Oathkeeper (51 page)

Stone cracked or shattered. Structures weakened and collapsed as heat melted the flash-frozen water. The dragon roared its delight.

*

So Hasimak is here.
Coal eyed the absent top quarter of the tower of High Elementals, soaring over the lower quarters and blazing with torrents of heat as he smote the glowing stone with his tremendous bulk, sending the tower tumbling sideways to crash through rows of close-by buildings.
How fun.

The castle came next, each of its three towers sent down blazing atop the icy reptilian figures. Some shattered on impact, others, lucky enough to be near the super-heated stone and not under it, stirred as they began to thaw. Yes, this was definitely more amusing than assisting the Aern at Fort Sunder would have been. There, he would have needed to preserve the Aern-built infrastructure, but as far as he knew, the Aern, in their war with the Zaur and the Eldrennai, had no interest in Port Ammond with its haughty architecture . . . and if they had wanted the city intact Kholster or his daughter should have mentioned it to him well in advance.

Attacking Port Ammond allowed him to keep his word to assist the Aern while destroying several thousand Zaur and providing assistance to the warsuits as requested. Two elves in one maw, as the saying went.

As Coal spun around to ready another cycle of cold and heat, the upper portion of the tower reappeared, first tumbling from the sky over the empty space where the lower portion had been, then held in place by the mages within.

*

“The first blast is the worst,” Hasimak hissed through gritted teeth immediately after jerking the tower away from the dragon, “as the frost-and-burn cycle of a dragon is imperfect. He absorbs heat from his surroundings, inflicting cold, but when unleashing the stored heat, the exchange is imperfect, only a bastard portion of that which he took in. By the third blast he is essentially breathing plain fire, and the cold effect is uncomfortable but not fatal.”

“Where are we?” Lord Stone asked. All four apprentices looked out the windows at the roiling chaos beyond the tower walls.

“Between dimensions,” Hasimak grunted. “He's probably toppled the tower, knocking the Port Gates out of alignment. I'll have to bring us back soon, and I may not be able to shift us out again unless at least two of the Port Gates are intact and in rough alignment. If we can wait him out, I may be able to convince him to leave. Dragons do not have the patience for a siege in the conventional sense. They find them too boring.”

“But he's destroying Port Ammond,” Klerris complained.

“The people are gone, except for us.” Hasimak's voice was soft and tired. “I would dearly like to preserve as much of the tower as I can, because it has been my home for years beyond measure, but it can be rebuilt. It can all be rebuilt.”

“And if you can't get the dragon to leave?” Hollis asked.

“I know the Betrayer of old.” Hasimak's eyes lit up at the memory.

“The Betrayer?” Zerris asked.

“When he was still young,” Hasimak said, “before the other dragons left Barrone, before Kevari fell, creating with her death throes the pass that bears her name . . . When his scales were black and his eyes were bright fire . . . that is what the other dragons called him.”

“But if you can't talk him into going away . . .” Klerris pressed.

Hasimak closed his eyes, internal struggle playing out on his features as a series of grimaces and twitches. At last, he gave a long, low moan.

“Have I ever,” Hasimak asked, absently pleating and re-pleating his robes, “told the four of you how to kill a dragon?”

*

Coal swooped over the rooftops of Port Ammond, belching a continuous stream of raw heat and energy, cutting a swathe through civilian, municipal, and military construction alike. Landing with the vigor of false youth atop the Royal Museum, the dragon chortled in low grumbling rumbles as it collapsed beneath his weight. Feeling the ebb of his inner heat, the dragon directed an irritated blast of rage at the museum's center, destroying exhibits old and new. Shattered cases from which the warsuits had emerged only days earlier caught fire. The wooden frames burned, and velvet pillows upon which warpicks had rested smoldered into ruin.

Wreathed in smoke, his fires blazing brightly throughout the port city, Coal dropped low into the center of the inferno he'd made of the Royal Museum where all the trouble had been set into motion thirteen years earlier and spent the last of his tremendous heat melting the stone beneath his claws, the remains of the ceiling above him and the walls around him, so that the molten stone flowed over and enfolded him.

