He looked for Jivex, and felt a pang of horror to see that the faerie dragon, still attached to the golem's back, had become a shape of gray granite like his foe. Then, however, Jivex too shook off the petrifactive effect, his scales shimmering as he became living flesh once more. The construct struck at him, and he dodged. Its fangs clashed as they snapped shut on empty air.

Taegan cut at it and said, "Back!" He and Jivex wheeled and joined the battle line Drigor, Celedon, Sureene, and Will had formed to block the way into the heart of the Rage. Firefingers, Scattercloak, and Darvin stood behind them.

His hands a blur, Will slung skiprock after skiprock at the golems as they clambered up out of the shattered floor. "Can't somebody just sink them down to the bottom again?" he asked.

"I'm afraid not," said Firefingers. "We don't have any more of those spells ready for the casting."

"Of course you don't," the halfing said. "Here they come!" He tucked his warsling back in his belt and whipped his hornblade from its scabbard.

The golems finished their scramble up to the surface and found their footing atop the shifting rubble. Jivex conjured a troop of flying pixies to hover in front of them and jab at them with their spears, but the illusion didn't balk them. Without hesitation, they charged right through it.

That left the matter up to sword, mace, warhammer, tooth, and claw, with the wizards aiding the folk on the front line as best they could. Firefingers made the iron golem's flaming breath arc harmlessly up at the ceiling, and Scattercloak created floating shields and blasts of wind to keep the stone drake's exhalations from reaching their targets. Darvin placed one glowing wall after another in the statues' way. The barriers dissolved the moment the constructs touched them. But perhaps they slowed them down a trifle and kept them from overrunning their foes by dint of sheer bulk and momentum.

Yet the golems steadily gained ground, for all that their foes contested every inch of it. Taegan cut, ducked, slashed, and sidestepped. Jivex raked at the stone dragon's luminous eye and hurtled on, narrowly evading a snap of its jaws, then a slap of its wing. Will darted under the iron wyrm, stabbed, and darted out before it could stamp on him.

Then huge iron claws flashed out and tore Drigor's head from his shoulders. His body fell with a clank of armor.

Several heartbeats later, the stone golem's tail whipped around at Celedon. The half-elf leaped back and parried, and the combination was enough to save his life. The blow, however, snapped his sword in two. He cursed, tossed it away and s.n.a.t.c.hed a dagger from his boot.

The iron wyrm raked at Sureene. The stroke failed to penetrate her mail, but it knocked her reeling, and afterward, her right arm dangled uselessly. Her comely face ashen, she shifted her mace to her off hand and advanced once more.

It was obvious to Taegan that he and his remaining comrades couldn't resist much longer. In all likelihood, they were going to die within the next few breaths, as a legion of avariels had perished in this place millennia before.

So be it. But only if their lives purchased a comparable victory. Come, on, Pavel, do it! he thought, even as he lunged at the stone wyrm's head.

Cloaked in a shimmering, multi-layered aura of protection, Pavel sprinted halfway across the vault before he started suffering ill-effects from the h.e.l.lfire contaminating the air. Then, however, a bluish flare swept over him, and agony stabbed through his body. He lost his balance, collapsed convulsing, and blacked out.

He woke to the clangor of steel bashing iron and stone. Thank the Morninglord, he'd only lost consciousness for a little while. His friends were still fighting to protect them. He just hoped he was still capable of an effort worth defending.

For his throbbing tongue was raw where he'd chewed it, and his mouth tasted of blood. Worse than that, his entire body had a sickening, pulsing wrongness to it. He could feel ma.s.ses swelling inside his flesh, like tumors or parasites growing.

He considered trying to heal himself. But even if it worked, the h.e.l.lfire would simply poison him anew, and in any case, he couldn't spare the time. The golems might break through Will and the others at any moment.

