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  Uncharacteristically calm, even content—if such a thing could be imagined from a man like Pristoleph—he took a deep breath and smiled.

  But his smile faded almost as quickly as it came to his lips. A strange feeling nettled at the back of his neck, and though he didn’t remember hearing anything, he could swear his ears had something akin to an aftertaste, the feeling of having heard something. He turned to look behind him but he was still alone in the big room. The statues all stood mute sentinel around the perimeter, staring out at nothing with eyes of marble, bronze, and wood.

  In the center of the room, ringed by an ornamental railing of polished brass, was a hole down which a spiral stairway sank into the room below. Even as Pristoleph assured himself that there was no one on the stair, a scuffle of booted feet sounded from below, and the head of one of his black firedrake guards appeared, scanning the room with a furrowed brow over his coal-black eyes. He saw Pristoleph and came up to the top of the stairs.

  “Ransar?” the firedrake said. “All is well?”

  “I believe so, Sergeant Nevor,” Pristoleph said, “but I have the strangest—”

  Pristoleph was silenced by the black firedrake’s shuddering, strangled cry of shock and pain. The dark-skinned, black-clad man’s knees buckled and he dropped to the floor—not dead, but nearly so. His longaxe clattered onto the wood floor next to him. Pristoleph stood as the huge, terrifying form of a water naga shimmered into existence. It stood just at the top of the stairs, behind Nevor, and by the way it held its right hand, Pristoleph could tell that it was the naga’s touch that had felled his guard.

  But not his only guard.

  “Firedrakes!” Pristoleph called.

  The naga, slithering on its blue-green scales, charged him, its clawed hands out in front of it, its fangs bared and its forked tongue flicking in and out of its mouth.

  “Firedrakes, to me!”

  Pristoleph drew the dagger from his belt and tried to jump to the side to avoid the charging naga, but his shin clipped the marble bench. He fell to his right and the naga slithered past him, raking along the left side of his chest and digging ragged furrows in his skin that flared with burning pain.

  He let loose a hissing curse as the dagger fell from his hand. He clambered away from the naga, literally crawling across the floor.

  The naga surged forward at him, and he grabbed for the dagger. The weapon looked small, hopelessly insufficient when compared to the bulk of the massive creature, but it was enchanted to bite a little deeper, hurt a little more, and slice a little faster than any ordinary dagger. Pristoleph didn’t usually come to his statue gallery armed at all, so he had to be thankful that he’d thought to carry the dagger with him that day.

  Surging above him, the naga opened its eyes wide and hissed at him, the humanlike, feminine face and arms the only thing about it that wasn’t a hellish serpent. Pristoleph felt a tingling wash over his body and he rolled away. A burst of panic welled up within him.

  “Guards!” he screamed, and only then heard them coming up the stairs.

  The naga heard it too and backed off enough to look at the stairs without giving Pristoleph too easy an opening with his dagger. The ransar picked up the knife with a shaking hand and paused long enough to fight back the fear. He could feel it fall away as suddenly as it came, and there was something about the feeling that made him think it came from outside him—it must have been some foul magic of the naga’s.

  Nevor tried to get to his feet but couldn’t. When a black firedrake in its bestial, dragonlike form, swooped up the stairs, it almost tripped over the sergeant.

  “Dlavin,” the dying sergeant gasped, and Pristoleph was thankful that Nevor had named the drake. In their natural forms, Pristoleph could never tell one from another. “To the ransar.”

  Nevor fell to the floor again, breathing but unconscious, and Dlavin took wing just long enough to hit the wood floor between Pristoleph and the naga.

  “Kill it!” Pristoleph barked, and before the words were even out of his mouth, the winged creature belched forth a cloud of black acid that sprayed over the naga.

  Pristoleph could hear it sizzle, and he climbed to his feet, watching and waiting for the serpent to dissolve before his eyes. But that didn’t happen. The naga winced at what appeared to be a minor burn, then smiled into the black firedrake’s reptilian face.

  The acid should have killed it.

