Tchazzar snorted. “That might be helpful if Captain Fezim and his men weren’t busy chasing traitors and ghosts in Threskel.”
“I believe they must have finished that work or nearly so,” Jhesrhi said. “After all, we haven’t had any more attempts on Your Majesty’s life or any more undead sneaking into the War College. We haven’t had any recent reports of unrest.”
“We haven’t had any news,” Tchazzar said, “even from the wyrmkeepers Halonya sent to find out what the sellswords have accomplished.”
Jhesrhi felt a pang of alarm. That was the first she’d heard of that particular pack of spies. But apparently the folk charged with concealing Aoth’s absence had handled the situation somehow.
And while Halonya would ordinarily have pounced on the opportunity to interpret the priests’ silence to the Brotherhood’s detriment, her priority now was to avoid the possibility of a dragon born’s spear in her guts. “I believe,” she said, “that we can take the quiet as a good sign. After all, I sent four men. If something were badly wrong, surely at least one would have rushed back to warn us.”
“Hmm.” Tchazzar studied the only two humans he truly trusted, united for once in their opinion. “All right, have it your way. The children will stay here, and the Brotherhood of the Griffon will march south with us.” He pivoted toward Hasos. “Send for them immediately, and tell them to come as fast as they can. Tell Aoth Fezim to fly on ahead and get to Luthcheq as fast as he can.”
“Yes, Majesty,” Hasos said.
And now I’ve done it, Jhesrhi thought. If we’ve been running a race, this is the final leg. She wished she knew how far Gaedynn, Aoth, and Khouryn had traveled along the course.
“It’s been a long time,” Balasar whispered.
Khouryn scowled. They were supposed to be lying in wait in silence. But in fairness to his friend, Balasar was keeping his voice low, and using a dwarf’s understanding of how sound carried and echoed underground, Khouryn had chosen their current hiding place partly because any noise they made wouldn’t travel far. So he decided not to make an issue of the dragonborn’s indiscretion.
“It seems like it,” he whispered back, “but then, it always does when you’re waiting.”
Lying on his belly on the ledge, Balasar rolled his shoulders until they popped. “Especially when you’re waiting on a dragon. Specifically the same dragon who’s already tried to kill the lot of us.”
A few spaces farther down the line, Vishva frowned to hear Praxasalandos so disparaged. Medrash simply said, “Prax is a different creature now. We just have to hope Gestanius didn’t sense that.”
“Or else she’ll have killed him,” Khouryn said, “and won’t come within a mile of our ambush.”
“Quicksilver wyrms are supposed to be tricky,” Biri said. She was lying beside Balasar-not, Khouryn assumed, by accident-and she smiled in the Daardendrien’s direction. “If you give him a chance, you may find out you’ve got a lot in common.”
Balasar snorted. “I may be friends with a gaggle of dragon worshipers, but forgive me if I stick at the dragons themselves.”
Across the cavern and near the mouth of the tunnel, an Imaskari in a nook in the wall waved both hands above his head. According to Jemleh, the fellow had the sharpest ears of any soldier in his command, sharp enough that his captain trusted him to hear Praxasalandos’s wings rustle and snap when the dragon shook them out to signal his approach.
Only Khouryn and those wizards who’d chosen to enhance their eyesight could see the waving. Everyone else lay prone or crouched, blind in the darkness. Khouryn whispered that everyone should shut up and be ready. The message traveled up and down the line in the form of a series of fumbling grips.
Then Praxasalandos strode into the chamber. Gestanius prowled right behind him. Khouryn winced.
It wasn’t because of the enormous size and manifest strength of the ancient blue, although they were daunting enough. It was the indefinable but gut-wrenching ugliness she shared with her ally Skuthosin. Like the green, she’d been a Chosen of Tiamat in her time, before Tchazzar killed and ate them to add his power her own. Then the Dark Lady had given them back their lives, and all that commerce with one of the supreme powers of evil had left a taint.
But so what? thought Khouryn. We killed Skuthosin and we’re going to kill you too.
Bringing the scent of a coming storm with her, her movements quick and flowing despite her hugeness, Gestanius stalked several paces into the cavern. Then she stopped abruptly, as if she’d sensed something or wondered if she had.
“How much farther?” she asked. Buzzing sparks and tiny lightning bolts crawled and arced on the double-pointed horn on her snout and the hornlets on her brow ridges. For those who could see nothing else, beholding the flickering must be somewhat like looking at a dragon-shaped constellation in the night sky.
“We’re nearly there,” Praxasalandos replied. He’d told Gestanius that he’d killed intruders in the tunnels as he was supposed to but that one of them had turned out to be a gold dragon shapeshifted into Imaskari form. The blue was coming to see if she could see identify the body. “In fact, we are there.”
“What do you mean?” Gestanius asked, looking around in vain for torn and mangled corpses.
Biri whispered words of power and flicked her wand back and forth as though leading a band of musicians. Medrash gripped his steel-gauntlet medallion and breathed a prayer to Torm. Elsewhere in the chamber, Khouryn knew, other spellcasters were raising and shaping power in their own fashions.
And maybe Gestanius heard the whispering or simply felt magic smoldering in the air because she suddenly craned her neck and twisted her head one way then the other. “Something-” she began.
Prax whirled and blasted her with a silvery plume of his breath. The vapor washed across her eyes, and she roared in shock and pain.
At the same time, a golden shimmer abruptly filled the opening through which the dragons had entered, and crackling flames leaped up to fill the exit on the opposite wall. Floating orbs of glowing power popped into existence to provide additional light.
Warriors howled battle cries. Crossbows clacked and quarrels thrummed through the air. Some glanced off Gestanius’s scales but others stuck. Khouryn discharged his own arbalest then grabbed his axe, leaped to his feet, and charged down the steep slope that descended from the shelf to the cavern floor.
It was a reckless, sliding scramble, but Medrash, Balasar, and others rushed along right beside him. For the moment Gestanius was slow with amazement and dazzled and sick from the poisonous kiss of Prax’s breath. Her enemies needed to press the advantage while they had it.
An Imaskari wizard splashed yellow fire across the tops of Gestanius’s wings. A stray wisp of Praxasalandos’s breath weapon stung Khouryn’s nose and filled his mouth with a nasty, metallic taste. He twisted his head and spat without breaking stride.
Then the stone beneath him started shaking, knocking him off balance and making him stumble. For a moment he assumed that one of his wizard allies had cast a spell that was causing the quaking. Then he recognized the distinctive rhythm of the vibration.
He sucked in a breath to yell a warning. But before he could get it out, a purple worm burst up out of the floor, its emergence flinging bits of rock through the air.
It was hard to be sure with the back end of it still in the burrow, but the creature looked as huge as Gestanius herself. Rearing like a serpent, it swiveled its head this way and that. That head, though bigger than a dwarf or man, was small in proportion to its possessor’s thick, leechlike body, and it was all jaws, with protruding tusks above and below. But Khouryn knew the lack of eyes wouldn’t keep the beast from orienting on its prey.
He had time to wonder if, mistrusting Praxasalandos, Gestanius had commanded the purple worm to shadow them or if it was just exceptionally rotten luck that had placed the creature within easy reach of its mistress’s psychic call. He wondered too if the magical barriers emplaced to hold the blue in the killing box might now ensure the slaughter of every last dragonborn, Imaskari, and stray dwarf instead. Then the worm decided on its target and, jaws gaping wide, plunged down at him like a mudslide.