Please, Tymora, no! Alias thought. Don't let anything be wrong with Dragonbait.

Fifty pounds of invisible halfling slammed into Alias's legs and clung to her like a child. "They've got him!" she cried.

Alias knelt down and managed to get hold of Olive's invisible shoulders. "Olive, try to keep calm," the swordswoman said, though her own voice rose alarmingly. "What have they done to him? Is Dragonbait all right?"

"Dragonbait is fine," Olive hissed. "It's Finder. He's been possessed. He's one of the minions!"

"No!" Alias whispered in shock.

"Yes," Olive sniffed. "He's got a flower coming out of his ear, and he's sitting in Coral's tent right now. We've got to get out of here."

"No," Akabar said. "Finder doesn't know our plans, and if we carry them out quickly, he won't have time to prepare them for our attack."

"No, Akabar!" Olive said. "You don't understand. Your blood is the seed! I heard Finder say so. If they catch you, it's all over."

"Akabar's blood can't be the seed," Alias said. "Coral told Dragonbait they were going to resurrect Moander tonight. How could Coral say that if she didn't even know where Akabar was?"

"Alias, she's the Mouth of Moander," Olive said. "She says whatever Moander wants her to say. She lied to upset Dragonbait, just as Moander lied to you when you were its prisoner."

Alias nodded thoughtfully. Moander took great delight in causing people grief and fear. The G.o.d would say anything to achieve that goal.

"I am not the seed," Akabar snarled.

"Akabar," Alias argued, "Moander had plenty of opportunity to put its power inside you and taint your blood. All its minions have been looking for you, trying to capture you. Olive must be right."

Akabar's eyes narrowed into slits and his head shook with anger. It had taken him a long time to forget his shame and fury at the way Moander had used his body to harm his friends. He couldn't deny that he'd been powerless in the G.o.d's control, and there had been times when he'd been unconscious and could have been violated with some foul magic. "Then it's the G.o.d's justice that I have been sent to destroy Moander," the mage said, his voice like steel. "I must stay."

"Akabar, be reasonable. We can't risk having you get captured. We have to get you out of here!" Alias insisted.

"No!" Akabar said stubbornly, "I am not fleeing."

"Akabar, suppose Moander's enchanted you to come here. By staying, you're simply doing its bidding," the swordswoman pointed out.

"It's too late to cancel our plans now," Akabar said "There's no way to alert Grypht. He's relying on us to do our parts,"

"All right," Alias sighed. As unwise as she felt it to be, she had no choice but to give in to the mage's logic.

"What are you going to do about Finder?" Olive asked anxiously. "You can't hit him with a cone of cold. It could kill him."

Akabar knelt beside Alias and laid his hand beside the swordswoman's on the halfling's shoulder. He gave Olive an encouraging squeeze. "Dragonbait is a paladin. He can cast a cure disease spell on Finder."

Olive nodded, though since she was invisible, the others couldn't see it. She pulled Dragonbait's sword out of the invisible sack and held the weapon out so Alias could see it.

Alias took the sword and whispered "Toast" in saurial. The sword glowed, then burst into flame. Olive drew a torch out of her knapsack and ignited it over the saurial's magical weapon.

"Good luck," Alias whispered to the halfling as the light from the torch, held by the halfling's invisible hand, bounced around the edge of the clearing.

"The light stone's gone out," Akabar whispered.

Alias heard a twittering noise coming from the inner huts. "There's the alarm."

From the center of the camp came a shout in saurial. "There's Dragonbait!" Alias said, spying the paladin running toward them, weaving his way through the huts of the saurial camp. "Get ready."

Akabar pulled out a feather from one of his robe pockets and began chanting a spell that would enable him to fly.

Alias gasped suddenly as the vines that fastened the pine boughs to the huts lashed out from the huts and tangled themselves around the paladin's legs. Dragonbait fell to the ground, trying desperately to pull the vines from his legs, but more vines began tangling around his arms and waist. Between the huts, a white saurial in white robes gestured in Dragonbait's direction. Vines began wrapping around the paladin's throat.

