The Rage (39 page)

stood the palace of the lord of Northkeep, the residences of the dignitaries of his court, and temples consecrated to the gods they’d worshiped. If seemed the most likely place to hold the secret of the Rage.

Battle, or the plunge to the bottom of the lake, had opened breaches and fissures in many a wall, and caved in sections of roof. Descending swimmers could enter the damaged buildings in a hundred different ways. Dorn chose to lead his allies down into the central courtyard and view the mansions, fortifications, and shrines somewhat as the living inhabitants of Northkeep must have experienced them. He hoped it would give him a sense of the place, and that in turn would help him guess precisely where to start the search.

It seemed worth a try, anyway. But when they’d swum so low they could almost have planted their feet in the muck on the bottom, and the high arched entryways to stone bastions and graceful spires yawned all around, the world turned black in a single instant, as if the water had changed to ink, or the sun in the sky overhead had winked out.

Fighting panic, Dorn thought he knew what was actually happening. The phantoms of Northkeep had conjured the darkness to help them dispose of the intruders.

Dorn’s spear was enchanted, and his iron arm was a magical weapon in its own right. He had at least a slim chance of defending himself against the dead, but only if he could see them. Floating blindly in the cold murk, he prayed that one of his spellcasting comrades possessed a magic sufficiently potent to wipe the darkness away.

Time crawled by, measured out by his racing heartbeats, punctuated by un interpretable little noises that jabbed at his nerves. Were Kara, Pavel, and Chatulio trying out failing to make light, or were they dead already? Had the spirits possessed the wit to strike at them first?

Finally brightness glowed through the water. Spear leveled, Dorn turned, seeking the spectral men-at-arms of legend. They weren’t there, but something else was. Malevolent dragons had given their lives to cast down Northkeep,

and their gigantic skeletons burst forth from their hiding places in the silt, stirring dirt into the water in the process. Points of red light burning deep in the eye sockets of their naked skulls, the entities oriented on the intruders.

Porn was reasonably certain it wasn’t a haunting in the truest sense of the term. Necromancy had animated the wyrm skeletons as it had the human corpses serving the Cult of the Dragon in Lyrabar. Conceivably Sammaster himself had laid the trap to insure that no one else would carry secrets out of Northkeep.

Thanks to their own magic, Dorn and his companions were no longer sightless and helpless, but they were in serious trouble nonetheless. Lacking vital organs, the undead were notoriously difficult to destroy in the best of circumstances. It was going to be even harder employing only such weapons and spells as were efficacious underwater.

Wheeling in the cloak that, among its other virtue, let him swim as fast and as nimbly as a manta ray, Pavel dodged the raking talons of a rearing skeleton, then brandished his sacred amulet. A red-gold beam of Lathander’s light blazed forth and burned the creature to powder.

Another skeleton Bung itself onto a copper dragon. The metallic drake’s body exploded into leering clown faces, which then blinked out of existence. Wings stroking to propel him through the water, the real Chatulio appeared out of nowhere above the undead construct and seized hold of the length of vertebrae between the bony armature of its wings. He tore at the creature with his jaws.

Ducking and twisting, avoiding gnashing fangs and scrabbling claws by inches, Raryn thrust his harpoon at a skeletal wyrm’s head. The point only chipped and scratched the bone, but while the dead thing was intent on the dwarf, Will squirmed between two of its ribs, and safely ensconced inside its torso, attacked the withered ligaments binding it together with his knife.

With her song, eerily distorted by the water but still somehow as beautiful as ever, Kara conjured a block of ice

into being within the rib cage of another skeletal drake. The white expanding mass shattered the unnatural thing into fragments.

That was as much as Dorn could take in before he found it necessary to focus on his own onrushing opponent. The bony thing snapped at him and caught his iron arm in its jaws. He simultaneously wrenched himself free, breaking a couple of its fangs, and drove his lance into an eye socket. He hoped that if he could hit one of the points of crimson phosphorescence, maybe that would kill it.

But when he pulled the spear back, the light was still smoldering at the back of the cavity, and the skeleton was as active as ever. It reared and slashed at him with its talons. He caught the stroke on his metal arm and so prevented it from ripping him apart, but the sheer force slammed him down into the muck on the floor of the lake. Blindness swallowed him once more as the silt covered his face. The undead wyrm clutched and squeezed him in its claws. The left side of his body with its shell of iron could take the pressure. It was obvious from the pain that the right side couldn’t.

