.”
Willem opened his mouth and screamed. The sound was like metal scraping on metal. Phyrea’s hair stood on end and her breath caught in her chest. She scrambled for the horse.
Hurry, Phyrea, her father urged.
Phyrea fell facefirst into the warmth of the horse’s spilled blood. She dug into the soft earth with her fingers,