"No!" Alias shouted, rushing forward. Before she could reach the paladin's side, however, other vines lashed out at her from huts at the edge of the clearing. Alias hacked through the vines with Dragonbait's flaming blade, but more vines kept coming at her.

As suddenly as they had appeared, the vines dropped to the ground, motionless. Akabar must have dispelled the magic that animated them, Alias thought. The swordswoman looked toward where Coral had stood to see if she was casting another spell at her, but the white saurial was nowhere in sight. Alias ran to help Dragonbait, only to find the vines surrounding him had also lost their enchantment and the saurial paladin was already pulling himself free.

"Are you all right?" she asked her companion in saurial.

"Yes," The paladin replied. With a remorseful scent of mint, he added, "I was stupid to get captured. I'm sorry."

"I'll yell at you later," Alias said, handing him his flaming sword. She grabbed the lizard's hand and pulled him back to the edge of the clearing, where Akabar was waiting.

"You might have been captured out there. What were you thinking, woman?" Akabar demanded.

"Sorry," Alias said. "Thanks for dispelling those tangle vines."

"I didn't do it," Akabar said. "It must have been Grypht."

"But he should be on the other side of the camp by now," Alias said.

"Alias, we haven't got time for discussions. Hold still so I can cast a flying spell on you," Akabar ordered.

Akabar repeated the chant for the spell he'd already cast on himself, brushing Alias's arms with a second feather. Instantly the feather burst into flame and disappeared.

"That's it?" she asked. "What do I do, flap my arms?"

"If you want to. However, it's not necessary," Akabar said. He turned to Dragonbait and explained hastily. "Olive is starting fires in the brush to the south of the clearing. Grypht will cast a wall of fire on the west side. You must use your sword to start igniting the forest on this side while Alias and I begin burning the huts. We're trying to drive the saurials out of the vale into the mountains to the east. Once the fires are all lit, Grypht and I will fly to the east to cast cones of cold at the saurials as they flee from the vale; Alias will be our lookout. You'll have to deal with any saurials who aren't panicked by the fires and are still acting on Moander's behalf."

Dragonbait nodded. He ran his finger down Alias's sword arm, whispering "Good luck" in saurial. As Alias and Akabar soared upward and off toward the huts, the paladin hurried to begin setting fires along the north edge of the vale.

Grypht paused a moment in midflight to look down into the camp. The sight of all the tribe's spell-casters bursting out of their huts, catching their toes on the halfling's trip wires, and sprawling on the ground might have been amusing in other circ.u.mstances. The wizard tried not to dwell on the thought that if his plan worked, most of these people would be dead before morning. He reminded himself of all the other lives at stake. He thought, too, of the desperate cry for release Coral had made in Alias's soul song. Even if it meant Coral's death, Grypht knew the priestess would accept anything rather than serve the Darkbringer.

He could see Coral's white hide standing out in the dusk. A dark figure stood beside her. The wizard squinted, but he had trouble making out much detail in the gathering darkness. He couldn't discern which of their tribe it was. Then the dark figure disappeared in a flash of light. The sight unsettled the old wizard. Who was the spell-caster, and where had he gone? Grypht wondered.

The sight of small fires burning below brought the wizard's mind back to the task at hand. He soared to the west side of the clearing and began to chant the words of his wall of fire spell.

From her vantage point high in the air, Alias saw the shimmering violet wall of flames to the west of the vale and whistled in awe. "It's nearly three hundred feet long," she breathed.

Hovering beside her, Akabar concentrated on rolling the flaming sphere beneath him into another hut before he stole a glance westward at Grypht's handiwork. "We're fortunate to have so powerful an ally," he said, then concentrated on moving the flaming sphere once more.

