Death of the Dragon - Ed Greenwood [66]
His sword, its everbright enchantments gone at her touch, was behind or beyond her wings and useless, but the King of Cormyr was ready. As her talons swept up and she drew back her legs to kick, she met his dagger, hard and full into her breast.
Azoun grimly set aside the fact that this was a weapon-less woman and his own blood-kin, and kept stabbing, pumping his arm and keeping his legs drawn up to protect himself. She spat blood at him, breast heaving under his blade, but her shrieks and squalls soon became coughs, and she faltered in the air and drew away without striking home with a single talon.
Where she had struck earlier, though, Azoun felt a sickening weakness, and a trembling was beginning. Her wounds were closing as he watched, while his own were festering-no, worse than that. As the weakness spread, his skin was withering and the flesh beneath it was rotting, a dark and spongy blight that was spreading swiftly. Soon he'd not be able to hold his sword. He had to end this quickly or have it ended for him.
Bringing his sword back in front of him like a leveled lance to keep her at bay, he felt in his codpiece for the magic he'd hoped not to have to waste this soon in the defense of Cormyr. He sought to distract his foe with the taunting, polite purr, "And whom, Dark Lady, have I the pleasure of slaying today?"
Her reply was a scream of bubbling rage out of which he could only just discern the name "Suzara" before she plunged in again.
The king was ready. He swung his sword aside and threw the small iron globe in his hand full into Suzara's face. If only its explosive magic persisted long enough to work, in the face of the magic-starved ghazneth's draining of dweomer…
It did. In a flash of raging radiance the sphere burst apart in leaping hoops and bands of cold iron that swung out into the air, dimming and flickering as Suzara flung back her head and gasped in unmistakable pleasure. The iron bands shrank in with lightning speed to tighten around the fell creature.
Gods be thanked! They were crashing through branches together now, Azoun and his monstrously transformed ancestor, and already the iron bands were crumbling away to white flakes and gray ashes as the ghazneth greedily drank their magic, but as they tightened the bands of cold iron burned Suzara, lacerating her limbs. The king saw her trapped wings spasm and writhe in pain as she tumbled past the last few boughs and smashed into a dark, stagnant forest pool.
Its waters danced away from the crippled ghazneth, then slid back over her like an eager blanket, leaving no trace of her but a few bubbles that soon slowed, then stopped.
Not dead, Azoun knew, just down out of battle for a time and probably not a long time. He'd best be away from here in haste, and without using more magic than he had to, either, not with a dragon gliding along just above the trees sniffing for it.
Healing was needful right now, though he probably required more than he was carrying. Azoun drained the two steel vials that rode in his boots, hefted his no-longer-magical blade, and set off through the damp green depths of the forest in the direction of the army he'd left behind such a short time ago.
The King of Cormyr felt surprisingly cheerful, despite the small concerns of a ghazneth behind him, a dragon lurking somewhere above, his kingdom hanging in the balance as orcs and goblins raided, the very real possibilities of meeting with a forest predator or just failing to meet with his troops in the vast and trackless trees ahead-and, of course, the danger that the rotting brought on by the talons of the ghazneth would claim him before he reached any aid, or leave