Whisper of Venom botg-2 Read online

  Over the course of the next little while, Medrash managed to jump off his panicked steed and use his paladin gifts. Balasar couldn’t tell precisely what his clan brother had done, but it seemed to affect everyone and every beast in his vicinity, and to create a pocket of savage resistance in what was otherwise a massacre.

  Then Khouryn’s spearmen charged up to engage the enemy. Other dragonborn might follow eventually, but-perhaps astonished by the bloody fiasco the lancers’ charge had become-they were slow to act. Nor were the flying trumpeters sounding the signal. Maybe Tarhun was currently incapable of giving the order.

  In any case, it seemed clear that without more support that even Khouryn could provide, the Tymantherans fighting in the center of the field couldn’t hold. Balasar turned to Patrin. “We have to help them.”

  “I agree,” Patrin said. But instead of ordering everyone forward, he wound his way through his swaying, twitching, shuddering troops toward Nala. Balasar followed.

  When he came close enough, he felt the sting of the magic seething in the air around her. It muddled his senses-for an instant, he experienced the purple of her robe as a sweet stink like that of rotting flowers and the unevenness of the ground beneath his feet as a shrill glissando.

  With one hand, Nala gripped her staff. The other was clenched too, and Balasar’s intuition told him it was holding something, even though no trace of the object protruded beyond her fingers.

  He suddenly suspected he knew exactly what sort of spell she was working. And if he’d been confident of his ability to prove it afterward, he would have run her through that instant.

  “Sir Balasar recommends that we attack immediately,” Patrin said. He’d stopped walking, but his beard of chains was still swinging and clinking a little. “I do too.”

  Nala looked annoyed at having to suspend her chant, then smoothed her features into a fonder though solemn expression. “Not yet,” she said. “The god will tell me when the moment is right.”

  “Our comrades need us now,” Balasar said.

  “I promise you,” the priestess said, “I’ll give the word as soon as I can.”

  Right, thought Balasar. Just as soon as Medrash and Khouryn’s warriors are dead, and the new tactics discredited. As soon as you can once again make the claim that only dragon-worshipers can defeat the giants.

  “As soon as you can,” said Patrin. He turned away.

  As they strode back to their positions in the vanguard, Balasar said, “No one respects Nala more than I do. As our priestess. But you’re the soldier. The war leader. If you think-”

  “No,” Patrin said. “It’s as hard for me as it is for you, but no. Why did we march here under this banner”-he nodded to indicate the purple pennon with the platinum dragon coiling down its length-“if not to assert our faith?”

  Actually, Balasar thought, I’m here to destroy your ridiculous creed. But not at the cost of Medrash’s life. He would have forsaken the cultists and run forward to help his kinsman that instant, except that it would have been an empty gesture. A single warrior couldn’t turn the tide, no matter how skillful he might be. He needed all the split-tailed sons of toads swaying and jerking around him.

  Swaying and jerking … with the fury of the dragon god boiling up inside them, they were as frantic to attack as he was.

  Balasar started writhing like the others. “Bahamut!” he howled. “Bahamut!” His companions echoed the cry. He clashed his sword against his targe, and the others did that too.

  He gripped his weapon midway up the blade, then used the foible to slice the right side of his face, where the bone piercings of Clan Daardendrien wouldn’t snag it. He swept the sword through the air, spattering his neighbors with drops of blood. “Bahamut!” he roared.

  The wyrm-worshipers cut themselves too. It spread through their disorderly ranks like a ripple in a pond. Balasar then punched the olive-scaled fellow on his left.

  The cultist rounded on him with rage in his eyes and tongues of yellow fire flickering between his fangs. Balasar screamed, “Bahamut!” And instead of spitting flame at him, the dragon-lover punched him back, then turned to give someone else a shove.

  When they were all thumping one another, Balasar judged that they were about as crazy as he knew how to make them. He brandished his bloody sword at the melee up ahead, bellowed, “Kill!” and charged.

  For a heartbeat or two, he had the horrible feeling that despite all he’d done to stir them up, no one was going to follow. Then the cultists too screamed, “Kill!”-or else the name of their god-and pounded after him.

