Richard Byers - The Captive Flame

Someone had done a fair amount of work to turn the basement into a proper shrine to Tiamat, the five-headed Dragon Queen. Votive candles burned before a bronze statue of the goddess. One flame glowed red, one white, one blue, one green, and one was a quivering teardrop of shadow. The sculpture’s necks almost appeared to weave in the soft, wavering light.

A portrait depicting the Nemesis of the Gods in her human guise as a beautiful woman with long black hair hung on the wall beside an intricately painted, multicolored pentagram. The smell of bitter incense hung in the air.

Dark scales glinting in the candlelight, the dragonborn assassin stood naked before the pentagonal bloodstone altar. His robe lay discarded on the floor.

He glared at the man with the side-whiskers. “I don’t like mortals in general,” he said. “I definitely don’t like it when they keep me waiting.”

Aoth frowned. Mortals? What in Kossuth’s name was that supposed to mean?

“I have an ordinary life,” the man replied. “I have to devote some time to living it. Otherwise people will get suspicious.”

“Just restore me to myself.”

“I’m working on it.” He took down a robe from a peg on the wall and pulled it on over his other clothing. Its shimmering scales changed color whenever he moved. He slipped on five rings, each bearing a stone the hue of one of the candle flames, and picked up an implement or weapon like a miner’s pick.

Evidently he himself was the wyrmkeeper of this particular sanctuary.

He faced the dragonborn. “Stand still.” He recited sibilant words of power and swung the heavy, unwieldy-looking pick through a looping figure with a dexterity that would have done credit to a juggler. The five wedge-shaped heads of the Tiamat statue seemed to cock forward ever so slightly, although that was likely just Aoth’s imagination.

And the assassin changed form.

His features remained reptilian, but twisted from a dragonborn’s rather handsome lineaments into ugliness. Batlike wings sprouted from his back, and a long tail with a spike on the end writhed out from the base of his spine. He-or it-dropped into a crouch.

Aoth wasn’t a scholar of demons. But he’d met a fair assortment on the battlefield, and knew an abishai when he saw one. And it made sense that with the aid of magic, one of the devil-like spirits could assume the form of a dragonborn. Both races were kin to wyrms and thus to each other, whatever the Tymantherans might care to believe.

In fact, a lot of things suddenly made sense. Like why the dragonborn murderers, raiders, and pirates had no clan piercings and why knowledgeable Tymantherans like Perra were unable to account for them. Why they possessed supernatural abilities ordinary dragonborn didn’t, and how they could lurk unnoticed in the heart of a city between atrocities. In point of fact, they didn’t. They went home to Tiamat’s domain in the astral world called Banehold until a human spellcaster saw fit to call them forth again.

Aoth felt a swell of elation. This truly had been a puzzle worth solving. When he reported what he’d discovered, it would save the alliance between Chessenta and Tymanther.

Its metamorphosis complete, the black abishai said, “Good. Now send me-” It whipped around toward the stairs.

Aoth realized it had glimpsed him from the corner of its eye. His veil had sufficed to fool it while it wore its dragonborn shape, but not now when its senses were evidently somewhat different.

The abishai charged up the risers. Sweating drops of fuming acid, its tail reared over its shoulder to strike like a scorpion’s stinger.

Aoth hurled darts of green light from his spear. The devil-kin twisted aside, and they missed. It resumed its climb. He charged the head of his weapon with destructive power and thrust it at the creature’s chest.

The abishai dodged that attack as well. Its tail whipped at Aoth’s shoulder. The bony point clanked against his mail and rebounded, although just the track of vapor it left in the air was enough to sting his eyes and make them water.

Meanwhile, the wyrmkeeper chanted.

Aoth feinted to the abishai’s foot. It leaped upward, beating its leathery wings as well as it could in the cramped space of the stairway, to rise above the attack. He whirled his spear-another maneuver that wasn’t easy in the confines-and smashed the butt into his opponent’s fanged, snarling mouth and snout.

The blow knocked the abishai back down the steps. He hurled more darts of light and, deprived of its balance, the creature couldn’t dodge. The missiles plunged into its body. It jerked and then lay still.

Aoth immediately looked for the wyrmkeeper. Whatever magic the bastard was attempting, he needed to put a stop to it.

But it was too late. The man with the pick had finished his incantation, and the pentagram, and the section of wall on which he’d painted it, had disappeared. In their place, a hole opened on a bleak, rocky landscape and a red sky mountainous with black thunderheads. Abishais were swarming through.

Jhesrhi studied the hillside with all its new pits and ditches to show where the underlying tunnels had collapsed. The dragon lay motionless, his head between his forefeet like a dog’s, as though merely looking around at all the commotion had exhausted him.

As far as she could tell, nothing else was moving either. That didn’t mean there wasn’t someone lying in wait-if there was one thing for which the denizens of the Shadowfell had a natural gift, it was sneaking and hiding-but if there was, she’d just have to wait for him to reveal himself and kill him when he did.

She strode out into the open. Drew breath to hail Tchazzar. Then a patch of earth heaved as something started to force its way out from underneath.

All right, she thought, let’s get this over with. She lifted her staff and felt its pleasure that she finally meant to use it in the manner it preferred.

Huge hands, their skin the same color as the surrounding dirt, gripped the edge of the new hole and heaved. A head with brutish features and curved taurine horns surged into view. Beneath it were massive shoulders armored in bands of sculpted stone.

Jhesrhi started backing away. She tried to stop.

I’m not a coward, she told herself. It unsettled me to return to Chessenta, and then to Threskel, but I got better. Gaedynn said I was better.

But evidently she wasn’t, because she couldn’t stop retreating. She couldn’t stop shaking or gasping either. Although she knew it couldn’t really be there, she seemed to feel her stiff, scratchy, filthy slave collar half choking her neck.

The elemental mage-a ken-kuni, one of the giants with an affinity for earth-sneered, drew himself to his feet, and lumbered toward her.

Abishais of various colors rushed the stairs. Aoth knew that like the dragons they resembled, each was largely immune to the force that infused its nature. The reds couldn’t burn, the whites couldn’t freeze, and so forth. So he hurled a rainbow of destructive power down the steps in the hope that multiple varied attacks would kill them all.

The barrage blasted them back and smashed the wooden risers beneath them. Some then lay motionless, charred and shriveled or transformed into stone. Another, plunged into dementia, looked around in confusion.

But others picked themselves up and snarled at the man who’d hammered them. And more of the vile things were still coming through the hole.

Maybe if Aoth killed the man who’d opened it, the gate would close. He pointed his spear, rattled off words of power, and hurled a jagged bolt of shadow. Like the abishais, the wyrmkeeper might be impervious to an attack resembling one or even all of his goddess’s breaths. But Aoth hoped the pure essence of death would knife through any defenses.