Azure Bonds Read online

  Akabar wore one of the lizard’s shirts and the makeshift kilt the halfling had fastened together out of her own cloaks. Olive wore a bright yellow cloak and looked, seated on the dragon’s head like a flashy helmet.

  When Olive had shouted a warning and they’d first beheld the Abomination, the monster-god was deep in the heart of the Elven Wood and still moving, albeit slowly. It had grown considerably though. The midden mound that had exploded out of its Yulash prison now stood seventy or more feet in height—a hill towering over all but the most ancient gnarled oaks and duskwoods.

  Its composition had changed as well. Human rot no longer figured prominently in its make-up. Instead, huge trees and crushed shrubbery were rolled into the hill. It still had an oozy, wet appearance, but now the ooze came from extruded sap and damp underbrush.

  The mound seemed to become aware of them as soon as they spotted it, for it began to speed up.

  Mist circled from a safe distance. The forward edge of the moving hill was a sharp angle, literally plowing its way through the forest.

  As they flew toward the front of the Abomination, a volley of black-barked trees shot out from the hill, trailing long streamers of vines. The god was trying the same tricks as before, only now he was using fifty-foot duskwoods instead of zombie soldiers to weight his snare vines.

  The larger size of the missiles and the redundancy of the attack made it easy for Mist to dodge the assault. The catapulted trees fell in the tangle of woods, smashing down other trees and carving huge divots where they landed.

  “Any sign of Alias?” Akabar shouted to Dragonbait.

  The saurial shook his head. Just as Akabar suspected. If Alias was in the mess, she was probably well hidden beneath the surface, something they had discussed before they left camp, with Mist translating.

  The dragon continued to circle Moander without attacking. The mound fired another volley of tree missiles. Once again, Mist dodged them with ease, until a particularly large one passed in front of her face. She pulled up suddenly, as if alarmed, and plummeted toward the ground. Moander lost sight of her behind the tree line.

  Moander chuckled with the arrogance of a god. It might have considered telling Alias of the failure of her friends if only it had not bragged of killing them earlier. It trained some of its eyes in the direction the dragon had gone down, while it continued its crawling march south. Myth Drannor, and the powers held within, awaited it.

  Dragonbait exchanged positions with the halfling and sat on Mist’s head. He kept the party waiting in the clearing where Mist had landed for a quarter of an hour. The lizard could sense the distance between them and the evil god. When he gave the signal, Mist rose and, skimming low over the trees, circled away until she had reached the tree break Moander had left behind. Along this trail she made her attack run, moving in on the god’s rear.

  “They’re going to have to call this ‘Moander’s Road,’ ” Olive shouted to the mage as she took in the devastation.

  Akabar nodded wordlessly, awed by the destruction around them. Moander apparently no longer needed to absorb more bulk; it just plowed up the great trees, pushing them aside and leaving them to die on the forest floor, half buried by the great mounds of dirt it also overturned.

  The dragon flew on unfazed by the rape of the Elven Wood. She kept her eyes forward, ignoring the great trench beneath her and the shattered trees at her flanks.

  The mage closed his eyes, trying to shut out the sound of the heavy wings beating, the rush of air on his face, and the rise and fall of the dragon’s back as she flew. He concentrated on his magic.

  Olive nudged him and pointed. Akabar opened his eyes. Mist was less than twenty yards from Moander. No duskwood bombards fired from the hill. The god was oblivious to the dragon’s proximity. Akabar allowed himself a brief smile when he spied the mass of duskwood trees and deadwood woven into the Abomination’s mass, the perfect materials for their plans. His spell was prepared; he awaited only Dragonbait’s signal.

  The lizard waved, and Mist rose above the hill, spouting a long, heavy stream of fire as she did so. Like an assassin’s knife, flames ripped into the greenery where the creature’s spine would be if it had one. Moander screamed just as Akabar triggered his pyrotechnic spell. The red streams of the dragon’s breath exploded in a further cavalcade of twisting yellows, spiraling oranges, and lancing azure blues. In the process of transforming the dragon’s fiery breath to explosive fireworks, Akabar’s spell snuffed the upper flames issuing from her maw, but the fireworks pierced deeper into the heart of the hill.

