He chanted and aimed his spear. A bolt of dazzling, crackling lightning leaped from the point and struck one of the red dragons. The creature convulsed and plummeted halfway to the ground before it regained control of its wings.
But while Aoth was busy with that one, the other red dived toward the archers and spearmen in one of the copses.
Relatively safe behind the sellswords and their shields, Oraxes hurled darts of force at the Threskelans who kept rushing the formation. Despite the ominous and unnatural darkness, it seemed to him that things were going reasonably well. Then their living enemies-scaly kobolds and pig-faced orcs-fell back and let the dead assault them.
Oraxes had felt though not seen the initial arrival of the phantoms, but then they’d simply gone away again. Now they were back and advancing in the form of skull-faced shadows. It was like they’d fed on something that made them more real.
Sellswords who’d faced the previous foes stolidly or even with sneering bravado quailed. But only for an instant, and then they braced themselves for what was to come. Oraxes remembered that they were men who’d followed Aoth into Thay and fought the undead horrors there.
But courage and experience didn’t always save them. Sometimes their jabbing spears and slashing swords bit, but just as often passed harmlessly through their insubstantial targets. When that happened, the ghosts reached right through shields and mail to plunge their fingers into living bodies. Then men screamed, withered, and collapsed.
One phantom felled a mercenary, then glided through his body before he could flop all the way to the ground. Oraxes conjured a burst of vitriol, which flew right through the ghost to splash and sizzle on its previous foe.
Stupid! Oraxes should have thrown darts of light. Resolved to do so, he started to backpedal and chanced to look squarely into the vacant orbits of the murky, wavering skull face. Suddenly he couldn’t look away, move, or even draw a breath. The ghost reached for him-
Behind him, Meralaine chanted rhyming words in a language that even he, a fellow mage, didn’t recognize. Her voice was soft, but something about it made certain syllables seem to ring like hammer strokes on an anvil.
It was the ghost’s turn to falter. Its form rippled in place like it was straining to break free of the power constraining it. Then, with a howl, it turned and launched itself at one of its fellow spirits. Two other phantoms did the same.
Oraxes sucked in a breath. He wanted to attack the enemy ghosts, not the ones serving Meralaine, but it was hard to tell which shadow was which. He was still trying to choose a target when he glimpsed motion overhead.
A dragon swooped at the coppice. It opened its jaws and spewed bright yellow flame. The lance of fire ignited or simply obliterated everything in its path-branches, archers on their elevated platforms, and living warriors and ghosts battling on the ground. And, like an artist’s brush painting a line of ruin on the earth, it was heading straight at Oraxes.
He started to scramble out of the way, then noticed that if Meralaine didn’t move, the wyrm’s breath would sweep right over her as well. And, evidently startled, she wasn’t moving.
He grabbed her and dragged her with him. His foot caught on a corpse’s outstretched arm. He fell, carrying Meralaine down with him. The jet of flame slashed by just a couple of finger-lengths from their feet, close enough to make him gasp at the searing heat.
Close enough too for the grass and fallen twigs and leaves the flare set on fire to pose an immediate threat. He scrambled to his feet, dragged Meralaine up beside him, looked around, and felt a stab of terror.
At first glance it seemed that everything was burning, in all directions, with no path through the flames. The heat hammered at him. Smoke set him coughing. A burning platform, the charred corpses of the bowmen who’d perched there, and the boughs that had supported it crashed down in front of him. Meralaine yelped.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I can handle this.” Fighting the need to cough again, for that would spoil the cadence, he rasped an incantation.
A corona of flame sprang up around him, staining the world blue-but it didn’t burn him. Instead, it replaced the heat of the dragon’s conflagration with a pleasant coolness.
He pulled Meralaine into the blue fire, and she cried out at what felt painfully cold to her. But once he put his arm around her and drew her close, she was completely inside the effect and experienced it as he did.
“Now we run,” he said. Before the protective enchantment faded.
He tried to flee in the opposite direction from the enemy-although with his surroundings transformed, suffused with the glare of flame and the blur of smoke, he wasn’t sure of his bearings. He also tried to lead Meralaine around the worst of the fires. But sometimes, if they didn’t want to retrace their steps, they had no choice but to plunge right through. At those moments their shield couldn’t keep out all the heat, and it was speed as much as magic that protected them.
They stumbled clear of the blaze an instant before their own halo of fire guttered out. Oraxes drew Meralaine onward for several more paces, turned, then cursed in surprise. Because, as he could see from the outside, the dragon’s breath had only set a relatively small area alight. The blaze had seemed as big as all of Luthcheq while they were struggling to escape it.
Meralaine coughed so hard that it nearly jerked her free of his encircling arm. Once she stopped, he realized there was no longer any particular reason to hold on to her. Still, he let her go with some reluctance.
She rubbed tears from her reddened eyes. “What now?”
A part of him answered, Run! Before the ghosts and dragons find us again! But what he said aloud was, “Look. Some of the sellswords are right over there. We’ll join up with them.”
Gaedynn picked a target and drew the fletching back to his ear, and then Eider veered-probably to avoid a threat her master hadn’t even noticed.
He automatically compensated for the shift and, leading the drake he wanted to shoot, loosed his arrow. The shaft drove into the reptile’s flank, and the creature plummeted.
Gaedynn smiled and glanced around for another foe. A blast of fire, hurled by something else in the air, silhouetted a dragon flying near the top of the rise. Presumably it was the green, since most spellcasters would know better than to hurl flame at a red.
Though he couldn’t make them out in the gloom, Gaedynn suspected it was Jhesrhi, riding on Scar, who’d thrown the attack. She was adept at fire magic, and the staff they’d looted from Jaxanaedegor’s caverns had augmented her abilities.
Which didn’t mean she could kill even a young dragon all by herself. He sent Eider winging in her direction.
Meanwhile, the green gained the high air. It shouldn’t have been able to outmaneuver a trained griffon, but maybe Scar was injured. Why not? Everything else was going wrong.
Gaedynn reached to draw an arrow from one of his quivers, then left it where it was. If he didn’t call attention to himself, maybe he could gain the high air relative to the wyrm and hit it with something likely to do more harm to a dragon than even a shaft sped by his own unerring hand.
The dragon’s neck whipped, and its jaws opened. Barely visible in the dimness, vapor streamed out.
Scar lashed his wings and dodged. Instantly, the green dived. Somehow, it had predicted in which direction Scar would move and had poised itself to plunge and intercept him and the woman on his back.
Gaedynn sent Eider hurtling down at the wyrm. Jhesrhi blasted the ventral side of the reptile’s body with a final flash of fire. Then Eider slammed into the base of its neck with a jolt that Gaedynn, standing up in the stirrups, felt through every portion of his body.
The griffon’s talons stabbed deep. Her beak snapped, tearing away chunks of scaly hide and flesh.