Despite the haze in the air, and the smarting blur in his eyes, Khouryn knew he’d just seen a giant skirmisher. He drew breath to shout an alert, but one of the dragonborn marching under the banners of the Platinum Cadre did it first.
So instead Khouryn shouted, “Form up! Protect yourselves!” He was sure there were only a few giants lurking on their flank, or somebody would have spotted one before then. Since they were too few to pose a serious threat, their purpose was to slow the advance, giving the bulk of Skuthosiin’s army more time to prepare. By halting and covering up with their shields, the Tymantherans were essentially giving them what they wanted. But they had to do something to keep the barbarians from picking them off one and two at a time.
Five giants popped up, and their long arms whipped. They didn’t throw spears or any other sort of crafted weapon. They must have been hoarding those for the true battle to come. But they were an offshoot of the race called stone giants and, like others of their kind, could fling rocks with deadly force and accuracy.
The impacts cracked and banged. One dragonborn fell down. But no stones streaked past shields to hammer the bodies behind them.
The barbarians ducked back down. Several crossbows clacked, an instant too late to have any hope of hitting their targets.
A female voice chanted words that sent a pang of chill stabbing through the hot air.
Khouryn turned. Several paces to his left, Kanjentellequor Biri, the albino wizard who’d unraveled the deeper secrets of Nala’s papers, had somehow prevailed on two spearmen to open a gap in the shield wall. Where she stood, inviting another stone as she rattled off her incantation and flicked a rod of roughly hewn and polished quartz through small, repetitive downstrokes.
Just as Khouryn reached her side, hailstones pounded down to batter the far slope of the dune. A giant howled.
Khouryn gripped Biri’s wrist and hauled her back behind the warriors. “I didn’t tell you to do that,” he said.
She grinned. “But it worked. They had cover, but not in relation to something that dropped straight down from overhead.”
“You didn’t have any cover either. It’s only by the Luckmaiden’s grace that you didn’t end up with your brains splashed across the ground. As it is, you showed the giants where you are.”
Tarhun had scattered the mages throughout the army, partly so the giants couldn’t target all of them at once. He’d also instructed them to refrain from casting spells till he said otherwise.
Biri’s smile melted away. Despite his time among them, Khouryn wasn’t good at guessing how old a dragonborn was. But he got a feeling the wizard was younger than he’d first supposed. “I just wanted to help,” she said.
“You already have,” Khouryn said, “and trust me, you will again. But for now, let the soldiers do the work. They can handle it.”
As if to illustrate his point, a squadron of outriders charged the giants. Khouryn couldn’t see everything that happened next. His hulking spearmen with their overlapping shields were in the way, and so was the ash dune. But he made out Medrash’s heater, painted with the steel gauntlet of Torm, and Balasar’s targe, emblazoned with the six white circles of Clan Daardendrien. He also saw giants toppling with lances embedded in their guts, or blood streaming from sword cuts on their necks and chests.
The infantry raised a cheer. Except that there was something wrong with it. Khouryn strained to make out the one voice that wasn’t jubilant, all but lost amid the clamor.
“Turn around!” someone bellowed. “Turn around!”
Khouryn did, and suffered a shock of amazement and dread. A brown dragon was heaving itself out of the ground. Huge as the burrowing creature was, it defied common sense that so few of the dragonborn had noticed its relatively blunt head with its mass of short, thick horns looming high above their own. But there hadn’t been anything there just a moment before, and almost everyone was watching the fight between the outriders and the giants.
The dragon glanced around, then oriented on Khouryn. Or maybe on the wizard standing beside him.
“Crouch down behind me!” he shouted. He wanted to tell her to close her eyes and turn her head too, but the brown didn’t give him time. Its neck whipped forward. Its jaws opened and spewed its breath weapon.
Khouryn covered up with his shield and squinched his own eyes shut, which was possibly the only thing that saved them from the hot grit that rasped across his skin. When he opened them again, sand and ash hung so thick in the air as to make the smoky haze he’d despised before seem clear by comparison.
Dragonborn cried out, because the brown’s breath had scraped them, or simply in fear and confusion. Khouryn could see some of the nearer ones, milling around or sprawled on the ground, but he couldn’t see the wyrm. A moment before, the sudden appearance of such a behemoth had seemed a nightmarish impossibility. Its vanishing felt like another, even though he assumed the cloud was actually responsible.
He only knew when it charged because its strides jolted the ground, and because dragonborn yelled as it trampled them or brushed them out of the way. “Run!” he rasped, his mouth foul with sand, and then his huge foe pounced out of the murk. The scalloped, winglike frills that extended down the sides of its body were undulating. Maybe that was how it kept the air agitated and full of grit even when it wasn’t spitting the stuff out of its gullet.
It struck at Khouryn, and he met its head with a thrust of his spear. The weapon drove straight into a nostril. The brown screeched and recoiled, jerking the spear out of his hand. It whipped its head back and forth until the foreign object tumbled out.
That gave Khouryn just enough time to discard his shield and snatch the urgrosh off his back.
The brown dragon clawed at him. He spun aside and chopped at its foot. The axe glanced off its scales.
At almost the same instant, the head at the end of the long neck arced over him, too high for him to attack. The brown was reaching for Biri. But she conjured a blast of frost that spattered the wyrm’s jaws and eyes and made it falter.
“You get away from it!” Khouryn bellowed. “Spears, follow my voice! It’s here!”
The dragon lifted a forefoot high. He only just spotted the action in the brown, swirling gloom. It stamped down at him. He sidestepped, cut, and that time hacked a gash in its hide.
Thunder boomed and light flared as Biri burned the wyrm with lightning. From a safer distance, Khouryn hoped. They were holding their own, but it couldn’t last-not unless they had help. Where were the damn spearmen?
There! Shadows swarmed out of the murk on either side of the dragon. Spears jabbed.
The brown struck left, then right, biting a dragonborn to pieces with each snap. Some spearmen cried out and retreated madly. But others were less frantic. They fell back just far enough to protect themselves, then attacked again as soon as the wyrm pivoted away.
Not that such maneuvering was easy. The dragon was faster and less predictable than the Beast. Its rippling alar membranes could swat a warrior, or its sweeping tail could shatter his legs, whether it was facing him or not.
Still, most of the warriors managed to stay alive for a few moments. Long enough for Khouryn to charge the wyrm and, taking advantage of his shorter stature, dash on underneath it.
He reversed his grip on the urgrosh and stabbed repeatedly upward with the spearhead. At first the dragon didn’t seem to notice. But then when he yanked the spike free, arterial blood spurted after it, spattering his arms, and the reptile jerked.
The brown wheeled, stamping, trying to claw and crush him or, failing that, at least get him out from underneath it. He scurried to avoid its feet, keep its ventral surface above him, and go on stabbing.