Whisper of Venom

Khouryn feinted a step to the right, then whirled and raced left, straight at a warrior with silvery scales. The reptile thrust with his practice spear. Khouryn dodged and then he was inside the reach of the weapon, where it was more or less useless.

The dragonborn tried to clout him with his oval shield. He had good technique, but Khouryn was expecting the attack and evaded it as well. He stepped up beside the warrior and clubbed him in the knee, using almost enough strength to break it.

The silver-scaled saurian fell onto both knees. By then his comrades were rushing in, but his body shielded Khouryn for a heartbeat. Long enough to bash him in the head, make his steel and leather helmet-fashioned with holes so his crest of thick, scaly tendrils like braided hair could flop out the back-clank, and lay him out in the trodden muck and the new spring grass.

Khouryn scuttled backward. His foot slipped, and a spear thrust nearly cost him some teeth. He whirled his baton in a circular parry and slapped the attack out of line less than a finger-length from his mouth.

By the time he felt sure of his balance, he had his opponents’ patterns and rhythms too. When they both jabbed, missed, and pulled their spears back at the same moment, he charged between them. When they tried to follow the motion and keep their long weapons pointed at him, they more or less tangled together.

Dragonborn were big, but they weren’t ogres. Khouryn had no trouble stabbing the one with the dark green scales in the throat with the end of his club. Once again he was careful not to kill. The warrior just reeled, dropped his spear, and clutched his neck while making choking sounds.

Hoping to end the fight, Khouryn rounded on his remaining opponent, only to find that the Linxakasendalor had been too quick. He’d retreated, taking himself beyond Khouryn’s reach and reestablishing the proper distance to use his spear.

He wasn’t attacking though. Maybe Khouryn had thrown a scare into him-although given that he was a dragonborn, it was more likely he was simply taking his time.

Hoping to goad him into doing something reckless, Khouryn gri

It worked a little too well. The Linxakasendalor’s face twisted, and he sucked in a breath. He meant to spit frost, fire, or something equally unpleasant, a trick the dragonborn shared with actual wyrms.

And here was Khouryn without a shield to block the spew. He hadn’t appropriated one because he wanted to impress, and fighting with only the baton was impressive. Right up until the moment he got frozen solid or burned to cinders.

The Linxakasendalor’s head jerked forward, and his jaws opened. Pearly frost streamed out.

Khouryn dodged left. The edge of the jet still gave him a chill, but nothing worse. He rushed the Linxakasendalor, knocked his spear out of line, and rammed the end of the baton into his gut. The dragonborn grunted and doubled over. The involuntary movement brought his head within easy reach. Khouryn hit him in the temple, and that was that.

Controlling his breathing-the win was supposed to look easy, after all-Khouryn turned, surveyed the rest of the troops, and judged that he had indeed impressed them.

“You see?” he asked. “That’s how a small fighter-and we’re all of us small compared to ash giants-turns his size to his advantage. That’s part of what I’m trying to teach you. Now, somebody clear these fools out of the way until they’re ready to resume the training. I want to see the rest of you fight the Beast. Move!”

The Beast was a big, drum-shaped, timber shell that one of the vanquisher’s wizards had enchanted to Khouryn’s specifications. When someone touched one of the small runes carved on the sides, it floated up and flew around three feet off the ground. The object then was to jab a rune with a spear point and render the contraption inanimate again.

The game was difficult because the Beast spun and changed direction unpredictably. And if a person didn’t fall back smartly when it lurched in his direction, it gave him an unpleasant bump. The point was to teach warriors how to assail a large adversary when its back was turned, then scramble out of reach when it turned in their direction.

Khouryn watched for a while and was pleased to see that at least some of the trainees were getting the hang of it. Then hoof beats thumped the earth. He turned to see Daardendrien Medrash trotting toward him astride a big, black mare.

Big and powerfully built even by dragonborn standards, Medrash had russet scales and bore the six white studs of Clan Daardendrien pierced into his left profile. He was an oddity among his people, a worshiper of one of Faerun’s gods. In fact, he was a paladin of Torm-a champion whose rapport with the Loyal Fury granted him certain mystical abilities.

Behind him, Djerad Thymar rose from the grasslands against a blue sky striped with wisps of white cloud. It was the strangest and most impressive city Khouryn had ever seen in a life of wandering, because it was all one colossal structure. The base was an immense block of granite. On top of that sat hundreds of pillars supporting a truncated pyramid.

Specks soared and swooped around the apex. The aerial cavalry called the Lance Defenders were coming and going on various errands. Their mounts were enormous bats, nocturnal by nature but capable of daytime service, and, seeing them, Khouryn felt a pang of sadness. He still missed Vigilant, his own winged steed, killed by a topaz dragon on the trek south from Luthcheq.

Medrash swung himself off the mare. “How is it going?” he asked.

Khouryn waved a hand at the training exercise. “See for yourself. I had to thump a couple of them to get this batch to take me seriously.”

Medrash smiled. “I know how you fight well, but eventually that ploy is going to turn around and bite you.”

“We’ll see.”

“I’m just saying they know how to fight too. All dragonborn do. Some of them have already served a year or two with the Lance Defenders.”

“I know. That’s why I only called out three of them. Ordinarily it’s four. Now tell me about the horses.”

“We’ve selected the most spirited and the steadiest. The riding masters tell me there’s no way to train them naturally in the time we have. But after conferring with the mages, they grudgingly agreed that if an animal carries the proper talismans of courage and obedience, it might do what you want it to.”

“ ‘Grudgingly’?”

“They love horses. They don’t want to see them get anywhere near the giants or those lizard things they conjure out of the ash.”

“I don’t blame them. But we need lancers on horseback as well as batback.”

That too would be an i

“We’ll have a few,” Medrash said. “Let’s hope they’re enough to make our troops look as impressive as the Platinum Cadre’s.”

“And that Balasar learns something that will discredit the Cadre in any case.”

Across the field, the trainees raised a cheer as someone finally managed to thump a rune and make the Beast drift back down to the ground.

Jhesrhi Coldcreek loved flying, and never more than today. It was exhilarating to see the buildings and tangled streets of Luthcheq laid out before her and hear the cheers and hymns of thanksgiving rising from the folk crowding the streets, hanging out the windows, and gathered on the rooftops.

Not, of course, that the cheers were for her. They were for Tchazzar. His scaly crimson wings shining in the sunlight, the red dragon was returning to the city he’d ruled a century before. His long-tailed shadow swept along beneath him, and the griffon riders with whom he shared the sky looked tiny by comparison, like hummingbirds escorting an eagle.