  He would have been happy to let them catch up. Unfortunately, a person couldn’t pretend to be mad with bloodlust and behave cautiously at the same time. So he kept running as fast as he could, and met the enemy before any of his companions.

  But not the enemy he wanted to engage, not the ash giants and green and gray reptiles locked in battle with Medrash and Khouryn’s troops up ahead. Earlier he’d noticed the brown, hunched, long-armed creatures with dangling folds of skin maneuvering to the edges of the battlefield. Now they came scurrying forward to attack the charging cultists’ flank.

  They didn’t look like much of a threat compared to either the ash giants themselves or the other minions the barbarian adepts had summoned. Balasar hoped the ones that managed to intercept him would only delay him a moment or two. Then a pair of them lashed their arms at him like they were throwing rocks.

  Wind screamed. Either scooped from the ground or simply conjured out of nothing, sand battered Balasar. It stung his eyes, forced its way into his nostrils and mouth, and choked him.

  Blinking and spitting, he covered up with his shield, then peeked over its rim as soon as the blast subsided. Through a stinging blur of tears, he saw the brown creatures rushing him, one a scuttling stride or two in advance of the other.

  Turning back and forth, he pretended he couldn’t see them at all. Then he lunged and cut at the head of the one in the lead the instant it came close enough.

  The brown creature’s body dissolved in a puff of sand, and the sword swept through the grit. The sand leaped several paces away, where, swirling, it congealed into solid flesh and bone once more.

  The trick startled Balasar, but not enough to make him lose track of the second sand thing, which had scrambled around him to strike from behind while its comrade had him distracted. He whirled and shifted his shield, and claws rasped across its surface. He riposted with a chest cut, and the creature collapsed. It was reassuring to see that the things couldn’t evade every attack by dissolving into dust.

  He whirled back toward its partner. It cocked back its apelike arm to hurl more sand. Balasar spat frost at it.

  Its staggered and pawed at the rime suddenly encrusting its blunt-snouted, lizardlike face. Balasar rushed it. It wiped the ice off its eyes just in time to see the slash that sheared through its throat.

  Balasar looked around. The sand things had proved tougher than anticipated, but, frenzied, spewing their breath weapons repeatedly, the members of the Platinum Cadre were making short work of them. He judged that in a few moments, everyone should be ready to race on to the real fight up ahead.

  Then a huge black bat slammed down on the ground-not plummeting, but almost. A split second later, the life went out of its eyes. Mangled and burned, it had plainly given the last of its strength to save its rider from a fatal fall.

  For a moment Balasar thought it a valiant effort wasted, because the big dragonborn slumped into the saddle looked as dead as his steed. But then the fellow groggily lifted his head, revealing the square gold studs pierced into the green hide under his eyes. The rider was the vanquisher himself.

  His trappings and armor charred, as was, no doubt, some of the flesh beneath, he fumbled with the straps holding him in the saddle. Then something else, something bigger even than a Lance Defender’s mount, thudded down on the ground.

  Like Tarhun’s bat, the crimson reptile had shredded wings, with arrows embedded in various
places where its halo of fire had yet to burn them away. It might have trouble returning to the air. But judging from the way it immediately headed for the vanquisher, each step igniting grass and weeds, it still had plenty of fight left in it.

  Alas, Tarhun didn’t. He managed to unbuckle the last of his straps, dismount, and lift his greatsword as high as his chest. Then he collapsed.

  Patrin had three brown opponents alternately trying to flense the flesh from his bones with their talons or scour it off with blasts of sand. Still, as he pivoted to and fro, he glimpsed the maimed bat’s plunge to earth and all that followed. He saw Balasar sprint to interpose himself between the huge red beast and the sprawled, motionless Tarhun.

  No lone swordsman, no matter how skilled, was a match for such a behemoth. Patrin decided he had to help, and quickly. He’d held off using Bahamut’s gifts, saving them for foes more formidable than his current adversaries, but now he reached out to the Platinum Dragon for aid.

