Whisper of Venom botg-2 Read online

  The dragon had merely instructed that the bodies be laid on a pyre afterward. He then stood on the battlements of the keep, breathing in smoke and the smell of charred flesh like that was the way a god consumed the energy of a sacrifice.

  Eventually he went back inside the citadel with most of the others in his inner circle, and Gaedynn surprised himself by lingering there with only drifting sparks and stars for company. He wasn’t sure why.

  The wind moaned. The fire leaped high, drawing a startled exclamation or two from the folk on the ground who were standing around watching it. The blackened corpses burned to ash in just a few heartbeats, and then the flames subsided to their former level.

  Gaedynn turned and smiled at the woman who’d come up behind him. “Buttercup. I take it that Tchazzar finally decided he could do without you by his side for a little while. Or did you use magic to give him the slip?”

  “Obviously,” Jhesrhi said, “you were able to handle the battle.”

  “I handled it brilliantly,” he said. “So well, in fact, that I think it’s safe to say Aoth has become superfluous. It’s time for the company to chuck him out and follow me. What would you say to a little mutiny?”

  She gave him the scowl that was her frequent response to his jokes.

  “No?” he continued. “Ah well. At least remaining in my current lowly estate will spare me the tedium of keeping track of the supplies and accounts. With Khouryn gone, the chore must be thrice as dreary.”

  “I hope he’s all right,” Jhesrhi said. “I hope he made it home.”

  “The Brotherhood is his home,” said Gaedynn, “and I hope he comes back in time to help us fight the cursed dragons. By the way, I like your new outfit. It’s very Red Wizard.”

  That brought a twist of genuine anger to her expression. “It’s not like … It’s a completely practical robe and cloak for a mage to wear to war.”

  “Is it? Then I suppose I’m just not used to seeing you put on new clothes until the old ones are covered in patches and falling apart even so.”

  “And I’m not used to hearing you speak to me with genuine spite in your taunts. Since you plainly don’t want my company, I’ll bid you good night.” She turned away.

  Fine, he thought, go, but then something made him speak up after all. “Wait. Stay if you like. I’m not angry at you.”

  She turned back around and, the golden ferrule of her staff clicking on the timbers, walked to the parapet. “At what, then?”

  He waved a hand at the pyre. It was quickly burning down to orange coals, and the folk who’d stood watching it were drifting away. “That, I suppose.”

  Jhesrhi sighed. “Well, they were just kobolds.”

  “I know. Give Hasos credit for choosing those nasty little brutes if he had to butcher someone. Still, you know me, Buttercup. I’m not chivalrous. I’ll cheerfully slit the throat of every bound, helpless prisoner and his mother too if I see a need for it. But this …” He shook his head.

  “Well,” she said, “each of them had committed treason by taking up arms against his rightful sovereign. It’s common for people to pay for that offense with their lives.”

  “That assumes Chessenta’s claim to Threskel is legitimate. Neither you nor I know that it is.”

  “Or that it isn’t.”

  “My point is that if we don’t know, the Great Bone Wyrm’s people certainly don’t. When they marched to war, they were just obeying the only rulers they’ve ever known.”

  “Maybe when they hear what happened here, they’ll reconsider whether they really want to do that.”

  Gaedynn frowned. “I concede that sending a message might be a sensible reason to slaughter some prisoners. But that’s not why Tchazzar did it.”

  Jhesrhi hesitated. “Sometimes a king doesn’t explain his true reason for doing a thing. Not if he thinks he can gain some advantage by giving a false one.”

  “Why in the name of the Black Bow are you defending him? You thought he was being crazy and cruel just like the rest of us did. That’s why you tried to talk him out of it. And why, just now, you made the fire flare up to burn the bodies quickly. You’re ashamed of what he did.”

  “All right. There may be moments when his mind isn’t altogether clear. If something had tortured and fed on you for a hundred years, you might have the same problem. He’ll mend with time.”

  “Have you seen any signs of it so far?”

  She scowled. “You shouldn’t talk about him this way.”

  “Why not? Are you going to tattle?”

