A blaze of breath narrowly missed him and obliterated two of his illusory twins. Beginning a charm to cloak himself in blur, he glanced back, then felt a surge of despair.

Three of the Tarterians were chasing him, but the others were spiraling down toward his allies, and despite the imminent threat, Kara and Brimstone continued battling one another. Raryn shouted to them to stop, to look, while loosing arrows at the creatures overhead. Shaft after shaft pierced the Tarterians' dark, mottled hide, but the wounds were insufficient to deter them.

With all hope lost, Taegan considered translating himself through s.p.a.ce so he could at least die fighting in proximity to his comrades. But then the Tarterians on his tail would follow him back to Kara and the others, and though he couldn't see how it actually mattered either way, somehow he just couldn't bring himself to do it. He flew onward instead, toward the dark, snow-dappled barrier mountains.

Instinct prompted him to veer, and a bubble of shadow burst into existence beside him, almost caging him, but not quite. Unfortunately, though, his evasive maneuver turned him straight at a Tarterian that had drawn up even with him on his left flank. Until this moment, he hadn't even realized it was there.

He looked around for a ghost dragon, or one of the areas of old, decaying magic his pursuers avoided. Neither was within reach. The wyrms had him boxed in, with nowhere left to flee. Green eyes shining, the Tarterian in front of him spread its black-fanged jaws.

Then a cloud of hummingbirds popped into existence around it and jabbed at it with their needle beaks. Startled, the Tarterian spewed hammering force at them instead of Taegan, cutting a clear s.p.a.ce through the middle of the flock but not destroying them all. The remainder continued to hara.s.s it, and it struck at them with tooth and claw.

Its distraction afforded Taegan an avenue of escape. He swung around the reptile, placing it between the other two wyrms and himself, and as he did so, Jivex's voice sounded from somewhere close at hand.

"How did you ever survive this long without me?" the faerie dragon asked.

To Pavel's relief, the gate actually had transported him, Tamarand, and Jivex to the valley they'd glimpsed before the grand divination went awry, but also into the midst of a situation so chaotic that it took him a moment or two of casting about to make any sense of it.

Exiting the portal, he and his companions found themselves on barren, bone-littered ground, with Kara and Brimstone locked in snarling combat close at hand. Three of the black, green-eyed wyrms-Tarterian dragons, if he could trust a reference he'd read as a seminary student-glided overhead.

Jivex whirled and sped away. He must have spotted something else requiring his attention. But before Pavel could determine what, one of the black, speckled wyrms overhead c.o.c.ked its head back and whipped it down. Its jaws snapped open wide, and a grayish, expanding burst of breath weapon exploded from its gullet.

Tamarand lashed his pinions and leaped. The blaze of force pounded down, jolting and cracking the frozen earth, smashing crumbling skeletons, but missing its targets. All three Tarterians maneuvered, orienting themselves to strike at the gigantic gold even as he roared an incantation.

A floating circle of white radiance appeared around Tamarand's body, and a pair of sizzling lightning bolts leaped upward from the ring. Each stabbed into the belly of one of the Tarterians, and the reptiles convulsed. At the same time, the gold crouched low and shrugged, spilling Pavel to the ground.

Tamarand then leaped, beat his gleaming, leathery wings, and took to the air. A flare of Tarterian breath bashed him, made him wobble in flight, but failed to knock him down. He riposted with a blast of fire, and his a.s.sailant plummeted, its tattered wings burning like dry leaves.

Meanwhile, Wardancer sprang through the portal with Will perched at the base of her serpentine neck. The bronze looked around, then flapped her wings and climbed to join the aerial combat. Unlike Tamarand, she hadn't opted to deposit her rider on the ground first, and the halfling pulled the warsling from his belt.

Their departure left Pavel to deal with Kara and Brimstone, at least until more of his comrades emerged from the gate. As always, mere proximity to the vampire made him clench with loathing, and his instinct was to do everything in his power to help Kara destroy him. But perhaps that would be wrong. Brimstone was an ally, too, and at the moment, arguably not responsible for his actions. His exile in this desolate place had likely left him starved for blood.

Thus, instead of casting attack spells, Pavel simply evoked flares of Lathander's warm, red-gold light from his amulet. The tactic worked to a degree. Brimstone hissed, twisted his head away from the glow, and attempted to scramble backward. Unfortunately, Kara still held him gripped in her talons and coils and wouldn't release him. She simply took advantage of his temporary incapacity to inflict further harm.

