Azure bonds - Kate Novak [131]
It was an outside chance, but having been held helpless and frustrated all through the last battle, she could not let the opportunity to injure the Abomination slip by. She plunged the pin of the barrette into the sphere.
The ball was as hot as a bonfire and singed Alias's fingers. She yanked her hand back, but Meander's "hand" lay still on the floor.
A high-pitched wail filled the chamber, followed by a deep rumbling. The swaying motion of the room turned to a severe rocking, like a ship in a storm. Alias, her shield, the apples, and the dead boar were tumbled from one side to the other. The swordswoman curled into a ball and wedged herself in tightly between the floor and the hand.
Spit in the god's eye, she thought, sucking on her fingers, for all the good it will do you. The sickly glow of the slime grew dimmer until it was finally extinguished. She was left alone in the glittering sapphire light of her cursed brands.
*****
"I think it knows we're here," Akabar declared.
The lizard, seated in front of the mage on the back of the great wyrm, growled in agreement. Pressed close beside him, Akabar caught a whiff of fresh-baked bread. Now that Dragonbait's means of communication had been rubbed in his face, so to speak, the mage realized that he could catch the saurial's more excited outbursts. The lizard had to, in effect, shout with his scent glands for a human to notice the smells. Akabar was beginning to piece together some sort of pattern between scents and sense. He berated himself for not having figured it out before-but then he hadn't figured out anything else correctly either, so far.
Dragonbait had awakened them all before dawn. Previously clownish and servile, the saurial had been transformed by the crisis into a sergeant major. First he healed all the wounds about Akabar's head. The mage noticed the woodsmoke scent that had surrounded them the last time Dragonbait had cured him.
"That's the smell of your healing prayers, isn't it?" the Turmishman had asked.
The lizard had nodded and given him a friendly squeeze on the shoulder. With a stern look he prompted Akabar to study his spells by jabbing his fingers at the mage's tomes. He patted and pushed Olive into packing their meager gear, while he used his skill to reknit the cluster of bones that held Mist's wing splayed out in flight. Lastly, he'd closed the gash Akabar's dagger had put in his own leg.
Akabar watched guiltily as the saurial performed this last task-guilty both for having caused the damage, and for taking his concentration from his assigned task to watch it repaired. Dragonbait worked in the glow of the finder's stone Alias had dropped. It was hard to see the glow of his hands as he healed his flesh, but now that Akabar knew what to expect, he would never miss it again.
Now, as they rode the dragon toward battle, Dragonbait held the finder's stone in his lap, although the sun had already risen. He still wore a kilt of sorts about his loins and one of Alias's cloaks wrapped around to keep out the wind, but he no longer bothered with a shirt. He left the runes on his chest exposed for the world to see.
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.