  “Of course not! But when we first arrived, you were impudent to his face. That’s … unprofessional, and bad for the company as a whole.”

  He realized she was right, but he didn’t want to admit it. “I thought working for the zulkirs was bad, but at least they were sane.”

  “You’re only seeing one side of him. He ended the persecution of those with arcane gifts.”

  Which you hope will ensure that no more little girls suffer the way you did, Gaedynn thought. But what he said aloud was, “And, more importantly, gave you the chance to flounce around in silk and jewels and play the princess.”

  “Enough of this,” Jhesrhi rapped. “Enough of you.” She turned back toward the stairs that led down into the keep, and that time, he didn’t try to stop her.

  The battlefield lay in the borderland between the desolation of Black Ash Plain and the fertile fields of Tymanther. There were no columns of solidified ash sliding around-which was good, since the giant shamans used them as weapons. But the vegetation was sparse and twisted, and when the breeze gusted from the south, the air smelled faintly of burning.

  After the dragonborn had destroyed several giant raiding parties, the rest joined together to make a stand. They waited like gaunt, crudely sculpted figures of stone. Medrash studied their ranks, looking for the leader strong enough to unite the once-contentious barbarian tribes. He couldn’t identify him. So far, no one had.

  The giants stood with little apparent organization. Facing them across the length of the field, the Tymantherans had more, although Khouryn had grumbled that they still looked like a motley assortment of little armies instead of one big one. Lance Defenders and anyone else who’d received the dwarf’s training stood in what amounted to one coherent formation, and the warriors who marched under the banners of the Platinum Cadre in another. Small war bands organized by various clans had rather haphazardly taken up positions between and around the two larger ones.

  Balasar naturally stood among the dragon-worshipers. Medrash fought the impulse to make eye contact or even glance in his clan brother’s direction. Balasar had told Nala and Patrin that his newfound devotion to Bahamut had estranged him from his kin, and Medrash didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that impression. He contented himself with silently asking Torm to strengthen his comrade’s arm in the fight to come.

  Horns sounded overhead. Tarhun was in the air riding a bat, and so were the buglers the vanquisher used to relay his orders to his troops.

  Dragonborn archers drew and loosed. Bat riders swooped toward the enemy, and they too shot arrows. Medrash knew that every bowman who’d spotted an adept was trying to eliminate that particular target.

  Meanwhile, the clan wizards chanted in unison. Wind howled in the faces of the giants. The idea was to scour away every stray fleck of ash on the plain before the shamans could use it to conjure one of their reptilian servants.

  The giants heaved enormous javelins and rocks, the raw strength of their towering frames a match for the mechanical power of a bow. Dragonborn reeled and fell. A horse screamed, collapsed, and-rolling and writhing-ground its rider beneath it. A bat plummeted.

  Meanwhile, impervious to the arrows streaking at them-or so it seemed-the adepts brandished their colored globes. The polished curves gleamed in the sunlight, and hulking, scaly creatures sprang into view.

  They didn’t scramble from drifts of ash, because the dragonborn mages had blown those all away. They leaped out of
nowhere. Medrash realized they always had. The giants, to confuse their enemies, had simply made it look like ash was necessary.

  A couple of the beasts looked like stunted, misshapen red dragons. Flames leaping not just from their jaws but rippling across their entire bodies, they jumped into the air, lashed their leathery wings, and soared toward the bat riders.

  Other shamans summoned the winged green creatures and gray lizard-bears Medrash had encountered previously. The former hopped and glided, and the latter ran-but snarling and screeching, each charged the dragonborn ranks in its own particular fashion.

  Behind them, hunched, dwarf-sized creatures skulked from nothingness. Their hide hung in loose brown folds, and their long arms dragged on the ground. Evidently intending to harass the Tymantherans from the flanks, they headed for the edges of the field.

  “Lances!” Medrash bellowed. A split second later, the brassy notes of a bugle cut through the air. The vanquisher was ordering him to take the same action he’d just begun on his own initiative.

