The dimness was no inconvenience to Aoth with his fire-kissed eyes. The cramped quarters, however, required that he and Cera stop walking arm in arm. She courteously waved for him to go first.
They were about a third of the way down when he saw something that brought him to a sudden stop. Cera bumped against his back, and he was glad she hadn’t done it harder. Because he wouldn’t have wanted her to knock him farther down the steps.
Just as he could see in the dark, and see even farther than a griffon, so too did he see the world in minute and exquisite detail. And thus, just as he was about to trust his weight to the next step, he’d spotted the webs of tiny cracks running through the half dozen risers immediately below him.
“Is something wrong?” Cera asked.
He reached with the point of his spear and touched the first stair below him. Most of it crumbled. He tapped the next. It disintegrated too. The fragments pattered on the undamaged steps one twist beneath them.
“They were fine when we climbed up,” Cera said.
“Yes.” Some spell or alchemical solution had weakened them in the brief period between Hasos’s descent and now.
And if not for his inhumanly keen vision, an edge Aoth liked to conceal from the world at large, the trap might have caught him. True, he had a tattoo to provide a soft landing if he fell, but it took an instant to activate the magic. Caught by surprise and dropping a relatively short distance, he could have cracked his head or broken his leg before he managed it.
Rushing footsteps thumped risers farther down the stairwell. Someone had been lying in wait to finish Aoth off if the plunge didn’t kill him. Now that it was plain that his target wasn’t going to fall, the assassin was trying to get away.
Aoth wished he could see the bastard. But even spellscarred eyes couldn’t peer through the plank stairs blocking the view.
He could give chase, though. He activated the tattoo, jumped through the hole created by the missing steps to the intact ones below, and charged onward.
He bounded all the way to the bottom and out into the street that ran parallel to the wall. Where people of various sorts were going about their business-they gasped and shied as he lunged into their midst with his spear at the ready.
“Did someone run out this doorway ahead of me?” he asked.
For what seemed an interminable moment, they all just gawked at him. Then a woman with the feet of a dead chicken sticking out of her wicker basket shook her head.
“Wonderful,” sighed Aoth. The would-be killer had evidently either exited the gate while invisible or used a spell or talisman to shift himself through space. Either way, he’d made a successful escape.
Aoth tramped back up the stairs, and warm yellow light gleamed down at him. Cera still stood where he’d left her, but now she was glowing. She’d raised her power in case she needed to defend herself, and her resolute expression made a marked contrast to her lighthearted manner from before.
“It’s all right,” Aoth said. “Well, not really. I wanted to find out who the whoreson was. But anyway, he’s gone.”
“See the dragon?” Jhesrhi asked.
“What?” said Gaedynn, wrenching himself back and forth in the saddle. “Where?”
It was one of those rare moments when he seemed genuinely flummoxed. Despite the potentially dangerous circumstances and her sour mood, it gave her a moment of malicious amusement to see the master scout discomfited at having missed something as big and threatening as a wyrm.
Although if she were inclined to be fair, she’d admit that it was surprisingly easy to miss a blue dragon flying against a blue sky. Fortunately, the wind in these farmlands was now her ally, and as a result she hadn’t needed her own eyes to learn of the creature’s approach.
“Just keep riding,” Gaedynn said. “In Threskel, a dragon’s one of the nobility, not a beast of prey. It likely won’t bother us unless we do something suspicious.”
The remark implied that he thought she might be on the verge of panic. In light of her behavior back at the kobold outpost, he had every right to, but it irked her anyway.
“I know what to do,” she snapped. She proved it by kicking the paint into motion and trotting on up the muddy road to Mourktar.
From a distance, with a number of towers jutting high above the buildings huddled around them, Mourktar looked like a fairly impressive city. Jhesrhi supposed that viewed from the seaward side, it would seem even more so. Because the town was Threskel’s one deepwater port on the Alamber Sea, and by all accounts, the bustling heart of the place was the docks and the warehouses adjacent to them.
Although Jhesrhi had no reason to care about that. Not unless she gave in to the temptation to board an outbound ship and flee. She and Gaedynn were there because prospectors, trappers, and others who sought their fortunes in the hills and mountains called the Sky Riders often passed through Mourktar on their way in and out.
The blue dragon flew on toward the city, and then a second such creature soared up from among the buildings. Surprised, Jhesrhi reined in her mount. Gaedynn caught up and halted beside her.
The blues circled each other. After a while, Jhesrhi said, “I can’t hear them at this distance, but I suppose they’re talking.”
“I’m sure they are,” Gaedynn replied. “By all accounts, dragons are garrulous creatures. But they’re doing more than that. I saw something like this once before and never forgot it. Each wyrm is trying to climb higher than the other. Given your affinity for the air, if you just look for the currents and updrafts, you’ll see it more clearly than I can.”
She reached out with her perceptions. It was only partly a matter of seeing, partly a matter of feeling at a distance. “Yes. You’re right.”
“And notice the smell in the air, like a storm is brewing. Notice the flicker inside their mouths. You can see it blink like a twinkling star, even this far away. I doubt there’s much point to it. It’s difficult to hurt a dragon with the same element it breathes itself. But it’s their instinct to ready the weapon, no matter what.”
“So they really are going to duel. I wonder why.”
“I have no idea. But I do know I’d rather not be in the town underneath them while they do it. Let’s watch from here.”
And that was what they did, for what seemed a long while. Then the dragons swooped toward the buildings below. One disappeared into the streets on the north side of Mourktar, and the other into the southern part of town.
Gaedynn shrugged. “Well, whatever it was that divided them, apparently they worked it out.”
“Apparently,” Jhesrhi said. She felt a little disappointed. How often did a person have the chance to watch dragons fight each other?
“Then shall we?” Gaedynn waved his hand at the road ahead. Jhesrhi gave a nod, and they rode onward.
By the time they reached the outskirts of the city, the clear sky was giving way to gray clouds blowing in from the sea. The streets teemed with a mixture of races. Humans. Kobolds. Goblins no taller than Khouryn with big pointed ears and ruddy skin, and orcs with swinish tusks and, occasionally, one eye gouged out in honor of their patron deity Gruumsh.
Whatever his kind, if a person was well armed and carried himself like a warrior, he often wore the wand-and-scepter badge. Mourktar was full of soldiers, some likely sellswords arrived by sea. It was additional evidence that Threskel really did intend to mount an invasion.
In a sensible world, Jhesrhi thought, she and Gaedynn would scurry back to the Brotherhood with this valuable piece of intelligence. But in this one, they had to proceed with their pointless errand, searching for a creature who’d surely perished in the cataclysm that had killed even mightier beings and altered the face of Faerun itself.