"Stop!" Pavel shouted. "Let him go!"

Somewhere close at hand, Raryn bellowed the same thing. But she didn't heed them. Pavel belatedly realized both dragons were mad, the vampire with blood thirst, Kara, with the Rage, and he had no idea what to do about it.

Then Nexus was there, huge as Tamarand, so huge that even Brimstone and Kara appeared small in comparison. He declaimed a rhyme, and some unseen force seized hold of Kara, yanked her away from the smoke drake, and flung her torn, b.l.o.o.d.y body through the air. Nexus wheeled, keeping track of her, and started another incantation.

That meant it was still Pavel's job to control Brimstone. Unfortunately, fangs bared, the vampire was already pivoting back in his direction. Pavel could keep producing blazes of dawnlight, but what would happen when he'd exhausted the capability?

Then Pavel noticed the Tarterian Tamarand had burned. The dark wyrm was still on the ground, its smoking wings apparently too charred to bear it aloft once more. Its neck swayed this way and that as it sought to aim a breath or supernatural attack at the gold soaring overhead.

Pavel pointed, shouted, "Look there!" and when Brimstone failed to heed him, forced the reptile to flinch and turn with another pulse of holy light. "There's blood! Take it from an enemy, not your allies!"

Brimstone hesitated, then lashed his wings, pounced on the other dragon's back, and buried his oversized fangs in its throat. They rolled, tangled together, spat blasts of breath at one another.

Pavel thought he should help Brimstone, but peered about first, lest some menace steal up on him unnoticed.

Nexus held Kara pinned beneath him as he recited the spell to quell the Rage. Obviously, the ward she'd previously established had failed, and the gold sought to conjure a replacement. Snarling and hissing, the song dragon struggled beneath him, and Pavel recalled with dismay that supposedly, only Sammaster had achieved such mastery of the enchantment that he could impose it on an unwilling subject. Nexus must hope that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Kara wasn't wholly lost to madness.

Dorn hovered near the confrontation. Maybe he thought it would help if Kara could see him.

Meanwhile, dragons and their riders lunged one pair at a time through the portal. Some of the wyrms staggered, or crouched down shaking, as something afflicted them, and Pavel surmised that the Rage must be even stronger here near the source. But none of the metallics succ.u.mbed. They shook off their distress, then they and their human comrades threw themselves into the confrontation with the Tarterians.

Some battled close at hand, fighting the wyrms Tamarand had initially engaged. Azhaq spat pale, glittering vapor that paralyzed Brimstone's opponent but had no effect on the vampire, who then guzzled and slurped the live wyrm's blood. Gloved hands gesturing, Scattercloak murmured a rhyme, whereupon gashes split a flying Tarterian's hide.

Other dragons and their riders streaked away in the direction Jivex had gone, to confront the three Tarterians wheeling in that portion of the sky.

In both cases, the end result was the same. The guardian drakes were powerful, but so were the newcomers, who also had them outnumbered. One by one, the Tarterians fell.

Which meant no one needed any further a.s.sistance from Pavel after all. He turned back around to see how Kara, Nexus, and Dorn were faring.

The gold roared the concluding syllable of his incantation. Kara kept on thrashing. Dorn rushed in close to her head. If she snapped at him, or spat lightning, he had no hope of avoiding it.

Heedless of the danger, he placed himself before one of her glaring amethyst eyes and rested his human hand on her brow. "It's me," he said, "and you're alive. You can't let the frenzy swallow you now!"

She shuddered, then sang the same words of power Nexus had just spoken, the sound both lovely and full of anguish, or perhaps, supreme effort. Gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, she shrank back into human form. Nexus stepped back and so avoided crushing her.

When she was entirely a woman once more, Kara and Dorn embraced. She started weeping, and so did he. The latter was a sight Pavel had never seen, nor ever expected to.

Dorn and Kara slipped away from the others as soon as they could manage it discreetly. At first, they had better things to do than talk. But afterwards, as they lay twined together wrapped in their cloaks, she explained how she'd survived.

"Maybe I should have guessed," he said, playing with a lock of her moon-blond hair. "After all, I realized you'd discovered something, so maybe I should have wondered if it wasn't you and not Brimstone who woke the magic in the cobbles. But curse it all, I'd just seen you die!"