  Fighting down the fear again, Pristoleph tightened his grip on his dagger and glanced over to the stairs to see two more guards—Varnol, in his human guise—and a second firedrake in its dragonlike form emerge from the room below. It took them both all of a heartbeat to figure out what was going on and rush to the aid of the ransar.

  Dlavin, surprised that his acid had so little effect on the naga, lunged to meet the serpent’s own charge. Pristoleph started to step to the side to flank the creature and try to slit its throat while it was caught up in a clawing grapple with Dlavin, but his foot wouldn’t move. He managed to bring the dagger up in front of his chest, then every muscle in his body locked in place.

  A hideous, keening voice sounded in Pristoleph’s head, Stand and watch while I devour your guards, Pristoleph, then you will know what it’s like to be eaten alive while you cannot even scream your last breath.

  Pristoleph’s skin crawled, but the rest of his body remained immobile. He hoped that he’d only imagined the voice, but he knew it was the naga.

  Dlavin’s left wing tore free under the assault of the naga’s ragged claws, and the black firedrake shot out more acid while it screamed in rage and agony. The naga took the fullness of the acid in its face and blinked and spat. The dazzling blue of its eyes faded into white, then the white turned to gray, and though he couldn’t express it, Pristoleph thrilled at the thought that his firedrake had managed to blind the thing.

  Dlavin fell to the floor, already bleeding to death, and on came Varnol with his longaxe. The stout wooden beams that held up the pyramidal ceiling were well enough above the black firedrake’s reach that even with the weapon’s long haft, he could hold it straight up above his head in an effort to bring it down onto the top of the naga’s head.

  The blue in the naga’s eyes reappeared and it looked up at the axe coming down hard and fast. The serpent creature twisted away, but the axe still took off its right ear. Blood poured out, then more when the axe bit deeply into the naga’s shoulder. The creature screamed—at least it sounded like a scream—and slithered back away from Varnol, who wrenched his axe head out of the monster’s shoulder with a wet crack.

  The second firedrake in its dragon form leaped at the naga, but the serpent looked up at him and disappeared. When the firedrake came down it landed on the floor next to its fallen comrade and whirled to find its foe, but the naga was nowhere to be seen.

  The firedrakes cast about, Varnol with his axe in front of him, the other taking wing to roost in the rafters twenty feet above the floor.

  Pristoleph tried to speak, but his jaw was locked closed, and all he could manage was to grind his teeth. Frustration and rage made his skin grow hotter and hotter, until Varnol finally felt it, glanced at him, and stepped away.

  “Ransar?” Varnol asked. “Are you unable to move?”

  Pristoleph just looked at him, hoping his total inability to answer would suffice as a “Yes.”

  “Moraahl,” Varnol said, looking up at the firedrake in the rafters. “The ransar is paralyzed. Fly down and summon a priest. I think the naga has fled.”

  Pristoleph tried to take a deep breath, but he could draw only enough air to sustain himself. He wanted to warn them that the naga was likely still in the room but simply couldn’t be seen. The firedrake named Moraahl leaped from the rafters and lit at the top of the stairs. It was at that moment that Pristoleph saw the blood on the floor. A drop first, then another, then too many to count. They appeared on the floor as if from nowhere—as if from the gaping wound of an unseen naga.

  Moraahl looked at Varnol an
d opened his crocodile-like jaws to speak when Nevor suddenly rolled over, shook, groaned, and died. The naga appeared next to him, its hand on the dead firedrake’s chest. The wound in the naga’s shoulder was partially closed, but the side of its head was still a mess of bloody pulp. Blood still flowed, but not as much and not as quickly.

  Moraahl didn’t get a chance to turn before the naga punched out with its left hand, digging deep into the black scales on Moraahls’s right side, just under his wing. The firedrake gurgled out a gout of acid that succeeded only in further ruining Pristoleph’s floor. The naga yanked back hard and came out with the still-beating, black heart of the firedrake it its clawed fist. Moraahl had time only to blink and close his mouth before he fell over dead.

  Pristoleph began to panic then. The thing was making quick work of his black firedrakes, and he couldn’t move a muscle.

  Terrible, isn’t it? the naga asked, invading his mind.

