The Rite (40 page)

“Get going,” Jivex said.

His injured pinion throbbing, Taegan took to the air and maneuvered in an arc, striving to keep himself hidden behind shops and houses, and when he had to cross the gaps separating them, spying for glimpses of the sunwyrm. At first Phourkyn seemed to be catching his breath, and casting about for his vanished foes. Soon enough, though, he stalked toward Firefingers’s tower, probably intending to hurl an attack spell or a blast of his breath through the entrance.

Before he could reach it, though, semblances of Rilitar, Jivex, and Taegan lunged into the street to confront him. The elf pointed his wand. The bladesinger and faerie dragon streaked through the air toward their foe. Phourkyn hesitated, peered at the deception, then snorted with contempt at a trick that, he thought, had failed to take him in.

By then, the real Taegan had flown up behind him. The avariel drove his sword into the center of Phourkyn’s back.

Phourkyn screamed. His serpentine tail with the point of brilliant glow at the end flopped limply to the ground. His four rear legs buckled. Using the four in front, he struggled to keep from falling down, and as he swayed and stumbled, Taegan went on thrusting.

The sunwyrm whipped his head around, and Taegan dodged the strike. It was easier when he didn’t have to worry about claw attacks. Phourkyn needed his remaining legs to hold his crippled body up.

Or perhaps not, for the sunwyrm spread his leathery wings and flexed the four functional legs to spring upward. Before he could, though, the earth beneath his feet rippled, turned a lighter shade of brown, and by the looks of it, changed in consistency as well, to an ooze more treacherous than quicksand. Phourkyn’s feet could find no purchase in the muck, and it sucked them down at once.

At the same time, strands of jagged darkness writhed about the sunwyrm’s wings, the shadow dimming their radiance. The limbs withered at its touch.

Taegan risked a glance around to find out which of the other wizards had emerged from the tower to join the battle. As it turned out, three of them had: Scattercloak, Jannatha Goldenshield, and Baerimel Dunnath. The petite, impishly pretty sisters looked ferocious. Avid to avenge their murdered cousin.

Phourkyn snapped his head around in their direction and snarled words of power. Trying to disrupt the conjuration, Taegan drove his sword into the sunwyrm’s neck. Jivex streaked through the air and ripped at the larger reptile’s eye. Phourkyn stumbled over his recitation. Taegan thrust home, pulled back his sword, and arterial blood spurted from the puncture.

Phourkyn vanished. Taegan swung his blade again anyway, just in case the traitor had simply become invisible, but the weapon touched nothing. The avariel cried out in fury that, at the end, his foe had eluded him.

But then Scattercloak said, “No. I forbid it.”

Whereupon Phourkyn reappeared beneath Taegan as abruptly as he’d blinked away.

It was startling, but Taegan had the reflexes of a master fencer even when his wits were addled. He attacked, slicing open a prodigious gash.

Phourkyn’s head splashed down into the quicksand. Half expecting the sunwyrm to rear back up, Taegan hovered warily above him. But all the traitor did was sink deeper into the muck. The yellow glare of his scaly hide dimmed.

“I don’t much like it,” said Scattercloak in his emotionless tenor voice, “when people commit unsavory acts and try to shift the blame onto me.”

Wings pounding, Taegan rushed back toward the alley and Rilitar. Jivex hurtled in his wake.

Dorn loosed arrow after arrow. Singing her defiance, Kara wheeled toward Malazan.

It seemed suicidal. The ancient red was twice Kara’s size. But in Dories judgment, the bard was making the right move. Over the past months, he’d learned her limits well enough to know she was nearly out of magic. Malazan almost certainly wasn’t. Therefore, if Kara tried to keep away from her adversary, the chromatic would simply smite her with spell after spell, while she had no way of striking back. Whereas, if she closed the distance, it was possible she could employ her breath weapon to good effect.

The drawback to the strategy, though, was that Kara would be in range of Malazan’s fiery breath as well. It was even possible that the red with her sheen of wet blood would catch the song dragon in her talons and bring her superior physical strength to bear. Dorn could only hope that Kara, being the smaller, would prove more agile in flight, or that his own presence would somehow give Kara a decisive advantage, unlikely as that seemed. He sent another shaft streaking across the sky. It flew to the target but glanced off Malazan’s scales.

