Shadowstorm

  “Disperse!” Rivalen shouted down at the men in the streets. “Get back! Spread out!”

  Brennus and Rivalen began to cast again. The dragon roared, swooped over them, opened its mouth, and exhaled a thick cloud of green vapor. Rivalen and Brennus completed their spells. Tamlin felt a hand on him, felt his body shimmer into mist. The screams and shouts sounded far off. The walls around him appeared to be only gray shadows. Rivalen and Brennus stood beside him.

  “The ethereal plane, Hulorn,” Rivalen said. “The dragon’s breath cannot affect us here.”

  Tamlin saw the shadows of men near him writhing in pain, clutching at their throats, digging fists into their eyes.

  “Put an end to the conjurer bringing fire elementals into the city,” Rivalen said to Brennus. “Then summon Yder.”

  “The earth elementals?” Brennus asked.

  “Variance and the priests, as best they can.”

  Brennus nodded. “The dragon?”

  “I will handle the dragon,” Rivalen said, and his golden eyes flared. “Prepare yourself, Hulorn.”

  Sound and substance turned solid as Rivalen took them back across the planar barrier. Men lay about on the walls, the ground. Some screamed. Others gagged, vomited. Hundreds lay still. An acrid, stinging stink hung in the air. Tamlin’s eyes watered.

  Behind Tamlin, the city burned. Around him, fully a third of his men lay dead or incapacitated. As he watched, shadows clotted here and there on the walls and the Sharran priests stepped from the darkness.

  “Variance!” Rivalen called to one of the Shadovar.

  The darkness around Rivalen churned and the tall priestess appeared before him. She threw up her faceguard.

  “Handle the earth elementals when they come, and protect the Hulorn,” Rivalen said. “If he comes to harm, you answer to me.”

  She looked at Tamlin, at Rivalen. She nodded and lowered her faceguard. The shadows swirling around her brushed Tamlin.

  “What are you going to do?” Tamlin asked Rivalen.

  In the sky above, the dragon flew over the Saerloonian army and started to wheel around.

  “Kill that green,” Rivalen said. He jumped from the wall and took flight.

  Meanwhile, Onthul’s voice boomed over the chaos. The tall captain strode the battlements, rallying the men. His voice was a croak, whether from gas or shouting, Tamlin did not know.

  “You can die fighting on your feet or crawling on your stomachs. How will you have it? Up and ready crossbows! Get on your damned feet!”

  A few hundred of the reserve units rushed up from within the city. They looked at the carnage with wide eyes. Onthul shouted at them to take station on the walls and replace the fallen.

  Out on the field, the red-robed wizard stood before the remaining fire elementals, preparing to teleport them into the city. Brennus watched him closely, hands ready, the words to a spell sitting just behind his lips. When the red-robed wizard disappeared with the fire elementals, Brennus hurriedly recited his spell and smiled. “I have him,” he said to Tamlin. Darkness swirled around him and he disappeared.

  With the fire elementals clear of the field, the Saerloonian trumpets sounded a march and the entire army lurched into motion.

  “Trebuchets!” Onthul shouted.

  The spotters, still alive, peeked over the wall and raised his hand. On the ground below, three of the four trebuchets remained manned. Replacements hurried in.

  “You are a spellcaster?” Variance asked Tamlin. Her voice sounded stilted behind her faceguard.

  Tamlin nodded.

  “Can you cast counterspells?”

  Again Tamlin nodded.

  “Ready them,” Variance said.

  A rumble shook the walls and the earth elementals exploded out of the ground in bursts of rock and dirt. Their heads reached the top of the walls. Tamlin stared into the blank, blunt-featured face of the one nearest him. It did not seem to notice him.

  The elementals bellowed, raised their arms to the sky, and smashed huge, rocky fists into the sides and tops of the walls. The impact shook Tamlin from his feet. The Khyber Gate rattled on its hinges. Dust, men, and rock flew into the sky. A thin crack opened along the wall near Tamlin. Another. Men shouted, screamed. Vats of oil shattered, soaked the walls, and burst into flame. Tamlin heard Onthul barking orders through the smoke and chaos. Crossbows twanged and bolts sank into the elementals by the dozen.

