Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [92]
Plus, he had one secret weapon: timing. It was Festival time again.
The nacatl pride he approached first was small, but fierce by reputation. None of his former friends or soldiers-in-arms lived there anymore; Marisi had outlived them. As Marisi approached the pride’s den in the wooded foothills near the ruins of Antali, he heard the opening roars of the hadu. He was just in time.
Marisi heard the chief shaman of the little pride begin to speak, heard his own accomplishments being narrated in tones of great ceremony. As soon as the shaman got to the part just before the chanting, he stepped out of the darkness and into the ring of firelight.
“I am Marisi,” he said. “Come, my warriors—let us make this night a reunion, rather than a remembrance.”
After a stunned silence, the pride’s chanting began again—but with a different intonation.
JUND
A beam of pure, concentrated sunlight lanced out of the smoke-filled Naya sky. It struck the dragon that flew on Sarkhan’s left side. The spell burned a hole directly through its throat. It tried to breathe a blast of fire in return, but flame spurted out through the hole in its neck in staccato bursts, charring it from the inside and sealing off its breathing passages. Then a hail of arrows from the jungle below tore through the beast, puncturing it like a pincushion. It arced down in a long parabola, then eventually fell, crashing into the trees somewhere far below.
Finally, Sarkhan thought. It must be the elves, or maybe the human tribes of Naya, finally fighting back with magic. The humanoids had begun amassing in the jungles below Sarkhan’s air assault, and although the archers were frustrating, some of them below him were potent spellcasters. It had taken days of Sarkhan’s draconic strafing to elicit that kind of response, days of charring huge swathes of jungle with dragonfire. That sunbeam spell was good. It would do nicely, churning up the mana of Naya, causing it to stream to the Maelstrom as Bolas desired. But he needed more than that, much more.
He took the one dragon’s death as an excuse to stage a retreat. He wheeled Karrthus around and headed back. Sarkhan craned his neck to see behind him, to see whether the humanoid armies had followed.
He needn’t have looked back. A blast of consecrated energy narrowly missed Karrthus’s wing. Sarkhan grinned.
“Come along, my enemies,” he said. “Come and answer my call to war.”
He slapped the side of Karrthus’s neck, and pressed his knee firmly into the dragon’s flank. The dragon banked slightly.
“That’s perfect,” Sarkhan said. “Straight ahead, just like this.”
They weren’t headed back toward Jund. Not exactly.
GRIXIS
I can’t believe this,” Salay was saying. Tears were streaming down her face as she helped hold the arms of the creature that had once been her son. “You knew this … He … was out there, and you didn’t tell me.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” said Levac.
“I was going to leave,” she sobbed. “You were going to let me leave my son, you bastard.”
“Without a way to save him, it was better not letting you know. I didn’t want that plaguing your heart as we started a new life.”
“This is my son,” she said through her teeth.
“And with these people’s help, I got him back,” said Levac.
“Please,” said Rafiq. “Let’s try to calm down. The boy needs us now.”
They held Vali down on a makeshift table in the small hermitage shack. Rafiq stood over him. He knew just the words to help the boy, words that he trusted, words that he knew came from the tongue of an angel.
He took the sigil of Asha from around his neck, and laid it on the boy’s chest. The Vali-creature flinched and snarled, trying to wriggle free, casting evil looks at the medallion, but they held him firm.
Rafiq said a prayer to Asha over the boy, reciting each line with the faith that burned in his heart. It took all his strength, but he summoned up every pure emotion in his fiber and poured it into the prayer. The words flowed out of him with the same intensity as the light that shone from the throne statue in the Jhessian arena. Every