Death of the Dragon - Ed Greenwood [38]
A pair of shining pearl eyes appeared in the darkness below, more or less where Vangerdahast remembered the corner of the scaffold to be. The goblins began to shriek and yammer madly. The eyes grew steadily, rapidly larger. The ghazneth was coming.
Finally, a goblin leaped up and caught hold of Vangerdahast's sleeve, then began to work its way hand-over-hand toward his wrist. The wizard's heart rose into his throat. He closed his eyes and tried one more time to decide whether Nalavara needed his ring of wishes or was frightened of it.
When the goblin grabbed hold of his wrist, he still had not decided. He closed his eyes and began, "I wish-"
A deafening clap of thunder interrupted the command. Vangerdahast's eyes were pained by a brilliant flash of light, and the goblin's weight vanished from his arm. A smell like scorched rabbit permeated the air.
"Do not!" growled a raspy voice. "As it is, you have nearly freed her!"
After squeezing his eyes open and shut several times, Vangerdahast was finally able to see a small cascade of flames licking the scaffold below him. The goblin leaders were chittering angrily and pointing at the flames. A moment later, several brave goblin warriors hurled themselves into the conflagration, using their own bodies and bare hands to beat out the fire.
Vangerdahast ignored their selfless display and stared into the ghazneth's gray eyes. "Do I… know you?"
"No," came the answer. The ghazneth pulled his shadowy body onto the landing beneath Vangerdahast, then plucked a pair of wands from a squealing goblin's wrist and began to absorb the magic. "Nobody knows me."
"You're lying," Vangerdahast said. Though the voice was far raspier than any he knew intimately, there was something familiar in its dry huskiness and crisp northern accent. "Where have we met?"
"Nowhere but here in this hell."
The ghazneth spun away and began to knock goblins off the scaffold, crying out when one little warrior managed to thrust an iron javelin through his abdomen. Vangerdahast watched in astonishment, at first confused as to why the phantom had come to his aid, then growing more frightened as the obvious answer occurred to him. He was a magician, and ghazneths needed magic the way vultures needed death.
After clearing the immediate area of goblins, the ghazneth spun around to point down the stairs. As the phantom turned, Vangerdahast glimpsed a dark but handsome face with reasonably human features and a grotesquely cleft chin. Before the wizard could see more, a torrent of water shot from the ghazneth's hand and blasted twenty goblins off the scaffold. The spray doused the fire they had been fighting and plunged the cavern back into darkness.
A powerful hand reached up and pulled Vangerdahast out of his wizard's cloak, then turned to throw him off the tower.
"Wait!" Vangerdahast cried, finally putting the chiseled face and northern accent together. "I do know you!"
"No longer," said the voice. "Now, go back to your nest and do not make me sorry I saved you."
The ghazneth pitched him into the darkness, and Vangerdahast barely had time to picture his snug little hammock before he heard himself shout the syllables of his teleport spell.
11
"These tuskers are so ugly," Lancelord Raddlesar grunted, as his blade ripped apart a fat-bellied orc's belly from its crotch to its breastbone, "that you'd think orc mothers'd soon lose interest in mothering more of them, hey?"
"They never do, Keldyn," another lancelord replied mournfully. "They just never do."
Those were the last words he ever uttered-a black blade burst through his helm and cheek and out his mouth in a red froth, and Lancelord Garthin toppled into the blood-churned mud without a sound, his dreams of settling his sweetheart in a grand house in Suzail swept away in one bright and terrible instant. His fall went unseen by his fellows in the frantic, hacking