  The Saerloonians shouted, moved double quick. The Selgauntan trebuchets fired and huge, sealed vats of alchemical fire arced into the sky. The impact would shatter the wooden vats and the viscous fluid would ignite upon contact with the air.

  It would not be enough, Tamlin knew. He was watching Selgaunt fall. The siege of his city would not last months. It would last hours.

  He decided to die fighting on his feet. He faced the nearest elemental and started to cast a counterspell. While he intoned the words, he saw the vats of alchemical fire hit the ground and explode in flame and heat. One landed short of the Saerloonians and lit the plains on fire, but three landed in the midst of the army and turned men to torches.

  The huge elemental took notice of him. It bellowed, raised its fist high, to smash Tamlin or the wall or both. Tamlin completed his counterspell and his magic warred with the power of the summoner of the elemental.

  And lost.

  Tamlin stared, frozen, as the elemental’s fist descended. Darkness gathered around him.

  “Not here,” Variance said, and transported him away before the elemental could crush him.

  Brennus appeared in the center of a wide, cobblestone avenue. The red-robed wizard stood in the middle of the street, his back to Brennus, flanked by columns of living flame twice his height. The flames crackled but there was order to the sound, and Brennus knew it to be the elementals’ language.

  The few pedestrians on the street fled in panic. An underfed donkey tied to a hitching post bucked and kicked, terrified, but could not free itself. Its cries of fear rang down the street.

  Behind Brennus, powerful impacts reverberated through the city. The attack on the walls had begun in earnest.

  The wizard uttered a command, pointed to his right and left, and the elementals moved to nearby buildings and lit them aflame. Muffled screams sounded from within.

  Brennus incanted the words to a spell that would prevent the wizard from teleporting. The wizard heard him, whirled. His eyes widened at the sight of Brennus.

  “Incinerate him!” the wizard called to the elementals, and ran for the cover of a nearby wagon as he started to cast a spell of his own.

  The elementals left off the buildings and raced toward Brennus like wildfire, leaving trails of flame in their wake.

  Brennus ignored them, finished his spell, and fired a thin green beam from his outstretched finger. It hit the wizard in the side. The spell did not harm him, but a field of pale green flared around him. The wizard cursed and aborted his spell, knowing that he was prevented from using magical transport. He had intended to transport himself out of the city.

  The elementals charged into Brennus and engulfed him. His world turned orange; the elementals’ crackling voices sounded loud in his ears. His wards entirely shielded him and his homunculi from the heat and flame, but the protective spells would not last long under the elementals’ onslaught.

  He held out his hands and shouted the words to a counterspell. His power engaged that of the summoner and overpowered it. The binding that held the elementals to the Prime Material Plane unwound and the creatures disappeared with a soft pop and a puff of smoke.

  The wizard stared at him. He recognized that Brennus had overpowered his summonings with ease. He started backing away down the street, intoning a spell. Brennus walked after him, reciting the words to his own spell.

  Heads poked out of windows.

  “He banished the elementals!”

  “He saved the city!”

  “But what of the dragon?”

  Brennus ignored the accolades. The sum
moner finished his spell, joined his thumbs, and blew on his hands. His spell amplified his breath, turned it frigid, and blasted it toward Brennus in a freezing sheet.

  Brennus’s body, infused with shadowstuff, resisted the magic of the spell and he endured the ice without harm. Completing his own spell, he pulled the summoner’s palpable fear from his head and let the magic turn it against him in the form of an illusion.

  Brennus did not see what form the illusion took, at least not clearly. He saw only a large shadowy form looming over the summoner. Its face suggested a muzzle; horns or large ears jutted from its head. The wizard collapsed to the ground on his knees, mouth open, eyes wide.

  “Do not touch me!” he screamed to his fears.

  Brennus’s illusion reached out a muscular arm that ended in a pincer. It touched the summoner and he gasped, clutched his chest, and died. His fears blew away in the breeze.

