The Rite (31 page)

Heartened, Pavel struck and missed again. The shadow wyrm whirled, and he flung himself flat to keep its tail from pulping his skull, then instantly had to roll to keep it from trampling him. Its stamping feet jolted the earth.

Had the creature slowed down at all? It didn’t appear so, and Pavel struggled to quell a surge of fear. He lurched to his feet and attempted another prayer.

Thanks be to Lathander, the incantation was still in his head. Warmth glowed through him, calming his mind and cleansing pain and fatigue from his body. He saw the spectral dragon more clearly. Its form didn’t shift and waver as much as before.

He rushed it, struck, and connected, the mace crunching into its scales. Igan sliced its neck, and blood jetted. Underneath the drake, Will cut another gash. The reptile lurched down to crush him, but he rolled clear before its ventral surface slammed against the ground.

The dragon tried to rise again, but floundered. Igan hacked into its neck. It screamed and convulsed, nearly rolling on top of Pavel before he leaped backward, then it lay still.

Pavel had the same reaction he often felt at such a moment, a numbed inability to believe the seemingly unstoppable creature had finally succumbed to its wounds. He was still trying to credit it when someone bellowed a warning.

The other half of the battle still raged high in the air. He looked up to see a serpentine shape with a tattered, crippled wing plummeting straight at him and Will. It looked solid, not shadowy, which meant it was Brimstone, not his foe.

Will dived. With his extraordinary agility, perhaps he’d make it out from under. Pavel recognized he had no chance of doing the same.

The failing Brimstone eclipsed the dead black sky. Then, just before he hit the ground, his body dissolved into smoke, a sulfurous mist suffused with stinging embers that shrouded the man he would otherwise have crushed.

Brimstone’s transformation revealed the other shadow dragon, swooping after him like a falcon attacking a pigeon. When the vampire turned to vapor, his assailant immediately turned its attention to the folk on the ground. Its throat swelled as it prepared to spit a spray of poisonous, devastating shadow.

A prone man heaved himself to his knees. Without bothering to rise any farther, plump Master Kulenov, evidently at least partially recovered from his immersion in dragon breath, jabbered an incantation. On the final word, he whipped a quirt, evidently one of the spell foci he carried concealed in his voluminous robes, through the air.

The shadow wyrm screeched, and its wings flailed out of time with one another. Flying clumsily, it leveled out of its dive, wheeled, and veered off. To Pavel’s eyes, it seemed dazed, but only for a moment. Then it oriented on Kulenov, and hurtled at the wizard. Kulenov’s nerve broke. He wailed and turned to run.

At the same instant, the cloud that was Brimstone drew in on itself and coalesced into solidity. The smoke drake’s wing was still torn, but not as badly as before. He flexed his legs, then beat his pinions as he sprang into the air.

The shadow wyrm was swooping low, and all its attention was on Kulenov. Otherwise, Brimstone, with his mangled wing, probably couldn’t have intercepted it. But he did, and plunged his fangs and talons into his adversary’s body.

Tangled together, unable to fly, they crashed to earth and roiled over and over. Until Brimstone caught the shadow dragon’s throat in his jaws.

The shadow wyrm thrashed madly for a few seconds, nearly shaking the vampire loose, but then its struggles subsided. Even after it stopped moving, Brimstone clung to it, slurping and guzzling its blood. The stolen vitality knit together the lacerations in his wing and closed his other wounds.

Relieved and repulsed in equal measure, Pavel turned his attention to the rest of the company, and winced at what he found. Five of his comrades were manifestly dead, and four more, wounded. Intent on aiding one of the injured, he took a step forward, but weakness abruptly overwhelmed him. He swayed and would have fallen if Drigor hadn’t caught hold of his arm.

“You took a full dose of shadow dragon breath, didn’t you’?” said the burly priest of Ilmater.

“Yes,” Paves gasped.

“Once we get back to the palace,” Drigor said, “I can restore you. Just hang on till then.” He turned to his other surviving comrades. “Whatever cures or other magic you want to cast, do it fast. We need to get out of here.”

Eyes gleaming, Brimstone lifted his gory mask away from his prey and rumbled, “You’re right. The battle raised too much commotion. Other shadow wyrms are surely coming.”

