Whisper of Venom

She gave a brusque nod to the wyrmkeeper, then turned and stalked away. Stepping over pegs and rope, she stopped in the narrow, shadowy gap between two humbler tents and pondered what to do next.

Earlier, Tchazzar’s offer had so flummoxed her that she’d forgotten that she had, in fact, agreed to spy on him if circumstances warranted. As they seemingly did now.

But since she’d agreed to serve him as her true liege lord, would it be wicked to follow through? One thing was certain-it would be dangerous. A dragon might sense magic at play around him.

Yet she found that her loyalty to Aoth, Gaedy

She whispered to the air. A cooperative breeze could carry sounds if they originated only a short distance away. And she’d been making friends with the winds thereabouts since Aoth, Tchazzar, and the other captains had selected the land for their battleground.

The cool breeze caressed her face and stirred strands of her hair, and then she heard Tchazzar like he was murmuring in her ear. He chanted sibilant, rhyming words in Draconic, meant to activate some enchanted object. The words were unfamiliar, but she recognized similarities to the charm that enabled her and Aoth to speak through a pair of fires despite whatever distance lay between them.

The incantation ended with three staccato syllables like raps from a hammer. A moment of silence followed. Then a new voice said, “Tchazzar.” Jhesrhi suspected from its depth and sibilant snarl that it too belonged to a dragon, one in his natural form.

“Skuthosiin,” Tchazzar answered. “Alasklerbanbastos has crawled out of his hole to attack me, and Jaxanaedegor is eager to betray him. This is our moment. Come north and help me make the kill.”

“I can’t,” Skuthosiin said. “My agents in Djerad Thymar failed me. If I’m to rule the south, I’ll have to win my crown in open battle. In fact, I came to this talk hoping you’d help me.”

“Forget the south for now!” Tchazzar said. “I’m offering you your chance at the Great Bone Wyrm!”

“Even if I were willing to forgo Unther,” Skuthosiin said, “the dragonborn have to change or die. Otherwise, their enmity will get in the way of every move we make. Ask Gestaniius to help you.”

“He’s on the other side of the Dragonsword Mountains. He wouldn’t arrive in time,” Tchazzar said. “Curse it, green, the three of us are allies. You owe me your help.”

“What about the help I already gave?” Skuthosiin said. “If not for me, your sellswords would never have come to Chessenta. Nor would they have searched for you in the Sky Riders.”

“A search you waited one hundred years to initiate!” Tchazzar said.

“A search for a false friend who killed and devoured me for my power,” Skuthosiin said.

“It was the Dark Lady’s will that we three fight for supremacy,” Tchazzar said. “I knew she’d bring you back to life.”

Skuthosiin laughed a rumbling laugh. “You neither knew nor cared, and I don’t blame you. I was trying to do the same thing to you and Gestaniius. But let’s not pretend there are any great bonds of fellowship between us. My proxies fetched you back because I hoped you’d prove useful.”

“I’m far more than useful,” Tchazzar said, his voice grating. “I’m the Chosen of Tiamat, and a god in my own right!”

“Then you shouldn’t need help to squash the occasional dracolich.”

A long pause followed. Jhesrhi imagined Tchazzar glaring and trembling with the futile urge to strike out at a creature hundreds of miles beyond his reach.

“I promise you,” the red dragon said at last, “you’ll have your new Unther, and the dragonborn will die. But first you have to help me.”

“I already explained why that’s impossible.”

“Then in accordance with the Sixty-Seventh Precept, I cut you off. You won’t have an inch of Alasklerbanbastos’s lands or one clipped copper from his hoard.”

“You can’t do that. The One Hundred and Seventh Precept-”

After a moment, Jhesrhi inferred that Tchazzar had ended the spell of communication, because there was nothing to hear but thumps and clacks. Evidently the war hero was kicking his camp furniture around.

She tried to make sense of the conversation that had triggered his frustration. It was like the parley with Jaxanaedegor; much of the import was maddeningly opaque.

But she understood that Skuthosiin and possibly other wyrms meant to exterminate the dragonborn, and it didn’t matter that Aoth and Cera had proved the Tymantherans i

Tchazzar, to whom she’d pledged her absolute fidelity.

TWELVE

28 KYTHORN -5 FLAMERULE T HE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

Summer had come, and, as Khouryn had observed on the march southwest, Tymanther was blooming. Trees were full of green leaves and singing birds; pastures of grass and the sheep, goats, and cattle grazing there; and fields of oats and barley. In contrast, Black Ash Plain had simply gotten nastier. The hot air was smokier, and some of the cinders adrift on it were stinging hot.

I don’t blame the giants for wanting to steal somebody else’s country, he thought. I wouldn’t want to live here either.

He wondered how they even managed to live in the midst of such desolation, then dismissed the question as irrelevant. His concern was to make sure that a goodly number of them didn’t live much longer. To that end, he took another look at the ash drifts and cracked, rocky soil to either side of the column.

Towers of ash glided in the distance, somewhat like ships under sail except that they moved independently of the wind. Then suddenly a gray-black bump bobbed up and then back down out of sight behind one of the true cinder dunes, if that was the right term for them. They were drifts big as hills, and a fellow could climb them like hills until he set his foot wrong. Then the ash would swallow him like quicksand.

Despite the haze in the air, and the smarting blur in his eyes, Khouryn knew he’d just seen a giant skirmisher. He drew breath to shout an alert, but one of the dragonborn marching under the ba

So instead Khouryn shouted, “Form up! Protect yourselves!” He was sure there were only a few giants lurking on their flank, or somebody would have spotted one before then. Since they were too few to pose a serious threat, their purpose was to slow the advance, giving the bulk of Skuthosiin’s army more time to prepare. By halting and covering up with their shields, the Tymantherans were essentially giving them what they wanted. But they had to do something to keep the barbarians from picking them off one and two at a time.

Five giants popped up, and their long arms whipped. They didn’t throw spears or any other sort of crafted weapon. They must have been hoarding those for the true battle to come. But they were an offshoot of the race called stone giants and, like others of their kind, could fling rocks with deadly force and accuracy.

The impacts cracked and banged. One dragonborn fell down. But no stones streaked past shields to hammer the bodies behind them.

The barbarians ducked back down. Several crossbows clacked, an instant too late to have any hope of hitting their targets.

A female voice chanted words that sent a pang of chill stabbing through the hot air.

Khouryn turned. Several paces to his left, Kanjentellequor Biri, the albino wizard who’d unraveled the deeper secrets of Nala’s papers, had somehow prevailed on two spearmen to open a gap in the shield wall. Where she stood, inviting another stone as she rattled off her incantation and flicked a rod of roughly hewn and polished quartz through small, repetitive downstrokes.