Alarming as all that was, Medrash could barely spare it a glance because, yellow eyes burning, flames leaping from between his fangs, Tchazzar was swooping toward the rooftop.
Still shaky from the fall, keenly aware of the treacherous slope beneath his boots and the drop-off at his back, Medrash heaved himself to his feet. Realizing that at some point he’d dropped his lance, he snatched for his sword. He hoped he could at least land a cut before the red wyrm overwhelmed him.
Then Balasar and his bat hurtled at Tchazzar’s head, and the Daardendrien threw his lance at the dragon’s eye. He didn’t hit it, but the missile did stick in the creases of hide underneath.
Tchazzar struck back but the bat dodged, and the blazing jaws clashed shut on nothing. Balasar kept on flitting around the wyrm’s head. His arm cocked and snapped as he threw knives.
Leveling off, Tchazzar twisted his neck for another strike. Then the wind howled. Though Medrash felt only the fringe of the blast, that was enough to send him tottering backward before he caught himself.
Tchazzar took the full force of the gale. It slammed him sideways into a tower to smash the facade. He and chunks of broken sandstone fell down into the street together. Meanwhile, Balasar and his bat tumbled through the air but fortunately didn’t suffer a collision of their own.
Roaring, Tchazzar rose with a lash of his wings that threw banging, clattering rubble in all directions. Then Jhesrhi Coldcreek swooped over him. To Medrash’s surprise, the sellsword wizard was riding a huge eagle, not a griffon.
He had little doubt that she’d conjured the wind, and Tchazzar apparently thought so too. He spit flame but missed the eagle as it raced on by. And since the street in which he’d landed was too narrow for him to spread his wings, he couldn’t immediately return to the air to chase it there. He snarled and bounded after it on foot.
Medrash had no way of following even had he wanted to, and he realized he still hadn’t checked Biri. Just as he scrambled up to her, she groaned and shifted her arm.
Then Balasar set his bat down on the roof and swung himself out of the saddle. “Are you all right?” he said.
“I think I’m just bruised,” said the mage. She tried to sit up, and Balasar crouched to help her. “Thanks to Prax.” She looked around the rooftop, and sorrow entered her voice. “He’s not going to put himself back together this time, is he?”
“I don’t think so,” Medrash said.
“So,” Balasar said, “I gather the exorcism didn’t work.”
“No,” Medrash said, and a bewildered anger welled up inside him. “And I don’t understand! Why would the Loyal Fury urge me to rush here if I can’t affect the outcome of the battle?”
“I’ll be a son of a toad if I know,” Balasar said. “It’s your superstition and your magic. But maybe there’s a reason. Think it through.”
Medrash gripped his gauntlet-shaped pendant as though he could squeeze inspiration out of it. “All right. I freed Prax but he was a metallic. Tchazzar’s a chromatic and it’s the chromatics who are really Tiamat’s people. Maybe I can’t channel enough power to break her grip on them.”
“But not all the dragons fighting on Tchazzar’s side are chromatics,” Biri said. “I spotted gem wyrms.”
“And if I can get them to turn on Tchazzar,” Medrash said, “or just go away, it will change the odds considerably. It might give Aoth and Shala Karanok a real chance to win.”
“Take the bat,” Balasar said. “You’ll need it to get close to your targets.”
“Thanks.” Medrash clambered toward the crest of the roof and the animal perched atop it. “Will you two be all right?”
“Fine,” Biri said. “I just need a moment to catch my breath, and then we’ll find a way down to the ground. I imagine Khouryn and his infantry can use an extra swordsman and wizard.”
Medrash touched his heels to the bat’s flanks, and the animal lashed its wings and soared upward. Resenting the dark, the eye-stinging smoke, and the taller structures, all of which seemed engaged in a conspiracy to deny him a clear view of the air around him, he looked for dragons.
The first one he spotted was Alasklerbanbastos, unmistakable even to someone who’d never seen him by virtue of his hugeness and the lightning flickering around his bare bones. According to Jhesrhi by way of Khouryn, Aoth had found a way to control the lich. But if so, the creature had slipped the leash, because he and his erstwhile master were fighting.
The Great Bone Wyrm spit a thunderbolt. Jet raised one wing and swept his rider safely to one side. Aoth hurled a rainbow of presumably destructive power from his spear. But Alasklerbanbastos didn’t even bother dodging, and the magic played over his skeletal form without doing any discernible damage.
Medrash wanted to go to the Thayan’s aid. Everything about Alasklerbanbastos outraged his sensibilities as both a paladin and a dragonborn. He could barely look at the lich without clenching and shivering with hate.
And besides, Aoth seemed to need help because at the moment there weren’t many other griffon riders fighting Alasklerbanbastos. Evidently the dragons were thinning them out, either by hurting them and their mounts or simply exhausting their supplies of arrows. It wouldn’t be long before there weren’t enough foes left in the air to keep the wyrms from turning their attention to the relatively helpless warriors on the ground.
And that, Medrash decided, was why he had to stick to his original plan. It offered the only real hope of winning. Though his instincts cried out against it, he passed the dracolich and the beleaguered warmage by.
The smoke seemed to thicken. Then he realized it wasn’t smoke anymore, not over that bit of the city, but rather something damper and cleaner: fog.
But though the mist was easier to breathe, it was an even greater hindrance to sight, and he soon realized that others had discovered the same thing to their cost. Below him, just visible in the cloud, battered sellswords tended their wounded mounts.
Then he heard crashing, and a squat, drum-shaped tower swam out of the vapor and the gloom. Even if it hadn’t originally been intended as a bastion, it resembled one, and troops on Aoth and Shala’s side had taken refuge inside. They could probably have held off the warriors who’d surrounded the structure for a long time too, except for the thing that was smashing and tearing its way down to them from above.
Medrash couldn’t see it even when he was nearly on top of it, although its existence was apparent from the long, deep tears appearing as it clawed the wood beneath it. Not content merely to blind its adversaries with fog, it had wrapped itself in true invisibility as well.
And that, Medrash realized, meant he had no way of knowing when it was about to use its breath weapon. But fortunately the bat had its own ways of sensing and had probably fought dragons on Black Ash Plain. The animal flung itself sideways, and although the shriek that sounded an instant later was painfully loud, it didn’t do Medrash any actual harm.
He resolved to let his mount fly as it saw fit. At the moment it understood how it ought to maneuver far better than he did. He reached out to Torm and Bahamut and, grateful that his mystical strength had returned, drew cold fire down.
Then pain ripped through his skull. He almost lost focus and let the gift the gods had given him spill from his grasp, but not quite. Snarling, he pushed the clawing alien presence out of mind.
But by the time he accomplished that, new rips had stopped scarring the rooftop, and the rapidly disintegrating surface no longer bowed under an unseen weight. The dragon was on the wing.
The bat flung itself to the right then the left, swooping and whirling, dodging more attacks that Medrash couldn’t see. But its agility wouldn’t save it for long, not against a foe who could strike with fang and claw, a burst of sound, the hammering force of its will, and Torm only knew what other tricks.