  New shoots cropped up immediately to cover the scarred area, but Mist was not through. As soon as she crested the top of the hill, she twisted and spun about, her passengers tied and braced. As she dropped along the back of the hill, she breathed again, sending more flames into the open wound she had carved.

  Though his stomach had risen to his throat when he’d momentarily hung upside down, the mage did not lose his focus. Another pyrotechnic spell speared the god.

  Moander burned. The hill, now composed more of harvested wood than refuse and slime, blazed. Even better, Ruskettle and Akabar could spot great flames shooting up through the coarse outer mesh of trees and brush, flames that originated nearer the heart of the monster.

  In her plant prison, Alias felt the air grow stuffy. The walls began to weep thick, yellowish tears through the moss. She rose to her feet, but was knocked back to the ground by a sudden sideways jerk of her enclosure. It seemed as if Moander had decided to move her prison.

  Moander halted and flattened out in an effort to draw more material into its mass, perhaps in an effort to smother the flames. But as the halfling had noted to Akabar the evening before, the forest was quite dry. Whatever the god drew into itself just fed the fires more. And the duskwoods were renowned for their fine burning resins.

  Next the Abomination tried to contain the fire by creating a firebreak in its body, splitting itself in two and leaving half of its mass behind. The pyrotechnics had done their job, though. The fire was everywhere; there was no escape from it. Flames curled out of the heart of the moving half of the hill and, like a fire that’s just been stirred, the blaze leaped higher and burned hotter.

  Mist had retreated, circling high overhead to evade any return attacks, but when none seemed forthcoming, she swooped back to administer the final blow. Akabar felt the dragon’s chest swell with a mighty intake of air.

  Before Mist had a chance to exhale, though, the top of Moander popped off like a cork in a bottle. Startled, Mist pulled up sharply, wary of some new type of attack. A pod twice the size of the dragon, but less than a tenth the size of the god before they’d attacked it, shot out from the hill. Egg-shaped, the missile tumbled end over end as it rose into the air. At the zenith of its flight it righted itself and then swept southeastward in a blur of movement.

  “Gold lions will get you good lunch that our woman is in that thing,” Olive shouted.

  Akabar nodded. “Along with whatever passes for the consciousness of Moander.”

  Dragonbait gave the dragon a sharp prod, and Mist took off after the pod.

  Behind them on the ground below, the burning pile of trees that had once been the Abomination of Moander spewed out a black column of smoke high enough to be spotted in Shadowdale, Hillsfar, and Yulash.

  Mist began to strain, flapping her wings faster to keep pace with the escape pod. Akabar concentrated, then barked the harsh syllables of another spell and pressed his hands against the back of the dragon. Summoned energies flowed from his hands into the great wyrm.

  Mist lunged forward at twice the speed. Her wings beat the air as gracefully and as quickly as a bird’s. The ground blurred in their vision, and they began closing the distance between them and the pod.

  “What did you do?” Olive gasped, her words torn from her mouth by the wind.

  “Haste,” Akabar explained. “Dangerous for humans—ages them a year. Can’t hurt this creature, though. She sleeps longer than that
after a meal.”

  * * * * *

  Moander spoke again to Alias, but now with just a bass voice, rumbling against a garbling background chatter that was almost unintelligible.

  “Flying,” he said after a garble. “Life energies low. Must gate.” Another long garble, then the bass voice surfaced. “Prepare for transport. Damaged goods.”

  The last phrase struck Alias as something that Akabar might say, and she fancied that some part of the mage’s mind must have entered into Moander’s being and not just the other way around. Perhaps it was the mage’s spirit warning her to keep herself safe. The further deterioration of Moander’s communication skills gave her a burst of hope. Things apparently weren’t going well for the god. Maybe an army had attacked it, or a horde of powerful adventurers.

  The circular shell of her prison wall began to shrink. Mouths surfaced all over the walls. Alias feared that Moander had decided to eat her rather than see her rescued, but the walls began to spit out streams of thick, moist silken strands. She was being cocooned.