  Pristoleph didn’t give it the satisfaction of a reply. Instead he put all his concentration into moving his elbow. All he wanted was to move that one elbow. While the ransar busied himself with that, Varnol charged the naga, his longaxe swinging in arcs before him so fast the weapon became but a silver blur. The air quivered with the sound of its slicing and reversing, slicing and reversing.

  The naga backed away from the onslaught and its face twisted in strange, unreadable expressions. Pristoleph got the feeling it was trying to cast some spell or bring to bear some magical ability, but there was no visible effect on the firedrake. A sound from one side of the room stole Pristoleph’s attention from his elbow and he saw a dead-pale hand with nails like sharpened talons fold itself over the hip of a statue. What emerged was an undead thing so hideous Pristoleph had to force himself to look at it. A stench of decay and putrescence filled the room, and Pristoleph cursed the naga anew for leaving him so he could only breathe through his nose.

  The sound of feet dragging on wood revealed that there was at least one more of the creatures—ghouls, Pristoleph decided—in the room with him. The one he could see hissed at the naga then looked Pristoleph in the eye. Its deformed lips twisted into a fang-lined grin, and it shambled forward from behind the statue. Pristoleph couldn’t even begin to imagine where it had come from.

  But even as Pristoleph began to consider what it would feel like to be eaten alive, the black firedrake that had lain bleeding at his feet stood in front of him, staggering and almost falling to put himself between his master and the ghoul.

  Dlavin, missing a wing and still slowly but surely bleeding to death, surged forward, stumbled again, but met the ghoul near the stairs. The undead creature lunged with its claws extended but never got within reach of the firedrake before a cloud of acidic mist mushroomed in its face.

  The ghoul staggered backward, clawing at its face and tearing free great strips of flesh, revealing the bone beneath. It had no skin on its face at all when it finally fell still.

  But Dlavin also fell, sprawling on the floor next to it. The black firedrake crawled, ever so weak, to the top of the stairs and let loose a roar that rattled the windows. The sound was suddenly choked off, though, when the second ghoul landed on the firedrake’s back and began to rip huge bites of flesh out of him in bloody mouthfuls. Dlavin twitched and grunted, trying to shake the thing off, but all he could really do was wait for the one bite that would finally kill him. The ghoul took its time.

  The naga screamed when it finally reached the wall, fetched up with its back to one of the triangular windows, and took a bloody slice from Varnol’s longaxe.

  At precisely the same moment, Dlavin shuddered once and died; the ghoul spat out the killing bite and fell back with acid dissolving its pale, vein-streaked chest.

  The naga smashed out the window behind it. Pristoleph could only watch as the naga grabbed the windowsill and fell backward out into the open air. Varnol tried to cut off its fingers with his axe, but the naga was too fast. It climbed up the stonework exterior of the tower, and Pristoleph, unable to tip his head up, could only see it pass over one of the skylights.

  The firedrake that had burned the ghoul leaped up out of the stairwell, making way for another of its kind. Both held longaxes.

  “This way!” Varnol shouted. “It’s on the roof!”

  The two firedrakes glanced at Pristoleph as if awaiting further instructions, but then surged ahead to the broken window.

  “Zevok,” Varnol said to one of the firedrakes, “the ransar has been paralyzed. Stay with him.”

  Zevok, one of the black firedrakes Pristoleph didn’t remember ever meeting—he hadn’t personally introduced himself to all of them—crossed the room to stand next to his ransar, his longaxe held ready in front of his chest. He scanned the carnage in the room with concern but no fear.

  Varnol and the other firedrake shifted into their true forms—it was a process Pristoleph never quite got used to—and leaped out of the window in pursuit of the naga.

  All at once Pristoleph’s neck moved. His head tipped up. Then he could bend his elbow, but just a little. He tried to take a deep breath. Though what he managed couldn’t have been described as “deep,” he did draw in more than the slightest bit of air.

  He looked up at the fight on the roof and saw the firedrakes harrying the naga, which clung to the flagpole. The pole began to bend under the creature’s considerable weight, and it took a few painful rakes of the firedrake’s claws. The orange pennant—sixteen feet long, Pristoleph remembered—made getting closer to the naga difficult for the two firedrakes, but they pressed on, trying to bleed dry their foe while at the same time not allowing themselves to become tangled in the flag.

