But what came next wouldn’t be as easy. Warriors scrambled from the buildings below. They scurried for their various stations and started shooting back at the attackers in the sky. A crossbow bolt whizzed past Jet’s beak, and he screeched in irritation.
Then an expanding glimmer of force leaped upward. Jet lashed his wings, flung himself to the side, and avoided all but the edge of the flare. Still, cold bit into Aoth’s body. Hit squarely and encrusted with frost, another mount and rider plunged toward the ground.
Aoth roused a tattoo to warm him and looked for the source of the magic. At first, even his fire-touched eyes couldn’t spot it. There was just too much happening. Then the tip of a white wand poked out an arrow loop at the top of one of the towers.
Jet dodged, and the next shimmering blaze missed him entirely. Aoth rattled off words of power and pointed his spear. A dark cloud materialized around the top of the bastion. The boards sizzled and crumbled as the acidic vapor ate into them. Inside the structure, people screamed.
As Aoth turned Jet toward the gate, he noticed the watchtower he’d blasted apart was barely burning. The flaming arrows some of the griffon riders were loosing weren’t doing much to set the fort on fire either. Some treatment evidently kept the timbers from burning easily.
Oh well, he’d half expected as much. Once they won the battle, the Brotherhood could still turn the place into a useless ruin. It would just take a little more sweat.
He threw a lightningbolt at the gate-which jumped in its frame, but weathered the assault without a mark. It definitely possessed protective enchantments.
But fortunately, the men and orcs poised to defend it didn’t. He bloodied them with a barrage of fist-sized hailstones, and while they were still reeling, he and three other griffon riders plunged down into their midst.
Beaks snapped and talons snatched, tearing the Bone Wyrm’s warriors to gory tatters. Aoth looked for an enemy to stick with his spear, but Jet didn’t give him the chance. The familiar was still angry from the blast of cold that had chilled him to the marrow, and this was a good opportunity to take it out on someone.
When all the defenders were dead, Aoth and his human companions dismounted, shoved back the bars securing the gate, and swung it open. The sellswords massed outside came streaming in.
After that, the combat became a chaos of packed bodies and slashing, jabbing blades, with aerial cavalry shooting from on high and occasionally diving to pick off some particularly appealing target. Aoth circled with the other griffon riders. It made it easier to oversee the progress of the battle as a whole and to use his spells to best effect.
Gradually the sellswords cleared the courtyards and bastions until only stubborn pockets of resistance remained. Khouryn’s spearmen regrouped, lighting lanterns and unpacking everburning torches with their heatless, greenish flames as they prepared to venture into the tunnels. It might well turn out to be the most dangerous part of the attack, but they knew what they were doing. A dwarf had trained them to fight underground.
Still, Aoth wondered if he should lead them personally. Then something burst out of one of the buildings with access to the burrows below. It could have fit through the doorway, but only just, and only if it had been moving carefully. In its haste, it smashed loose scraps of wood and sent them flying.
The beast was an enormous blue lizard with big frilled ears and a spike on its snout. It moved in a glittering haze that also shrouded the creature on its back. The rider was a kobold with a single enormous azure scale seemingly grafted in the center of his chest. The scale flickered repeatedly, like lightning was flashing inside it, and pus seeped around the edges.
The blue lizard crashed into the front ranks of the spearmen. Dipping and tossing its head, it caught sellswords on its horn and flung them into the air. At the same time, small lightning bolts leaped from its massive body to sear one soldier, then another. The men so afflicted danced spastically in place, and the kobold howled with laughter.
Aoth wondered why this terror was only entering the battle now. He was lucky it hadn’t shown up earlier, before the balance tilted in the attackers’ favor.
He rattled off words of power and hurled darts of light. They vanished when they touched the seething aura. Other griffon riders loosed arrows. The shafts broke on contact with the haze.
Still laughing, the kobold raised a length of blue metal. Lightning crackled from the tip and burned into a griffon. The beast dropped, then spread its wings and arrested its fall. Plainly injured and struggling, it flew beyond the walls, no doubt looking for a safe place to set down. Aoth couldn’t tell if the man now slumped on its feathery neck was still alive or not.
Meanwhile, the stormlizard went on bulling, rending, and trampling its way through the lines of spearmen. Aoth decided its master might not have waited too long to unleash it after all. If somebody didn’t find a way to stop it, it could still win the fight for Threskel.
He cast a rainbow from his spear. Each colored beam had the potential to smite the reptile in a different way. None of them pierced its halo.
“There’s no way to hurt it except close up,” said Jet. “Of course, then the halo burns us. But I’m game.”
“Wait.” Aoth rattled off charms of protection against lightning in particular and hostile magic in general. He activated tattoos with similar functions. “There. That might help. Now yank the kobold off the beast’s back.”
Jet poised his talons and swooped.
The kobold twisted and pointed his wand. Jet dived even lower and streaked along mere inches from the ground. Aoth ducked, and lightning crackled over his head.
Jet lashed his wings and bobbed back up to the kobold shaman’s level. Aoth aimed his spear, just in case the griffon’s claws somehow missed the target.
Then, faster and more nimbly than Aoth had imagined it could move, the stormlizard spun around and reared up onto its hind legs like a horse. One of its forefeet struck at Jet.
Through their psychic link, Aoth felt his mount’s determination to swerve and avoid the blow, and then the shock when it hit him anyway. They lurched off balance and nearly tumbled over, and the griffon fought to stay right side up and regain control of his trajectory.
He managed the former but not quite the latter. He jolted to earth amid a scatter of dead orcs, and momentum pitched him off his feet.
Fortunately, Aoth could feel that neither the stormlizard’s claws nor slamming into the ground had hurt Jet badly. Mostly they’d made him angry. He drew breath to let out a screech and plunge back into the fight.
“Wait!” Aoth snapped. “Pretend you’re hurt. Stay here. When they’ve forgotten all about you, then come at them again.” He swung himself out of the saddle.
As he started to run, he saw that the stormlizard had resumed tearing into the spearmen. No doubt realizing that even if they avoided the jabbing horn, the flares of lightning would sear them where they stood, the sellswords were falling back, their ranks disintegrating.
“That’s right!” Aoth yelled. “Get clear! Leave it to me!”
Charging his spear with destructive power, he poised himself in front of the stormlizard. He was close enough to attack it-close enough too that the kobold would have difficulty casting spells at him past the enormous blue reptile’s head.
Which was good as far as it went, but it also put him within easy reach of the stormlizard’s horn. It surged forward and tossed its head, and the spike nearly caught him even though the creature had done exactly what he expected.
Still, he did sidestep the blow and riposted with a thrust. His spear leaped through the sparkling haze without difficulty and stabbed the stormlizard in the face. It roared, and he grinned. He’d finally hurt the thing.