The Ruin (27 page)

Will hoped some defensive measure was in place to counter such a move, but he didn’t know what it was. That was one of the many things he hated about war: the feeling that most of the time, he didn’t fully understand what was happening and certainly had no hope of controlling it.

Arrows flew back and forth. Magic filled the air with strange smells and pulses of warmth and chill as the spellcasters chanted it into being. The white dragons tried again to fly at the ridge, and as before, the Sossrim druids and wizards created bursts of flame, and conjured warriors of living fire and wind, to bar the way. The wyrms fell back.

Their quivers nearly empty already, archers cried for more arrows, or yanked shafts from the ground, the ramparts of snow and sticks, and the bodies of fallen comrades. A man near Will caught a shaft in the chest, smiled as if delighted to discover the wound hadn’t inconvenienced him in the slightest, then collapsed.

Stival chaffed Pavel on how long it took to cock an arbalest. The human side of his mouth sneering, Dorn shot methodically at whatever target presented itself. No doubt he would have preferred to attack Zethrindor, but the undead white hadn’t yet ventured into range. Thus far, the dracolich was directing his army more or less from the rear, evidently holding his own terrible prowess in reserve for later.

Meanwhile, Will simply stood and watched. The sling the Sossrim had given him was a decent weapon, but it couldn’t throw a missile as far as a bow, and at that point, the enemy was simply too distant.

Or so he imagined. But then, closer to the center of the battle line, earth and snow heaved, a section of the ramparts collapsed, and a gigantic, wingless dirty-white wyrm burst

up out of the ground. Pale blue eyes blazing, it snagged an archer with its stubby foreclaws, conveyed him to its jaws, plunged its fangs into him, and sucked at him in a way that reminded Will of Brimstone. The white drake only guzzled for an instant, though, before spitting out its first victim and reaching for another.

The blood-drinker was a tundra landwyrm. Will had never encountered one before, but recognized it from Stival’s stories. It shouldn’t have been able to tunnel all the way up through the hill so quickly, but presumably, magic had augmented its natural capabilities.

As well as those of its kin, for, farther down the ridge, two more landwyrms exploded up out of the earth. The trio slaughtered at least twenty men in just a couple moments. Other soldiers, overcome by fear, scrambled away from the drakes. Madislak’s entire formation was in danger of disintegrating.

Zethrindor knew it, too, and flung his troops into another charge at the hilltop. Men, dwarves, and giants ran. Dragons beat their way through the air.

Nearly knocked down and trampled by fleeing Sossrim, Will felt an uncharacteristic panic welling up inside. For a moment, he too nearly bolted. Then he glimpsed Dorn shoving his way toward the nearest landwyrm, and the sight steadied him. Maybe it was because he and Pavel felt responsible for their friend, or perhaps it was simply that he was used to following where Dorn led. In any case, he scurried in his wake, meanwhile switching out the sling for his new short sword.

Dorn sprang at the reptile’s flank, ripped its scaly hide with his iron claws, then slashed it with his hand-and-a-half sword. The landwyrm screeched and whirled, and he leaped backward, evading a snap of its jaws.

It was at that point that Will squirmed his way out of the press of humans fleeing in the opposite direction and got his first good look at the fight as a whole. To his relief, he and Dorn were by no means battling alone. Pavel had conjured a glowing, flying mace to hammer at the landwyrm, and it

bloodied the wyrm’s shoulder with a shrill whine of concentrated noise. Wheeling around the reptile, Jivex evoked a hood of glittering golden dust, which unfortunately fell away without sticking to the larger creature’s head. Stival, Natali, and other members of their troop assailed the foe with swords and spears.

Though it was difficult to imagine what good it could possibly do. Even if they managed to kill the landwyrm, other drakes, giants, dwarves, and barbarians were already rushing to overrun the ridge.

Will shoved such reflections out of his head. The task at hand was to slaughter that particular dragon. He’d worry about other perils later.

He waited until the landwyrm’s head was pointed away from him, then, wary of its stamping feet and lashing tail, darted underneath it. He plunged his short sword into its guts.

