Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [116]
Dan was vaguely aware of the gray-robed stranger in the background.
The man was still making notes, though he showed little interest in the events being enacted before him. He had turned the silver hourglass over; now sand, glowing like powdered diamonds, filtered slowly through the glass’s neck.
And still, except for Danyal, no one else in the cavern had seemed to notice him.
But it was the dragon who again commanded their attention. Flayze roared, the sound like the crash of a massive thundercloud, sending the companions and Kelryn Darewind reeling back from the onslaught of sound. Only the two wizards held their ground, black robes flapping around their legs as they regarded the crouching form of the infuriated dragon.
The whiplike tail lashed around, a crimson tendril of crushing power, but the fleshly mage pointed and barked a command. A spear of crackling lightning ripped through the air, striking the dragon’s tail and shattering the last half of the supple limb. With a howl, Flayze pulled the bleeding stump into a coil around his feet.
But the dragon’s wings were flexing now as the slowing effects of the ice magic wore off. The great head lashed forward, jaws gaping as it snapped toward the nearest of the two black-robed shapes.
The wizard blinked out of sight just before the serpent’s jaws clamped shut. Danyal whirled in surprise, seeing that the mage had transported himself to the other side of the cavern. There he raised a hand and sent another searing bolt of lightning hissing and sparking into the dragon’s side.
Still roaring, Flayze whirled back, but Danyal sensed that the dragon moved purely in reaction to the attacks of the two wizards. Indeed, as the crimson jaws lashed toward the target who had just released the lightning bolt, the other magic-user pointed a finger-this one, Dan saw clearly now, as bony and thin as any skeleton’s-and released a great barrage of glowing, sparking balls of magic.
The arcane missiles struck the dragon’s neck, one after another searing through the layer of armored scales. The great serpent moaned, the sound curiously plaintive emerging from such a monstrous being. Flayze thrashed again, more weakly this time, and tried to extend a reaching forelimb, only to have the leg blasted by another onslaught of magic missiles.
Finally, with a shuddering groan, the massive red dragon collapsed to the floor and lay still, dead.
CHAPTER 45
The Ambitious Priest Third Bakukal, Reapember
374 AC
“My lord Fistandantilus!” cried Kelryn, throwing himself at the feet of the nearest of the wizards. “You have appeared in answer to my prayers!”
He reached out as if to wrap his arms around the figure’s legs, but then hesitated, rising to his knees, staring hopefully upward.
The black-robed figure ignored the man, turning a shadowy face toward the other gaunt, shrouded form. Though the two were dressed alike and approximately the same size, the nearer sorcerer was somehow more substantial, more solid than the other.
Both, Dan realized, were equally frightening.
The second wizard drew back its hood to reveal a visage of ghastly horror. Danyal recognized the skull of Fistandantilus, except that now that bony visage was attached to a skeletal neck, extending out of a corpselike body. The arms that moved the sleeves of the robe seemed vaporous and incorporeal, while the face bore that same, teeth-baring grimace that the companions had seen on the inanimate skull. The hands were skin stretched taut over bone and seemed to float, unattached physically, at the ends of the wide sleeves.
And the eyes of the skull had changed, Dan saw with a dull throb of horror. Instead of cold shadows within the empty sockets, there glowed a spark of heat in place of each eye, a crimson spot of burning fire that seemed to penetrate Danyal’s skin, to shrivel his insides with