still sticking out of its mask. Anton had lost his grip on it when the creature turned. Now unarmed except for the pitiful dagger in his hand and the unloaded crossbow dangling from his wrist, he dodged and retreated as the reptile clawed at him. If not for the spell of quickness, it likely would have torn him to shreds already. As it was, it was plain that, bereft of any weapon that could deter the drake from attacking with every iota of its demented aggression, he couldn’t survive much longer.
She hastily peered at the scroll. Two spells left. She triggered the first.
Water surged, churned, and spun around the drake. Caught by surprise, engulfed in a miniature maelstrom, even a creature of prodigious strength had difficultly swimming in the direction it intended to go, and as it floundered, Anton kicked and shot beyond its reach.
The drake flailed, trying to break free of the bubble of turbulence. Tu’ala’keth unleashed the final spell. A ragged blot of shadow appeared before her then shattered into flat, flapping shapes like mantas. Untroubled by the violent, erratic currents, the apparitions whirled around the dragon. It was impossible to see how they attacked it, if, in fact, they made physical contact at all. But gashes ripped the reptile’s hide, and a hind leg, a foreleg, and half the tail sheared away completely. Head nearly severed, wings shredded, the drake drifted toward the bottom in a billowing cloud of blood.
Anton dived after it, gripped the hilt of the greatsword, planted his feet on the wyrm’s head, and pulled the weapon free. By the time he managed that, most of their comrades had fled past, leaving him and Tu’ala’keth at the rear of the throng.
Tail lashing, a dragon eel streaked at them. A vertical plane of azure force abruptly appeared in its way, and it slammed into the obstruction beak-first. Amid the chaos, Tu’ala’keth couldn’t tell who’d conjured the effect, but it stopped the creature for a critical moment.
She and Anton raced onward with the great frantic horde of their fellows. People slowed abruptly as their charms of quickness exhausted their power. Time would tell which ones had seized enough of a lead to keep ahead of the wyrms.
It would have been easy for anyone to break away. The officers were too busy trying to save their own lives to interfere with anybody who did, and with scores of potential victims to pursue, the wyrms might well not veer away to pick off a single stray.
But as far as Tu’ala’keth could judge, most of the company were keeping to the plan. A plan, she realized, that now required her and Anton to bear left. She turned, and others began to do the same, their courses crisscrossing as each headed where he’d been ordered to go.
The soft luminescence of Myth Nantar flowered before and below her. Muscles burning with strain, she put on a final burst of speed, passed among the first of the coral-girded spires, then dared to turn and look back.
Most members of the advance forceor what was left of ithad already entered the city via one of several avenues, and diving lower than the rooftops, the wyrms were splitting up to chase them down the same thoroughfares. It was as the allies had hoped. In normal circumstances, dragons were cunning, but addled by the Rage, infuriated by the harassment they’d already suffered and the frustration of prey fleeing just beyond their reach, the reptiles either didn’t realize or didn’t care that their foes were luring them into a trap.
Of course, it was possible they didn’t need to care. Their power might well prevail against every ruse and tactic Myth Nantar had prepared.
But Tu’ala’keth refused to believe it. Not after she and Anton had come so far and achieved so much. The Bitch Queen had no mercy, nor concern for fairness as mortals understood it, but still the pattern would not complete itself in such a bitter fashion.
She and the human swam onward, past dozens of their exhausted, frightened comrades rushing to get indoors, to the keep that was supposed to be their particular refuge. They hurried through an entry on the third story, an opening blessedly too small for even the least of the wyrms to negotiate, and the shalarin warriors waiting on the other side gaped at them.
“What’s happening?” an officer asked.
Somewhere outside a dragon roared.
“That noise pretty much says it,” Anton gasped, slumping with exhaustion. “We drew the dragons into town. Now you go kill them.”
Anton watched as the shalarins made their last-second preparations for combat. Most were soldiers of the Protectors Caste, with bony spines stiffening their dorsal fins rigid as the crest on a human knight’s steel helm. But they had spellcasters to support them.
Across the city other squads drawn from all six allied races were no doubt doing exactly the same thing, and Anton silently wished them luck. It was their fight now. He and his comrades had done their job by luring the dragons down the proper streets in the proper heedless state of mind.
But maybe he didn’t want to hold back while others finished the battle. It was strange, really. As a spy, he’d rarely been present when the Turmian fleet or army, acting on intelligence he’d provided, eliminated a threat to the republic, and he’d rarely cared. But this time, for whatever reason, he wanted in at the kill.
The greatsword rejoiced at his witless impulse, at a new opportunity for bloodshed. Calm down, he told it sourly, meanwhile casting about for Tu’ala’keth.
Clasping her skeletal pendant, the waveservant was murmuring a prayer. At the conclusion, she shivered, rolled her narrow shoulders as if working stiffness out, then took a firmer grip on her trident.
He swam to her. “What did you just do?” he asked.
“I suppressed my fatigue,” she said, “making myself fit to fight once more.”
“Cast the same charm on me, will you? If you’ve got another.”
She flashed him one of her rare smiles. “I do. I expected you would want it.”
The spell stung like a hundred hornets, and he grunted at the blaze of pain. It lasted only an instant, though, and afterward, he felt as though hed rested for a day.
Tu’ala’keth made her way to one of the warriors bearing a satchel. “I will take that,” she said, indicating the bag.
The Protector eyed her uncertainly. “I volunteered,” he said.
“Your bravery does you credit,” she said, “but unless you have experience fighting dragons, I am better suited to the task.”
“All right. If you put it that way.” He handed her the bag just as a roar from the street outside agitated the water and shook the walls of the keep itself.
Anton hurried to a window. Beyond was a dragon turtle, its spiky shell nearly broad enough to fill the canyonlike avenue. Its beaked head twisted from side to side, and its eyes glared as it sought the elusive prey who’d fled inside the buildings to either side.
Quarrels flew from windows and doorways. Anton shouldered his own crossbow and started shooting. Many of the missiles glanced harmlessly off the reptile’s shell or scales, but some lodged in its hide. Meanwhile, the magicians threw darts of light and raked the beast with blasts of shadow. Blood tinged the water around its body.
The reptile pivoted toward one of the larger entry-ways across the street, a circular opening midway up a marble wall. Anton prayed that everyone inside recognized the danger, that they were already bolting deeper into the structure. But even if so, many wouldn’t get clear in time.
With a screech like the wail of a god’s teakettle, the dragon turtle vomited its breath weapon, boiling the water in front of it. Framed in the windows to either side of the entry way, shalarins convulsed then floated lifeless.
But other defenders endured elsewhere, to shoot darts and fling attack spells, and it would take the reptile’s breath time to replenish itself. Maybe, despite its derangement, it now began to understand it was at a disadvantage. With a stroke of its flippers, it shot a few yards farther down the street then halted as it evidently perceived it couldn’t escape in that direction. Myth Nantar was a city half buried in reef, and like many of its byways, this particular street terminated in an upsweep of coral.
The dragon turtle wheeled just as, rippling with rainbows, a curtain of conjured force abruptly blocked the other end of the avenue. The leviathan angled its body upward, preparing to ascend, but a gigantic net, the magically toughened cables thick as a strong man’s thigh, now covered the street like a lid on a pot to complete the killing box. A team of warriors had stretched it across while the reptile was looking elsewhere.