Kholster watched all of this without comment, several of him moving amongst the dead Zaur and Sri'Zaur, those who'd frozen incorrectly and died rather than entering a protective freeze, those who'd been crushed, and those who'd been burned. It no longer pained him to be in so many places at once. Being unified by Vander acting again as his Overwatch kept him all in sync, requiring him to focus only on a handful of things at once, with the rest sorting itself out in the back of his mind without the need for direct attention.

One by one, the primal gods joined him.

Xalistan arrived first, appearing in classic fashion with a lion's body, the trunk of a humanoid attached in place of the neck, and huge leathery wings springing from his back. He held a bone spear in his hands, tossing his horned head like a challenging buck, but Kholster paid him little heed other than to clad himself in Harvester, Reaper appearing on his back.

Are we going to reap him?
Harvester asked.

No
, Kholster thought.
We needed to take Aldo, and I may have to reap others so they have a chance to learn a few things, but the primals appear to understand for the most part.

Understand?

That mortals are not toys
, Vander answered.

Clad in dead leaves, mulch, and moss, her body composed of the carcasses of dead animals, mushrooms blooming from their hides, Gromma arrived in a cloud of dirt. Yhask and Queelay, the wind and sea, arrived together as a storm raging over the port, their heads formed of cloud and rain, gazing down upon the scene.

Minapsis and Kilke arrived together looking every bit the brother and sister they were, Kilke clothed in shadows, Minapsis in black furs. Their horns were bedecked with jewelry.

“My husband is angry with you,” Minapsis told him.

“Then he should not have allowed me to fight him,” Kholster said, eyes forward, watching the reptilian forces attempting to withdraw, those who were sufficiently thawed to do so. “I am doing exactly what he asked. That he may have underestimated what that would entail or how being reduced to one aspect would change his opinion on the matter is no fault of mine.”

“You have to learn to abide by the rules, Kholster,” Dienox said firmly, manifesting in a suit of black plate armor. He held a matching buckler in his left hand and a longsword in his right. “What you said earlier—if we don't follow rules, cosmically binding or not, then we'll destroy the Outwork in our squabbling and float in the Dragonwaste blaming each other.”

“This destruction.” Head bowed, Sedvinia appeared in a long-sleeved dress of dark gray, “It's both wonderful and terrible, the power of this one beast.” Eyeing Kholster pointedly, she added. “The dragon, too.”

“If he were a beast,” Gromma rustled, “I would collect him.”

“Or I,” Xalistan growled.

“Are we talking about the dragon,” Kilke's ram-horned head asked, “or the death god?”

“Both are problematic.” Shidarva, the goddess of justice and retribution, four armed, a scimitar edged in blue fire wielded in each hand, burst into existence. Her armor flashed with the same fire. “Both must be dealt with.”

“Oh?” A Dwarf in full plate armor, wielding a hammer arcing with electricity, rose up from the stones. “And what has the dragon done to offend?”

“Jun.” Shidarva gestured with her swords, encompassing the destruction. “Do you not see what it has done to Port Ammond?”

“I see.” Jun nodded. “And it is a mortal being whose redress must be handled by other mortal beings. Any deity who interferes with Coal will get to experience the joy of having his or her head between my hammer and my favorite anvil.”

“The dragon is not the problem.” Torgrimm, still in his farmer's clothes, pitchfork in hand, arrived next. “I may have made a mistake when I—”

“That you did,” Kholster spoke. “But I do not believe you comprehend why it was a mistake to give a portion of your power to me, to make yourself vulnerable so I could take it . . . but you will. Aldo is learning now. I will deliver the same lesson to any of you who require it.”

“Oh stop your posturing,” Dienox bellowed. “The dragon is going to go off a few more times before it finishes. Can we at least watch that first?”

CHAPTER 37

THE THERMODYNAMICS OF DRAGONS

<> came the call from Asvrin and his thrice-cursed Shades. Captain Dryga, still slow from the cold and groggy from such a quick freeze and thaw, could not even tell how far away the master assassin was, only that the Zaurtol he used was blunted and inelegant, as if beaten on Zaurruk handler drums from far away.

Probably exactly what he did, the coward.

