The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [26]
A few develop the taste for the flesh of one family or seem to develop an enmity for folk of a specific barony or town. All of them hate those can hurt them most: archers and wizards. Minstrels often tell the tale of Maerdantha, who lost an entire family-son after daughter after uncle-because they could all hurl spells at dark flying things who devoured their sheep. In the end, she spun the shape of a nightwyrm with her own spells and lurked in that shape among the fast-dwindling family flock.
When the hunter came, she clung to her life and slew him only because he reacted amorously to her form rather than deciding to rend her at the first sight.
The body the servants found, after carrying their sorely wounded mistress to shelter, was sixty feet long from the shoulders of its batlike wings to the tip of its barbed tail. Even torn in death, it lay sleek and sinuous, looking so graceful and so deadly that few dared approach it. Its pointed heads were many, and all of them had birdlike beaks as long as a man is tall, lined with many sharp, sharklike teeth. Its eyes were white shapes, without pupil or focus, and even priests were seen to shudder as they drew near.
This nightwyrm seemed smaller than most, but far more generously equipped with jaws. As they gaped open, snapping hungrily as it plunged down at Embra, the beast did not seem the slightest whit amorous.
Unless, that is, its love was for the blood-drenched, smokingly fresh corpses of sorceresses.
The Lady of Jewels spat into her hand and stammered a word of power she'd hoped not to have to use until she was years older than now. It echoed eerily around her as she thrust her arm forward, hurling her spittle down one of the wyrm's yawning gullets. The sick weakness born of using that word burst forth within her, and she moaned aloud.
The other head darted at her, dark-fanged jaws snapping. Embra kicked it away and threw herself up and over the tangled pile of tree limbs in one desperate, twisting motion. Branches raked her skin like tongues of fire, jolting her out of her nausea.
The nightwyrm began thrashing as her magic raged inside it, black coils whipping wildly. She rolled away, keeping one arm in front of her face, and hissed the word that would bring her spell to its fatal conclusion.
The night exploded in a wet, rending rain of angry magical fire and enchanted monster, shaking the dew-drenched ground. Somewhere near, men shouted in fear.
Gore slapped onto trees all around and splattered down through shuddering leaves. Wood and flesh alike hissed in the afterglow of the blast as the black droplets that had been the nightwyrm landed on the tangled branches and the three escapees. Tiny tendrils of smoke arose from where those droplets fell.
The Lady Silvertree scrubbed at the worst of her burning patches, just above her knee, with the smoking remnants of her nightgown. Sobbing for breath, she tried hard not to empty her swimming stomach… and managed it, somehow. "Serpent in the shadows!" she cursed, using the strongest oath known in the Vale almost wearily.
Tearing herself free of one last, daggerlike tree branch with a wrench that left a bloody gouge along her ribs, she gulped cold night air hungrily, blinked, and found herself staring into the eyes of Hawkril Anharu.
The armaragor's hair was smoldering here and there where the acidic ichor of the nightwyrm had struck home, and his wet, smoke-smudged face wore a look of awe. Craer rose into view beside him, as drenched with monster innards as his two companions, and wordlessly offered Embra a dark bundle that she recognized as the clothing she'd had him put in the sack.
"Later," she snapped, and pointed imperiously along the seared scar her earlier spell had cloven through the woods. When neither of the men moved, she snarled something wordless and stumbled past them. For heroes, these two were a prize pair of dazed idiots…
"Is there something about the word unharmed that eludes your comprehension?" the Baron Silvertree asked mildly, lowering cold and level eyes from