“And without that trick, no one would care?” Medrash asked. The light inside his blade faded to the merest trace of pale phosphorescence.
Praxasalandos hesitated. “I didn’t say that. In its cold and selfish way, xorvintaal is beautiful.” His voice took on a dreamy, faraway quality. “Fascinating. The multiple levels of play. The subtlety. There are many dragons who’d succumb to the allure without any need for coercion. But not me! I pray to Bahamut to blind my eyes and shear my wings if I’m lying.”
“You can prove what you say,” Medrash said. “But with deeds, not words.”
“Just tell me how,” Praxasalandos said.
“First,” said the dragonborn, “guide us to Gestanius.”
“Of course.”
“Second, help us take her by surprise in the most advantageous circumstances possible. As far as she knows, you’re still her faithful guardian. You can lure her to where we need her to be.”
Praxasalandos hesitated again and Khouryn thought he knew why. Gestanius was likely cunning enough to see through many a deception, and stronger than the quicksilver dragon as well. If she realized her supposed helper was trying to betray her, Prax was unlikely to survive.
But after a heartbeat, he said, “Yes. I’ll do that too because I have to atone.”
They hiked on in silence for a while. Despite his pains, or maybe because of them, Khouryn dozed then jerked awake again just in time to see the light of Medrash’s blade go out entirely. Blind, the paladin faltered.
Prax crouched. “I can carry two as easily as one,” he said. “Climb onto my back.”
“Otherwise,” said Khouryn, “it’ll take us forever to join back up with the others.”
Medrash sheathed his sword. “Very well,” he said.
NINE
27 E LEASIS, THE Y EAR OF THE A GELESS O NE
As Jet neared the earthmote, Cera tried not to imagine arrows streaking up out of the dark. She knew her companions were formidable. After all she’d experienced since the day she met the man to whose waist she was currently clinging, she was starting to feel reasonably formidable herself. Still, it took only one lucky shot to kill any human being, windsoul, or even a griffon. Of everyone flying in the vanguard, only Alasklerbanbastos was all but certain to survive any initial attack, and he was a potential threat to the rest of them.
But he wouldn’t be if she stopped fretting and attended to her job. She let go of Aoth with her right hand, slipped it into the pouch on her belt, and gripped the shadow stone.
The contact she so established wasn’t psychic communication like Aoth shared with Jet. It was more raw and primitive than that. But as usual, she felt the dragon’s arrogance, cruelty, and the filthy, unnatural force that sustained his existence, and they grated on her like the rasp of fingernails on a slate. She also felt Alasklerbanbastos’s stab of disgust at her touch and the slavery and indignity it represented.
Jet, Eider, and the dracolich set down on the stony floating island-more or less like a mountaintop with the rest of the mountain scooped out from underneath it-without either of the sentries loosing arrows at them or raising the alarm. Aoth had said he’d chosen a line of approach that neither wyrmkeeper could see well, and darkness and stealth had done the rest.
The six genasi set down too, and the winds that had carried them made Cera’s vestments flap and tousled her curls where they stuck out from under her helmet. She and Aoth swung themselves off Jet’s back, and the familiar immediately lashed his wings and flew away to pick up two more riders. When Gaedynn and Son-liin dismounted, Eider followed.
Gaedynn laid an arrow on his bow then, keeping low, led Son-liin and the windsouls in the direction of the bridge. Their first task was to capture it and keep any wyrmkeepers on the far side from crossing.
Whereas Aoth and Alasklerbanbastos’s job was to slaughter the priests on the near side. They hoped to divest Vairshekellabex of allies before he even realized he was under attack.
The warmage and the undead dragon skulked toward the vague forms of the five standing stones the wyrmkeepers had raised and then magically twisted into serpentine shapes. No doubt it was a shrine of sorts, and the priests dwelling on the earthmote had built their huts and pitched their tents around it.
Aoth skulked into one hut, and Alasklerbanbastos slipped his head under a lean-to. Cera could picture the spear thrusts that followed and the piercing and shearing as the dragon’s fangs nipped sleeping men to pieces.
Much as she’d come to detest wyrmkeepers-the wretches had tortured her, after all-Cera was still happy to be excused from such merciless brutality. She was quite happy that it was her chore to hold Alasklerbanbastos’s leash from far enough away that he couldn’t suddenly spin around and strike at her.
A soft, brushing noise came from the left. Her heartbeat accelerating, she pivoted in that direction and poised her buckler in front of her. She remembered Aoth telling her that she tended to hold it too close to her body and shifted it out a little farther.
No matter how she peered, she couldn’t see a threat, no stray wyrmkeeper creeping or wandering around in the night. She wished she could summon Amaunator’s light, but of course that would give away everything.
When no arrow flew at her and no magic flared, she decided her nerves were playing tricks or else she’d heard a night bird or some small nocturnal animal.
She turned back around and located Alasklerbanbastos slinking in the dark, and the sound came again, a bit louder and, therefore, surely, closer.
She jerked around and still couldn’t see anything amiss. But instinct screamed that she was in danger.
She backed up a step, and the clouds that veiled the earthmote parted for a moment. Selune’s light gleamed and rippled on a flat something flowing over the ground. At first Cera thought it was streaming liquid or a swarm of beetles scuttling as one. Then, perhaps comprehending that she’d spotted it, it heaved itself upward.
It was a hollow dragon. The billowing, sagging, flopping way it moved showed there was nothing inside the leathery hide. It reminded Cera of the costumes that a line of Tchazzar cultists sometimes wore to parade through the streets of Luthcheq. But those constructions were meant to look like red dragons. The sparks that started popping and sizzling and the smell like an approaching storm that mixed with the reek of corruption suggested that the empty wyrm was in some sense a blue.
It was a blue like Alasklerbanbastos, whose flayed appearance she finally understood. Still retreating, she gripped the phylactery and focused her will to force him to call off his creation.
But before she could pour sunlight into the gem, pain stabbed out of it, up her arm and into her head. She staggered and the stone nearly slipped from her fingers.
I didn’t know he could turn it around! she thought, feeling outraged as a child who’d caught a playmate cheating at a game. He never showed me that he could!
White light flickered inside the hollow dragon, at the back of the mouth and behind the empty eye sockets. Realizing what was coming, denying the all-but-paralyzing pain, Cera flung herself to the side. Her attacker’s breath, a dazzling bolt of lightning, blazed past her. Thunder boomed.
Now, Cera thought, now I’ll get the lich. But the empty dragon lunged at her, and she had to focus on avoiding that attack… and the next one… and the next.
Aoth was creeping from a hut to the tent next to it when the thunder boomed. As he spun around, he assumed that some idiot stormsoul had seen a threat and, forgetting that everyone was supposed to keep quiet, exerted his elemental powers in response.
But in fact, it was worse than that. Alasklerbanbastos had turned away from his appointed task and was bounding back the way they’d come, toward the edge of the earthmote and Cera. For some reason, he evidently believed she couldn’t hurt him with the phylactery anymore, and he no doubt had good reason for his confidence. For a heartbeat Aoth thought of Chathi, who’d died because he hadn’t anticipated another clever creature’s secret plan.