Beneath Akabar and Alias, the saurial workers had begun to smell the smoke and emerge from their huts. Just as Grypht had predicted, not even the Darkbringer could control the instinct of the saurials to flee from fire. Although the small flying saurials might have fled in any direction they wanted, they followed the rest and flew east toward the mage and swordswoman.

"Fliers," Alias warned. "Ten of them, at least."

Akabar looked up and pulled out Grypht's wand of frost. He flew across the path of the fliers twice, luring them into following him. Alias remained, hovering near the ground until she saw no more fliers pa.s.sing by. Then she followed them, keeping out of range of Akabar's wand.

The mage flew low over a patch of brush. It was important that the fliers didn't fall too great a distance when they fell into their torpor. The wand's cold might kill their possessing vines and leave them unharmed, but they couldn't survive a crash to the earth from any great height. With a sudden twist, Akabar faced the fliers coming at him and hovered in place.

The lead flier was only five yards from Akabar when the mage pointed the wand of frost at it, and only three when he gave the whistle that approximated the saurial word to trigger the wand. Motes of white crystalline ice blasted out of the tip of the wand in a cone sixty feet long. The flying saurial in the lead was immediately covered in a rime of frost and dropped to the ground. Another eight, also whitened by the wand's magical cold, fell after him.

Two fliers had been beyond the reach of the wand's cone, however. Now they dived down upon Akabar with their sharp beaks open.

Akabar headed for a higher alt.i.tude to evade the attackers, but one managed to tear through his robe and leave a gash in his side. The mage cried out and clutched at his side.

Alias flew to the side of the injured mage. As the two remaining fliers turned and swooped down on them, Alias drew her sword. One creature called out in saurial, "Look out! She has a weapon!" and pulled up, but the other couldn't stop its dive in time. Alias's blade tore through the saurial's wing, and the creature spun helplessly to the earth. Alias chased the remaining flying saurial as Akabar flew down toward the injured one.

Grypht had told Alias that the flying saurials could fly with the grace and speed of eagles. Alias might never have caught up with this one in ordinary circ.u.mstances, but the creature was exhausted from its day's labor and had lost much of its maneuverability because of Moander's possessive vines. Since Alias's flight was magical, the swordswoman was not in the least winded by her chase. She swooped down on the last winged saurial, grabbing it by the vines that grew from its back and wrapped about its waist.

The creature struggled frantically, and its vines began wrapping around Alias's arm. The swordswoman soared earthward and landed beside Akabar. Quickly the mage sliced the vines off near the saurial's back. The little saurial began to slash at Akabar's arms with its beak, but the mage grabbed it by its throat and held it fast while Alias tied its wings behind its back with a length of rope. Then they laid the trussed flier alongside the injured one by the side of the trail leading west out of the vale. Finally they stood and waited for the saurials who were coming up the trail on foot. It had been Akabar's idea to drive the saurials eastward, so they would have to climb uphill, slowing them down so it would be easier to cast magic on them.

Alias could hear the approaching saurials shouting, and she could smell the violet scent of their fear rising up the vale with the smoke of the fires. "Are you all right?" she asked the mage beside her. He was bleeding from the gashes in his side and his arm.

Akabar nodded and held out Grypht's wand. "It'll hurt more later, when I have time to think about it," he said.

The approaching saurials were somewhat larger than the fliers, and Akabar didn't wait till the last minute to fire the wand at them. When they were twenty feet away, he whistled the wand's command word. The lead creatures were struck by the blast of freezing ice, but they kept coining for several seconds before they were stopped by the cold. At least twenty fell to the ground, but others behind them kept coming.

Akabar flew over the fallen saurials and fired off another blast from the wand. Many more saurials dropped. A few, too large to be affected quickly by the cold or with some resistance to magic, ran on up the hill. Alias took to the air to get out of their path.

"I could get to enjoy this flying thing," the swordswoman said, turning a somersault in the air. She sheathed her sword and landed back on the ground, then began dragging saurials off the path so they wouldn't be crushed by any that followed.