  Brennus walked over to the donkey. Its wild eyes rolled in its head and it backed off to the limit of its tether, but it was too exhausted to do anything more. Brennus reached out a shadow-shrouded hand, stroked its head. “There, now,” he said.

  His homunculi emerged from his robe and bit through the tether. The donkey turned and tore off down the street.

  More and more heads poked out of windows and doors, all looking at him, back at the walls, up at the sky for the dragon. They wanted a savior and he had given them one. Rivalen would be pleased.

  Through his ring, he reached out his mind for his brother Yder.

  Come now, he said, and Yder returned a quick acknowledgement.

  Brennus dared not transport himself blindly back to the walls, for fear he could materialize in a maelstrom. He did not know what damage the earth elementals had done. Using shadows as stepping stones, he worked his way back to the Khyber Gate.

  The impact of Furlinastis’s body drove Cale so deeply into the soft earth that the hole might as well have been a grave. The dragon’s weight crushed him. His ribs shattered, his arm broke, his ankle. Pain lit a spark shower in his brain. He heard the dragon’s roar, muffled by the mud that encased him.

  Free us, said voices in his mind, and he knew them to be those of the souls trapped in the dragon’s shadow shroud.

  Cale? Magadon said, his voice tense. Cale?

  He could not respond. He hung onto consciousness through force of will. Drawing on the darkness around him, he transported himself out from under the dragon. He appeared in another stand of twisted trees, a bowshot behind the dragon. Mud caked his cloak and trousers. He whispered the words to one of his most powerful healing spells and the magical energy reknit his bones. The shadowstuff in his flesh worked at the rest.

  I am all right, he said to Magadon and Riven. He stood perfectly still and tried to control his breathing. His mind raced through his options.

  Furlinastis reared back his long neck and cocked his head.

  “I hear your heart, priest.” He whirled his girth around with alarming rapidity. Shadows boiled around the dragon, faces formed, pleading with Cale.

  “This is not as I would have it,” the dragon said. “But one of us must die.”

  Cale did not bother to parse the meaning of the dragon’s words. He invoked a spell that summoned a column of fire and immersed the dragon in flame. The spell appeared to cause no harm as the huge reptile roared and took flight out of the conflagration. The beat of his wings sent a gale of flames rushing across the swamp toward Cale. Trees and scrub shriveled in the heat. Cale ducked behind a tree and the firestorm did him no harm.

  Airborne, the dragon pronounced a single eldritch word and the fog and shadows around Cale swirled, merged, and partly solidified. Cale could still breathe but could not see past his hands, and the fog resisted his movements as well as water. He knew what to expect next, even before he heard the beat of the dragon’s wings above him and the inhalation of breath.

  He frantically drew on the darkness to get him clear, but he was too slow. Furlinastis exhaled with a roar and the deadly, life-draining black vapor saturated the magical fog. Cale dived for a low spot in the earth but the fog stubbornly resisted his movements. The cold of the dragon’s breath prickled his skin, entered his body through nose, ears, and mouth, and siphoned off much of his soul. He weakened; some of the power he used to cast spells drained away. He shouted with pain and rode the shadows to another stand of trees.

  Riven’s voice sounded in his head. Cale?

  Cale could hardly breathe. Soon, he answered, and leaned on a tree to keep his feet. Stand ready.

  Rivalen watched the huge green dragon wheel in a wide arc. Its scales glimmered like emeralds in the morning sun. The same sun felt like needles on Rivalen’s exposed skin. With an effort of will, he dimmed the light around him and flew toward the dragon, cloaked in shadow.

  Below him, he saw the Saerloonian forces advancing through trebuchet fire on the double quick. Behind he heard the elementals, the world-shaking crash of their fists on the city’s walls.

  The dragon completed its turn, saw him approaching, and roared. It spoke a series of arcane words, beat its wings, lowered its neck, and arrowed straight for him. The moment the great reptile flew within range, Rivalen intoned the words to a spell that pit his will against that of the dragon. He had used a similar spell to cow a kraken. Few could resist its power.