  Instinctively, she tried to beat back the rising mass, afraid it would suffocate her. Would her “masters” find a way to make her breathe again, she wondered. She was soon overwhelmed by the fiber. Covered from head to toe, she could still breathe through the wrapping, but the air was stuffy, and she felt as though she’d been buried alive.

  The egg-shaped pod flattened till it looked more like a giant pumpkin seed. It tore through the sky. Along its trailing edge, half a hundred eyes opened at once to watch the advancing dragon. Moander had husbanded its energies carefully. But either the god had miscalculated or dragons had become faster during its imprisonment. Moander weighed its options. Its last desperate bid for escape was to use magic—the most costly method of travel.

  They were still far from the ruins of Myth Drannor, but Moander could sense the siren song of the old city’s dormant power, still humming away deep beneath toppled buildings and battle-scarred halls. With its godly abilities, Moander reached out and began syphoning off the magical energies of the dead elven kingdom.

  The god channeled this energy directly into its spell. At the forward point of the pumpkin seed a blur of purple appeared, then stretched about the seed like a thin mist.

  Mist, the dragon, was close enough for her passengers to make out the crawling glow that began to envelop the pod carrying Alias. Akabar was trying to figure out what it could be. A protection device, perhaps? Or—

  He never finished his thought, for once the glow completely covered the pod, it began to shrink. Like a street magician’s trick, there was nothing left in the purple cloak Moander had wrapped itself in, nothing to keep the cloak from collapsing in on itself.

  A Turmish curse escaped Akabar’s lips before he explained, “That’s a gate between worlds.”

  Olive looked around in a wild-eyed panic.

  “We’ve got to pull up,” the mage insisted. “If we pass through that cloud, we could end up anywhere.”

  Both halfling and mage began to thump the sides of the dragon, trying to get her attention. When she turned back to look at them, they mimed pulling back on imaginary reins to symbolize their need to halt.

  Mist turned her head forward again. Dragonbait kept his head turned to watch Akabar and Olive signaling him to stop the dragon. Dragonbait shook his reptilian head. He leaned over Mist’s forehead and made some motion Akabar and Olive could not see. When he sat back again, Dragonbait held the finder’s stone over his head.

  Mist sped toward the purple cloud that dotted the sky low over the Elven Wood and dove in. Like the god preceding them, they were obscured from view. The shouts of the mage and the bard died away. The cloud dissipated slowly, as though reluctant to give up its form.

  Battle over Westgate

  This is like riding up into a maelstrom, Olive thought as they plunged into the purplish fog that had swallowed Moander, though she could not honestly say she had ever done so. The purple fog became a long, gray tube—the oozing wake of the god’s passage from the forest north of Myth Drannor to wherever it was heading.

  Floating castles and statues danced along the edges of the tube. Ruskettle noticed that Alias’s finder’s stone, which Dragonbait now held high over his head, shone a beam before them that stretched all the way down the tube to illuminate the retreating rear of the mad god.

  Moander disappeared in another purple fog. They plunged after it, were buffeted by a second stomach-churning whirlwind, and suddenly burst into bright sunshine in a clear blue sky.

  Below them to the left was a bustling, walled city of some size—a sea port. The green-blue water told Olive that she was looking at the Inner Sea. The shape of the harbor and the seven peculiar hills outside of the city walls identified their destination as Westgate.

  * * * * *

  Giogioni Wyvernspur let out a deep sigh of relief as he topped the last rise on the road from Reddansyr and surveyed the city of Westgate and the land surrounding it. Since his narrow escape in Teziir from the sorceress who so resembled the sell-sword Alias, Giogi had been moving overland, first by carriage, then on horseback.

  From his vantage point, the Cormyrian noble took in the plain, which ran along the sea coast. Covered with the same rich, slick grass as the hills bordering it, the greenery of the plain ran right to the stock and caravan yards scattered around the city wall. A ring of seven mounds lay south of the city just east of the road on which he traveled. All seven hillocks were crowned with old ruins—stone circles of druids and temples of more sinister cults.