  He felt taut with eagerness, because he’d learned from experience that Khouryn’s methods worked. And they now had a chance to demonstrate that to a great many dragonborn, the vanquisher included. Everyone would see that Tymantherans didn’t have to betray their ancestors and grovel before those heroes’ ancient enemies to defeat the giants. No matter how many new tricks the savages mastered.

  More smoothly and uniformly than they had mere days before, all the lancers canted their lances at the proper angle. On Medrash’s command, they walked their horses forward. Then trotted. Then cantered. Their weapons dropped to threaten the onrushing saurians, and then they broke into a gallop.

  But Medrash’s brown gelding only ran for a couple of strides. Then the animal balked, nearly pitching its startled rider out of the saddle. The horse tossed its head and whinnied.

  Shields overlapping, all but marching in stride, the spearmen advanced in good order. Khouryn gave a slight nod of satisfaction, then saw disaster strike Medrash’s charging lancers.

  Almost every horse spooked at the same instant. Despite the long weapons in the lancers’ hands, and the way they were riding nearly shoulder to shoulder, some of the steeds managed to halt, turn, and bolt toward the rest of the vanquisher’s army. Their masters were the lucky ones. Other animals slammed into their fellow steeds and knocked them stumbling, or off their feet entirely. Dragonborn yelled, hauled on the reins, and dug in their spurs, fighting to regain control. Meanwhile the first wave of conjured creatures swept over them. A glider ripped a warrior from the saddle. A lizard-bear seized a horse in its fangs and wrenched it down onto the ground, breaking both its front legs in the process. The steed screamed and thrashed. Vapor billowed from around the reptile’s jaws as its corrosive spittle ate its way into the animal’s flesh.

  “Rock of Battle!” Khouryn cursed. “Charge! Charge!”

  “That will break the formation,” said a sergeant who’d apparently learned the lessons of drill a little too well.

  “To the Abyss with the formation!” Khouryn roared. “Run up there and kill something!” Before the enemy killed every one of the riders.

  Medrash’s horse bucked and reared. He decided he had to get off before the animal threw him. He dropped his lance and kicked his feet out of the stirrups, which made his bouncing perch even more precarious than before. Clinging to his saddle with his one free hand-his shield prevented the use of the other-he swung his leg over the gelding’s back and jumped.

  He landed with a jolt, staggered a step, then caught his balance. All around him, gray and green reptile things lunged and pounced, rending dragonborn who were virtually unable to defend themselves. Posing nearly as much of a danger as the saurians, horses with bloody wounds and fuming burns surged one way and another.

  At least, since he was no longer fighting his own terrified mount, Medrash could more easily focus his will. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then reached out to Torm.

  The god’s Power rushed into him like a flash flood surging down a gorge. He shook his steel-gauntleted fist above his head.

  The sun was shining. A lesser light should have gone unnoticed. But somehow brightness, or a sense of it, pulsed from his hand. With it came a suggestion of quiet that was just as paradoxical amid the roars, shrieks, and crashes of blows on armor. For some distance around him, saurians hesitated in midattack. Horses stopped resisting the dictates of spur and rein.

  Unfortunately, the artificial tranquility would only last for a few heartbeats. “Dismount!” Medrash bellowed. “Fight on foot, but like Khouryn taught you!”

  Riders swung themselves down from their mounts. Shaking off passivity, one of the gray saurians charged a dragonborn who had one foot still in the stirrup and one on the ground.

  Medrash couldn’t intercept the threat in time, but his breath could. As he snatched for the hilt of his sword, he spat lightning. The crackling flare seared the lizard thing’s body, bursting some of the tumorlike growths bulging from its flank. It stumbled and jerked for the moment the punishment lasted, then whirled toward the one who’d hurt it.

  Medrash let it come to him, then sidestepped just as it rushed into striking distance. Its snapping jaws still bashed his shield and jolted his arm, but at least its momentum didn’t knock him off his feet. He cut into the creature’s hide and shouted “Torm!” The god’s Power manifested as a thunderclap. Though Medrash perceived just how supremely loud it was, he heard it without distress. But, unprotected by the Loyal Fury’s grace, the lizard thing lurched and roared like it had suffered a second and even more damaging sword stroke.