In another minute, they were on the march, scurrying through the columns of stone. For Pavel, the frantic scramble was a brutal test of endurance. He panted, his head swam, and the eternal night of the Shadow Deep seemed even darker than before.

At the head of the column, Celedon said, “Can’t we go any faster?”

“No,” Brimstone growled. “It takes me time to choose the correct path.” They rounded another outcropping. “But behold!”

Squinting, Pavel could just make out a relatively low hump of rock with a ring of standing stones at the top. At the center of the circle was the rarest of all phenomena in that universe of gloom, a point of pale phosphorescence,

This is the place,” said Brimstone. “Come on.”

Pavel felt as if it required the very last of his stamina to clamber up the rise. Climbing beside him, Will eyed him with concern.

Are you going to make it?” the halfling asked.

Pavel nodded. He supposed that to truly reassure Will, he should have responded with an insult, but he couldn’t spare the breath.

The light they’d spotted from below floated at the center of the ring of menhirs. It was Dragonsbane’s spirit, gleaming, semitransparent, and motionless, seemingly in a deep slumber like his physical body back in the mortal realm.

Pavel knew that by rights, the soul of a great paladin ought to shine more brightly. But an egg-shaped weave of crisscrossed shadows surrounded the king’s essence, trapping and dimming the radiance.

Igan scowled and reached for the black web as if he thought to break it apart by strength alone.

“Don’t touch that,” Brimstone snapped, “unless you want to rot your arm off. I’ll open it.”

The dragon hissed words of power. Magic whined through the air, and made fresh blood trickle from the nicks on Pavel’s face. The dark prison faded for a moment, then clotted back to its former condition.

, “I thought you knew how to do this,” said Will.

“I do,” Brimstone snarled.

He recited the incantation a second time, but achieved no more than before.

“I can break it,” said Mor Kulenov.

Staff held high, he declaimed a counterspell. A screech of wind lashed everyone’s clothes. The mound shuddered and groaned. Yet the black mesh held.

Will studied the sky.

“More dragons,” he said, “coming fast.”

He extracted a skiprock from his belt pouch. Celedon rounded on Brimstone.

“It’s now or never,” the spymaster said.

“My spell should work,” the vampire said. “But if Sammaster himself enchanted the fetish…”

“Light,” Pavel croaked. “Light drives out dark. Somebody conjure a flash at the same time Brimstone works his spell.”

“I’ll try it,” Drigor said, and produced a flare so bright it made Pavel squinch his eyes shut. Still, the shadow prison remained.

“The wyrms are just about close enough to start throwing their own charms,” Will reported. “I’ll wager those will work.”

“We’ll attempt it again,” said Pavel, raising his sun symbol, “only this time, summon the light.”

Drigor shook his head. `My friend, you’re sorely wounded, and I’ve advanced farther in the mysteries than you. If it didn’t work when I—”

“Your light,” Pavel snapped, “isn’t Lathander’s light.” He glared at Brimstone. “Your incantation is longer than mine. You begin.”

The dragon snarled words of power. Pavel tried to judge when to chime in with the opening of his prayer. It was more difficult than it should have been. He felt so weak and muddled.

Yet he and Brimstone finished at precisely the same instant, and a ray of red-gold light blazed from his amulet to strike the web of shadows. Striking in concert with the force of the vampire’s spell, it seared away the strands of darkness. The radiance of Dragonsbane’s spirit shined forth in all its glory, and the translucent figure vanished.

“Can we go home, too?” called Will. “Preferably soon?” Brimstone began a new spell. Half a dozen dragons dived and spewed shadow from their gaping jaws.

But it never reached their targets. The dark world spun, dropped away, and Pavel and his companions stood in the torch lit courtyard once more. Christine and her retainers exclaimed at their sudden reappearance.

Pavel turned toward the couch and its occupant. Whereupon anguish and frustration stabbed him to the heart, for the king looked exactly the same as before.

But then Dragonsbane’s eyes flew open, and he bolted upright.

“Lances—!” he rasped, then peered about in confusion.

Celedon murmured an incantation and flicked one hand through a cabalistic pass. A large, luminous, three-dimensional map of Damara and the surrounding territories shimmered into existence to float three feet above the ground. Small, stationary images of goblins, giants, mounted

knights, spearmen, and archers stood about the landscape like tokens on a game board.

