Not that the spell had hurt the green enough to deter it for long. It was wheeling to come at them again. Jhesrhi leaped onto the back of her griffon. And Shala reached Tchazzar.

The living god was still in human guise. The plan had called for him to remain so until the enemy army had fully committed itself to battle. Only then would he transform and attack with all the allegedly awesome power at his command.

But at this point, the Threskelans had committed themselves-and anyway, the plan had turned to dung. Yet Tchazzar still stood passively, as far back from the melee as the sunlords and the reserves. His eyes were wide and darted back and forth.

Shala pointed at the oncoming dragon with her bloody sword. “It’s there!” she gasped. “Right there!”

Jhesrhi hurled more fire as her winged steed sprang into the air. This time the wyrm bore the punishment without flinching and spewed vapor in return. Shala winced, but the griffon somehow wrenched himself and his rider out of the way.

Tchazzar still wasn’t moving. “Change!” Shala said. “Kill the thing!”

“It’s what they want,” Tchazzar said.

“What? Who?”

“The things that come in the dark. They want me to transform so they can find me.”

Shala didn’t understand and had no idea what to say to him. She only knew that if the god wasn’t going to fight, then it was all up to the mortals. Despising him, she sucked in a deep, steadying breath, then strode back to the ramparts.

Jet lashed his wings, bobbed above the drake that had apparently believed he didn’t notice it driving in on his flank, and tore its head apart with his talons. Where’s Tchazzar? he asked. If he’s anything like what he’s supposed to be, he can still turn this thing around.

I don’t know, Aoth replied. Nor did he have time to try to spot the war hero. Without the help of the air elementals, the fight in the sky had become far more difficult. And after he won that-if he and his fellow griffon riders could win it-there were half a dozen other situations that needed their immediate attention.

He chanted and aimed his spear. A bolt of dazzling, crackling lightning leaped from the point and struck one of the red dragons. The creature convulsed and plummeted halfway to the ground before it regained control of its wings.

But while Aoth was busy with that one, the other red dived toward the archers and spearmen in one of the copses.

Relatively safe behind the sellswords and their shields, Oraxes hurled darts of force at the Threskelans who kept rushing the formation. Despite the ominous and unnatural darkness, it seemed to him that things were going reasonably well. Then their living enemies-scaly kobolds and pig-faced orcs-fell back and let the dead assault them.

Oraxes had felt though not seen the initial arrival of the phantoms, but then they’d simply gone away again. Now they were back and advancing in the form of skull-faced shadows. It was like they’d fed on something that made them more real.

Sellswords who’d faced the previous foes stolidly or even with sneering bravado quailed. But only for an instant, and then they braced themselves for what was to come. Oraxes remembered that they were men who’d followed Aoth into Thay and fought the undead horrors there.

But courage and experience didn’t always save them. Sometimes their jabbing spears and slashing swords bit, but just as often passed harmlessly through their insubstantial targets. When that happened, the ghosts reached right through shields and mail to plunge their fingers into living bodies. Then men screamed, withered, and collapsed.

One phantom felled a mercenary, then glided through his body before he could flop all the way to the ground. Oraxes conjured a burst of vitriol, which flew right through the ghost to splash and sizzle on its previous foe.

Stupid! Oraxes should have thrown darts of light. Resolved to do so, he started to backpedal and chanced to look squarely into the vacant orbits of the murky, wavering skull face. Suddenly he couldn’t look away, move, or even draw a breath. The ghost reached for him-

Behind him, Meralaine chanted rhyming words in a language that even he, a fellow mage, didn’t recognize. Her voice was soft, but something about it made certain syllables seem to ring like hammer strokes on an anvil.

It was the ghost’s turn to falter. Its form rippled in place like it was straining to break free of the power constraining it. Then, with a howl, it turned and launched itself at one of its fellow spirits. Two other phantoms did the same.

Oraxes sucked in a breath. He wanted to attack the enemy ghosts, not the ones serving Meralaine, but it was hard to tell which shadow was which. He was still trying to choose a target when he glimpsed motion overhead.

A dragon swooped at the coppice. It opened its jaws and spewed bright yellow flame. The lance of fire ignited or simply obliterated everything in its path-branches, archers on their elevated platforms, and living warriors and ghosts battling on the ground. And, like an artist’s brush painting a line of ruin on the earth, it was heading straight at Oraxes.

He started to scramble out of the way, then noticed that if Meralaine didn’t move, the wyrm’s breath would sweep right over her as well. And, evidently startled, she wasn’t moving.

He grabbed her and dragged her with him. His foot caught on a corpse’s outstretched arm. He fell, carrying Meralaine down with him. The jet of flame slashed by just a couple of finger-lengths from their feet, close enough to make him gasp at the searing heat.

Close enough too for the grass and fallen twigs and leaves the flare set on fire to pose an immediate threat. He scrambled to his feet, dragged Meralaine up beside him, looked around, and felt a stab of terror.

At first glance it seemed that everything was burning, in all directions, with no path through the flames. The heat hammered at him. Smoke set him coughing. A burning platform, the charred corpses of the bowmen who’d perched there, and the boughs that had supported it crashed down in front of him. Meralaine yelped.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I can handle this.” Fighting the need to cough again, for that would spoil the cadence, he rasped an incantation.

A corona of flame sprang up around him, staining the world blue-but it didn’t burn him. Instead, it replaced the heat of the dragon’s conflagration with a pleasant coolness.

He pulled Meralaine into the blue fire, and she cried out at what felt painfully cold to her. But once he put his arm around her and drew her close, she was completely inside the effect and experienced it as he did.

“Now we run,” he said. Before the protective enchantment faded.

He tried to flee in the opposite direction from the enemy-although with his surroundings transformed, suffused with the glare of flame and the blur of smoke, he wasn’t sure of his bearings. He also tried to lead Meralaine around the worst of the fires. But sometimes, if they didn’t want to retrace their steps, they had no choice but to plunge right through. At those moments their shield couldn’t keep out all the heat, and it was speed as much as magic that protected them.

They stumbled clear of the blaze an instant before their own halo of fire guttered out. Oraxes drew Meralaine onward for several more paces, turned, then cursed in surprise. Because, as he could see from the outside, the dragon’s breath had only set a relatively small area alight. The blaze had seemed as big as all of Luthcheq while they were struggling to escape it.

Meralaine coughed so hard that it nearly jerked her free of his encircling arm. Once she stopped, he realized there was no longer any particular reason to hold on to her. Still, he let her go with some reluctance.