Azure bonds - Kate Novak [134]
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.
24
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