  But that didn’t finish it either. It spun in Medrash’s direction, tearing his blade from its body and splashing him with a droplet or two of blistering fluid. It struck at him, and he interposed his shield. The attack slammed into the obstruction, and then the saurian twisted its neck and caught the edge of the shield in its fangs. It gnawed as it lashed its head back and forth. Bits of smoking, dissolving oak and hide fell away from the shield. Medrash’s arm throbbed like it was coming out of its socket. He staggered in a frantic effort to keep his foe from yanking him off his feet.

  He cut at the lizard-bear, only to find that off balance as he was, he could do no more than scratch its hide. He tried to pull his arm free of the straps securing it to the crumbling shield but, perhaps because of the attitude into which his adversary had twisted it, he couldn’t.

  He pushed aside incipient panic and drew down Torm’s glory once again. He willed the saurian to recognize the Power burning inside him, and to fear it.

  Which, from a mundane perspective, was absurd. At that moment, the lizard thing was like some enormous hound at furious play, while he resembled its helpless bone. Yet the brute faltered, its eyes widening.

  Medrash recovered his balance, stepped, and thrust with all his strength. His sword punched deep into the creature’s skull, and its legs buckled beneath it. But even in death it clung to the shield, and so dragged him down to the ground along with it. Finally, on one knee, he managed to slip his aching arm from the loops.

  A shadow fell over him.

  Instinct made him raise his shield arm as he turned. The slashing wing claws that might otherwise have shattered his skull or broken his neck clattered against his armored limb instead. Still, the multiple impacts stabbed pain through the already-tortured arm and flung him backward, away from the dead lizard-bear and the sword still embedded in its head.

  The glider landed on its short, thick legs, then pivoted. Medrash scrambled toward his weapon. The saurian’s head snapped forward. Its jaws opened wide and spewed greenish vapor over him.

  Medrash’s skin burned, and his eyes filled with blinding tears. He started coughing and couldn’t stop. He needed to use Torm’s Power to cleanse him of poison, inside and out, but he knew his foe wasn’t going to give him the chance.

  Then a spear jabbed through one of the creature’s batlike wings. It snarled, turned, and found itself facing th
ree more such weapons, two aimed high, the other low. It whirled a wing back to slash with the bony fingertips protruding from the scalloped edge, and its foes backpedaled. More spears jabbed it from behind, as warriors assaulted it with the same tactics they’d employed against the hovering wooden Beast.

  Despite the handicap posed by his burning nose, mouth, throat, and lungs, Medrash wheezed a prayer. All his pains eased, including the fierce one in his shield arm. He flexed it and found that even if had been broken a moment before, it wasn’t anymore.

  Tears still streaming from his eyes, he scrambled onward to the lizard thing’s carcass and jerked his sword out of it. Then he drew himself to his feet and looked around.

  On every side, dragonborn fought saurians and the ash giants who’d advanced behind the conjured horrors. Some of the warriors were the surviving members of Medrash’s dismounted cavalry, often using lances as spears for the sake of the reach they provided. Others were actual spearmen, who must have rushed forward to support their embattled comrades. Medrash recognized the hammer and axe emblem of the company Khouryn was commanding personally, although amid all the howling, crashing frenzy, he failed to spot the dwarf himself.

  He could see that in such chaotic circumstances, when a new enemy could come at a fighter at any instant and from any side, Khouryn’s tactics were less effective than they might have been otherwise. Still, they were working to a degree, and as a result the fight wasn’t over yet.

  Medrash looked around for a fallen lance, spear, or an intact shield. He failed to find any of them in his immediate vicinity, but spotted a battered heater lying between a giant’s bare, filthy feet. He shouted a battle cry and charged.

  Balasar winced when the horses balked, turning what should have been a devastating attack into little more than a sacrificial offering to the ash giants and their reptilian pets.

  To their credit, Patrin and some of the other cultists looked just as horrified as he felt. Nala, however, simply kept swaying back and forth and crooning a sibilant prayer or incantation.