He groped around, found his mace and Sureene's scroll, and clambered to his feet. The world tilted and spun, and he nearly fell again. He took a breath, and the vertigo partially subsided. He limped onward.

h.e.l.lfire snaked and crackled, and he was too weak and dizzy even to try to avoid the streamers anymore. They seared him, stabbed him, staggered him, and the nodules inside his body pounded like extra hearts at their touch. But they failed to knock him down as the blue one had. Perhaps Lathander was holding him up.

He hobbled the last few steps to the phylactery, and reckoning that one ought to try the simple and obvious first, bashed it with his mace. But the blow neither damaged the black pendant nor jolted it out of position.

It would have to be magic, then. He took his own amulet from around his neck and gripped it and the phylactery together in his hand. He called his deity's name, drew a blaze of purifying dawnlight from the sun symbol, and read the first trigger phrase on the parchment.

Nothing happened, and so he repeated the process.

Sammaster exulted in the impotence and degradation of his foes. He snarled an incantation, and hail hammered the two sisters. It didn't kill them, but it left them b.l.o.o.d.y and dazed, crawling on the ground like the vermin they were. A flick of his tail shattered a copper's skull. His gaze paralyzed a bra.s.s, and the "n.o.ble" metallic plummeted out of the sky.

It was glorious. Until he felt a blaze of pain. It was an insult less to the body than the spirit, and for all his erudition and long and varied experience, he'd never felt anything like it before. Yet he knew what it meant.

Some power was attacking his phylactery. Belatedly, he remembered the foes who'd run into the barbican. Repeatedly distracted, he'd never verified that Gjellani had actually disposed of them, and certainly hadn't sent any more wyrms to a.s.sist with the job. He could only a.s.sume that the wretches had somehow survived and made it all the way to the source of the Rage.

Bungler! Idiot! Playing games out here when the only thing that truly mattered was in jeopardy!

But he could still salvage the situation. All he had to do was recite the proper incantation to translate himself to the mythal. He growled the first word.

Intent on Sammaster, Dorn had momentarily lost track of Kara, but heard her cry, "Don't let him finish that spell!" Then, wings furled, she plummeted down on top of the lich and drove her talons into his spine.

Huge as she was in dragon form, she was small compared to the t.i.tanic shape Sammaster had adopted, and even her ferocious a.s.sault didn't make his recitation falter. Without missing a beat, he twisted his head around, caught her in his jaws, yanked her off him, and slammed her to the ground, where she lay unmoving.

Brimstone pounced on the lich, rending rotten, shriveled flesh with his oversized fangs. That injury did make Sammaster's recitation falter, and dead eyes glaring, he seized hold of Brimstone's collar in his foreclaws and roared a different word of power. The choker broke apart, the jeweled fragments melting even as they dropped, and the vampire dissolved along with them. For a moment, he endured as a swirl of smoke and embers, then vanished utterly.

Sammaster raised and swiveled his head, spewing fire. The blaze seared some of the metallics diving at him and forced others to veer off. Then, floating, still burning, it split and shaped itself into half a dozen bright, draconic shapes that lashed their wings and flew at one or another of his foes.

Evidently confident that none of his enemies in the air would be able to balk him, Sammaster again began the spell that had so alarmed Kara.

By that time, Dorn and Raryn had covered most of the distance to their adversary. Running on two good legs, even if they were short ones, the dwarf reached the lich first. He drove his ice-axe into Sammaster's hind leg.

Sammaster plainly perceived the stroke, because he retaliated by picking up his foot and trying to stamp on Raryn, who scrambled out from underneath. But the pain, if, in fact, that was what the mad creature felt, was insufficient to disrupt his conjuring.

Dorn rushed in cutting, ducking and dodging huge, raking talons, the sweeping, pounding tail, and hammering wings. It was insane. In his present form, Sammaster was so big that the hunters couldn't even reach his body, only his extremities, and obviously, no crippled hunter could expect to last more than heartbeat against such a fearsome quarry.

Don't think about it! Just hit and move, hit and move.

