Most of the arching vines fell short of their mark, and the sickening thuds of dead flesh hitting hard ground sounded through the forest. Two vines succeeded in entangling the dragon, one in the middle of the neck, the other near the base of the right wing.
Akabar muttered another spell, and a trio of magic missiles sizzled through the sky with unerring precision, striking the purplish plates over the beast’s heart.
The former Red Plumes closed on the dragon’s passengers as the tendrils they had ridden upward spun about the beast like spider’s silk entrapping a fly. Dragonbait skewered the man approaching him.
The god-possessed corpse thrust itself farther onto the lizard’s sword and grabbed at Dragonbait’s shoulders, attempting to knock him off balance. Dragonbait lashed out with a powerful kick, removing his sword, and sending the corpse spiraling down to the ground. The lizard chopped loose the vine entangling the dragon’s wing.
The dead man that had arrived on the vine about Mist’s neck crawled toward the halfling. The vine began dragging the dragon closer to the mound of refuse.
Mist bucked, almost dislodging her passengers, but did not succeed at tearing the binding about her throat. With her wings she began sweeping the air before her in great gusts. The loose matter atop Moander spun away in a whirlwind of stinking rot, and the puppet Akabar was driven to his knees, the spell in his throat spoiled by the assault.
More tendrils trailed up the single, thick root that bound the dragon like a hangman’s noose.
Moander turned Akabar’s body around to face Alias. “Say good-bye to this puppet, servant,” Akabar’s voice instructed. “I can afford to lose this tool, but not you.”
The mossy ground began to rise around Alias, as the supporting roots beneath her withdrew. She struggled as she sank into the heart of Moander. She screamed when the leaves and rotting fungus began covering her, but another porous, spongy mat of moss covered her mouth. She gasped for air and pungently scented vapors flowed into her lungs. Within moments she was asleep.
Dragonbait, alerted by the warrior woman’s shout, and seeing that she would soon be beyond reach, leaped from the dragon’s back.
Fifty feet separated the dragon from the oozing god, and a number of fanged mouths at the end of tendrils had finished their snaking climb up the tether about the great wyrm’s neck. Olive was trying to fend off these horrid little maws and dodge past the rotting soldier’s corpse that blocked her attempts to cut the tether.
A fall from fifty feet to hard ground would have snapped even Dragonbait’s legs, but where he landed on Moander, over the spot where Alias had disappeared, all was soft muck. Akabar turned to face him, but hesitated for a moment. Tendrils were already beginning to twist upward to ensnare the lizard-creature.
Akabar spat out the guttural words of another spell. Unaccountably the spell dissolved, but Moander did not waste energy registering its confusion on Akabar’s face. The tendrils wrapping around the lizard hesitated, unsure about attacking the creature with the same markings as their valued prisoner. Without Moander’s command, they were unable to come to any conclusion, and Moander’s attention was elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the bard was losing her battle at the dragon’s head. The mouths had succeeded in taking several little bites out of her, she could not get past the corpse of the Red Plume mercenary, and Moander continued drawing in the great flying wyrm with a slow, inexhaustible force. Already the distance between dragon and god had been halved, and white flecks of spittle dotted the dragon’s lower whiskers.
Olive was reminded of halfling children fishing for bats with light, durable twine and live moths as bait. For some fool reason, this halfling is on the bat’s side, she thought, even though the bat is losing.
Mist twisted her head so that her chin rested along the thickening vine. Opportunistic tendrils immediately laced themselves into the dragon’s whiskers, then began trying to crawl into the wyrm’s mouth to suffocate her.
Dragonbait faced the possessed Akabar. A sea of tendrils ebbed and flowed around the lizard, still waiting for Moander to direct them, but Moander’s mind was fully occupied with controlling Akabar and dealing with the dragon.
Rivulets of sweat poured from the mage’s face, and his robes were drenched and rotting from his contact with Moander’s innards. His head tilted to the right as Moander sorted through his thoughts for a way the mage might deal with the lizard. But there was only one weapon left in Akabar’s repertoire.
The mage’s hand drew out his curved dagger. “Kill me, or die yourself,” Moander challenged with Akabar’s voice, now a gasping death-rattle. “You lose in either case, don’t you, pure one?”
Dragonbait crouched, then leaped, using his overlong sword as a vaulting pole. As he sailed over the mage’s head, Akabar’s dagger caught in the side of his leg and remained there, twisting out of its wielder’s hand.
Wounded, the lizard made a sloppy landing. The scaly flesh around his eyes crinkled in pain, but he spun his oddly shaped, toothed sword over his head and sliced at Akabar from behind.
The outer diamond tip of his sword struck at the back of the mage’s neck right where the sucker-tendrils clustered in a main bundle before they trailed back in a thick vine to Moander’s heart. Most of the cluster was severed neatly without a scratch on the mage’s scalp. Dragonbait put his foot against Akabar’s back to keep him in place and yanked the remaining vine-bundle from Akabar’s head.
Just then, Mist breathed a mighty exhalation of flame and brimstone that caused her belly to flex deeply inward. The fire traveled down the side of the tether about her neck and turned the side of the god into a jungle inferno. The wet vegetable flesh alighted again, and the outer layers of the snare vine were reduced to ash.
Akabar’s and Moander’s mouths screamed, but their voices were no longer in hellish synchrony. They were separate entities. Akabar fell to his knees, gasping, his hands clutching the wounds made from the sucker that had been ripped away. The tendrils surrounding him and Dragonbait wavered and then closed in.
The lizard grabbed the mage by the arm and yanked him to his feet. He lopped off a few more tendrils on the living mound, tugged the mage with him, and jumped.
Warrior and Turmishman tumbled down the slope, resisting the impulse to stop their fall by grabbing hold of the overhanging vines and tree stumps that stood out from Moander’s lower flanks. They fell in a heap at the base of the monster.
Moander burned and crackled. Plumes of acrid smoke billowed up from his body. Moander tired of this battle—it was dangerously exhausting his life energies. The Abomination desired a retreat, but if he loosed the dragon, the beast might yet find the strength to breathe again and destroy the god’s earthly form. The tendril snaring the dragon was almost burned through. Moander had to damage the wyrm first, and damage her badly.
The god played out an additional length of the tether vine. Mist felt the line slacken and, believing in her exhaustion that the line had finally broken, pulled back with a frantic beat of her wings. She succeeded in snapping the line even more taut. Moander gave one last great pull, and the weakened vine snapped apart.
Mist, with the halfling clutching for dear life to her ears, pitched over backward and crashed among the trees.
The huge god-hill, burning and mostly blind, shifted one way then another before plunging deeper into the forest. Smaller trees were plowed underneath, but now Moander flowed between the larger trees, unable to snap them.
Dragonbait pulled Akabar from the Abomination’s path. The mage oozed blood in scarlet ponds from half-a-dozen shallow head wounds. He moaned softly and began to cry.
Dragonbait pulled the mage’s curved dagger from his scaly calf and examined the gash. His hands glowed softly in the dim woods, and the cut grew less deep but did not close completely. His healing ability exhausted, Dragonbait tore his ragged new shirt in two to use as bandages.