  Pristoleph took a step forward and opened his mouth just a little. He managed a small sound, not quite a word, and Zevok leaned in closer to hear.

  Still looking up, Pristoleph watched as a shimmering glow appeared in the air next to the naga, and a portion of the blue sky for all appearances in the shape of a door, opened onto what looked like a roiling thunderstorm. Pristoleph got only the vaguest glimpse of fast-moving gray-black clouds and a flash of lightning that briefly lit the naga a shocking yellow. Then the serpent creature fell sideways into the space.

  The two firedrakes flexed their wings to follow, but the door in the sky slammed shut and they flew instead through empty air and followed each other in a long, swooping circle around the tower.

  41

  26 Eleint, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR)

  THE CANAL SITE

  Surero’s hands shook and his hair stood on end. The black firedrake’s grip on his arm was more than firm, but it wasn’t painful—not yet. He stood still, holding his hands away from his body as he was instructed. He tried to ignore the smell of acid that drifted from the dark-skinned guard. Surero knew that smell, and the fact that it was coming from the man’s breath was, for the alchemist, more frightening than the gleam of his razor-sharp axe.

  He looked at Ivar Devorast, who stood at the edge of the trench, so far north they were only a few miles from the banks of the Nagaflow. Devorast was flanked by two of the black-clad guards. He looked back at Surero and the way he tipped his head and widened his eyes said, Just be quiet and don’t resist … until we know we have to.

  It had taken a very, very long time before he was able to read Devorast that well.

  Three more of the black firedrakes stood a few yards away, their vicious longaxes held at the ready, scanning the growing crowd of workers that had come to see what all the fuss was about. The men kept a respectful distance, but Surero could feel a rising tension in the air. The men liked Devorast, and everyone was suspicious of the black firedrakes.

  One of the firedrakes looked up into the overcast sky and blinked a few times. Surero couldn’t tell if he was listening to something or smelling the air. After a brief moment he looked at Devorast and said, “Kneel to receive the ransar.”

  Devorast didn’t have a chance to bend his knee before the two black firedrakes pushed him to the muddy
ground. Surero was likewise forced down.

  There was a blur of violet-blue light and a prickling in the air. Surero squinted, ready to close his eyes tightly should something explode or … he didn’t know what else.

  Pristoleph stepped out of the light, emerging from the air itself, and the uncomfortable feeling was gone.

  The black firedrakes stiffened to attention while the ransar walked past them in a straight line to Devorast. The moment he was within reach, Pristoleph slapped Devorast so hard across the face, he was knocked out of the grip of one of the firedrakes. There was a moment of confusion while the guards struggled to get Devorast back to his knees. Pristoleph stepped back, shaking his hand and rubbing his wrist. Blood oozed from the side of Devorast’s lip.

  “Did you send it to kill me?” Pristoleph said, his voice grinding with anger. “Or did it decide on its own?”

  Devorast jerked his arm away from one of the firedrakes to wipe the blood from his face. The guard was about to hit him, but Pristoleph waved him off.

  “Let him up,” the ransar said.

  Devorast stood and the black firedrakes didn’t hold him, but stayed close enough to kill him in the blink of an eye should the ransar order it.

  “Speak,” Pristoleph demanded.

  “I didn’t send anyone to kill anyone,” Devorast said.

  “You said they were under control,” Pristoleph seethed.

  Devorast just looked at him with a question in his eyes.

  “The nagas,” Pristoleph said.

  “We are the embodiments of the ideal, genasi,” a voice at once resonant and sibilant said from behind Surero.

  The black firedrake that held Surero released him to hold his axe in both hands. The guards surrounded the ransar, whose strange orange hair seemed to blaze on his head like fire.

  Genasi, Surero thought. That explained a lot.

  “We are under no monkey’s ‘control,’” Svayyah said as she slithered just close enough to make the black firedrakes nervous, but not feel as though they had to attack. “What is the meaning of this?”