He stabbed four times before the landwyrm’s flesh shuddered in response to what might have been a particularly telling stroke. The drake would try to retaliate. Will scurried to get out from under it, and his boot slipped in the snow, costing him his balance and forward momentum.

The shadow of a huge foot fell over him. He struggled to regain his equilibrium and realized it wasn’t going to happen quickly enough. Then Pavel lunged forward, grabbed him, and yanked him out of harm’s way. The wyrm’s foot slammed down, jolting the frozen earth.

They were both off balance, and the landwyrm twisted its head perpendicular to its usual attitude and spread its gray-white jaws to strike at them. Stival scurried to interpose himself between the reptile and its intended prey and cut with his broadsword. The straight, heavy blade sheared so deep into the underside of the drake’s jaw that bone crunched, and blood gushed in bright, rhythmic arterial spurts. The landwyrm screamed and whipped its head away.

Dorn gripped his bastard sword with both hands and hacked at the base of the reptile’s neck. Jivex lit midway

down its back, beside the heavy, jagged, segmented dorsal ridge, and ripped at its flesh with fang and claw. Natal! and her comrades slashed and stabbed.

The landwyrm froze. Shuddered. Flopped over onto its side to roll and thrash. A couple warriors were too slow scurrying out of the way, and the reptile crushed them.

As its death throes subsided, Will, panting, turned to find the next threat.

Rather to his surprise, all three tundra landwyrms were dead. Better still, it seemed the panic the creatures had inspired had been less universal than his initial impression of it, because folk who hadn’t engaged the burrowing drakes had resumed the task of holding back the rest of the enemy. The giants, dwarves, and barbarians had gained some ground, but their advance had bogged down short of the top of the rise. Nor had the flying dragons penetrated the mystical barriers the Sossrim spellcasters kept placing in their way.

Will spotted movement in the forest. Limbs slashed up and down, shaking snow and icicles loose. Was it possible the trees themselves were walking and striking at creatures on the ground?

Dwarves and barbarians reeled out into the open with bears, wolves, and hawks in pursuit. A frost giant likewise tried to flee, but something even bigger than itself grabbed its head in gnarled brown hands and gave it a neck-breaking twist. The killer was a treant, a creature like a tree with a face, and a divided trunk that served for legs. Bare bark from its root-like feet to its highest branches, denuded of leaves by the advent of winter, it turned and strode back into the forest, presumably in search of other intruders.

It didn’t seem as if the invaders could flank Madislak’s army by looping around to the east. in fact, for a moment, Will found the entire situation encouraging, and grinning, was about to say so. Then he noticed how many more Sossrim the landwyrms had left smashed, torn, and lifeless in crimson pools on the ground.

Does it truly all just come down to numbers? he wondered. No matter how well we fight, Zethrindor and his flunkies just grind us away in the end’?

No. He refused to believe it. Though if it did happen, then sometime before the finish, he’d make a point of reminding Pavel he’d predicted it would turn out to be a bad idea to backtrack.

Dragons flew high, then circled, plainly intending to attack from multiple directions at once. Stival herded his surviving warriors back to what remained of the ramparts. Will grabbed the edge of a dead archer’s tabard, wiped the blood from his short sword, replaced it in its scabbard, and pulled the sling from his belt.

Taegan remained absolutely still. Breathed as softly as possible. Did his utmost to remain calm, lest the pounding of an agitated heart, or the smell of fear, somehow leaking through Raryn’s enchantment, betray him. Meanwhile, the huge Tarterian, with its luminous green eyes, tattered wings, and black teeth and talons, stalked closer, while its fellows prowled higher up the mountain, or wheeled against the stars.

Taegan supposed that, incongruous as it seemed to posit such a thing about such a precarious situation, his daft scheme was going relatively well. The dark wyrms hadn’t located him yet, which meant that, if Tymora smiled, Kara and Brimstone might actually have sufficient time to penetrate the ruined castle.

Had Taegan been directing the Tarterians, such would not have been the case. If he’d recognized that odd things were occurring on one side of the valley, he would have dispatched some of the wyrms to make sure all was well on the other. But these particular dragons evidently didn’t think that way. According to Brimstone, their one great ruling instinct was to hunt, catch, torment, and slaughter prey. If so, perhaps none

of them could bear to abandon the search for the trickster lurking close at hand.