He tore frantically at the bony phalanges with his own claws until the members came apart then floundered upward out of the mud. The undead drake bit at him through the murky water, and he punched with his knuckle spikes. The impact jolted him backward but likewise unhinged one side of the creature’s jaw. He assumed that, mindless and lifeless, the construct didn’t feel pain any more than he felt it in his metal limbs, but some reflex made it snatch its head back anyway.

That gave Dorn an opening. He flung himself in close and clawed at the base of its long, fleshless neck. The spinal column broke apart, scattering loose vertebrae wide as dinner plates, and the skeletal drake’s head tumbled away from the rest of it. The body collapsed, more bones separating or twisting into awkward relationships to reduce it to an inert and meaningless jumble.

Dorn turned, seeking the next threat. His first chaotic impression was that while they had more skeletons to

dispatch, he and his comrades were holding their own. Then Kara’s song swelled. Even if, perchance, she wasn’t using some esoteric or occult language, he had no hope of comprehending the words. The water robbed them of sense. But somehow they conveyed an urgency that made him cast frantically about.

The warning didn’t help as much as Kara must have hoped. When Dorn turned himself into the right attitude, the creature was already striking at him.

The thing was huge as a wyrm and resembled the dragons he’d encountered in certain respects, yet it was nothing he’d ever seen or even heard reports of hitherto. In its essence, it was a colossal serpent with dark, slimy scales, yet possessed of stunted wings and legs, far too small to enable it to walk or fly, but useful, perhaps, when it swam. Its long tail split into two writhing, whip-like appendages, which it lashed at its target. A man couldn’t effectively swing a flail or even a sword at the bottom of a lake. The water offered too much resistance. But the drake was so prodigiously strong that it suffered no such limitation.

Dorn tried to dodge and shield flesh with iron, but surprise and the water cost him a critical moment, and he knew with a sickening certainty that the beast was going to strike him a solid, perhaps lethal blow. Then Kara lunged between the human and the aquatic wyrm. Its tail struck her instead.

Evidently the tips of the appendage were as sharp ,as blades, for they split her shimmering hide, then sliced deeper as it pulled them along in a wicked, drawing cut. Twin clouds of blood billowed forth, mixing with the muddy water to make it even more difficult to see.

Kara snapped at the water dragon. It twisted clear of the attack, then instantly lashed her again. She convulsed at the shock. The aquatic wyrm coiled around her like a python, then proceeded to constrict, bite, and slash at her at the same time. She kept trying to fight back, but her foe clasped her so tightly that it was impossible for her to strike a telling blow.

Enraged, Dorn kicked forward, out the wyrm was cunning. It had, after all, waited for the newcomers to focus their attention on the skeletons before attempting a surprise attack. Perhaps it had even manufactured the initial darkness. At any rate, it saw no reason to allow a second foe to jab and claw at it before it finished with the first. A flick of the forked tail sufficed to shoot it several yards out of reach.

Wishing that he’d claimed the manta ray garment for himself, Dorn labored after the creature through water that tasted of dirt and Kara’s blood. Perhaps amused by his pursuit, the dark-scaled wyrm let him close almost into spear range before widening the distance once again. As far as the human could tell, the trivial exertion in no way slackened the serpent’s grip or otherwise hindered its efforts to kill the song dragon. Kara’s struggles grew weaker by the second. A wing and hind leg protruded from her adversary’s slimy coils at odd ankles, manifestly dislocated or broken.

Dorn realized he couldn’t swim fast enough to overtake the huge, yellow-eyed snake thing until the latter decided to permit it, not without help, anyway. He peered through the cloudy, filthy water. His friends were still battling skeletons, fighting so hard they might not even have noticed the water drake and surely couldn’t break away to confront it even if they had.

Or so it seemed. But then Chatulio, hard-pressed though he was by a pair of enormous undead wyrms, spun away from their gnashing fangs and raking talons to peer across the battlefield at Kara’s captor. A mass of scuttling crabs abruptly appeared on the aquatic drake’s head and the uppermost section of its body, where they started pinching and picking away with their claws.

