The Ruin (43 page)

He wasn’t. Instead, he lay on his belly in the center of the golden pentacle with blood around his head.

“Get up, weakling!” Will cried.

“Can’t,” Pavel croaked. He had gore all over his chin, too. “Finished. Worth it to be rid of you. Get out.”

“Not without you!” Will scrambled toward him. “Taegan!” said Pavel. “Stop him!”

The avariel grabbed Will and hauled him back. As he struggled to free himself, he glimpsed huge plunging shapes, leaping flame and gray vapor, the golems driving forward in a final irresistible onslaught. Then they vanished into flash and blur.

As far as Nexus was concerned, Tamarand had proved himself as brilliant a captain as Lareth. Under his leadership, the metallics had performed miracles. But sometimes even miracles were insufficient, and as their comrades plummeted from the sky, or spiraled down too sorely wounded to continue fighting, he feared this was one of them.

Then something flashed far below him on the ground. In a battle fought with sorcery and dragon breath, plenty of things blazed and flared, and he didn’t know what impelled him to attend to this one. Yet he looked down just in time to witness Sammaster’s demise.

Nexus started roaring out the most potent spell of banishment in his repertoire. He’d attempted it twice already without success, but with Sammaster gone, and the power of the enchantments the lich had conjured perhaps attenuated, it was worth another try.

A chaos dragon spat acid at him. A howling drake battered him with its shriek. Refusing to let the punishment balk him, he declaimed the final words of the incantation.

All across the sky, and all at once, the otherworldly dragons disappeared, cast back to the infernal realms from which their master had drawn them.

8-27 Nightal, the Year of Rogue Dragons

Grigel Ragenev dripped viscous amber poison from a glass pipette into the brew simmering in the vessel below. The task required steady hands and total concentration. The mixture had to be precise, and what made it more difficult still was that, magic being a somewhat chaotic process, one couldn’t know beforehand the exact proportions, or at which moments another droplet needed to go in. Assessing the shifting colors of the elixir and the inconstant smell of the fumes, the alchemist had to make judgments as he went along.

At his back, something crashed. It startled him, his hand shook, and venom plopped into the brew. A puff of sulfurous yellow vapor revealed that the mix and thus a tenday’s work were ruined.

Grigel lurched around on his stool to berate the fool who’d made the noise, but what he saw curdled

his fury into anxiety. It was Ssalangan who’d knocked down the crudely made door of the hut, and who crouched glaring through the opening.

“Where,” growled the white, “is Sammaster?”

“I don’t know,” Grigel said, his voice a little shrill. “He left without telling anyone where he was going. I’m sure he’ll return as soon as he can.”

“Don’t count on it,” Ssalangan said. “We dragons believe he fled and left you slaves behind to suffer our displeasure. As you will. But we’ll hunt him down and punish him, too. We have enough displeasure t o go around.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Rage, of course. It faded from our minds two days ago, but we waited to be sure it was really gone. It is. Even though you thralls swore it would never end on its own. You lied to scare us into accepting the transformation.”

“No!” Grigel said. “If what you’re saying is true, the FirstSpeaker deceived us cultists as well.”

Ssalangan sneered. “I think I may actually believe you. But it doesn’t matter. I’m in a bad mood, and hungry, too.”

The white lunged forward, and since the doorway was merely humansized, the wall shattered to accommodate him. Elsewhere in the compound, wyrms roared, and their worshipers screamed.

Keeping a wary eye out for ghost dragons and other hazards, Tamarand, Nexus, Azhaq, and others collected stones to build their fallen comrades’ cairns. Magic would have facilitated the task, but it felt proper to toil at it with wing and claw.

Tamarand tore at a mountainside, struggling to rip out another chunk of granite. The Tarterians had fed here and so weakened the stone, but it resisted him nonetheless. Nexus set down to assist him.

“It was a great victory,” the wizard said. “We mourn the fallen, but it’s permissible to celebrate as well.”

Tamarand grunted.

“In fact,” Nexus persisted, “it was a victory worthy of a king.”

“I told you already, I won’t be King of Justice.”

“Because you won’t forgive yourself for Lareth’s death. But you needed to kill him to save our entire race, perhaps all of Faerűn, and save it we did.”