The red roared an incantation. The words of power made Dorn’s stomach churn. For a second, the cold mountain wind blew hot.

Kara screamed and pulled her wings into her body, as if they were clenching in an uncontrollable spasm. She and Dorn plummeted. Malazan hurtled forward and down, swooping to intercept them in mid-descent, claws poised to seize and rend.

Fight it!” Dorn shouted, simultaneously loosing another shaft striking Malazan’s chest, but intent on making her kill, she didn’t even seem to notice.

Painted in gore, the red’s outstretched wings seemed to cover the entire sky. Dorn sunk an arrow into her flesh and snatched for another, even though the onrushing dragon was so close that he doubted he’d have time for a final shot.

Then, at the last possible instant, Kara resumed her song and unfurled and beat her wings. The action jerked her to the side, and Malazan plummeted past her. Kara blasted the red with a sparkling jet of her breath. Malazan jerked and screeched at the crackling touch of the lightning suffusing the vapor.

Panting, his heart pounding, Dorn realized Kara had tricked her foe. Recognizing the spell Malazan had cast to cripple her wings, she’d pretended the power had overwhelmed her, to lure the red into opening herself up to an attack.

A successful ploy, but scarcely a decisive one. Malazan swept her wings up and down, climbed after them, and spewed fire.

Kara tilted her pinions and spun herself out of the path of the plume of flame. Woven into the savage melody of her song, another spell from her dwindling store shrouded Malazan in a cloud of nasty-looking olive vapor, but to no apparent effect.

Kara and Malazan wheeled and swooped about the sky, and though intent on the red, Dorn nonetheless caught glimpses of the aerial battle as a whole. After repeated uses, the dragons’ breath weapons took more time to renew themselves. For that reason, or because it seemed a relatively safe tactic to use against a wounded, weary, or smaller foe, a good many wyrms were finally assailing their enemies with fang and claw. A red swooped over a gold, raking gouges in the metal’s scales as it hurtled past. A brass attempted a similar maneuver against a skull wyrm, but the black seized its attacker’s hind leg in its teeth and yanked it close. Ripping and biting at one another, unable to fly while twined together, the dragons plummeted halfway down the sky before breaking their grapple, springing apart, and spreading their wings once more.

Dorn still couldn’t tell which side was winning.

He drove an arrow into Malazan’s mask, just missing the gigantic reptile’s blank yellow eye. The red snarled words of power, and the longbow jerked from his grip, as if invisible hands had seized it. The ploy caught him by surprise, and though he snatched for the weapon, he failed to catch it. It tumbled end over end toward the mountains below.

Without it, he was useless, nothing but hindering weight on Kara’s back.

He recognized the final spells Kara cast, one after the other. The first should have stolen Malazan’s voice, but didn’t take. The other made her breath blaze so brightly that it might have blinded the red, except that the chromatic dodged the blast. After that, though the bard kept chanting her song of righteous wrath, there were no more incantations threaded through the lyrics.

She veered, climbed, and swooped, accelerated and decelerated, with uncanny foresight and agility, evading the flares of flame and sorcery that Malazan hurled in her direction. Until the red howled words that jabbed pain into Dorn’s ears and made them bleed. Malazan then spewed more fire, not bothering to aim it at Kara but simply blasting it into the air.

The mass of flame lingered, floating, and writhed into the shape of a dragon nearly as huge as Malazan herself. It lashed its burning pinions and streaked toward Kara.

With a pang of fear, Dom grasped the point of the tactic. The song dragon had enjoyed some success evading one foe, but two could maneuver to trap her between them.

Malazan and her creation winged their way toward Kara, converging on her from two directions. The crystal-blue dragon faked a turn, then spun back around, swooped lower, and caught an updraft lifting her high once more.

It didn’t matter. She succeeded in distancing herself from the creature of living fire, but Malazan matched her move for move. Indeed, the red anticipated her, attained a slight advantage in altitude, and close enough once more, spat flame.

Kara tried to swoop under the attack, but the flare still seared the ends of her upraised wings. The shock silenced her song and made her flounder in the air, whereupon Malazan dived at her. Dorn bellowed a warning that, he already knew, Kara was for the moment incapable of heeding.

