Clay was back to biting his lip. Here it comes, he thought.
“I have a plan,” the wizard announced, peering down at the map over steepled fingers. Laughter bubbled up his throat and emerged as a worrisome cackle. “And let me tell you, friends—”
“It’s risky?” Gabe supplied.
Moog glanced up. His eyes wide and wild above a lunatic smile. “Verging on suicidal,” he said.
Chapter Forty-eight
The Maze of Stone and Fire
“Suicidal is right,” Ashe muttered. “I can’t believe we sent Matty into a dragon’s lair by himself.”
“I should have been the one to do it,” said Kit. “I’ve little to fear from a dragon, but Matrick—”
“—was once a thief,” Gabriel told them. “And a damned good one. If anyone can pull this off, he can.”
They’d entered Teragoth before sunrise this morning, giving Castia a wide berth and approaching the ancient ruins from the south. Edwick brought the Old Glory in low, so as not to draw attention from the Horde. Kit had offered an unasked-for narration as they navigated the derelict city, elaborating on its former glory.
“There’s what’s left of the akra track. I won a fortune there once, and lost it all on a single bet.” He shook his head and pursed his bloodless lips. “I should have known a bird named Sure Thing was too good to be true. And look, the scroll house! It had a roof once, and a lovely patio from which you could see the entire city. They served the most incredible brunch: poached basilisk eggs and toasted bread with brown butter preserve. No one does a good basilisk egg anymore,” he remarked sadly, and Clay heard Ganelon mutter under his breath: What the fuck is brunch?
They’d set the skyship down in what had once been a grand forum. Moog’s plan—Moog’s brilliant, desperate, utterly preposterous plan—required one of them to sneak into the old shrine to Tamarat, the apparent lair of the dragon Akatung. Matrick had volunteered, and so the rest of them sat aboard the Glory, hoping against hope that their presence in the city remained unnoticed by Lastleaf or his Horde.
Clay had been cautiously hopeful since the wizard had outlined his strategy the night before, but when the sun broke over the snow-mantled mountains he was offered his first glimpse—aside from what he’d seen in Moog’s crystal ball—of Castia itself, rising like a white shoal in the midst of a poisoned ocean just a few miles east.
And suddenly every breath was a sucking gasp, every heartbeat a hammer blow. A part of Clay’s mind begged him to turn away, to close his eyes, to look anywhere but at the writhing, crawling, clamouring monstrosity that was the Heartwyld Horde, but he could not.
Someone, probably Gabriel, had once told him that to be courageous you had to first know fear. As Clay saw it, he would need a reserve of courage in the hours to come that demanded more fear than he had ever known, and so he let the horror of what they were about to face wash over him, soak into him, clamp around his soul like an iron fist, and squeeze …
“He’s been in there awhile,” observed Tiamax. The arachnian had painted himself for war. His entire body was black, save for the tips of each spindly limb, which were bloodred, and he’d painted a red hourglass on his abdomen. Clay wasn’t exactly sure why an hourglass should be frightening, but for some reason it was.
“I don’t think we’ve been spotted yet,” said Piglet, peering fearfully over the starboard rail.
So far, so good, Clay thought.
But then Ashe pointed down a debris-littered side street. “Gnolls!” she hissed.
Clay squinted down the alley. A pack of humanoid hyenas were skulking in the shadow of a ruined wall.
“Barret, Tiamax, Piglet,” said Gabriel. “You three run them down. Ganelon and Ashe, circle round and head them off. The rest of us will stay and wait for Matrick.”
To Clay’s surprise Vanguard’s frontman didn’t blink an eye at taking orders from Gabe. He jumped over the rail and beckoned his bandmates to follow. “Let’s get this done. If these bonesuckers run off and warn their friends this whole plan goes to shit.”
Kit followed Ganelon and Ashe overboard. “I know the city,” he explained when it looked as if the southerner would order him back. “I can help make certain they don’t escape.”
Ganelon nodded grudgingly and the three of them hurried off east.
One of the gnoll scavengers loosed a startled howl. Barret replied with his crossbow, cutting it short. He nodded at Edwick in the pilot’s seat and then squinted up at Gabriel. “Don’t go killing my bard.”
Gabe’s smile was stretched thin. “No promises,” he said.
Barret chuckled, then turned to the others. “Let’s roll!”
Tiamax went first, four of his six hands bearing some sort of weapon, one of which was a barbed javelin. He hurled it as he closed, impaling one of the scavengers, and then spun his abdomen toward the rest. A splash of white webbing burst from the spinnerets near his rear, trapping a few of the gnolls as surely as a net.
A sticky, super-gross net, thought Clay. He wrinkled his nose, wincing as the stitches in his face pulled taut. Needless to say, he was beginning to understand Ashe’s reluctance to let the medic bed her, despite, as Tiamax himself had put it, the obvious benefit of having six hands.
Barret reloaded his crossbow on the run. He got one more shot off (the gnolls ensnared by webbing were easy prey) before he slung the weapon across his back and drew a pair of short axes from his belt. Piglet lumbered beside him wielding a square longshield and his father’s spiked flail. Clay might have wondered if the kid could hold his own, except he knew Barret, and Barret wouldn’t keep him around if Piglet were a liability, regardless of whether or not he was Hog’s boy.
Gabriel stirred restlessly, and Clay recognised in his friend the same urge he was trying to quell within himself: to jump out there and join the fight. The impulse wasn’t just mental, either. Clay’s heart was thrumming in his chest. His fingers twitched with the craving to feel Blackheart’s familiar weight, or a weapon’s heavy heft in his grasp, though that wouldn’t be happening anytime soon—not while his arm was in a sling, anyway.
No doubt sensing their bloodlust, Moog shuffled over and crouched between them. “Pretty fat for a warrior, eh?”
“Huh?” He and Gabe expressed their confusion in unison.
“Elavis.” Moog indicated the statue in the centre of the shrine’s sunken plaza. It was in miraculously good repair, considering its age and the state of its immediate surroundings. Set upon on a plinth twice as tall as Clay, the ancient deity stood with his head bowed, one hand clasping the hilt of a huge broadsword planted between his feet, the other pointed east, presumably toward the heart of Dominion power. Also, as Moog had so keenly observed, he was pretty fat.
“He was a hero of the Old Dominion. One of their greatest warriors, in fact.”
Clay frowned up at the statue. “I thought humans were mostly servants back then.”
“They mostly were,” Moog confirmed. “But Elavis was an exception. He made his name by challenging the champions of rival Exarchs to single combat. He died without ever having lost a battle. Too young, alas.”
“Young?” asked Gabriel. “How did he die then?”
Moog scratched at one bushy eyebrow. “Well, you see how big he was. Apparently he broke through a latrine seat and drowned in the sewage below.”
A shitty way to go, Clay was about to remark when a muffled shout echoed from beyond the recessed columns fronting the shrine. “Did you guys hear that?”
Edwick was cupping one ear. “It sounded like Matrick,” he said.
More incomprehensible words drifted into the plaza. Gabriel slipped over the skyship’s low rail and moved a few paces ahead. Clay looked down the side street; gnoll corpses littered the ground, but there was no sign of Barret and the others.
“ … rt … ip!” came the voice from within the temple, still faint.
“That was Matty, no doubt,” said Moog. “But the words … Gabe, could you make out any of that?”