Where he found it all but impossible to stand. The dracolich’s motion bounced him around, and the bottom of the rib cage was like a floor with planks missing. Small lightning bolts crackled across the space he occupied, stinging and jolting him. They’d do worse than that once they wore away his protective enchantments.
He grabbed a rib to find and keep his balance, released the remaining energy in the spear, and jabbed at the curves of bone around him. If Tymora smiled, maybe Alasklerbanbastos would find the assault from the inside as difficult to ignore as Gaedynn’s arrow rattling around in his head.
For two or three heartbeats, that didn’t appear to be the case. But then the dracolich whirled around like a hound chasing its tail. Head bent backward at the end of his long neck, he glared at the pest infesting his core.
“Not this time,” said Aoth. He made sure he didn’t meet the Bone Wyrm’s gaze. And wished the creature didn’t have a hundred other ways of attacking him.
Alasklerbanbastos’s fleshless jaws opened. Aoth shouted a word of defense, and the world blazed white.
Medrash’s vision had cleared, and to a degree so had his thoughts. He could see and understand what was happening before him, and that was hellish. Because his friends and comrades needed him.
Chopping with his urgrosh, or jabbing with the spike on the butt, Khouryn was fighting as brilliantly as any warrior Medrash had ever seen. Grinning, shouting taunts, waiting until the last possible instant to dance out of the way of an attack in order to land a counterstroke, Balasar was equally superb. And they had help. Dragonborn kept streaming into the heart of Ashhold. Bat riders wheeled and swooped overhead, hurling javelins or thrusting with lances and polearms. Some of the mages had arrived as well. Cloaked in a protective blur, Biri hurled bursts of frost from her rose quartz wand.
Yet Medrash’s instincts told him it wasn’t going to be enough. Skuthosiin had gashes and punctures all over his prodigious body, but they weren’t slowing him down. He seemed to fell an adversary with every snap of his fangs, snatch of his talons, or swing of his tail, and when he managed another burst of poison breath, he was apt to kill several at once. To make the situation even more dire, a couple of the ash giant shamans had shaken off their debility, some of the hulking barbarian warriors had retreated into the heart of Ashhold, and they were all making a stand with their dragon chieftain.
Medrash reached out to Torm. As on his previous attempts, he failed to make contact. Even though he felt like his thoughts had cleared, his injury seemed to hinder his spiritual gifts just as it had paralyzed his body.
It occurred to him that he was likely dying. In other circumstances, that might not have dismayed him. But now it felt like failure. Like he’d be abandoning Balasar and the others.
He groped uselessly in the void. Then a familiar figure crouched over him. “Patrin?” he croaked.
The newcomer’s eyes widened in surprise, and Medrash realized he’d been mistaken. The fellow was younger and thinner than Bahamut’s knight had been, and his hide was brown-freckled ochre, not crimson. Medrash decided that it was the youth’s purple and platinum tunic, and the dark, that had confused him.
“I’m … I’m not him,” the newcomer said.
“I see that now,” said Medrash. “Go. Fight. Don’t worry about me.”
“I’m not him,” the youth repeated, “but the wind whispered to me. It said that now the god needs meto be his champion in this place. It told me to heal you. But I don’t know how!”
Even with his body broken and useless, Medrash felt a twinge of repugnance at the thought of accepting any boon from a dragon god. But he was far too desperate to pay it any heed.
“Put your hands on my shoulders,” he said. “Now reach out to Bahamut with your mind. You just have to concentrate and believe the Power will come. And be ready when it does. Sometimes-”
The newly anointed paladin cried out. A cold, stinging Power burst out of his hands and surged through Medrash, sharpening his thoughts and washing the deadness out of his limbs. Which brought a certain amount of pain, because the magic didn’t entirely heal his burns and bruises. But he so rejoiced in the return of sensation that even discomfort was a kind of joy.
The dragon-worshiper’s eyes rolled up into his head. He toppled sideways.
Medrash sat up and caught the unconscious youth, then laid him gently on the ground. He wished he could put him somewhere safer, but with Skuthosiin slaughtering dragonborn every moment, there wasn’t time. Besides, nowhere in Ashhold was truly safe, nor would be until the fight was won.
He stood up and found his fallen sword, then tried to assess how much mystical Power remained to him. To his surprise, he had plenty. Bahamut had left him some blisters and scrapes, but had evidently refreshed his paladin gifts.
A Daardendrien warrior with a broken leg lay in front of Skuthosiin. Jaws open wide, the green dragon’s head arced down at him.
Medrash shouted, “Torm!” The world blurred for an instant as he switched places with his injured kinsman.
Sidestepping, he slashed at the side of the dragon’s head as it plunged by. He missed the slit-pupiled yellow eye, but his blade split the scaly hide beneath.
Skuthosiin whipped his head up high, almost snatching the sword from Medrash’s grip. But he held on tight, and, slinging drops of gore, the blade pulled out of the wound instead.
Skuthosiin glared down at him, and the spiritual deformity that made him profoundly if indefinably hideous seemed to concentrate in his gaze. Perhaps it was supposed to make Medrash avert his eyes, or to churn his guts with nausea, but it did neither. It only made him even more determined to destroy the threat to his people once and for all.
“I don’t care how many little gods you have propping you up!” the dragon snarled. “My lady is the only one that matters!”
“Prove it,” Medrash said. He raised his sword, and white light blazed from the blade. Skuthosiin recoiled. Medrash dashed forward to strike while the wyrm was still dazzled. Other warriors did the same.
Aoth had tattoos to blunt pain and avert shock. To keep him awake and active even when wounded. Sprawled inside Alasklerbanbastos’s rib cage, he released their power.
And that was all he did. He didn’t know how badly he was hurt-badly, he suspected-but he was sure he couldn’t withstand another blast of the dracolich’s breath. His only hope was to lie motionless and convince Alasklerbanbastos he was dead already.
Just look away, he thought, watching the Great Bone Wyrm through slitted eyes. There are dozens of people beating on you and trying to kill you. Look around at them.
Alasklerbanbastos’s head whipped away. Then Tchazzar crashed down on him like an avalanche.
Nala tried to avoid conflict as she skulked around the edges of the battle. It wasn’t too difficult. With Skuthosiin and various giants to fight, her fellow dragonborn tended to overlook her. Which was fortunate, because she needed to make haste.
Impossible though it seemed, she could tell that the tide had turned against her master. Probably realizing it, he had at one point spread his wings to take to the air. But, chanting in unison, three of the vanquisher’s wizards had created a web of blue light that covered the center of Ashhold like a lid on a jar.
The barrier at least kept the Lance Defenders on their bats from harrying Skuthosiin any further. But in Nala’s judgment, they weren’t really the problem. Nor, for all their power, were the mages. Nor the common warriors, jabbing and hacking with dogged determination. It was Medrash. The paladin was exalted, fighting like one of the dragon-killing rebels in the tales of treason and blasphemy that made up the history of their people.
Nala had to strike him down and make it stick. Then Skuthosiin could still prevail, and would unquestionably know whom to reward for his victory.