The warmage and the undead dragon skulked toward the vague forms of the five standing stones the wyrmkeepers had raised and then magically twisted into serpentine shapes. No doubt it was a shrine of sorts, and the priests dwelling on the earthmote had built their huts and pitched their tents around it.

Aoth skulked into one hut, and Alasklerbanbastos slipped his head under a lean-to. Cera could picture the spear thrusts that followed and the piercing and shearing as the dragon’s fangs nipped sleeping men to pieces.

Much as she’d come to detest wyrmkeepers-the wretches had tortured her, after all-Cera was still happy to be excused from such merciless brutality. She was quite happy that it was her chore to hold Alasklerbanbastos’s leash from far enough away that he couldn’t suddenly spin around and strike at her.

A soft, brushing noise came from the left. Her heartbeat accelerating, she pivoted in that direction and poised her buckler in front of her. She remembered Aoth telling her that she tended to hold it too close to her body and shifted it out a little farther.

No matter how she peered, she couldn’t see a threat, no stray wyrmkeeper creeping or wandering around in the night. She wished she could summon Amaunator’s light, but of course that would give away everything.

When no arrow flew at her and no magic flared, she decided her nerves were playing tricks or else she’d heard a night bird or some small nocturnal animal.

She turned back around and located Alasklerbanbastos slinking in the dark, and the sound came again, a bit louder and, therefore, surely, closer.

She jerked around and still couldn’t see anything amiss. But instinct screamed that she was in danger.

She backed up a step, and the clouds that veiled the earthmote parted for a moment. Selune’s light gleamed and rippled on a flat something flowing over the ground. At first Cera thought it was streaming liquid or a swarm of beetles scuttling as one. Then, perhaps comprehending that she’d spotted it, it heaved itself upward.

It was a hollow dragon. The billowing, sagging, flopping way it moved showed there was nothing inside the leathery hide. It reminded Cera of the costumes that a line of Tchazzar cultists sometimes wore to parade through the streets of Luthcheq. But those constructions were meant to look like red dragons. The sparks that started popping and sizzling and the smell like an approaching storm that mixed with the reek of corruption suggested that the empty wyrm was in some sense a blue.

It was a blue like Alasklerbanbastos, whose flayed appearance she finally understood. Still retreating, she gripped the phylactery and focused her will to force him to call off his creation.

But before she could pour sunlight into the gem, pain stabbed out of it, up her arm and into her head. She staggered and the stone nearly slipped from her fingers.

I didn’t know he could turn it around! she thought, feeling outraged as a child who’d caught a playmate cheating at a game. He never showed me that he could!

White light flickered inside the hollow dragon, at the back of the mouth and behind the empty eye sockets. Realizing what was coming, denying the all-but-paralyzing pain, Cera flung herself to the side. Her attacker’s breath, a dazzling bolt of lightning, blazed past her. Thunder boomed.

Now, Cera thought, now I’ll get the lich. But the empty dragon lunged at her, and she had to focus on avoiding that attack… and the next one… and the next.

Aoth was creeping from a hut to the tent next to it when the thunder boomed. As he spun around, he assumed that some idiot stormsoul had seen a threat and, forgetting that everyone was supposed to keep quiet, exerted his elemental powers in response.

But in fact, it was worse than that. Alasklerbanbastos had turned away from his appointed task and was bounding back the way they’d come, toward the edge of the earthmote and Cera. For some reason, he evidently believed she couldn’t hurt him with the phylactery anymore, and he no doubt had good reason for his confidence. For a heartbeat Aoth thought of Chathi, who’d died because he hadn’t anticipated another clever creature’s secret plan.

He started to run after Alasklerbanbastos then realized he’d never catch him. He pointed his spear and shouted a word of power.

A spark leaped from the point of the weapon, hurtled through the dark, struck the top of the dracolich’s tail, and exploded into a booming burst of flame. Alasklerbanbastos jerked and stumbled but then ran on.

Aoth spun his spear over his head and called floating, spinning blades of amber light into being, right in front of the undead wyrm. Alasklerbanbastos couldn’t stop or turn in time to avoid them, and they sheared chunks of rotting flesh away.

“Turn and fight me!” Aoth shouted. “Otherwise I’ll tear you apart!”

Alasklerbanbastos kept charging toward Cera. He was already close enough to attack her with his breath or a spell but apparently wanted to use fang and claw instead. Another bound or two would close the distance.

The bridge linking the earthmote to the mountaintop was a slender, arching, granite span seemingly extruded from the bedrock. It had low, rudimentary parapets and, as far as Gaedynn could tell, no tangible understructure to keep it from collapsing under its own weight. Magic had made it and sustained it.

One of the earthmote’s two sentries had stood watch on that end of the bridge. His corpse lay facedown with Son-liin’s arrow sticking out of its spine. Gaedynn took another look around, making sure nothing was happening that required his attention, then squatted and started rummaging through the wyrmkeeper’s possessions.

One of the windsouls made a little spitting sound.

“What?” Gaedynn asked, whispering. “We have time and if I find anything, I’ll share.”

“We’re not doing this for loot,” the firestormer said.

“That doesn’t mean you have to shrink from it in horror,” Gaedynn replied.

Son-liin chuckled and a thunderclap split the night. Somewhere behind them, something flashed.

His eyes wide, blue gleams flowing rapidly through the lines that etched his skin, the windsoul who’d taken exception to Gaedynn’s sellsword ways looked as if he’d forgotten all about them. “It’s too soon!” he said. “We aren’t all on the earthmote yet. We can’t be. There hasn’t been time!”

“That’s war for you,” said Gaedynn, rising and reaching for an arrow. “Nothing-” A burst of fire flared in the dark. Specifically, the dark off to the left, near the edge of the floating island. He felt a jolt of alarm.

Vairshekellabex’s cave was in the center of the earthmote. If he’d come out sooner than expected, but Aoth and Alasklerbanbastos had met him with blasts of battle magic and dragon breath, that wouldn’t have been too bad. But the flashes and noise were coming from the wrong spot for that to be the case.

It was just a guess, but Gaedynn suspected Alasklerbanbastos had devised another ploy to steal back his freedom, and Aoth and Cera were trying to subdue him. If so, then there was no one in position to deal with Vairshekellabex when he emerged as, roused by all the commotion, he surely would.

“Hold the bridge,” Gaedynn said. “Make sure no enemy sneaks up behind you. I have to go.”

He stalked toward the heart of the earthmote. Spinning lengths of yellow light appeared on the left. Aoth’s magic, most likely. Gaedynn had seen him use the spell before.

He heard a scuffing footstep and spun around, drawing his bow as he did. Son-liin was trotting to catch up with him.

“I told you to defend the bridge,” he said.

“There!” she said. She showed him where she meant by pivoting and loosing an arrow of her own.