  “Now this,” he informed the horse he now rode, Daisyeye II, “has been a much more pleasant experience than my last trip on horseback. That ended, you see, with the death of your namesake, the first Daisyeye, followed by a singularly unpleasant interview with a dragon—an incident that will stick in my mind as long as, if not longer than, the nasty affair of losing Aunt Dorath’s pet land urchin.”

  Giogi sighed again. He had been expecting to be waylaid by any of the hundred thousand brigands, bandits, dark powers, and orc bands that were said to lie in wait just beyond the borders of the civilized world. Yet, despite all the expected awfulness, his trip overland had been relatively peaceful.

  About time I had some good luck, he thought, pulling off his wide-brimmed hat and letting the wind rustle through his hair.

  At that moment the crash of a powerful lightning strike echoed all around him. Daisyeye II reared on her hindquarters. Directly overhead a great rend appeared in the sky. Through this a huge rock jettisoned into the world.

  Giogi reigned Daisyeye in tightly to avoid being spilled onto the road. He might have been better off patting the beast and whispering soothing words, but his eyes were glued on the rocketing projectile. It looked like a rotting basket, with masses of greenery hanging from all sides. Along its trailing edge it spurt out jets of blue flame.

  With a piercing howl the gash in the sky began to close. Then a red dragon burst through the hole overhead, pursuing the “basket.” The dragon’s appearance was Giogioni’s first indication of just how big the lump of decay really was.

  The head of the dragon chasing the basket shone with a yellow light. Giogi squinted. The yellow light seemed to be coming from a figure riding between the dragon’s ears. Then the Cormyrian noble noticed the dragon’s color.

  “No. It can’t be,” he whispered to himself. But his heart sank with the certainty that it was indeed Mist.

  If Giogi had remained on the hilltop observing the dragon, he might have noticed the other figures on her back; he might even have heard the eerie chant that rose from one of the mounds just south of him, but Daisyeye II decided she’d had enough. She plunged uncontrollably down the hill into the high grass, taking the young Wyvernspur with her.

  * * * * *

  Akabar kept his eyes glued to Moander. Blue flames spurted from the god, but the mage recognized that the flames did not originate from the damaging fires they had set within the monster. They were some means of propulsio
n. Somehow the monster’s temporary occupation of his mind had left the mage with more than just the memory of the words he’d been forced to say to Alias or the evil deeds he’d been maneuvered into performing. He understood the means of the Abomination’s flight, and while he admired its cleverness, he shivered with horror at the reminder of what the god had done to him.

  Moander’s vast godly knowledge, however, was not going to aid in its escape. The dragon, under the effects of Akabar’s spell of haste, was still gaining. The god arced downward toward the seven mounds outside the city walls. Then it halted, hovering over one of the hills. Great red stone plinths shaped like fangs curved inward about the crown of the hill. In their center burned a bonfire. Olive spotted tiny figures moving about the hilltop. From this distance the figures looked no bigger than ants.

  Moander let a drop of slime fall away from its body. The slime oozed like a water drop slipping along a strand of spider silk, then it hung ten or so feet before splattering on the ground. The ant-sized figures were on it in a second.

  “It’s delivered Alias to its followers,” Akabar shouted.

  The halfling nodded. “We have to land and rescue her.”

  The mage shook his head in disagreement. “We have to finish our battle with the god first,” he said.

  “Are you crazy? We could be killed. I want off this ride, now,” Olive insisted.

  Akabar’s eyes glittered with vengeance, and the halfling realized she wasn’t going to get anywhere trying to convince him to help her down. Fortunately for her, it wasn’t up to him. “Dragonbait!” she hollered. “Alias is down there! We have to land and help her!”

  But Olive was not to discover whether the lizard paladin was more concerned with the warrior woman or destroying Moander. Moander took the decision out of his hands. Once it had unloaded its passenger, the god launched itself toward them.

  Mist banked sharply, and the mass of fungus, slime, and forest rocketed past them. The sudden movement caused the halfling to lose her grip on the safety rope. She would have fallen to her death if Akabar had not seized the hem of her skirt and pulled her back. Olive suddenly was not feeling hungry—the human equivalent of feeling frightened out of her mind. Mist completed her banking maneuver by turning about to face Moander’s return charge.