Finally, the bearded figure lowered his staff. Though it was impossible to hear the archmage's voice over the booming chant of the high mages and the general battle roar, Aubric saw the human's fingers flashing through the familiar gestures of a magic dispelling spell. He lowered his arm. "Loose!"
The thrum of eighty bowstrings sounded as one, and a cloud of arrows hissed through the sky. As they neared the phaerimm, the shafts bunched into swarms, almost like wasps streaking out to sting the fools who dared disturb their nests.
The flights struck with an almost audible thud, driving the phaerimm closer to Rocnest's basalt cliffs and a little downward. Fully half the arrows snapped against the creatures' scaly armor, but the others sank deep, adding their feathery tails to the forest of spines already rising on the backs of the phaerimm. The Lordly Wands adjusted their course and swooped to engage, but were brought up short when a handful of battered human mages appeared alongside Khelben to hurl a fusillade of bolts and flashes at the phaerimm. Several blasts ricocheted off their intended targets and streaked back to the caster, and a full half dozen merely vanished without causing visible harm. The other spells hit on mark, spraying cracked scales and broken thorns in every direction.
One phaerimm lost an arm and went tumbling ground-ward, only to vanish in a silver flash. The other four fought back in kind, swinging out to spray Rocnest's scorched rim with every color of hissing bolt. There were lightning blasts and fire streams and storms of exploding hail, but the most destructive attack was a surge of invisible force that slammed into the cliff itself, creating a boom so loud it hit Aubric like a punch. A web of fissures shot across the rocky face, bringing the rim down in a crashing mass of stone and black dust.
Rhydwych and her Wands swooped into the roiling cloud somewhere beneath the phaerimm. Aubric raised his arm to signal the blade charge and was startled to realize he was already half a dozen steps behind everyone else. Determined not to dishonor his position by being the last into battle, he reached out to the Weave and felt its strength surge into him-but he found also that his legs would not rise faster, nor his lungs draw deeper, nor his heart pump harder. He could not understand what was wrong-until he noticed the dull burning in his abdomen and felt the wet warmth pouring down his leg. The pain he had shunted aside, but one could demand only so much from a body, and he had long ago passed that threshold.
As the landslide settled, brilliant flashes and deep rumblings filled the dust cloud. A Lordly Wand tumbled out of the roiling mass in a dozen pieces and rained to ground amidst the Noble Blades. They paid no attention and vanished, screaming, into the swirling murk.
Aubric raced after them, lungs aching and muscles burning. The plain turned into a hazy field of jumbled stone and ghostly silhouettes, and the air grew thick with choking dust, filling his throat with racking coughs. It occurred to him he might not survive to thank Evereska's new allies, and his thoughts turned briefly to Morgwais-the Red Lady, with skin so bronze it was scarlet-and he was sorry he had not gone with her into the High Forest, not because he feared what was about to befall him, nor even because he knew he would never see her again, but because he had let her think that his duty meant more to him than she did.
Aubric came to the base of the landslide and saw his ghostly Blades scrambling up the boulders, chasing after handfuls of long gray cords dragging across the stones. One elf sprang off a stone, and letting his sword fall free, caught hold of the rope. He began to climb, and the line dragged across the ground more slowly. Another warrior caught hold and dropped to his seat, bracing himself between two boulders to hold it in place.
Coughing and hacking so hard he could hardly hold himself straight, Aubric ran his gaze fifty feet up the line to the amorphous blob above. In the swirling dust, it looked like some sort of jellyfish, with a shapeless body and a string of long tentacles dangling below It took the blademajor a moment to recognize what he was seeing, to identify the tangled knot of limbs as the grotesquely broken arms and legs of three Lordly Wands, wrapped tight to their foe by the sticky white strands of a magic web.
A rolling ball of flame engulfed the phaerimm, drawing an anguished shriek from a lone elf voice. Aubric thought for a moment that Khelben or a human wizard had hurled the spell down from above. When the creature did not come crashing to the ground, he realized that the fireball had been no more than a desperate attempt to free itself-but elven ropes did not burn. A half dozen Noble Blades grabbed hold with the other two warriors and hauled their foe down toward its death. The thornback had other ideas and vanished in a twinkling of silver spell light.
A second phaerimm, still reeling from the fury of earlier attacks, was not so lucky. A trio of elves caught its ropes, then drew it down while their fellows poured arrows into it. By the time the dazed creature finally thought to raise a shield, they had it on the ground, dragging it past a teetering boulder. When their fellows pushed the monolith over, the spray of green blood left no doubt about its fate.
Aubric clambered over the rocks toward Rocnest, searching the sky for the last two creatures. The booming voices of the high mages continued unabated, as did the cries of the wounded and the rumble of shifting stone, but an ominous pause had descended over the battle itself. By the time he reached the base of the cliff, the dust cloud had thinned to a mere haze.
Dureth came up beside him. "Aubric, you look in a bad way."
Aubric nodded and searched the landslide below. "Did you see what became of the last two phaerimm?" A worried look came to Dureth's eye. "No."
"Then tell those who can to hurry." Aubric turned toward the cliff. There was perhaps fifty feet of vertical face, then another hundred of steep bowl where the avalanche had caved away. He sheathed his sword and looped a coil of rope over his shoulder. "I'll see you above."
Dureth caught his arm. "You can't do this, my friend," he said. "Not alone."
"How can I not?" Climbing as nimbly as a spider despite his wound, Aubric started up the cliff. "I doubt there is anyone left who can keep up." "Aubric, no one expects the blademajor to-"
But Aubric was already twenty feet up, his fingers and toes moving quickly from one hold to another. Dureth began to yell at the others to regroup, asking if anyone had a spell of flight. By the time the high lord had everyone gathered, Aubric was pulling himself off the vertical face onto the treacherous slope left by the landslide. He yelled for the others to stand clear and scrambled up through the loose stone, twice falling and nearly sliding to his death.
The high mages continued their spellcasting, their voices rising to a fevered pitch as they neared completion. When the top of the slide basin came into view, Aubric began to think Rhydwych had killed the other two phaerimm herself-and that, of course, was when the crackle of a war spell rumbled over the crest of the slope. He tied the rope off to a spar of rock and tossed the free end to the others, then drew his sword and scrambled into the saddle.
At the top, Aubric dropped to his belly and peered into Rocnest. All that remained of the ancient fortress were a few sections of elf-raised wall along the jagged rim. But down in the basin stood a rectangle of lustrous black stone, still shining with the magic that had drawn it from the ground. In front of the block stood a gossamer-robed Gold elf female, her voice ringing heavenward as she plucked strands of Weave from the air and plaited them into the dark monolith. She was fashioning an elegant keel arch, its purple depths growing ever darker and richer. With every fiber she laid, the mage herself seemed to grow wispy, translucent, as though she were braiding herself into her work. Aubric thought it so, for though the high mages kept their art to themselves, he had heard that their magic often involved the binding of their own spirits.