Mad as a hound covered in stinging ants, the dark drake convulsed and bent its body in a circle, swatting at its own throat and skull to dislodge the crustaceans. It maintained its death grip on its feebly squirming captive, but evidently forgot about Dorn, for it finally let him swim close enough to strike.

The half-golem drove his spear twice into the coils of scaly muscle gripping Kara. The dark wyrm’s body twisted, whipping its head into position to bite. Though raw little pockmarks freckled its mask, it didn’t have crabs worrying it anymore. Either the skeletons had shaken Chatulio’s concentration and so put an end to his magic, or the aquatic dragon had rid itself of the harassment in some other way.

It struck. Dorn ducked under the attack, then sank his talons into a patch of the slimy, scaly hide behind its jaws. Whatever else happened, the filthy thing wasn’t going to retreat beyond his reach. Dorn drove his spear into the underside of its throat.

Its neck swelled, and its jaws opened wide. Evidently it truly was some sort of dragon, for it was unleashing a breath weapon. In air, the exhalation might have leaped forth in the usual cone or streak. Underwater, a dirty stain billowed in all directions.

Its touch made Dorn’s mind turn slack and dull, so that all its contents—rage, fear, his very awareness of what was happening—threatened to slip away. He clamped down on them, resisting the stupefying effect with all his will, and at that same instant, the wyrm snapped its head in an arc.

The sudden jerk nearly shook Dorn loose. It did make him fumble his grip on the spear, which slipped from his grasp. His iron hand was the best weapon remaining to him, which meant he needed to hang on with the other one to free it up. He prayed his human fingers were strong enough to keep him anchored.

Dorn ripped at the serpent’s scales and the meat beneath. It breathed, and the murk diffusing through the water burned the half-golem’s skin.

Acid, he thought, clenching himself against the pain, squinting in the hope that the stuff wouldn’t sear his eyes out.

He found a spot that, when attacked, made the water wyrm convulse—a vulnerable place, maybe a particularly sensitive cluster of nerves. Dorn clawed it furiously, and the huge creature slashed at him with its tail blades. He twisted

and caught the stroke on his iron half. The impact jolted him but couldn’t cut through the armor.

The dragon swung its tail back for another blow, and though he couldn’t have explained how, Dorn understood what could happen next if he was strong, quick, and skillful enough to make it happen. It was a sort of fighter’s intuition that sometimes spoke when he needed it most, an instinct he’d first discovered in the arena.

He clawed some more. The creature’s pain needed to be constant and unbearable. It whipped its tail at him, and he flung himself clear of its body. If his timing was off, or he failed to push off with sufficient agility, the blow would hit him, and almost certainly cleave flesh. Even if he survived that by releasing his grip, he’d given up the only advantage he possessed. If his trick failed, it was unlikely the wyrm would give him the chance to hurt it any further.

But the ploy worked. Frantic, maybe spastic with pain, the serpent slashed the tail blades deep into its own throat, half-severing the amber-eyed head_ Its blood streaming upward like smoke from some great fire, it drifted toward the bottom.

Dorn pulled at its coils out couldn’t loosen them. Then something cut off the sunlight shining down from the surface, casting him into shadow. Certain some new horror had arrived to menace him, he looked up. Bearing several bite and claw wounds along his flanks, Chatulio swam above him. The copper used his talons to pry the motionless Kara from her bonds.

By the time Chatulio finished, the rest of their comrades had gathered around. Each was wounded, even Pavel, who, in the manta cloak, had seemed to have the best chance of escaping injury. Heedless of the blood leaking from his own gashed leg, his handsome face grave and intent, he set about the business of trying to save Kara’s life. The water garbled his words in a way that, in other circumstances, might have

•

seemed comical. Dorn could only hope Lathander still understood the prayers.

The priest’s hands shone with rich golden light. Then, at the tops of the ravaged towers rising throughout the city, bells began to toll. Strangely, the water didn’t muffle or warp that sound in the slightest.

No Dorn thought. It isn’t fair that this should happen when we’ve just finished a fight, when we’re hurt and exhausted and have already expended a goodly portion of our magic. It doesn’t even make sense. Why is it the wraiths never attacked the skeletal dragons or that gigantic serpent?