She had begun to move eastward, out of the vale, when she noticed something moving near the top of the pile, something white. Olive shook her head in surprise. It was Coral, climbing to the top of her god’s potential body. She must be pretty far gone to hang around a burning vale, Olive thought. Then she saw another figure about halfway up the pile, also climbing toward the top. The halfling gasped. It was Dragonbait!
“Stupid paladin!” Olive growled. “After I specifically told him that Alias didn’t want any dangerous heroics. He’d die up there, Olive realized, if she didn’t get him to climb back down. With an irritated sigh, she moved toward the pile and began climbing after the paladin.
Grypht threw a cone of cold at a group of saurial stragglers moving up the hills away from the burning vale. He landed beside a cluster of saurial bodies lying on the ground. It was getting warm from the fire’s heat; the fallen would rise out of their torpor soon, but many of them would be too weak to move without the rotting vines providing energy to their bodies. He walked through the bodies until he found a perfect candidate to help him—one of the large saurials with the sharp, diamond-shaped plates of armor running down his back.
The wizard bent over the saurial and shook him. “Sweetleaf,” he called, “snap out of it.” Grypht forced a danger scent from his glands to help bring the other saurial around.
“Wh-what?” Sweetleaf said, opening his eyes suddenly.
“You’ve been under the Darkbringer’s power. Cure your disease quickly. We have a lot of work to do.”
“I—I remember now. I was possessed,” Sweetleaf muttered.
“Fortunately, since you were a stranger in the tribe, none of the others knew you were a cleric, or you would have been possessed sooner and in no shape to help us now,” Grypht said. “Now cure yourself so we can be sure no more of Moander’s spores taint your body. Then we can begin to rescue the rest of our unfortunate brothers.”
Akabar had done a good job, the saurial wizard noted privately, looking up the hill at the number of saurials the mage had felled with the wand. Grypht was too busy worrying about his own people, though, to wonder where the mage was at the moment.
Akabar lay on the very top of the pile of dead vegetation that Moander intended to make its new body. He could hear Alias screaming and struggling with the saurial mages who had captured her. She was only a few yards away from him, but magically held as he was, he was powerless to help her. He knew he was frightened, but he had his faith to support him. Alias, on the other hand, must be terrified, he realized. She had tried to convince him to flee to avoid exactly this situation. Tb be honest, he had hoped to avoid it, but fleeing was not an honorable option.
Zhara had told him that he would be responsible for the god’s death forever, and he had accepted the honor with pride. His priestess wife had been unable to tell him, however, if he would live through the experience. At the moment, he suspected he would not. His blood, from the wounds in his side and his arm, hissed and sparkled as it dripped onto the greenery beneath him. That certainly wasn’t a good sign, but if Moander had to be resurrected to be destroyed, so be it, he thought.
In the moonlight, he could see a white saurial moving toward him. It was Coral, Moander’s high priestess. She knelt beside him. A potpourri of conflicting emotional scents poured from her. Moander could force her to feel its evil pleasure, but the god did not, or could not, prevent her from expressing her own grief and fear.
Coral held up a large, luminous mushroom, which she shoved into Akabar’s mouth. The acrid taste made the mage feel violently ill, but he was unable to spit it out. He felt his mouth grow numb. Next Coral drew out a dagger carved from a giant thorn and pressed the tip of it against the artery in his neck. Akabar closed his eyes, certain he was about to die, but he felt no more than a prick in his neck. He opened his eyes again. Coral held the dagger up to the moonlight. There was a single drop of his blood on its tip, and before Akabar’s eyes, the blood crystallized into a brilliant, rounded gem. Coral plucked the gem from the dagger, spat on it, and pushed it into the pile of greenery beneath them.
Just as Akabar was beginning to hope he might not actually be killed, the mage felt the pile shift beneath him, and he began to sink into it. His skin began to sparkle everywhere the greenery touched him. The red and white robe he wore began to rot away from his body, exposing more of his flesh to the magic of the pile. Since he could do nothing else, the Turmish mage began to pray.
19
The Weapon
Held by four saurial mages, Alias could do nothing but shriek and cry as Coral chanted foul prayers over Akabar, declaring his blood the seed of Moander’s resurrection. As the Turmish mage was sucked into the rotting mess the saurials had built for Moander, the swordswoman began to shake uncontrollably. This was her worst nightmare—the one she forced herself to forget whenever she woke from it. In it, she inevitably watched her friend being absorbed by the Darkbringer just as she had been. Now, though, there was no waking up.
Akabar should have gone back to the cave as soon as they found out that he was the seed, she thought. She should have knocked him out and dragged him away. And Zhara never should have let him come north. There had to have been some way to prevent all this.
Suddenly the swordswoman’s arm began to burn as if it were on fire. The blue brands on her arm glowed brighter than lantern light. “No,” Alias whispered.
“Yes,” a voice said in saurial. Alias looked up into the face of the saurial who once was Dragonbait’s lover. Her duties with the seed complete, the priestess had moved to the swordswoman’s side. She studied Alias’s arm eagerly. “The symbol of Moander is returning to her arm,” she announced.
Dragonbait, who had nearly reached the top of the pile, didn’t need to hear the Mouth of Moander’s words to know what was happening to Alias. He could feel it himself in the brand on his chest that bound him to the swordswoman. There, reasserting itself in his own scales, he could see the tattoo of a blue glowing mouth of fangs set in a human palm.
When the pain had subsided, he finished climbing up the side of the pile of greenery. Crashing through the soggy, rotting vegetation, he cried out the trigger word to set his sword aflame. He stabbed one of the mages through the heart and the corpse fell into the pile. As if the pile had an insatiable appetite, the body was sucked into it almost instantly.
Before the paladin could attack again, Coral finished chanting another entanglement spell. A vine rose up from the pile, wrapped itself around Dragonbait’s waist, and pulled him away from Alias. A second vine lashed itself around his legs and held him fast. He couldn’t hack at the vines without slashing himself.
Coral stepped up to the paladin, a ceremonial dagger in her hand. “Champion,” she whispered, “you know what must happen now. Your sacrifice will bind the servant’s will to Moander.”
“Coral, no. You can’t do this. This isn’t you. Fight it, please,” the paladin urged.
“You have your sword,” the white saurial whispered.
Dragonbait held his sword beside Coral’s head. The flames of the blade were reflected in her white scales.
“Either I will kill you, or you will kill me,” Coral said.
Dragonbait watched as Alias struggled with the three remaining saurial mages. If he were the only one to die, he wouldn’t even consider killing Coral. He would let her take his life. But Alias was his sister, and Coral was the Mouth of Moander. He couldn’t let Moander have Alias. Still he hesitated.