Akabar was intent on the remaining saurials charging up the hill. He already had his wand pointed at them. The Turmish mage whistled out the command word, but as the wand fired its icy cone, it crumbled in Akabar's hand, its power spent.

Suddenly, from the air above her, Alias heard chanting. She looked up to see two saurials of Dragonbait's type looking down on Akabar. Spell-casters, she realized, with fly spells like our own! The Turmish mage couldn't hear them, so he was oblivious to their presence.

"Akabar! Above you!" the swordswoman called out in warning, but Akabar still didn't move. He was frozen in the same position he'd been in when he pointed the wand. The saurial mages held him fast with their magic.

Alias drew her sword and flew up into their midst, shouting a battle cry in saurial and blasting the scent of her anger in their direction. The mages quickly flew off in separate directions. Alias turned back to Akabar, only to discover that a third flying sauriai had s.n.a.t.c.hed up the paralyzed mage in a net and was now flying back toward the camp with him.

Alias flew after Akabar's captor. Slowed by his burden, the saurial couldn't keep ahead of the furious swordswoman, but Alias had forgotten about the other two mages. She heard a chanting just above her, and suddenly she felt as though she were flying through jelly. Her flight had been slowed with magic. Akabar's captor burst ahead of her. The other saurial mages swooped down on her with another net, and she couldn't dodge out of the way in time. They closed her up in the net and wrenched her sword from her hand. Then they flew after Akabar's captor, toward the looming pile that would become Moander's new body.

Olive tossed the stub of her spent torch into the burning brush. "I sure hope I don't run into any treants or druids tonight," she muttered. She looked eastward at Grypht's wall of fire. Olive had never seen a blaze so big.

It was getting terribly hot in the vale, and the halfling noticed steam rising from the pile that was to become Meander's body. She knew the fire's main purpose was to herd the saurials toward Akabar's and Grypht's cones of cold, but she couldn't help wishing they'd get extra lucky and manage to burn the wet pile of hacked forest as well, despite the magic that protected it from fire. She would never be comfortable until she was sure Moander's waiting body was gone for good.

She had begun to move eastward, out of the vale, when she noticed something moving near the top of the pile, something white. Olive shook her head in surprise. It was Coral, climbing to the top of her G.o.d's potential body. She must be pretty far gone to hang around a burning vale. Olive thought. Then she saw another figure about halfway up the pile, also climbing toward the top. The halfling gasped. It was Dragonbait!

"Stupid paladin!" Olive growled. "After I specifically told him that Alias didn't want any dangerous heroics. He'd die up there, Olive realized, if she didn't get him to climb back down. With an irritated sigh, she moved toward the pile and began climbing after the paladin.

Grypht threw a cone of cold at a group of saurial stragglers moving up the hills away from the burning vale. He landed beside a cl.u.s.ter of sauriai bodies lying on the ground. It was getting warm from the fire's heat; the fallen would rise out of their torpor soon, but many of them would be too weak to move without the rotting vines providing energy to their bodies. He walked through the bodies until he found a perfect candidate to help hima"one of the large saurials with the sharp, diamond-shaped plates of armor running down his back.

The wizard bent over the sauriai and shook him. "Sweetleaf," he called, "snap out of it." Grypht forced a danger scent from his glands to help bring the other saurial around.

"Wh-what?" Sweetleaf said, opening his eyes suddenly.

"You've been under the Darkbringer's power. Cure your disease quickly. We have a lot of work to do."

"Ia"I remember now. I was possessed," Sweetleaf muttered.

"Fortunately, since you were a stranger in the tribe, none of the others knew you were a cleric, or you would have been possessed sooner and in no shape to help us now," Grypht said. "Now cure yourself so we can be sure no more of Moander's spores taint your body. Then we can begin to rescue the rest of our unfortunate brothers."

Akabar had done a good job, the saurial wizard noted privately, looking up the hill at the number of saurials the mage had felled with the wand. Grypht was too busy worrying about his own people, though, to wonder where the mage was at the moment.

