Then the guardian’s form rippled, and illusion veiled it once more. But not the same illusion. Khouryn was facing himself.
He assumed the trick was supposed to make him hesitate, but if so the reptile had misjudged him. He advanced, struck, and his foe didn’t hop back quickly enough. The axe ripped a gash in its torso.
Pain tore down Khouryn’s body as if he truly had cut his own flesh. It’s not real! he insisted to himself. And when the reptile hurled itself at him, he met it with another strike.
The urgrosh smashed through ribs and into its target’s vitals. The shock, or the echo of it, made Khouryn black out. When he roused, he was lying on the floor. So was his foe. Looking like its natural self again, it stared at him with lifeless, slit-pupiled eyes.
He judged that he’d only been unconscious for a heartbeat or two, because everyone else was still fighting. The other guardians had adopted the same tactic the dead one had used at the last. Medrash was dueling a copy of himself, and Balasar other Balasars.
And even there, where the fact that two were fighting one should have made it obvious, Khouryn found it difficult to pick out the real Balasar from one moment to the next. It was like there was more than simple illusion at work, like the guardians’ power gnawed at his mind to promote confusion and hysteria.
Refusing to succumb to them, he studied what was happening in front of him. Then he jumped up, rushed one of the Balasars, and chopped the base of its spine. Its shroud of illusion melted away as the creature crumpled. He started toward the other, and then instinct made him stop short. He felt the breeze as the reptile’s tail spikes whipped by in front of his face. He lunged into striking range and hacked one of its legs out from under it.
The real Balasar pounced to finish it off, and Khouryn rounded on the nearer Medrash. Who saw him coming and cried, “No! It’s me! Kill the other one!”
“Sorry,” Khouryn answered. He swung at the speaker’s kidney, and it collapsed in a frenzy of skinny, thrashing limbs and whipping tail. The actual Medrash dispatched it with a thrust to the heart.
Still feeling some ache from his phantom wounds as well as the genuine gashes on his leg, Khouryn looked around. He didn’t see anything else advancing to attack. “Everyone all right?” he panted.
“Just scratched up a little,” Balasar said. “And craving a nap. How could you tell the difference between them and us?”
“The purplespawn copied your looks,” Khouryn answered. “They couldn’t copy your fighting styles. And when I stared hard, I could make out the details of what was going on.”
“Purplespawn,” Balasar repeated. “That’s what these things are?”
“I think so,” Khouryn said. “They generally live underground like dwarves do. They’re supposed to be related to dark elves and dragons too, disturbing as that coupling is to imagine.”
“So,” said Medrash, “like the portal drake, they’re the kind of creature we might expect to find in Nala’s service. But before they interrupted us, you were telling us you’d discovered something you didn’t expect.”
Khouryn grinned. “Ah yes.” Since he’d decided to linger in Tymanther, he’d often regretted that he had so little aptitude for unraveling mysteries and conspiracies; Gaedynn or Aoth could surely do better. But by the Wanderer’s Eye, with help from the Daardendriens, he’d still found the end of the trail. “This isn’t a shrine to Bahamut but to Tiamat. Nala is actually a wyrmkeeper, a priestess of Tiamat.”
The dragonborn just looked at him.
“I don’t know a great deal about either Bahamut or Tiamat,” Khouryn persisted. “My people worship other gods. But I do know that Bahamut is considered good, and Tiamat evil. So, by infiltrating the Platinum Cadre, Nala has taken a group of worshipers who aspired to be virtuous and tricked them into corruption.”
“But for the most part,” Balasar said, “dragonborn don’t know anything about any of your gods.” He stifled a yawn. “They certainly don’t know enough to distinguish between one dragon god and another. Now that Nala’s accomplished the hard task of convincing them that any kind of wyrm worship can be a good thing, I don’t think this bit of news will trouble them. They simply won’t understand it.”
Khouryn frowned. “Surely the cultists won’t like hearing they pledged themselves to a completely different god than they imagined.”
“Once they go through the initiation,” Balasar replied, “Nala has at least the tip of a claw in every one of their heads.” He yawned again. “They’re the least likely of all to see the importance.”
“Curse it!” Khouryn said. “I can’t believe we’ve come this far and still have nothing!”
“I don’t believe it either,” Medrash said. He looked around and then, for want of anything better, wiped the blood from his sword with the edge of his cloak. “Torm brought us here for a reason.” He smiled. “And besides, you’re both forgetting we still haven’t discovered the reason for that wagonload of sand.”
Watching for more purplespawn or other threats, they stalked deeper into the tomb. Khouryn reflected that the owners must be-or have been-an important clan to possess such a spacious vault. Then he gasped at something extraordinary enough to push all such extraneous thoughts right out of his head.
Khouryn didn’t know a great deal about glassblowing, but he recognized the furnaces, blowpipes, marver, punty, and other tools required for the work. Raiann had set up in an open space where three crypts came together, and the five-headed statue of Tiamat he’d glimpsed previously loomed over everything else.
Nala’s ritual circle covered the patch of floor immediately in front of the idol. Intricately rendered in several colors, the figure was in its essence a wheel with S-shaped spokes.
The glass globes that Raiann crafted and Nala enchanted sat on a simple wooden rack convenient to both workspaces. Pinpoints of light from the votive candles reflected in the curves.
This, or something like it, was exactly what Khouryn and his comrades had needed to find. Yet for a moment, he felt less overjoyed than stunned by the sheer audacity and enormity of Nala’s scheme. She hadn’t just seized on the opportunity a menace afforded to foist her noisome creed on her fellow dragonborn. She’d help create the threat by crafting weapons to make the giants more dangerous than they’d ever been before.
“I said the barbarians had never made anything as fine-as civilized-as those orbs,” Balasar remarked at length. “Do you remember me saying that?”
“I remember Nala destroying every talisman we captured as soon as she could get her hands on it,” Medrash answered. “To make sure no mage or diviner could possibly figure out who fashioned it.”
Balasar strode to an improvised desk, a sarcophagus with parchment and writing implements on top and a stool positioned beside it. He picked up a couple of papers and, squinting in what for him was inadequate light, skimmed the text. “Who’s Skuthosiin?”
“A dragon,” said Khouryn, “who used to live hereabouts. He died during the Spellplague.”
“Don’t bet on it. We’ll have to go through these notes at length, but it seems Nala’s in communication with him.”
“I assume,” Medrash said, “that we can obtain other samples of Nala’s handwriting for comparison.”
Balasar laughed. “Oh yes. We have her. We absolutely have her. When Tarhun-” His eyes widened. “Watch out!”
Khouryn pivoted. Glaring, swaying slightly from side to side, Nala stood between them and the door Medrash had forced open.
Khouryn rushed her. The Daardendriens did too. She whirled and bolted for the corridor. As she dived through the door, she hissed a phrase in what he suspected was Draconic.
The door swung shut, nearly bashing Khouryn in the nose. He tried repeating the syllables Nala had spoken. Evidently he didn’t have them exactly right, because the mass of stone refused to pivot.