“That doesn’t excuse treachery.”

“I say it does, and it also proves the benefits of leadership.”

“Lareth’s leadership would have doomed us all if Karasendrieth and her rogues hadn’t defied him.”

Nexus sighed, warming the chill arctic air and suffusing it with a scent like incense. “Sky and stone, you’re stubborn. Just think about it, will you?”

Tamarand hesitated. “I’ll think about it.”

As Azhaq piled rocks atop Havarlan’s body, he noticed the new scars on his legs and feet. They were as plentiful as the old ones crisscrossing the female’s hide.

Though many folk considered him arrogant, even by dragon standards, he wasn’t vain enough to imagine he’d grown to be Havarlan’s equal. But perhaps he was silver enough to keep her dream from dying with her. To see to it that, in one form or another, the Talons of Justice lived on.

Kara reflected that in a sense, their great endeavor had begun in an inn, and it was ending the same way. This room, however, was a private one rented for the occasion, and free of wererats.

“Back at the start,” she said, “l hired some of you to help me. Obviously, we’ve come a long way since then, far beyond

notions of pay and employment. But I still want to share what I have, as a token of my gratitude and love.”

She upended her pouch and dumped the treasure clattering on a table. The coins, gems, and jewelry gleamed in the light of the fire crackling in the hearth.

Will craned on tiptoe so he could take a proper look, then, to her surprise, took only a single gold band set with a ruby. “This will do me for a keepsake. I picked up plenty on our way back through Brimstone’s cave. You can give the rest of my share to a temple of Lathander.” His face twisted, and he blinked.

Raryn clasped the halfling’s shoulder. “He was the best of us,” the ranger said.

“He was a useless charlatan!” Will spat. “But I miss him. A little.”

Raryn turned to the pile and pulled out a fistful of gold and a true silver armband set with emeralds. “I don’t need much, either, where I’m headed. But I might want some.”

“Are you going somewhere?” asked Dorn, sprawled on a couch, a cup of brandy in his remaining hand.

“Back to the Great Glacier. Joylin’s there, with no kin left to look after her. I have to make sure she’s all right. I need to see my tribe again, too, now that they’ve betrayed me. I don’t want revenge, but I have to talk to them if I’m ever to forgive them.”

“I’ll tag along,” said Will, “if you’ll have me. I feel like doing something.”

“I don’t envy you a second journey on the ice,” Taegan said, elegant in the new blue and scarlet suit a tailor, extravagantly rewarded, had labored day and night to finish. “Particularly at this time of year. For my part, I intend to winter savoring the luxuries of Lyrabar, and resume my forays into the wilderness come spring.’

“Where will you go then?” Kara asked.

“Back to my own tribe in the Earthwood, and then to other avariel enclaves, if I can find them. I finally understand why we hide from the world. To say the least, there’s no shame in

it, but millennia after the chromatics gave up trying to exterminate us, there’s no longer any necessity, either. Someone ought to speak to the others of that, and of the advantages of rejoining the rest of civilization.”

Perched on the mantelpiece, tail dangling, Jivex snorted. “I suppose that means the Gray Forest will have to do without me for a while longer. Since it’s clear you’re helpless without me. Now it’s my turn to choose.” He lashed his wings, hurtled across the room, and landed amid the mass of gems and precious metal.

“If you’ll recall,” Taegan drawled, “you and I never were in Lady Kara’s employ.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, smiling. “Both of you, take anything you want.”

After the division of the treasure came the finest meal the kitchen could provide, its best wine, and toasts to Pavel, Chatulio, Gorstag, Igan, Madislak, Drigor, and everybody else who’d given his life to end the Rage. The company traded reminiscences of their lost comrades, and after some coaxing, Kara sang her first attempt at a ballad describing the dive into Northkeep. Everyone professed to find it splendid, though to her ear, it was still a raw, unpolished thing.

Finally, one by one, the others stumbled off to seek their beds. Until only she and Dorn remained.

He sighed. “Everyone’s leaving.”

“As they probably should,” she replied, holding his hand. “We’re all tipsy.”

“I don’t mean now. In the days to come. I don’t blame them. They have things to do, and I obviously can’t follow.”