Akabar lay on the very top of the pile of dead vegetation that Moander intended to make its new body. He could hear Alias screaming and struggling with the saurial mages who had captured her. She was only a few yards away from him, but magically held as he was, he was powerless to help her. He knew he was frightened, but he had his faith to support him. Alias, on the other hand, must be terrified, he realized. She had tried to convince him to flee to avoid exactly this situation. To be honest, he had hoped to avoid it, but fleeing was not an honorable option.

Zhara had told him that he would be responsible for the G.o.d's death forever, and he had accepted the honor with pride. His priestess wife had been unable to tell him, however, if he would live through the experience. At the moment, he suspected he would not. His blood, from the wounds in his side and his arm, hissed and sparkled as it dripped onto the greenery beneath him. That certainly wasn't a good sign, but if Moander had to be resurrected to be destroyed, so be it, he thought.

In the moonlight, he could see a white saurial moving toward him. It was Coral, Moander's high priestess. She knelt beside him. A potpourri of conflicting emotional scents poured from her. Moander could force her to feel its evil pleasure, but the G.o.d did not, or could not, prevent her from expressing her own grief and fear.

Coral held up a large, luminous mushroom, which she shoved into Akabar's mouth. The acrid taste made the mage feel violently ill, but he was unable to spit it out. He felt his mouth grow numb. Next Coral drew out a dagger carved from a giant thorn and pressed the tip of it against the artery in his neck. Akabar closed his eyes, certain he was about to die, but he felt no more than a p.r.i.c.k in his neck. He opened his eyes again. Coral held the dagger up to the moonlight. There was a single drop of his blood on its tip, and before Akabar's eyes, the blood crystallized into a brilliant, rounded gem. Coral plucked the gem from the dagger, spat on it, and pushed it into the pile of greenery beneath them.

Just as Akabar was beginning to hope he might not actually be killed, the mage felt the pile shift beneath him, and he began to sink into it. His skin began to sparkle everywhere the greenery touched him. The red and white robe he wore began to rot away from his body, exposing more of his flesh to the magic of the pile. Since he could do nothing else, the Turmish mage began to pray.

19.

The Weapon

Held by four saurial mages, Alias could do nothing but shriek and cry as Coral chanted foul prayers over Akabar, declaring his blood the seed of Moander's resurrection. As the Turmish mage was sucked into the rotting mess the saurials had built for Moander, the swordswoman began to shake uncontrollably. This was her worst nightmarea"the one she forced herself to forget whenever she woke from it. In it, she inevitably watched her friend being absorbed by the Darkbringer just as she had been. Now, though, there was no waking up.

Akabar should have gone back to the cave as soon as they found out that he was the seed, she thought. She should have knocked him out and dragged him away. And Zhara never should have let him come north. There had to have been some way to prevent all this.

Suddenly the swordswoman's arm began to burn as if it were on fire. The blue brands on her arm glowed brighter than lantern light. "No," Alias whispered.

"Yes," a voice said in saurial. Alias looked up into the face of the saurial who once was Dragonbait's lover. Her duties with the seed complete, the priestess had moved to the swords-woman's side. She studied Alias's arm eagerly. "The symbol of Moander is returning to her arm," she announced.

Dragonbait, who had nearly reached the top of the pile, didn't need to hear the Mouth of Moander's words to know what was happening to Alias. He could feel it himself in the brand on his chest that bound him to the swordswoman. There, rea.s.serting itself in his own scales, he could see the tattoo of a blue glowing mouth of fangs set in a human palm.

When the pain had subsided, he finished climbing up the side of the pile of greenery. Crashing through the soggy, rotting vegetation, he cried out the trigger word to set his sword aflame. He stabbed one of the mages through the heart and the corpse fell into the pile. As if the pile had an insatiable appet.i.te, the body was sucked into it almost instantly.