Responding to his master’s thoughts, Jet abandoned his pursuit of the phantoms rising toward the skyship and hurtled toward the towering sacred trees. He likewise gave a rasping cry that brought wild griffons streaking after him.
Meanwhile, Aoth cast a charm to amplify his voice. “Push for the weirs!” he bellowed to his soldiers on the ground, and an enormous mink looked up and nodded to show it understood.
Cera had long since discovered she’d been too optimistic at the start of the battle. Although Orgurth and her other defenders were fighting savagely to hold back the foe, she’d still needed to wield her mace as a warrior would, often enough that scraps of rotting flesh and strands of greasy hair clung to the stubby spikes.
Swaying, an animate corpse with its nose and most of its left profile rotted away stumbled between two golems busy with other foes. Reluctant to expend any of the Keeper’s light on a single such brutish creature, Cera waited for the zombie to swing its war hammer, then sidestepped and blocked with her shield.
The blow banged on the hide-and-wooden targe and jolted her arm but didn’t hurt her. She swung low and smashed the zombie’s knee, and it pitched forward. She then bashed it in the nape of the neck, and it fell on its ruined face in the snow.
At the same instant, she glimpsed motion at the corner of her vision. She turned. Just a stride away, a ghoul was rushing her with jagged claws outstretched. Fortunately, Orgurth lunged to intercept it, cut, and split its skull. The ghoul dropped.
The orc grinned at Cera. “Are you close enough yet?” he shouted, making himself heard over the din of battle.
“A little farther!” Her answer made her feel guilty. People were dying to help her push forward.
Orgurth’s leer stretched wider. “Why not?” He turned back toward the enemies still separating them from the weir trees and then snarled an obscenity. Because Uramar himself was leading a dozen floating direhelms right at them.
In a sudden surging confusion, two of the flying suits of half-plate assailed Orgurth, and to dodge the initial slashes of their swords, he sprang to the side. Other direhelms engaged golems and berserkers. Somehow, in an instant, all Cera’s protectors were busy fighting for their own lives, and Uramar had a clear path to her.
Fine, she thought. A blaspheme wasa target worthy of her deity’s wrath. She raised her mace to the sun shining above the filthy darkness and started a prayer to smite him.
Then, however, her focus shattered into terror and bewilderment, and her half-finished invocation forgotten, she recoiled. Only for a moment, and then a cleric’s trained will allowed her to shed the effects of what had no doubt been an adversary’s spell. But that was time enough for Uramar to lumber into striking distance.
As he did, bitter cold, fiercer by far than the natural chill of this winter day, stabbed into Cera like a knife. She gasped, and her whole body clenched, rendering her incapable of prayer, raising her targe, or offering any other sort of defense. Uramar swung his greatsword high to split her head.
Then, missing her by no more than a finger length, Jet swooped over her head, and his talons punched into the blaspheme’s chest. Wings lashing, the black griffon-and Aoth astride his back-climbed and carried Uramar into the air.
Other griffons dived at more of the foe a heartbeat later. Berserkers, golems, bright fey, and telthors rushed up to reinforce Cera’s original bodyguards. Teeth chattering with the aftereffects of Uramar’s frigid aura, she decided she truly was going to reach where she needed to be. And then, with Amaunator’s help, she’d vindicate the faith of those who fought and fell to get her there!
Through their psychic bond, Aoth could feel the deadly chill that emanated from Uramar’s body assailing Jet. And the griffon must have likewise sensed his concern.
I’m not some dainty human, Jet snarled. I can take a little cold.
You can’t take even a scratch from a life-stealing blade, Aoth replied. Just drop him. If the fall doesn’t kill him, I’ll blast him.
I’m gripping him so he can’t use the sword. I want to pull him apart and pop his stitches.
Aoth opened his mind to Jet’s perceptions so completely that it was like the griffon’s body was his own. And then he realized Jet was right. The familiar wasable to withstand the chill, and with both arms grinding together in one set of talons, Uramar truly was helpless.
All right, Aoth agreed, kill him. But when he shifted back to his own body’s senses, Aoth regretted saying it.
Because twisting atop the thick, scaly coils of his lower body, Lod was tracking Jet’s course through the air. Lod’s fleshless jaw worked, and his naked phalanges crooked, forming a series of conjuring signs.
Aoth couldn’t tell what spell the leader of the Eminence of Araunt was casting, but he expected he and Jet needed to dodge it and the griffon would require every iota of his speed and agility to do so. Unfortunately, intent on the struggling foe in his claws, Jet hadn’t even noticed the threat.
Drop him!Aoth ordered. And see what I’m seeing!
Jet did both things at once; Aoth’s sense of communion pulsed stronger as, for an instant, his steed looked through his eyes. Then Jet swung himself through a tight evasive maneuver that, in the absence of a saddle and safety straps, nearly tossed his rider off his back.
Magic banged through the air so loudly, it was as if the world itself were shattering, and Aoth’s ears throbbed. Still, Jet had avoided the actual stream of focused, murderous sound. The attack struck one of the weirs and rattled it, snapping loose a number of the spreading limbs. One just missed Aoth and Jet as it plummeted to the ground.
Still turning, the griffon sought to get behind the bone naga. Aoth extended his spear, spoke a word of command, and released one of the spells stored in the weapon. A ray of sunlight leaped from the point.
Unfortunately, the top of his dragonlike tail twisting to rotate the human-skeleton apex of his body, Lod refused to allow his opponents to strike him from behind, and at the same instant the light stabbed forth, he clenched his bony fist. The unnatural gloom thickened around the beam and all but smothered it. The dim remnant that splashed across the naga’s ribs made them shiver and smoke but nothing more.
All right, Aoth thought, the undead naga had evidently warded himself against daylight, and he’d promised not to hurl fire. But maybe a thunderbolt would do the trick. He rattled off buzzing, crackling words and used his spear point to scratch a glowing zigzag on the air.
Striding between two of the several lumpish, faceless men of dirt and stone that the earth had spawned for her further protection, Jhesrhi spotted Nyevarra among the mass of undead and dark fey. A fair-minded universe would at least have kept the vampire durthan busy tending the darkness that increasingly eroded the resolve and vitality of mortal men and bright fey alike. But evidently Nyevarra had finished altering the curse she’d laid on the forest and was thus free to rejoin the battle.
Specifically, raising the Stag King’s stolen weapon high, she appeared to be casting maledictions in Cera’s direction, and the peril to her friend made the urge to hurl fire roar through Jhesrhi’s mind and sent heat surging through her veins.
But instead of succumbing to the impulse, she spoke once more to the earth, the other element to which she was currently most attuned. Brown hands erupted from the snow under Nyevarra’s feet, gripped her calves, and jerked her downward.