“Do you believe,” she asked, “they’re abandoning you forever? That you’ll never see them again?”

Scowling, he continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “You need to go, too. Pavel was the best of us. You should always have been with him, not a freak like me, and now that I’m crippled again, our being together is just ridiculous. You—”

She slapped the human side of his face.

“Any more prattle like that,” she said, “and you’ll get another. In the first place, I would no more forsake you for possessing a maimed body than you deserted me for suffering a stricken mind. In the second, do you imagine that Nexus, Firefingers, Sureene, and the others are going to leave you like this? I don’t know if they’ll fit you out with iron limbs again, but they’ll do something. You’re one of the champions who saved dragonkind, all the world, perhaps, and a good many people love you. Stop sulking, open your eyes, and see what’s real!”

His lips quirked into a smile. “I guess that sometimes, I still have a sour way of thinking.”

“Then I’ll have to train it out of you.”

Brimstone floated in howling darkness. There was nothing t o see, but he felt an invisible maelstrom whirling and churning below him. Striving to suck him down.

Though his thoughts were muddled, he sensed it was natural, probably even inevitable that he succumb to the vortex. Yet at the same time, he dreaded it, and so he resisted. Not by flapping his wings, for his body had become as diffuse and abstract a thing as his mind. By sheer will.

It was impossible to tell how long he struggled, but eventually, a point of light appeared. He strained for it, and gradually crept closer, or perhaps pulled it toward him. It became a pale, glimmering rectangle with a sparkling circle in the center, then the white glow of it was all around him, washing away the dark.

He realized he once again possessed physicality in his form of smoke and embers. The whiteness held him strait as a torturer’s cage, and he probed it, seeking release. He couldn’t find an opening as such, but there was a pathway, an accommodating vector, and he flowed along it.

He boiled up into frigid air. Into a valley girt with dark mountains and covered with a black and starry sky. His thoughts snapped into clarity, and he remembered this was

the place where Sammaster had destroyed him.

Except, not quite. Peering down, he found a single link of his collar lying on the ground. Somehow, that one piece had survived the lich’s spell of annihilation to serve as his anchor as he hung between undeath and oblivion. To enable him to clamber back into the mortal world.

He took on solid form, gashed his chest with a talon, and tucked the diamond-and-platinum link into the wound. As it healed over, he looked around.

Still wearing the dracolich form he’d assumed at the end, Sammaster—or rather, his shattered corpse—lay some yards away. Brimstone had kept the madman from translating himself away, and afterward his allies had somehow managed to slay him.

Or had they? Brimstone knew better than anyone how powerful and wily Sammaster was. Perhaps his seeming demise had been a trick. Perhaps he’d risen from this husk to assail his foes anew.

But there were cairns on the battlefield. Brimstone tumbled stones from the top of one and found a silver beneath. Only the victors could have erected the piles, and Sammaster would scarcely have bothered to give one of the metallics an honorable interment.

Still, Brimstone couldn’t find it in his heart to be certain. He prowled into the citadel to seek the source of the Rage. ,

Golems guarded the threshold, but paid no heed to his smoky shape. Beyond, in a vault begemmed to resemble the heavens, lay the body of Pavel Shemov. Brimstone reflected that he and the sun priest would never have the final confrontation they’d both desired, then spotted a litter of black (lust and fragments.

He was mystic enough to discern that he was looking at the remains of Sammaster’s phylactery, which the lich had evidently integrated into the mythal, and at last he believed. He and his allies had prevailed, not merely putting an end to the Rage, but expunging its master from the world for good and all.

The realization left him feeling a strange jumble of emotions: Exultation, certainly, but annealed with regret that he hadn’t witnessed Sammaster’s downfall, as well as an underlying emptiness. The struggle for revenge had consumed him for much of his existence, and abruptly it was over. What was he supposed to do?

Then he sneered at his mawkish feelings, for the answer was obvious. He still thirsted for blood and power, and with a goodly number of the metallics who might have opposed him slain, and much of Faerűn still in turmoil in the aftermath of the dragon flights, it was a perfect time to strike for both. He flowed back past the golems to discover what other secrets the ruined castle held.