But some invisible agency intercepted Malazan short of her target and bounced her higher into the air. The fringe of the same force caught Kara and spun her like a wheel until she managed to right herself.

Meanwhile, Dorn recognized the surge of vertigo that resulted when up and down reversed themselves, for Azhaq had once used the same power against him. He looked down and saw the silver climbing toward Malazan with Raryn astride his back. The dwarf shot an arrow into the red’s belly.

Wings pounding, Malazan wheeled to escape the enchantment Azhaq had created, the treacherous, disorienting zone where things fell upward. She screeched, and her fiery conjured creature hurtled at the silver.

Azhaq didn’t try to evade the apparition. He simply rattled off an incantation, and the bright mass of living flame vanished as if it had never been. Raryn loosed more arrows, driving them into the red’s neck, breast, and guts.

Azhaq was an old wyrm, unscathed, with a highly competent archer mounted on his back. Kara was relatively young, wounded, and bore a rider who had no way of attacking at range. Understandably, Malazan oriented on the Talon of Justice and the tracker, and that, Dorn realized, afforded him an opportunity.

“Climb!” he said to Kara. “Swing behind and above Malazan, and get close.”

“I don’t need to be too close to use my breath.”

“Do it!”

“I’ll try,” she promised, and beat her charred and blistered wings.

Azhaq roared an incantation, and a blaze of frost streaked up from his outstretched talons, only to melt away just before it reached Malazan. The red laughed and growled her own cabalistic rhyme. Gashes split Azhaq’s argent hide, as if invisible blades were hacking him. As he reeled in the air, wracked by the ongoing punishment, Malazan rattled off a second spell. A creature that seemed part man and part gray-feathered vulture materialized midway between its summoner and the shield dragon. It gave an ear-splitting screech and dived at Azhaq and Raryn. The dwarf drove an arrow all the way through its spindly, crooked neck, but it didn’t falter.

That was all Dorn had time to see before Malazan reclaimed his full attention. The red plainly hadn’t forgotten her other foes, for her head twisted, seeking them. Her eyes blazed when she saw how close they’d sneaked.

But Dorn saw with a sick, helpless feeling, that it wasn’t close enough.

He expected Kara to veer off. Malazan having spotted her, it was the only sane thing to do. But still striving to do as Dorn had bade her, resuming her battle anthem, she swooped nearer.

Malazan met her with a burst of fiery breath. The song dragon’s body shielded Dorn from the worst of it, but even so, the brush of the flame was excruciating. Quite possibly, it had burned Kara’s life away.

But he couldn’t think about that. He had to act. He jerked loose the knot securing him to Kara’s back, scrambled to his feet on her scorched, blistered body, and leaped.

He was no acrobat like Will, and when Malazan spotted him and started to spin away, he was sure he was going to miss, to fall and smash himself to pulp on the ground far below. But he banged down on the red’s back instead.

Malazan’s scales were slick with their coating of blood, and he started to slide away into space. He snagged his iron claws in her hide and drew his bastard sword.

Malazan spat fire at him. He hunkered down, shielding his human parts behind the metal ones, and though he gasped in agony, when the jet of flame guttered out, he was still alive. He plunged his sword into the red’s flesh.

The blade bit deep, but not deep enough. Malazan poised her head to strike at him. It was an awkward angle for her, straight back along her own spine, but neither could he do much in the way of dodging when he had to cling to her like a tick to keep her slippery, heaving mass from flinging him off. All he had was the forlorn hope that she’d hurt her fangs on his iron half, and flinch back.

Or so he thought, until Kara hurtled onto Malazan’s neck. Though her blue hide was horribly blackened and burned from head to tail, she clawed and bit at the red with a ferocity no doubt born of desperation, and Malazan struck back at her. Locked together, the dragons fell.

Dorn kept thrusting and cutting, and ducked a random sweep of Kara’s tail that would otherwise have snapped his neck.

Malazan left off biting long enough to roar three grating syllables, and afterward, any blood her attackers spilled burst into flame on contact with the air, searing them.

Dorn refused to let the pain balk him. He attacked until one particularly deep wound made Malazan convulse. The sudden jerk broke the hunter’s grip on the hilt of his sword, tore his talons from Malazan’s hide, and hurled him into empty air.

Here is death, then, he thought. Naturally, it had arrived only when he’d decided he actually wanted to live.