He wheeled his mount to keep beyond the creature's reach, but the skeletal griffon didn't respond quickly enough. A tentacle whipped around its neck, shattering naked vertebrae, and hung there in a loop. Blue fire ran up the arm toward the steed and its rider as though following a trail of oil.
Bareris chanted words of power, undipped the strap holding Tammith to the saddle, and grabbed hold of her shroud. The azure flame leaped at him just as he sang the final note. The world seemed to break apart, and then he was standing on the ground with his legs still spread as though straddling a mount. Tammith fell to the ground at his feet, her weight jerking his hand down with her. The folds of the shroud separated. Smoke billowed forth, and Bareris cried out in horror.
But Tammith wasn't burning up. The sun had already dropped out of sight, and she'd turned to mist to extricate herself from her cloth cocoon. The swirls of fog congealed into human form.
"What's going on?" Tammith asked.
Bareris pointed. "That."
The creature had scattered the griffon riders. Perhaps thinking that now they'd leave it alone, it plummeted, and jolted the earth when it slammed down. It then heaved itself toward him, Tammith, and Dimon's men, crawling and lashing its tentacles as fast as it had originally. The curse of slowness had worn off.
Tammith smiled, revealing upper canines extending into fangs. "I'll stop it."
"No. Stay back. The blue fire can destroy anything, even a vampire."
"Then I'll make sure it doesn't touch me." She exploded into a cloud of bats.
The winged beasts hurled themselves at the oncoming giant. Dodging the sweeps of its tentacles, they caught hold of them in their claws and sank their fangs into them. Bareris couldn't tell if the immense horror had any blood for them to suck, but he was sure Tammith was using the cold malignancy of her touch in an effort to drain its life away.
He, too, did his best to kill it. He wanted to charge and fight near her with his sword, but the better tactic was to stand back and use magic. So he battered the horror with shout after shout and spell after spell.
As Tammith had promised, at first the bats took flight whenever blue flame flowed or leaped close to them, but then she failed to notice a flare until it was too late. The blaze engulfed a bat, and it burst in a sort of fiery splash. Bareris winced.
Then the gigantic creature collapsed, its dozens of arms flopping to the ground and beginning to liquefy. A putrid stench suffused the air.
Bareris hadn't been able to tell which attacks had truly hurt it, and he couldn't tell which had killed it, either. Perhaps none of them. Possibly the beast had borne some fundamental flaw in its anatomy that kept it from living very long.
The surviving bats took flight from the rotting tangle, then whirled together. Tammith wasn't marked or bleeding, but she stumbled.
Bareris ran to her. "Are you all right?"
She nodded. "I will be. That was close. When the fire took a portion of me, it felt as if it was going to jump to all my bodies. But somehow I pushed it back."
"You really didn't have to charge and attack."
"As far as that's concerned, when you moved us, you didn't have to drop us between the creature and the soldiers of Tyraturos. Neither one of us is responsible for looking after them."
"I suppose that's true." They each had acted as instinct prompted, which suggested that, whatever she believed, not all her urges were selfish and cruel.
The captain of Dimon's legionnaires came trotting up to them. He hadn't observed the final phase of the fight in any detail, and he stopped short when he noticed Tammith's alabaster skin, the subtle luminescence in her dark eyes, and the fangs still furrowing her lower lip. Before the war, he might have felt a personal aversion to vampires, but he would have accepted their presence in the army as a matter of course. Now, he feared that any such creature served Szass Tam.
"It's all right," Bareris said, investing his voice with a dash of magic to calm and convince. "Captain Iltazyarra is on our side."
The other commander took a breath. "Of course. Please, forgive my moment of confusion. To tell you the truth, I'm still rattled from seeing that beast tear into us. I don't know what we would have done if you griffon riders hadn't happened by."
You would have died, Bareris thought. "We were glad to help."
"Can you help some more? I've got soldiers who fled and are still running, not realizing the creature is dead. Can your fellows catch up with them and herd them back?"
"Of course."
"Thank you." The officer shook his head. "By the Hand, what a mess! This route was supposed to be clear. A wave of blue flame must have carved the gorge and created the beast just a short time ago."
Bareris frowned, then shrugged. "I suppose."
Long before his superiors in the Order of Conjuration commanded him to serve with the army, Thamas Napret had become accustomed to the groans and whimpers of injured men. A Red Wizard couldn't climb the ladder of his hierarchy without hearing such noises frequently.
Yet now they seemed like a reproach, and distracted him from his contemplation of the stars. He rose, picked up his staff with its inlaid runes of gold, and walked away from the camp.
He didn't go far. Some of Szass Tam's warriors might still be lurking around, and even if not, wild kobolds and goblins sometimes crept down from the Sunrise Mountains to forage and raid in the wooded hills of Gauros. He put a few paces between himself and the nearest of his associates, then sat down on ground carpeted with dry pine needles, crossed his legs, and sank into a meditative trance. Perhaps the gods-assuming that any were left alive-would reveal how things had gone so horribly wrong.
Dmitra Flass had ordered their small band to inflict as much harm on Gauros as possible, and in truth, it didn't take a huge army to burn farms and villages and overrun tax stations in the sparsely settled tharch, especially when Azhir Kren and the majority of her troops were fighting elsewhere. The ability to move fast and vanish into the forests kept the southerners safe from retaliation.
Or at least it had for a while. Then a force of howling blood orcs and yellow-eyed dread warriors descended on them under cover of night. Taken by surprise, Thamas and his allies had nonetheless managed to repel the attackers, but they'd lost half their number in the process, with several more likely to succumb to their wounds before the end of the night.
It shouldn't have happened. They'd covered their tracks and hidden themselves well, as always. Even skilled manhunters-
Thamas sensed rather than heard a presence at his back, and twisted his head around. Gothog Dyernina and two soldiers had crept up behind him. Gothog was half Rashemi and half orc, as his pointed ears and protruding lower canines attested. As far as Thamas was concerned, such creatures had no business commanding, but as the war killed Mulan officers, it provided opportunities for the lower orders to rise from the ranks, and over time, he'd gotten used to Gothog, too.
Which didn't mean he wanted the lout interrupting him when he was trying to concentrate. "What is it?" he asked.
"I want to know," Gothog said, "why you didn't warn me the enemy was coming."
"Because I'm not a diviner," Thamas said. "I'd like to know why your scouts and sentries didn't spot them."
"Right," Gothog said, "you're a conjuror. But it didn't do us a lot of good during the fight, did it? At first, you didn't do anything. Then, when you finally whistled up that big three-headed snake, it attacked our own men."
"It destroyed several of our foes first, and I sent it back to the Abyss as soon as I lost control. I explained this to you. The mystical forces in the cosmos are out of balance. Until that changes, wizardry won't be as reliable as it ought to be."