She smiled. "Did you believe only Jivex and Chatulio could conjure illusions? Perhaps I should be offended." Her levity gave way to a gentler tone: "Truly, I'm sorry my trick deceived you and caused you pain."

"Don't be sorry for something that saved your life! I just wish ... after I watched it happen, nothing meant anything. I wouldn't be here with you now, or alive anywhere, most likely, if Pavel, Will, and even Jivex hadn't looked after me. I'm ashamed of that. You deserve a better man-"

She laid a finger across his lips. "Let's make a pact," she said. "You won't abuse yourself for all your supposed shortcomings, and I won't berate myself for my inability to withstand the Rage."

He smiled. "That sounds all right."

Kara's head turned, and after another moment, Dorn heard what she was hearing: the rhythmic scuffing of footsteps on frozen earth and rock. He'd laid his sword ready to hand, and he gripped the hilt, cast away his makeshift blanket, leaped to his feet, and a.s.sumed his fighting stance.

Carrying the new bow, axe, and harpoon his friends had brought in hopes of finding him alive, Raryn emerged from the darkness to behold his partner poised for combat, except for a total lack of clothing. The dwarf's lips quirked upward behind the s.h.a.ggy white mustache, and Kara giggled.

Dorn gave her a look of mock reproach. "You can see in the dark," he said. "You could have told me who was coming."

"I wanted to," she said, "but, hero that you are, you sprang into action so quickly!"

"Sorry to intrude," Raryn said. "But Firefingers thinks the magic keeping us out of the castle is about to give way. I thought you'd want to be there." He gave them a nod, turned, and tramped back down the slope.

Shivering, Dorn pulled on his garments, and Kara did the same. They kissed once more, then descended the trail until they reached a spot affording a view of the ruined citadel.

To Dorn's eyes, the pile was mostly just a shapeless black ma.s.s in the gloom, but silvery light illuminated the vicinity of the white-walled barbican, and the dragons and smaller folk a.s.sembled there working their magic. Their chanting droned.

Kara studied the scene, then said, "Yes! Nexus and the others are breaking through."

"Then ... we win?" It was wonderful, yet also strange to think that the year-long struggle might conclude so quietly. To realize that, here at the end, after all his battles, he'd likely just stand looking on while dragons and wizards finished the work.

"I think so," Kara said.

6 Nightal, the Year of Rogue Dragons The ferule of his staff thumping on the ground and hard-packed earthen floors, Sammaster prowled through the Cult of the Dragon's newest stronghold, making sure all was as it should be.

He'd masked his withered skull-face with the semblance of life, and eliminated the scent of corruption wafting from his person, but even so, as he encountered his followers, many seemed nervous. Perhaps they feared he'd overheard them grumbling about the dearth of creature comforts, the long hours of arduous labor, or the surly, impatient ingrat.i.tude of the Sacred Ones for whom they toiled.

He actually sympathized with their discontents. Though a lich had little use for such amenities, he certainly recalled how the living craved tasty, plentiful food, warmth, slumber in soft beds, and diversions at the end of a hard day's work. Unfortunately, the cult had hastily built this enclave-a palisade surrounding a collection of low, ramshackle structures with sod roofs-in the hills north of the steppeland called the Ride. Its remoteness from civilization ensured that the conspirators' enemies wouldn't discover and destroy it as they had so many others, but likewise obliged them to endure primitive conditions.

It was the inexorable progress of the Rage, however, that necessitated the lengthy, grueling work shifts. The curse kept waxing stronger, and would soon become so virulent that even Sammaster would no longer be able to suppress it in the minds of individual dragons. He had to produce enough dracoliches to fulfill Maglas's prophecy before that came to pa.s.s, because, lost to derangement, the rest of the chromatics would reject transformation thereafter.

As for the arrogance and sour humor of the reptiles-well, that was dragons for you. They were more magnificent than the very G.o.ds, but could also comport themselves like petulant, malicious, selfish children. It made sense once one realized that the even the oldest were ultimately immature and incomplete. It was only in undeath that they achieved their full potential.

So, when Sammaster caught one of his underlings flagging or shirking, he sought first to lift his spirits. To make him laugh, encourage him with praise, inspire him by describing the glorious world to come, or tempt him with promises of reward. But if such measures failed, he had no choice but resort to threats, and when even those proved insufficient, punishment.