“Retreat!” Dryga croaked as the second wave of cold hit him. Some made it back into the water; other smacked their heads into ice too thick to break, skulls cracking and blood spilling on the ice.

“Hello, enemies of my favorite mortal-turned-deity,” the dragon bellowed as its shadow fell over Dryga, its claws striking the ice of the harbor, intensifying the cold. “I'm afraid I got carried away with the destruction of the city on that first breath. I shall correct that oversight presently.”

Dryga got his head turned around far enough that, as he froze in place, he had a clear view of the great wyrm, lines of fire racing along its pitch-black scales, eyes alive with flame, fang-rimmed maw filled with light.

When the blast of heat came, it was nothing like Dryga had ever imagined, not fire so much as a beam of heat so strong it set the air ablaze. Where it hit, stone shattered, scale, muscle, and bone flash-fried to cinders, blown away by the force of that terrible beam, even as it cooked them. The dragon's hate swept along a flat plane, clearing the dock of buildings and invaders alike.

Tracking upward in an arc, the flashing column of orange, yellow, and white clove the shattered base of Castle Ammond in twain again, dropping lower remnants of the towers atop the dead and dying. Steam flowed up from the boiling bay as the dragon aimed the last of its second breath down at those attempting to escape back into the waters, melting the very ice upon which it stood but jerking itself upward into the roiling storm overhead on its immense wings of destruction.

The last sound Dryga heard was a hiss, a pop, and the high-pitched whine of his organs sizzling inside his skin. Then he saw the god of death, and it was an Aern.

*

As some of Kholster gathered the souls of the dead, the Prime Kholster, the one who wore Harvester and unslung Reaper from his back, gauntlets tight around its bone-white grip, stood surrounded by all of the other gods save Nomi and the new god of knowledge. Distracted, the primals had eyes mainly for the dragon. Its destruction and glee were far more intriguing than yet another squabble among deities.

Shidarva and the others gave Kholster the entirety of their focus, weapons at the ready (though Dienox did seem torn between watching the dragon and watching Kholster . . . and Jun appeared to be on both sides or on the sides of mortals themselves rather than either side).

“You've gone too far,” Shidarva breathed. “You acted as if there were no rules! You murdered Aldo and did who-knows-what with his soul!”

“It's in a safe place.” Kholster's words came soft, sure, and unhurried. He turned with glacial slowness and profundity as if he were an Irkanth noticing a tiny creature upon which it might pounce. “And I did not murder him.”

“You claim that you did not—” Shidarva took a step, the ground beneath her feet pulsing blue with each move.

“I loaned a soul my warpick.” Kholster held Reaper up and out. “You need not be alarmed. He gave it back.”

“But you tricked Aldo,” Dienox growled, ignoring the dragon, who had settled amid the wreckage of Castle Ammond to bask in the glow of his own warmth before lashing out again. “You blinded him.”

“The eye that spies on me,” Kholster quoted, holding out two obsidian eyes with amber pupils surround by jade irises. He shook them in his left hand like a gambler throwing bones. “I shall pluck out.”

Kilke tried and failed to stifle a laugh, the resulting snort drawing a disapproving glare from Minapsis and Torgrimm as he stepped free of the conflict and then, drawing a two-handed blade as long as he was tall, moved to Kholster's side.

“Could you quote what Aldo said to me the last time I caught him spying on me and confronted him about it, please, Harvester?”

“My friend, if pulling a few of my eyes out of their box and shaking them about would mollify you in any way—” Harvester recited.

“You claim this was all an ill-timed prank?” Torgrimm asked. “Is that it? You—!”

“Demoted him.” Kholster held his left hand out and dropped the eyes. A box containing the others appeared beneath them, held by a bald Aern. Vander wore no warsuit, clad as he was in life in bone-steel mail, jeans, and boots favored by so many Aern . . . a slight variation being the fedora he wore, with vents sewn in to better accommodate his ears.

“I'm standing in for the god of truth and lies until he's learned the lesson you all need to learn.” Vander snapped the box shut and stuffed it into a pocket that, though the box fit seamlessly, was too small to contain it.

“And what lesson is that?” Dienox asked. “And what do you mean ‘truth and lies'? Aldo was the god of knowledge! Kilke is the liar!”