Richard Byers - The Captive Flame

“Then tell me, please.”

She did, and when she finished, he felt a mix of dismay and admiration.

“Bravo,” he said. “That’s as crazy a scheme as I’ve ever heard. Easily crazier than invading Thay with nothing but the strength of the Wizards’ Reach behind us.”

She scowled. “Then you don’t want to try it?”

He grinned. “Actually, I do. But right now we need to clear out of here. Then we should find a place where we can go to ground, at least temporarily. We’ll proceed with your idea come nightfall.”

Waiting until night wouldn’t ensure they went undetected, not in a world populated by creatures that saw well in the dark. But he hoped that like the orcs and goblin-kin with which he was familiar, they couldn’t see as far in the dark as a man could in the light.

Once the Shadowfell was black as a coinlender’s heart, with just a few faint stars gleaming in the sky and a feeling of sheer poisonous wrongness suffusing the air like a stench, he and Jhesrhi crept back to the hill where Tchazzar lay imprisoned. They kept watch long enough for him to start feeling hopeful that the dragon truly was alone, with nothing but his weakness and the staples to prevent his escape.

Then suddenly, one of the shadar-kai’s small servants appeared on the hillside. Then another. Gaedynn peered closer and discerned that the dark little men were emerging from a hole in the ground like a line of ants.

Once he and Jhesrhi spotted the mouth of that tunnel, they soon noticed others, and the traffic that came and went, shadar-kai and other things that looked stranger and more dangerous still. Evidently, most of the time the hill was full of them, although they cleared out when the blight wyrm came to feed.

“Curse it,” Jhesrhi whispered. “It won’t work.”

“Yes it will,” Gaedynn replied. “It’s just that you only came up with half a workable plan. Fortunately I, clever fellow that I am, have now devised the rest.”

“Which is?”

“Do you remember wondering if the shadar-kai huntsman was hunting us specifically?”

She scowled. “Of course.”

“Well, if they weren’t before, we’re going to make them start.”

9-10 MIRTUL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

Aoth and Jet floated on a northerly wind and studied the fortress. Other griffon riders glided to either side but surely couldn’t see the outpost, not at such a distance in the feeble predawn light.

To the untrained eye, the stronghold with its palisade walls might not have looked impressive. But it had a warren of tunnels underneath it, and a garrison large and varied enough to fill up both the above ground and subterranean barracks.

“You don’t like this, do you?” asked Jet.

“I don’t dislike it,” Aoth replied, “but it’s about the limit of what we ought to tackle by ourselves, especially with Gaedynn, Jhesrhi, and Khouryn absent.”

“Then why do it?”

“The Threskelans have a lot of supplies stored there. On top of that, it’s supposed to be a mustering point for troops bound for Chessenta. So let them arrive and find the place burned, its provisions stolen, and its garrison slaughtered. It might give them second thoughts, particularly the sellswords.”

“Let’s get on with it, then.”

Aoth peered down at the rolling scrubland and the foot soldiers and horsemen making their way across it. In theory, a ridge higher than the surrounding terrain shielded them from the view of the sentries in the fortress. “We’ll give our comrades on the ground a little more time to maneuver into position.”

As he waited, his thoughts drifted back to the events of the day before the previous one. He’d eliminated Cera as a possible traitor-to say the least-but otherwise he was no closer to flushing out the dragonborn assassins or figuring out why they wanted to kill him.

In fact, the jaunt into the past had left him with new questions. Why had all those dragons been palavering? Were they all Alasklerbanbastos’s allies? Was every single one of them going to attack Chessenta at the dracolich’s behest? If so, then how could the war hero’s forces possibly withstand them?

He scowled and tried to set such puzzles aside. He needed to focus on winning this battle. Everything else could wait.

He looked at the pale gleam on the eastern horizon and decided he’d delayed long enough. He willed power into the head of his spear to make it glow yellow, then swept it forward to point at the fortress. All around him, wings snapped and flapped as riders urged their griffons toward the objective.

Men laid arrows on their bows. Aoth pondered whether to start with fire or lightning and decided on the latter. Griffons furled their wings and swooped lower.

Then a horn blatted in the watchtower at one of the corners of the palisade. Aoth had hoped sentries who’d watched through the night would be tired and inattentive at the end of it, but evidently one was still alert.

Annoyed, Aoth rewarded the fellow’s vigilance by hurling a bright, booming lightningbolt at the tower. It blew apart the clapboard roof and, he hoped, fried whoever was underneath.

Meanwhile, arrows whistled down at the wall walks, stabbing into other sentries as they tried to ready their own bows. Orcs and kobolds toppled from their perches to smash down in the courtyards below.

But what came next wouldn’t be as easy. Warriors scrambled from the buildings below. They scurried for their various stations and started shooting back at the attackers in the sky. A crossbow bolt whizzed past Jet’s beak, and he screeched in irritation.

Then an expanding glimmer of force leaped upward. Jet lashed his wings, flung himself to the side, and avoided all but the edge of the flare. Still, cold bit into Aoth’s body. Hit squarely and encrusted with frost, another mount and rider plunged toward the ground.

Aoth roused a tattoo to warm him and looked for the source of the magic. At first, even his fire-touched eyes couldn’t spot it. There was just too much happening. Then the tip of a white wand poked out an arrow loop at the top of one of the towers.

Jet dodged, and the next shimmering blaze missed him entirely. Aoth rattled off words of power and pointed his spear. A dark cloud materialized around the top of the bastion. The boards sizzled and crumbled as the acidic vapor ate into them. Inside the structure, people screamed.

As Aoth turned Jet toward the gate, he noticed the watchtower he’d blasted apart was barely burning. The flaming arrows some of the griffon riders were loosing weren’t doing much to set the fort on fire either. Some treatment evidently kept the timbers from burning easily.

Oh well, he’d half expected as much. Once they won the battle, the Brotherhood could still turn the place into a useless ruin. It would just take a little more sweat.

He threw a lightningbolt at the gate-which jumped in its frame, but weathered the assault without a mark. It definitely possessed protective enchantments.

But fortunately, the men and orcs poised to defend it didn’t. He bloodied them with a barrage of fist-sized hailstones, and while they were still reeling, he and three other griffon riders plunged down into their midst.

Beaks snapped and talons snatched, tearing the Bone Wyrm’s warriors to gory tatters. Aoth looked for an enemy to stick with his spear, but Jet didn’t give him the chance. The familiar was still angry from the blast of cold that had chilled him to the marrow, and this was a good opportunity to take it out on someone.

When all the defenders were dead, Aoth and his human companions dismounted, shoved back the bars securing the gate, and swung it open. The sellswords massed outside came streaming in.

After that, the combat became a chaos of packed bodies and slashing, jabbing blades, with aerial cavalry shooting from on high and occasionally diving to pick off some particularly appealing target. Aoth circled with the other griffon riders. It made it easier to oversee the progress of the battle as a whole and to use his spells to best effect.