Black, wedge-shaped, withered-looking head swinging back and forth, the nearest Tarterian glided a step closer. Taegan felt a sudden stab of alarm.

Had the wyrm spotted him? His instincts screamed yes, but he didn’t know why. Had he observed something without quite realizing what, or was that prolonged game of hide-andseek simply wearing on his nerves?

He studied the Tarterian. To superficial appearances, it was searching for him in the same manner as before. It peered this way and that. Sniffed the snowy ground and the frigid breeze. Cocked its ragged-edged ears to listen.

Yet it seemed to him that it might be crawling a trifle faster as it made its way in his general direction, as though it had already spotted its quarry, and all the subsequent casting about was just a show to conceal the fact. He likewise had the impression that, as its head pivoted at the end of its serpentine neck, it spent just a little more time gazing in his direction than it did looking elsewhere.

Ile realized he was certain. It knew where he was, and he had to start moving before it eased into striking distance. He spread his pinions, sprang into the air, and flew away from the boulder he’d been using for cover. The dragon immediately turned, tracking the motion just as if it could see invisible people, and charged, unfurling its own ragged, leathery wings as it bounded along.

He kept ahead of the creature, gained some altitude on it before it too took to the air, but the other Tarterians were orienting on him. Screeching and hissing, wings lashing, they wheeled, swooped and leaped in his direction.

Racing out over the valley, he rattled off an incantation and flourished the innocuous-looking scrap of licorice root that—praise Sune—none of his former captors had bothered to take from him. Power jolted through his limbs, accelerating his reactions. When he glanced back at the Tarterians, they appeared to be moving slower than before.

But they could still fly faster than he could. His advantages, to the extent that he could be said to possess any, were that they couldn’t actually see him, and that he could maneuver more nimbly. He veered and turned, trying to shake them off his trail, or, failing that, at least keep them from catching up with him.

Snarling, they compensated by spreading out, so a turn away from one was likely to carry him closer to another. They also started spewing their breath weapons and employing their mystical abilities, and he had to trust. his veil of invisibility and zigzagging mode of flight to spoil their aim.

It soon became apparent they wouldn’t spoil it by much. A blaze of force missed him, but blasted close enough to agitate the air around him and make him flounder. He sensed a raw ache in the fabric of existence, a flaw that engendered a sympathetic throb in his own head, manifesting just in front of him. He dived, and a floating bubble of shadow seethed into existence above him. A rippling hole in empty space opened to his left and sucked at him as if he were bath water in peril of swirling down a drain. Inside it, he glimpsed a maze of pearly, featureless corridors like the one Brimstone had described. He lashed his pinions and broke the magic’s grip on him. Balked of its prey, the hole melted from existence.

Rather to his own amazement, he was unscathed and uncaught so far, but he was rapidly approaching the wall of dark, snow-dappled peaks on the other side of the valley. He couldn’t fly very far into them, lest he blunder into one of the maze traps. He had to turn, but. a simple change of course was no longer possible. The Tarterians were too close, and would catch him if he tried.

He felt tempted to use his final trick. Certainly, it offered his best hope of survival. but even assuming it succeeded, it would bring the chase to an early end, and he’d promised himself he’d buy Kara and Brimstone as much time as possible.

To Baator with it, then. He’d play the game as he’d originally intended. He veered right and swooped low, into the

area where he and his comrades had most often observed the largest of the several ghost dragons.

Though sometimes the spirit wandered elsewhere, or simply vanished altogether, and such appeared to be the case at the moment. When Taegan glanced back, he discerned that the Tarterians had nonetheless hesitated before entering its domain, but they cried to one another and drove forward.

That meant his ploy hadn’t done him any good. Indeed, by requiring him to swoop lower, ceding the Tarterians the advantage of height, it had worsened his chances.

Prompted, presumably, by magic gone senile, strange, crumbling skulls laughed as he hurtled by. Rocks rolled and hitched themselves into a curving line which, for a moment, became a pale, slithering serpent. Then an enormous shadow fell over him. He looked up. A Tarterian hung directly overhead, its jaws spreading and its head cocking back to spit its breath.