The tempo of the spell accelerated toward its conclusion. Dorn invited a strike to give himself the chance to cut at whatever part of Sammaster came hurtling at him. It turned out to be a gigantic, withered forefoot. He twisted aside, and felt the remains of his iron leg buckle. As he cut, turning his whole body into the blow, the prosthesis broke apart.

But his blade still plunged deep into the corpse-thing's limb, cleaving flesh and smashing bone. Sammaster shrieked, finally botching his incantation. As he fell, Dorn resolved to cherish the memory of that scream even as the lich tore him apart.

Pavel had read the trigger phrase four times, to no effect. But on the fifth try, the phylactery shuddered in his grip like a frenzied animal struggling to escape, then crumbled into grit and soft, tiny fragments. Their terminus lost, the flares of h.e.l.lfire leaped wildly around the chamber, until the miniature portals from which they sprang exploded in a stuttering series of blasts, leaving only ragged craters in the walls.

That's it, thought Pavel. It has to be. He wanted to rejoice, but felt too sick and weary.

Besides, it wasn't entirely over. The destruction of the mythal hadn't deterred the golems. They were still striving to kill the trespa.s.sers as fiercely as before.

Pavel hefted his mace and moved to help his comrades. But as soon as he took a step, his strength failed, and he fell down vomiting blood.

Dorn looked up expecting to see the stroke that would kill him. But Sammaster wasn't moving. Or rather, he was standing in place trembling, while Raryn chopped at his leg.

A shaft of red-gold light punched a hole in Sammaster's flank from the inside. Another beam burst forth, and another, erupting from every part of his body and in all directions, until the hideous shape of rot and bone was nearly lost inside a blaze like the rising sun. The lich lifted his head and screamed, then toppled.

Right at Dorn, and even riddled with holes, there was still plenty of corpse left to squash a human. Knowing it was hopeless, he nonetheless tried to crawl, and a pair of fanged jaws s.n.a.t.c.hed him up. Leaping, Kara whisked him out from under the plummeting ma.s.s.

Dorn's eyes ached as if he was going to cry. "Sammaster didn't kill you," he said. "You're alive."

She set him gently on the ground. "Better than that," she said, "I'm sane."

Will slashed at the stone dragon, and the hornblade glanced off without biting. Small wonder. In time, hammering on iron and granite dulled even an enchanted sword.

He twisted away from a talon strike. Tried to riposte but found himself too slow. He was tired, gasping, his weapon heavy in his grip, and everyone else was in the same sorry condition. The end would come quickly.

Then, abruptly, Scattercloak said, in a voice still so devoid of emotion that it took a moment for the words to register: "We've won. Fall back, gather round, and I'll translate us away."

Of necessity, Will had been focused on the enemy. Still, it seemed astonishing, unreal, that after a year of striving, Pavel had succeeded in quelling the Rage without him even noticing. As he and his surviving comrades retreated, the golems pursuing, he risked a glance to make sure his friend was hurrying to join the rest of them.

He wasn't. Instead, he lay on his belly in the center of the golden pentacle with blood around his head.

"Get up, weakling!" Will cried.

"Can't," Pavel croaked. He had gore all over his chin, too. "Finished. Worth it to be rid of you. Get out."

"Not without you!" Will scrambled toward him.

"Taegan!" said Pavel. "Stop him!"

The avariel grabbed Will and hauled him back. As he struggled to free himself, he glimpsed huge plunging shapes, leaping flame and gray vapor, the golems driving forward in a final irresistible onslaught. Then they vanished into flash and blur.

As far as Nexus was concerned, Tamarand had proved himself as brilliant a captain as Lareth. Under his leadership, the metallics had performed miracles. But sometimes even miracles were insufficient, and as their comrades plummeted from the sky, or spiraled down too sorely wounded to continue fighting, he feared this was one of them.

Then something flashed far below him on the ground. In a battle fought with sorcery and dragon breath, plenty of things blazed and flared, and he didn't know what impelled him to attend to this one. Yet he looked down just in time to witness Sammaster's demise.