  The moment he completed the spell, the arcane energy rebounded on him, shaped by the dragon. He had only a moment to process the event—the dragon must have cast a protective abjuration that rebounded spells back on their caster, or perhaps bore a ring imbued with that power.

  The power of Rivalen’s own will twisted back upon him, tried to make him subservient to the dragon. His own voice sounded in his head.

  Remain still and do not resist.

  Magic made the words a compulsion. He fought it but his body went slack. He stopped in mid air and hovered. The dragon beat its wings, loomed larger in his sight. He could not move.

  Roaring, the dragon exhaled a cloud of corrosive green gas that engulfed Rivalen. The gas burned his skin, melted his clothes to his flesh, and sheathed him in agony. The gas did not dissipate, as Rivalen expected. Instead it clung to him, continued to burn, to melt his flesh. He screamed as skin sloughed from him and rained down on the plains below.

  Pain focused his mind. He fought his way free of the will-dominating spell a moment before the dragon’s enormous form careened unharmed through its own breath and crashed into him.

  The impact shattered bone, drove him backward through the air. The dragon followed up and deftly snatched him in a claw. The creature squeezed him more tightly than a vise. Ribs cracked, snapped. The dragon’s corrosive breath, clinging to Rivalen still, burned his flesh more. He groaned and fought to stay conscious as his shadowstuff-infused flesh, sheltered from the sun by the dragon’s body, sought to regenerate some of its injuries. Unable to concentrate to cast a spell, he swung his blade weakly at the creature’s underbelly but did not so much as scratch the scales. Luckily, the creature’s long neck prevented it from bringing its fangs to bear while flying and holding him in a claw.

  “Debts are owed, shade, your kind to mine,” the dragon said. “You are the first to pay, but not the last.”

  Rivalen swallowed blood, fought through the haze of pain, and snarled an answer. “This debt is between only us, dragon. And you now owe me.”

  The dragon growled and squeezed him harder. Bones splintered and Rivalen screamed with agony. He gripped his consciousness with both hands, forced himself to concentrate, and spat the single word of a spell that would teleport him from the dragon’s grasp. His pain-clouded brain imagined no end point for the spell except away from the dragon, and he appeared in open air three bowshots away.

  The dragon roared at his escape, turned its head on its long neck to scan the sky. It spotted him and started to turn. Its awkwardness in flight gave Rivalen some time, a thirtycount perhaps.

  The dragon’s breath finally flowed off his skin and dissipated
, though it had left his flesh raw, ragged, and slicked with blood. He held his holy symbol in sticky fingers and incanted the words to the most powerful healing spell he knew. The energy flooded him, healing most of the injuries wrought by the dragon. He winced as his bones and organs squirmed back into their proper positions and reknit.

  The dragon roared again as it continued its turn. Rivalen presumed the reptile would renew the power of its spell-turning as it came, and he knew his options were limited. More than half his spells would be useless. He would have to disjoin the turning magic with one of his most powerful abjurations, or face the dragon with only indirect spells and his sword.

  He would prepare for either option. The disjunction was uncertain and sometimes failed.

  Speaking quickly, he incanted a series of spells that doubled his size and that of his sword, increased his strength, his endurance, and gave him supernatural speed. He hefted his enlarged blade in his hand. It did not seem an adequate weapon.

  He attuned his communication ring to Brennus.

  Where are Yder and Sakkors?

  The answer came immediately.

  Close.

  Rivalen searched the sky in the direction of Selgaunt Bay but saw nothing other than smoke from the burning buildings in the city and rock dust from the walls.

  Tamlin materialized with Variance on the avenue behind the Khyber Gate. The gate rattled on its hinges under an elemental’s onslaught. The walls to the right and left of the gate cracked and shook under the fists of the huge creatures.

  “Get me back up to the walls!” he said to Variance.

  “That is no place for you,” she answered.

  Men dashed all around him, screaming, shouting. Several had dropped to one knee and fired their crossbows rapidly at the exposed heads of the elementals, which rose above the height of the wall. More of the men from the reserve units ran up to the walls, firing crossbows, shouting, adding to the chaos.