The Binding Stone (The Dragon Below, Book 1) (41 page)

G
eth's hand darted to his belt and snatched out his sword. The ancient weapon seemed even heavier than it had before, and the twilight sheen of the metal had taken on a dull glow, as if the sword somehow recognized that the creatures it had been made to destroy were near.

He heard shouts and screams from Batul's party on top of the mound. It was a trap. Dah'mir had been ready for them.

"Ambush!" he yelled. He raised his sword high and lunged--

The mind flayer's foul, tentacled head turned sharply. Its white eyes flashed and a wave of pure mental power blasted through Geth. He staggered under the assault, struggling to resist the illithid's power. The orcs in his band cried in fear and pain, caught in the same unseen attack. Some of those cries ended abruptly.

Around Geth's neck, though, Adolan's collar was icy, like a shocking slap of winter. Geth clung to that clean cold and forced himself to stay on his feet. A fast glance over his shoulder showed him that most of his band hadn't been so fortunate. Batul's hand-picked orc raiders were down and twitching on the ground. Krepis was supporting Natrac. Orshok stumbled like a drunkard.

"They knew!" the young druid gasped. "How did they know?"

"Those herons!" Geth roared. "Those damn herons!"

He whirled back to the mind flayer. Its tentacles thrashing, it slapped a spindly hand against the chuul's armored shell and the
monstrous creature scuttled forward, pincers snapping.

Geth howled and shifted as he leaped forward to meet it. Invincibility flowing through him, he swung the byeshk sword hard at one of those grasping claws. The blade hit the chitin with a crunch, shattering it, and bit deep into the flesh beneath. The chuul screeched in pain and thrust out with its pincer, trying to slap him aside, but Geth soaked up the blow and stood his ground. He wrenched his sword free and dodged back, then swept the blade down the center of the pincer.

The heavy blade found the joint of the claw and cleaved through it in a spray of strange, thin blood. Half of the chuul's pincer sagged and fell, crippled. Once again, the creature screeched and thrashed, but Geth rolled under the sweeping, useless claw and threw himself at the mind flayer. The chuul was big and dangerous, but if the illithid had the chance to unleash another one of those mental blasts ...

But the illithid was rising into the air, floating up as Dandra did--except higher. Safely out of his reach, it peered down at him with its dead white eyes.

The chuul's broad, armored back turned on Geth as Orshok, Natrac, and Krepis closed with it. Without even hesitating, the shifter jumped onto the creature, planted one foot at the curve above the thing's tail, vaulted up onto its shoulders, then--as the startled chuul reared back--leaped off and hurled himself at the hovering mind flayer.

He had a brief glimpse of the illithid's tentacles stiffening in sudden shock an instant before he slammed into it.

They tumbled through the air, his metal-clad right arm wrapped tight around its narrow, bony hips. Geth could feel thin fists pounding at his shoulders and tentacles groping and scraping at his head. He thrust upward with his sword.

The ancient Dhakaani smiths who had forged the weapon had ground sharp edges onto the spreading curves of its forked tip. The purple blade might not have pierced like a normal sword--but it cut very well. A palm's width of metal chopped deep into the mind flayer's back. Metal grated through bone. The mind flayer went limp.

They fell. Geth twisted and flung himself free from the creature, rolling as he hit the ground. He came up in crouch. The mind flayer's tentacles were still writhing, straining toward him. A whirling slice with the byeshk sword made certain the illithid was dead before he spun around.

Their tumble through the air had carried them away from the chuul and from the mouth of the mound. He was closer to the crowd now--and the people in the mob had finally realized that there was a larger battle going on than just the one they were watching. Roars and shouts rose into shrieks and battle cries. At the head of crowd, Dah'mir stood on a platform, arms thrust out.

"Attack!" he bellowed above the tumult. His green eyes flashed and a hand stabbed toward Geth. "The shifter! Bring the shifter to me!"

Geth's stomach knotted. "Tiger's blood!" he choked as Bonetree hunters and dolgrims alike split away from the swarm of the crowd.

Then Natrac and Orshok stood on either side of him with Krepis at his back. All three were covered in the thin blood of the chuul.