  Power thrilled along his nerves. It simultaneously seemed to descend from above and to well up inside him, a sensation impossible to describe to anyone who hadn’t experienced it for himself.

  Patrin whirled his sword in a circle, and brightness-or the pure, rarefied idea of it-exploded from the blade. The light became a spinning horizontal wheel of glowing glyphs with himself at the hub. Assailed by their holy Power, the summoned creatures shrieked and floundered backward.

  He didn’t know how badly he’d hurt them, nor did he care. Someone else could finish them off if need be. The important thing was that they didn’t have him tightly surrounded anymore. He ran toward Balasar and his enormous foe.

  Flames leaping from its jaws, the crested, wedge-shaped head at the end of the long neck struck like a snake. Balasar managed to sidestep and land a cut three times. But on its fourth bite, the reptile caught the edge of his shield in its fangs. It used that hold to pick him up, whip its neck, and fling him to the side. He slammed down hard and slid, and the beast strode on toward Tarhun. Either it innately understood that the dragonborn monarch was the more important target, or its summoner had so instructed it.

  Fortunately, Patrin judged that Balasar had delayed the beast just long enough for him to place himself between the reptile and Tarhun and play the same role his comrade had played. But as he put on a final burst of speed, as he neared the huge creature and saw it even more clearly, doubt suddenly assailed him.

  It had nothing to do with fear for his own survival, although obviously that was uncertain in the extreme. Rather, it involved the essential nature of the creature he was about to challenge.

  He’d noticed that all the beasts the giant shamans summoned with their crystal globes shared certain characteristics with dragons. All, even the brown, hunched sand things, appeared reptilian. Some possessed acidic spittle or poison breath.

  Still, the fiery beast was different. Patrin didn’t think it was a true wyrm, but it was so like one that he wondered if, despite all the manifest reasons to do so, it could be right for a champion of the dragon god to oppose it.

  But his uncertainty only lasted a heartbeat. Then came a surge of supernal strength he hadn’t even requested, and with it clarity. He often asked Bahamut for guidance. For once, the god had chosen to provide it, assuring him without the necessity of words that it was, in fact, his sacred duty to battle creatures like the one that loomed before him.

  When the reptile struck, it was like a tree or tower falling at him. He leaped aside, which saved his life, but didn’t spare him from the blistering heat the saurian radiated like an oven. Grateful that at least at the moment flame didn’t shroud the thing’s entire crested head, he stepped in, shouted the name of his god, and cut.

  Guided by Bahamut’s Power, Patrin’s sword found a place where the creature’s scales overlapped imperfectly. As a result, the stroke bit deeper than any of Balasar’s efforts. The creature jerked its head high. Hot enough to scald, blood showered down. Patrin twisted away to protect his face.

  Unfortunately that meant he’d looked away from his foe, and instinct immediately screamed that he’d made a mistake. He sprang from the shadow of the immense foot hurtling down to crush him. Something-the tip of a claw, he realized-snagged the back of his surcoat and started to yank him down onto his back. But then the purple garment ripped instead. He reeled, then caught his balance.

  As he turned, the ruined surcoat slid down low enough to hinder the action of his arms or even trip him. It was on fire too. But he didn’t have time to rid himself of it, because his foe was already striking at him again.

  He leaped aside, then hurled more of Bahamut’s Power. Silvery light flared from his sword to splash across the side of the reptile’s head. Its neck twisted as it oriented on him once again, but it moved more slowly than before. The god’s Power had robbed it of its quickness.

  Patrin tore the tattered, burning surcoat off his body, then dashed past the creature’s head to its body. He thrust, seeking the enormous heart that had to be beating somewhere behind its armor of scales.

  The sword drove in deep. But it didn’t stop the beast, which tried to stamp on him. He dodged out from under its foot, slashed the extremity, then glimpsed motion at the periphery of his vision. He turned his head. Blazing jaws open wide, the creature was twisting its neck around for another bite.

  Good. Maybe this time, with Bahamut’s Power hindering the saurian, he could put out one of its eyes or even reach the brain behind it.