Because the cultists simply had to keep working. Even if they were coming to hate and fear the increasingly erratic creatures to whom they'd pledged their worship. Even if their service had begun to feel like exile and slavery. Even if it turned out that the future held no reward for them but the knowledge that they'd played a part in fulfilling destiny's plan. For ultimately, that fulfillment was the only thing that mattered.

Of course, Sammaster was the person who truly bore the responsibility for creating the Faerun to be, and sometimes, when his spiteful, envious foes thwarted one or another of his schemes, it weighed on him like a yoke of iron. Sometimes his setbacks made him feel pathetically inadequate, and he yearned to pa.s.s the burden to another. But there was no one else, and even if there had been, he actually knew it was his calling that defined and empowered him. Forsake it and his wizardry notwithstanding it, he'd revert to the hapless wretch Mystra, Al.u.s.triel, and so many others had abused and betrayed.

A roar and a crash jolted him from his meditations.

He turned. Knotted together, clawing, biting, and lashing one another with their tails, Chuth, a green drake, and Ssalangan, a white, rolled through the wreckage of the cookhouse. Cultists scurried to distance themselves from the fight. Other wyrms gathered around to watch.

Sammaster supposed it could be worse. The destruction of the kitchen with its ovens, hearth, and larder would pose a hardship to the humans who depended on them, but had the dragons demolished one of the shrines or workshops involved in the Sacred Work, their confrontation could have set the process back by tendays.

As it still might, if he didn't intervene. He flourished his staff and shouted, "Stop!" "Stop!" Magic amplified his voice into an earth-shaking boom. Magic amplified his voice into an earth-shaking boom.

The brawling dragons froze, then slunk apart, off the collapsed cookhouse and the squashed, motionless human bodies visible inside. Once again, the wyrms reminded Sammaster of children. Children caught misbehaving.

"What's this about?" he asked.

Chuth spat, suffusing the air with a noxious, stinging hint of his breath weapon. "This pale little newt claims that he, and the vermin who flew in with him, deserve the right to change before the rest of us."

"Yes," said Ssalangan. "As near as I can make out, you lot have spent the last few months lying around doing nothing. My companions and I performed a vital service. Therefore, we've earned the right to become dracoliches first."

Sammaster wondered again precisely what Ssalangan and the other whites had accomplished, or bungled, during the course of their "vital service." The reptiles claimed they'd finished subjugating the Great Glacier for Iyraclea, losing Zethrindor and several other comrades in the doing, but were vague about the details. Sammaster suspected they were withholding information they thought would displease him.

Such perversity was frustrating, but he hadn't felt he could press too hard. He might be the architect of their destiny, but he was also, in the final a.n.a.lysis, their servant. Besides, a thousand other matters clamored for his attention.

Like this present bit of folly. "We've already decided in what order you drakes will undergo the ritual," he said. "The matter doesn't require further discussion."

"Curse you!" Ssalangan snarled, blood seeping from claw marks on his alabaster neck. "It isn't fair!" Other whites growled and hissed in agreement.

"I beg you to be patient," Sammaster said. "After months of preparation, we're finally ready to begin. I promise that by year's end, you'll all be dracoliches."

"I don't even want to be undead," Ssalangan grumbled, "at least not yet, not for hundreds of years. I'm only doing it because you and these miserable humans swear the frenzy's never going to end. If I thought-"

"What do you perceive when you look inside yourself?" Sammaster said. "The Rage has festered in your mind for an entire year. Is it dwindling, or growing ever stronger?"

The white grunted and turned away, unable to refute the point but also unwilling to concede it. Sammaster smiled to the limited extent that his shriveled countenance was still capable of it, then the world flared a luminous red and tolled like a colossal bell.

Or at least it did for him. No one else appeared to sense anything out of the ordinary, nor was there any reason why they should. He'd created the ward to alert only himself.

"I have to go," he said. "I'll return as soon as I can." He rattled off a charm and thumped the b.u.t.t of his staff on the ground. The world shattered and remade itself in an instant.

As intended, his spell of translocation deposited him behind an arched window in one of the watchtowers overlooking the elven citadel's forward aspect. It was the destruction of his enchantment of twisted s.p.a.ce that had triggered the mystical warning, and the folk in front of the barbican were still congratulating themselves on their success in breaching it.