Nexus started roaring out the most potent spell of banishment in his repertoire. He'd attempted it twice already without success, but with Sammaster gone, and the power of the enchantments the lich had conjured perhaps attenuated, it was worth another try.

A chaos dragon spat acid at him. A howling drake battered him with its shriek. Refusing to let the punishment balk him, he declaimed the final words of the incantation.

All across the sky, and all at once, the otherworldly dragons disappeared, cast back to the infernal realms from which their master had drawn them.

8-27 Nightal, the Year of Rogue Dragons Grigel Ragenev dripped viscous amber poison from a gla.s.s pipette into the brew simmering in the vessel below. The task required steady hands and total concentration. The mixture had to be precise, and what made it more difficult still was that, magic being a somewhat chaotic process, one couldn't know beforehand the exact proportions, or at which moments another droplet needed to go in. a.s.sessing the shifting colors of the elixir and the inconstant smell of the fumes, the alchemist had to make judgments as he went along.

At his back, something crashed. It startled him, his hand shook, and venom plopped into the brew. A puff of sulfurous yellow vapor revealed that the mix and thus a tenday's work were ruined.

Grigel lurched around on his stool to berate the fool who'd made the noise, but what he saw curdled his fury into anxiety. It was Ssalangan who'd knocked down the crudely made door of the hut, and who crouched glaring through the opening.

"Where," growled the white, "is Sammaster?"

"I don't know," Grigel said, his voice a little shrill. "He left without telling anyone where he was going. I'm sure he'll return as soon as he can."

"Don't count on it," Ssalangan said. "We dragons believe he fled and left you slaves behind to suffer our displeasure. As you will. But we'll hunt him down and punish him, too. We have enough displeasure to go around."

"What are you talking about?"

"The Rage, of course. It faded from our minds two days ago, but we waited to be sure it was really gone. It is. Even though you thralls swore it would never end on its own. You lied to scare us into accepting the transformation."

"No!" Grigel said. "If what you're saying is true, the First-Speaker deceived us cultists as well."

Ssalangan sneered. "I think I may actually believe you. But it doesn't matter. I'm in a bad mood, and hungry, too."

The white lunged forward, and since the doorway was merely human-sized, the wall shattered to accommodate him. Elsewhere in the compound, wyrms roared, and their worshipers screamed.

Keeping a wary eye out for ghost dragons and other hazards, Tamarand, Nexus, Azhaq, and others collected stones to build their fallen comrades' cairns. Magic would have facilitated the task, but it felt proper to toil at it with wing and claw.

Tamarand tore at a mountainside, struggling to rip out another chunk of granite. The Tarterians had fed here and so weakened the stone, but it resisted him nonetheless. Nexus set down to a.s.sist him.

"It was a great victory," the wizard said. "We mourn the fallen, but it's permissible to celebrate as well."

Tamarand grunted.

"In fact," Nexus persisted, "it was a victory worthy of a king."

"I told you already, I won't be King of Justice."

"Because you won't forgive yourself for Lareth's death. But you needed to kill him to save our entire race, perhaps all of Faerun, and save it we did."

"That doesn't excuse treachery."

"I say it does, and it also proves the benefits of leadership."

"Lareth's leadership would have doomed us all if Karasendrieth and her rogues hadn't defied him."

Nexus sighed, warming the chill arctic air and suffusing it with a scent like incense. "Sky and stone, you're stubborn. Just think about it, will you?"

Tamarand hesitated. "I'll think about it."

As Azhaq piled rocks atop Havarlan's body, he noticed the new scars on his legs and feet. They were as plentiful as the old ones crisscrossing the female's hide.

Though many folk considered him arrogant, even by dragon standards, he wasn't vain enough to imagine he'd grown to be Havarlan's equal. But perhaps he was silver enough to keep her dream from dying with her. To see to it that, in one form or another, the Talons of Justice lived on.

Kara reflected that in a sense, their great endeavor had begun in an inn, and it was ending the same way. This room, however, was a private one rented for the occasion, and free of wererats.