“Our intelligence concerning the enemy’s whereabouts is incomplete,” the thin, sly-faced spymaster said. “But as you can see, the scouts report that the Vaasan horde has dispersed to plunder. Still, the majority remain in the duchies of Brandiar and Carmathan, all within a few days’ march of one another. They’d have little difficulty recombining into a single force, and I believe they’ll soon do precisely that, to assault Heliogabalus.”

Still slightly ill from his exposure to dragon breath, but vastly improved thanks to Drigor’s ministrations, Pavel shuffled and craned with the foremost captains and royal officers in Damara for a clearer look at the map. It had surprised him when he, Will, and Brimstone received a summons to the council of war, especially since the vampiric drake’s participation required another open-air palaver in the benighted courtyard. But evidently the king felt they’d played such a significant role in his rescue that it was their due.

Like Pavel, Dragonsbane was still trying to shake off the lingering effects of an ordeal. The magic of the priests of Ilmater had kept the monarch’s body alive in his soul’s absence, but couldn’t entirely compensate for the lack of water, food, and exercise. As a result, Dragonsbane stood leaning on a gold-headed cane. Pavel prayed that the king’s strength would return quickly. The gods knew, the man was going to need it.

As he studied the map, Dragonsbane’s face was tight and grim.

“So much devastation,” he said, “and the representation doesn’t even show the damage to the fields and crops.”

“I’ve conferred with the elder druids,” said Queen Christine. “They say it’s not too late to insure a reasonable harvest, one large enough to stave off famine in the months ahead. They’ll petition the earth and weather to yield all the bounty they can. But the farmers must return to their labors soon.”

“Which requires chasing the goblins out of the barley,” said Will, standing on tiptoe to see over the top of the map. Dragonsbane smiled for just an instant. “That it does,

“It’s obvious we have no choice but to fight,” said Brellan Starav. “But we need to lay our plans in the knowledge that the Vaasans have us greatly outnumbered.”

“We’ll send forth riders tonight,” said Dragonsbane, “to every noble hiding on his estate with a company of guards. With luck, some of them will reach the royal army in time to make themselves useful.”

“With respect, Your Majesty,” Drigor said, “we told people right along that you weren’t dead. Nobody believed our reassurances.”

“Because folk assumed that if I truly was alive, I’d get up off my arse and drive out the invaders,” the blond-bearded monarch said. “Now, the heralds can proclaim that the king is riding to war. Maybe that will make a difference.”

“You realize,” Celedon said, “the goblins and giants will learn of it as well.”

“Good. We don’t have time to defeat a hundred raiding parties one by one. We need our foes to merge into a single army, which we can then smash at one go. Demoralized, any survivors will run back to Vaasa, or at least the protection of the Gates.”

Drigor grinned a grin that made his harsh, scarred features even more forbidding. “A nice trick if we can manage it.”

“Trickery,” said Dragonsbane, “is what I have in mind. Even a proper army will often disintegrate in fear and confusion if attacked unexpectedly on the flank, or better still, the rear, and goblins, though fierce under the right circumstances, aren’t disciplined troops. So here’s what I propose. We’ll split our force in two. One half, with me at its head, will proceed across country with no attempt at stealth. With some maneuvering, it can probably arrange to engage the enemy around here—” he pointed with the ferule of his cane—”to the west of these hills.”

Brellan, nodding, said, “I understand. The second half of the army sneaks north and hides behind the rise. Once the battle begins, and Your Majesty’s command fixes the Vaasans in place, the rest of Damara’s protectors take the creatures from behind. We crush them with a convergent attack.’

“Maybe,” said Will.

The commander of the Paladins of the Golden Cup scowled down at the halfling. “Do you see a problem with His Majesty’s strategy?”

Will shrugged. “I’m no knight, just a hunter, but I’ve had a few brushes with goblin kin out in the wild. They may not be ‘disciplined troops,’ but they’re not idiots, either. They know how to look after themselves in hostile country. They’re liable to send scouts into those hills, spot the second force, and spoil your big surprise.”

Brellan stood silent for a moment, pondering, then said, “Curse it, you’re right.”

“Then how about this?” said Dragonsbane. “My company will engage the enemy farther north, then flee the field with the Vaasans in hot pursuit until we reach the final battleground. That will deny them the opportunity to investigate what waits behind the hills. Does that meet with your approval, Goodman Turnstone?”