The red light flared. Vestausan and Vestausir howled and Tempest saw something strange on the dragon’s face: true terror. The great wings flapped in earnest and the iron spike finally gave way, vanishing in a wisp of smoke as the creature pulled free. The dragon half rose into the air, dumping off those Tigerclaws that had been clinging to its back. But its tail and broken leg-hampered by the remains of Roghar’s battering ram-still dragged at it. The other Tigerclaws retreated, Roghar and Shara along with them. The dragon seemed to weaken, dropping back to the ground as a shadow fell over it.
Tempest blinked. No, she realized, the shadow wasn’t something that had fallen over the creature. It was something that was rising out of its flesh, clinging to it like a haze of darkness.
“What is that?” she murmured to Quarhaun, but the drow only shook his head.
“Tharizdun,” called Kri, “reclaim what is yours!” His free hand made a wide, spiraling gesture.
Vestausir and Vestausan roared again as the darkness began to bleed away from it like smoke drawn into a draft. Thick ropes of shadow flowed together, twisting and compressing into a black thread that snaked through the air and vanished into the ruddy light between Kri and Albanon’s hands. The dragon’s struggle weakened further still.
Where the darkness pulled away, the creature’s bloody and spell-torn scales were left red and crystalline, much like the Voidharrow but more solid and less liquid. For a moment, fear lurched inside Tempest. Was Kri somehow purifying the dragon’s substance? Empowering it?
Then she saw that the crystals themselves seemed to be evaporating. Gaping holes opened like wounds in the dragon’s body, hide and muscles melting away to expose bone-and even bone dissipated, as if eaten away by some unseen force. Tempest watched in awe as Vestausan and Vestausir boiled away like water thrown on hot metal. The two heads roared and shrieked together, until suddenly one head went silent. It still writhed in agony and its mouth still gaped, but no sound came out.
One of the dragon’s forelegs collapsed. The creature fell flat, its cries reduced to mewling. Forelegs that were no more than half-formed stumps scraped at the ground-then it was entirely still. The only sound in the valley was Kri and Albanon’s continued chanting, and even that was mostly Kri. Albanon’s mouth moved, but his eyes were wide in shock. Tempest felt disgust rise in her. “It’s dead,” she called to the priest. “You can stop.”
Kri shook his head and raised his voice again. Vestausan and Vestausir faded even more quickly, like a corpse rotting before her eyes. Beside Shara, Uldane retched and turned away.
Only one part of the body did not disappear. The vast wings drooped and fell, falling like leather shrouds. The crystal that had flashed on them turned clear and evaporated, leaving the flesh in tatters, but the wings stubbornly remained. Only when every other trace of the dragon had vanished did Kri finally fall silent. The red light winked out. The eerie change that had come over the valley with Kri’s invocation of Tharizdun faded, but not Tempest’s feeling of unease.
“Interesting,” Kri said. “Except for the wings, it was formed entirely out of the Voidharrow. What did it call itself?”
“Vestausan and Vestausir,” Tempest told him.
“ Ausan and ausir,” said Albanon. His voice was distant, but thin. “In Draconic, ‘first wing’ and ‘second wing,’ just as gix was ‘claw.’ ”
“What just happened?” Shara asked, her voice unsteady. “What did you do to it?”
“We defeated it, of course.” Kri went over to the fallen wings and prodded them with a toe, then looked up and around at the staring Tigerclaws. “Albanon,” he said, “are you going to introduce me or do I need to do it myself?”
The eladrin ignored him. Blue eyes that had been wide and bright when he emerged from the hole in the cliff were dark and haunted as they turned to Tempest. Albanon reached a trembling arm toward her. “Tempest…”
She hesitated for only a heartbeat, then went to him. He all but collapsed in her arms and she guided him to the ground as gently as she could. She wanted to be tender, but anger burned inside her, too. “You idiot. You said you wouldn’t try to use that power again!”
He stared into her face. “I had to. We needed to escape and save you-all of you. All of us.” Albanon’s hand unfolded and he held out the stone fragment she had seen him take from his pouch. It had been red. Now dark veins twisted across its surface, as black as the shadow Albanon and Kri had drawn from the two-headed dragon. “The urge that guided us here was right, Tempest. We have what we need to destroy the Voidharrow now. Kri just proved it. We’re ready to face Vestapalk.”
They camped for the night at the entrance to the valley. Kri tried to persuade Albanon and the others, as well as the Tigerclaws, that they would be comfortable inside the cloister, but Albanon refused to listen to the advice. “I’m not going back in there,” he insisted, clutching tight the staff that one of the shifters had returned to him. “I won’t let anyone else, either.”
No one else wanted to once the wizard had described-with lurid exaggeration-what was hidden behind the cliff face. Tempest went pale. Several of the Tigerclaw shifters made a primitive warding sign against evil.
They made the same sign toward Kri when Albanon introduced him. Kri gave the eladrin a disapproving glance. “Someone has been telling stories when I wasn’t around to defend myself.”
Shara glared at him. “You’re insane and a traitor. That’s not telling stories, that’s warning people.”
“Be civil,” said Albanon to both of them. The wizard was trying his best to appear calm, but Kri could see the conflict in him. Albanon might attempt to deny it, but the power he had embraced in shattering the sealed doors of the cloister was his already. “At least for tonight. Shara, we need Kri to defeat Vestapalk. Kri, the Tigerclaws don’t like Tharizdun-”
“Who does?” muttered Shara.
Kri took a certain satisfaction in seeing Albanon wince and elbow her before continuing, “We’ve earned their respect, but it’s precarious. No preaching.”
He smiled in his best fawning manner. “Of course. You know, you sound exactly like Moorin when you say that.”
Albanon’s scowl joined Shara’s.
Still, Kri did have to admit that the Tigerclaws treated them all with more respect than he’d ever experienced in previous encounters with the barbarians. Their hunters caught food for all of them-an excellent change from peryton eggs-and as the temperature dropped, one of them gave him a cloak left by warrior killed by Vestausan and Vestausir. Kri sat around a fire with the others, Turbull, and some of the remaining Tigerclaws, feeling content for the first time in a very long while. He had pleased his god, or at least it seemed as if he had. With Albanon’s aid, he would be the Chained God’s instrument of vengeance on the Voidharrow. Shara and Uldane’s open glares couldn’t bother him, nor could Tempest and Quarhaun’s mistrustful wariness or the Tigerclaws’ whispering when they didn’t think he could hear them. Even Albanon’s butchered explanation of the nature of the Voidharrow and of how extracting Tharizdun’s will was the key to destroying it failed to grate on his nerves.
Much, anyway. By the gods, the wizard’s old mentor had been sloppy in his training.
When the bulky Tigerclaw named Hurn asked-the third person to do so-exactly what had happened to the dragon after it had been “melted,” Kri couldn’t take it anymore. He sat up.
“Vestausan and Vestausir weren’t ‘melted’ or ‘evaporated,’ ” he said. “The creature was formed out of the Voidharrow and when the will of Tharizdun was removed, there was nothing left to protect it. The stuff of our world attacked and destroyed it. To answer the question I think you’re really trying to ask, it is completely gone. There is no residue of it drifting around the valley, waiting to condense with the morning dew. If your tribe wishes to attempt to hide from the Abyssal Plague in the valley, you won’t be troubled unless more plague demons come.”