"I'm never eating lobster again," croaked Natrac.

Geth bared his teeth in grim humor and risked a glance up at the top of the mound. The clouds that had covered the sky flashed with distant heat lightning and against that fitful flickering, bulky figures struggled. Chuul raised their pincers and dolgaunts struck with tentacles. Above the battle, robes whipping in the wind, floated two more mind flayers. Geth caught a glimpse of dark shapes tumbling down the steep side of the mound as orcs managed to topple a chuul, only to be caught and stunned by the mental blast of one of the illithids.

"Where's Batul?" he spat over his shoulder at Krepis. "Why isn't he doing something?"

Lightning danced from the clouds in a bolt that wrapped around one of the floating mind flayers. The thin creature's limbs and tentacles snapped into sudden stiffness and it dropped out of the air like a wounded bird. The brilliant flare left an image imprinted on Geth's eyes: the silhouette of an old orc with his hunda stick raised to the sky.

"Batul doing something!" Krepis shouted above the thunder that rolled across the battlefield.

The lightning had barely given the hunters and dolgrims pause, but it gave Geth fresh hope. He thrust up the byeshk sword.

"Take it to them!" he roared--and charged.

One of the mind flayers had a particular streak of cruelty. When the illithids left Dandra, it turned her head so that she could see Virikhad's psicrystal gleaming in the dim light of laboratory. With the weird device of copper and bone clutching her head, Dandra felt like she had no will at all. She couldn't think, she couldn't move, she could barely call up memories from only moments before--not that there was much to remember. The laboratory was still. The only sound, apart from a brief, distant flurry of excitement and activity that came and went elsewhere in the mound, was her breathing.

Somehow she could still
feel
, though, maybe out of instinct like breathing or blinking her eyes. Emotions bubbled inside her, primal emotions, raw and pure. Fear. Rage. Uncluttered by thought, they burned her.

There was something familiar about that purity of emotion. Her mind drifted and flew back through her memories, back before her anger and her fear, back before Bull Hollow and that first trip Zarash'ak and even before Sharn. Back before she'd been a person to when she'd been a crystal, before she'd even developed a proper mind. Back to the time when all that she'd been was emotion, new and raw, eager and focused.

She hadn't been fear, then. She hadn't been rage. She had been determination.

She had been and always would be.

Light shone on the walls of the laboratory. Orange light, the glow of a proper flame, not the blue-green light of Dah'mir's strange torches. Dandra heard the whisper of quiet footsteps, heard someone murmur her name. The light came closer. It moved around the table and Ashi stepped into Dandra's field of vision. The big hunter carried a naked blade and a stick of wood
that had burned through nearly half of its length. Dandra saw her spear strapped across her back. Ashi's face was pale, but strangely resolved. She moved back and Dandra felt the straps that bound her body being released. The hunter returned to her vision, bending down to look into her eyes.

"Dandra?" she asked again. Ashi's eyes flicked to the spindly device that the illithids had slid down over her head. She set down her sword and reached up to tug the device away.

Thought returned to fill Dandra's head with a rush of demands and concerns, but pure determination cut through all of them. She reached for her powers with an ease like nothing she'd known before and spun out a rippling web of
vayhatana
.

Ashi slammed back hard against the ground. She struggled desperately as Dandra sat up and glared down at her. "Let me go!" she spat. "I'm here to--"

Dandra squatted down and slapped her. "You're here to what?" she snapped. "Hunt me? I'm already here. Torment me? Let's wait for the mind flayers to come back. Murder my friends? I think Dah'mir's already done that!"

"No, you stupid outclanner!" snarled Ashi. "I'm here to rescue you!"

"Really? Why would you do that?" Dandra narrowed her eyes in concentration and Ashi's body rose from the floor, flying through the air to slam against the wall of the laboratory. The big woman grunted in pain. She blinked and focused her eyes on Dandra.

"I'd do it because Singe asked me to!" Ashi said. "While you were under Dah'mir's power, Singe helped me understand things about myself. I'm leaving the Bonetree clan. It was too late for me to save him, but--"