They hadn't sensed his arrival, nor spotted him framed in the shadowy window, and that gave him a chance to study them. He recognized some of the metallics, like Nexus, Havarlan, and Tamarand, and had he believed that any of his enemies could ever reach this hidden, isolated place, he might have expected to encounter them here. But the rest of the motley band was an astonishment. He could see no sign of the Chosen, Harpers, or deities who'd thwarted him in the past. In their place blathered the mages of Thentia, a potential problem he'd believed he'd neutralized. A hulking warrior with two iron limbs, and a black-winged avariel. A dark wyrm with luminous red eyes-could it actually be Brimstone, who'd turned against him so long ago?

It was maddening, inconceivable, that all they'd all found their way here, through the labyrinth of perils and obfuscations he'd created to prevent it. Fury came shrieking up inside him, directed less at the intruders than at himself, a worthless dunce who'd somehow managed to fail yet again.

But no, it wasn't true. He hadn't failed, not while he himself was the final protection, still in place. He, and the minions sworn to rush to his aid, if ever the ruined castle needed defending.

Down below, his enemies, still oblivious to his presence, started organizing themselves into search parties. It gave him time to armor himself in charms of protection. Then he twisted a tarnished silver ring on his bony finger and whispered a single word.

The night blazed as if the stars were all falling at once.

With a bit of trepidation, Kara began the shift to dragon form. The Rage would grind at her more forcefully in that guise, but she thought she could bear it for as long as it would take to find and destroy the source of the curse, and her draconic prowess might prove useful if Sammaster had left still more guardians or traps inside the castle. Her wings leaped forth from her shoulders, she dropped to all fours, Dorn stepped back to give her expanding body room, then the black sky flared white.

She looked up, at luminous circles like a dozen full moons, and realized they were gates. Serpentine shadows with bat-like wings appeared in the rounds, taking on definition, solidity, even as the portals faded, until the reptiles were wholly present, and the wounds in s.p.a.ce, entirely healed.

In that first moment, she couldn't count the newcomers, though she did perceive that they had the dragons on the ground outnumbered. Nor could she identify the various species in all their diversity, especially since she'd never actually encountered most of them before, merely their descriptions, in books or recitations of esoteric lore.

But she did spot a gigantic h.e.l.lfire wyrm, with bony spikes stabbing up from its head and shoulders, and the color of its scales inconstant, oozing from one shade of yellow or crimson to another as if the creature were made of flowing magma.

Also a howling dragon, long and spindly of body, with deceptively short and delicate-looking limbs. Topaz eyes dotted with minute pupils glared from its mask, and a ruff of spines encircled the back of its head.

Near the howling drake swooped a pyroclastic dragon, ma.s.sively built, its hide a mottled confusion of dark patches mixed with streaks and blotches of fiery red and gold. Its wings were gray and fragile in appearance, like charred parchment.

All were wyrms native to other levels of existence, ones likewise home to fiends, malevolent deities, and the d.a.m.ned. Plainly, Sammaster had compelled or purchased their aid as he had that of his Tarterians and shadow dragons, and arranged for them to appear and attack if intruders unsealed the castle.

And they attacked with all the advantages of height and surprise. Commencing a battle anthem, Kara lashed her wings and sprang into the air. With a great clatter of pinions, her rogues, and the drakes who had eventually made common cause with them, followed after her.

Even as they took flight, Nexus and some of the others rattled off incantations. Celedon, Drigor, and the spellcasters of Thentia did the same. Floating shields and barriers of congealed light shimmered into existence between Sammaster's minions and their intended prey.

But not enough of them, not in time. As they dived, the lich's sentinels spat a dazzling, shrieking a.s.sortment of breath weapons, blasts of flame, lightning, and hammering sound that crisscrossed and overlapped as they hurtled down. The attacks found the gaps in the defensive enchantments and would surely have killed folk on the ground if some of the metallics hadn't deliberately placed themselves in the way. Wardancer stretched her wings wide to catch every bit of a pale burst of frost. It coated her dorsal surface in rime and made her wobble spastically in flight.

But she survived. Everyone in Kara's field of vision survived, and it was time to strike back. Wheeling, she spotted a chaos dragon-changing color repeatedly like a chameleon, only fast as the beat of a panicked heart, even the shape of its body in constant flux-within reach.