  But then, in midstrike, the creature broke free of the lethargy with which his magic had afflicted it. Suddenly its head was streaking at him twice as fast as before. Caught by surprise, he couldn’t dodge, only attempt to interpose his shield.

  It was enough to save his life. But the crashing impact flung him backward and slammed him down onto his back. Flame leaping and rippling across its entire body, his foe reared over him. He lifted his sword to impale whatever part of its body came hammering down to finish him.

  Then a feeling of beneficent Power, not the glory of his own deity but surely something akin to it, wrapped around him. The world blinked. Afterward, he was still lying on the ground, but his foe wasn’t right on top of him.

  He sat up and looked around. The huge reptile was a little way off, and Medrash was in front of it. He’d used one of Torm’s gifts to trade places with a comrade in distress.

  The beast struck. But Medrash wasn’t supine or dazed by the shock of a blow he’d just sustained. He dodged, and his blade sliced across one of the reptile’s slit-pupiled yellow eyes. It shrieked and recoiled.

  But then it struck again and would have snapped Medrash’s head off if he hadn’t dropped low at the last possible instant. Patrin scrambled to his feet and charged back into the fight.

  Together, he and Medrash gashed their enormous foe with cut after cut and seared it with flare after flare of holy Power. Until Patrin felt himself slowing and his link to Bahamut attenuating to a useless, hollow ache. He insisted to himself that just one more cut or prayer might finish the beast. That it wasn’t as unstoppable as it seemed.

  Then sharp, sibilant words, spoken in an esoteric language that even Patrin couldn’t understand, rasped through the air. Like himself, Nala had followed when the rest of the Cadre charged. Now she’d come to help protect the vanquisher.

  Swaying back and forth, gripping her staff in both hands, she spun it through a complex series of loops and arcs. Then, on the final syllable of her chant, she thrust the tip at the saurian’s head.

  A blast of flame leaped from her weapon, engulfed the beast’s upper body, and flickered out … leaving it unscathed. Head cocked, the reptile regarded Nala with its remaining good eye. Though Patrin had no real idea how intelligent it was, he had the feeling it was laughing at the fool who had attacked it with an element that constituted a part of its essential nature.

  If so, then it was still laughing when bright, sizzling lightning leaped from the staff to complete the obliteration of its damaged eye. It convulsed, a
nd Patrin and Medrash scrambled back from its stamping feet and lashing tail.

  Next came a burst of fumes that set it retching, and then acid that dissolved scales and ate its way into the muscle beneath. Finally, frost extinguished the last of the flames dancing on its body, painted its head and neck white, and toppled it to the ground.

  Patrin watched it, making sure it wasn’t going to get up again, then turned to see if anything else was threatening Tarhun. Nothing was, and appearing essentially intact, Balasar was clambering to his feet.

  Patrin realized it was a glorious moment. Torm and Bahamut sometimes battled side by side against evil gods and devils. Their earthly champions had just done the same and, by combining forces, had staved off a calamity. Then his beloved Nala had used her own divine gifts to administer the killing stroke to their foe. He gave Medrash a grin.

  His fellow paladin smiled back, and Patrin judged that it was a genuine expression of good will. Medrash was incapable of withholding gratitude and camaraderie in such circumstances. But his feelings weren’t wholehearted-there was ambivalence behind his eyes as well. Dismay that they’d needed Bahamut’s Power to achieve their victory.

  Curse it, why couldn’t the Daardendrien just get over his prejudice? Why couldn’t he accept that he and his fellow paladin were the same?

  Maybe he just needs more time, Patrin thought. Then, as Nala stood panting and leaning on her staff, Balasar stumbled up behind her and planted a heavy hand on her shoulder.

  Nala tried to slow her breathing. It wasn’t easy; her masters would have scowled to see her struggle so simply to compose herself. But the assault on the redspawn had been as taxing a feat of magic as she’d ever attempted.

  Suddenly something grabbed her shoulder, transferring a goodly portion of its weight to her slumping frame. Startled, sure an ash giant or one of their minions had crept up behind her, she let out a squawk and lurched around.