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.In his old body, he could have used his breath weapon several times before depleting it, but in his new one, he’d exhausted it with a single exhalation.A shock ripped through the base of his neck.One of his foes—the deathlord, he suspected—had driven a scythe in deep.Another stroke or two like that could cripple him.He leaped into the air, lashed his wings, and soared upward.That rid him of all the foes who didn’t have wings to follow.He swiped with his claws, smashing birds by the dozen, and snarled an incantation.Meanwhile, he felt some sort of psychic magic pounding at his mind.But it wasn’t divine power like the despicable sunlady wielded, and it couldn’t pierce his defenses.He bellowed the last word of his spell, and a cloud of acidic vapor seethed into existence around him.It stung him, but it was worth it because it annihilated the shadowravens.Sizzling, they fell like stones and corroded away to nothing before they reached the ground.A beat of his wings carried Alasklerbanbastos clear of the burning mist, and he looked around for the deathlord.He was reasonably sure the creature had followed him aloft, but at first glance, he couldn’t spot him.A weight thumped down on top of Alasklerbanbastos’s head.Certain that he had only an instant before the deathlord’s scythe would slash at one of his eyes, he lashed his neck as though he were cracking a whip.The sorrowsworn tumbled from his perch.Alasklerbanbastos twisted his head and tried to snap him out of the air.His teeth clashed shut on nothing.The deathlord had shifted through space to dodge the attack.Another psychic attack beat at Alasklerbanbastos’s consciousness.He snarled in annoyance as he tried to locate his opponent once again.There! Even blurrier than before, probably turned intangible, the deathlord was swooping toward the ground to rejoin his underlings.Alasklerbanbastos’s snarl turned into a laugh because abandoning the high air was the wrong play.He furled his wings, plunged downward, and rattled off three words that drew all the lightning that continually danced in a blue dragon’s body down into his foreclaws.Crackling, they glowed white and should annihilate an insubstantial foe as readily as any other.Just before Alasklerbanbastos plummeted into striking distance, the deathlord sensed the danger.He wrenched himself around, congealed into solidity, and swung the scythe.It gashed Alasklerbanbastos’s leg, but that was all.Then the dragon’s claws stabbed into the sorrowsworn’s body, piercing it, all but splitting and tearing it to pieces.It was a killing stroke even without the lightning that discharged itself with a thunderous bang an instant later.Alasklerbanbastos flicked the charred scraps that were all that remained of the deathlord off his talons and spread his wings for a softer descent.The remaining sorrowsworn were brave, stupid, or compelled by some enchantment.Even with their chieftain and the shadowravens destroyed, they kept fighting, and pretty well at that.Still, it took Alasklerbanbastos only a few more moments to rip them apart.He looked around and made sure he’d gotten them all.Then he stalked on to the dead god’s temple.Since the building was lying on its side, the entry was halfway up the wall.At some point, the doors had come loose from the hinges, leaving just a hole.He stuck his head inside.Somehow, the outer shell of the temple had survived its slide or tumble into the crevasse partially intact.But the disaster had shattered interior walls and shaken everything loose from its proper place.Broken pews, icons, and skeletons lay heaped and jumbled altogether.Alasklerbanbastos felt a little disappointed.Whatever the sorrowsworn had believed was growing inside the ruinous womb, he couldn’t detect any sign of it.But he could still feel the throbbing, malignant power of the place, and that was what was important.He crawled through the doorway.The litter shifted under his weight, so, using his claws and tail, he scooped and swept it to the sides until he had a clear place to work.Then he chanted words of power and scratched a rune on the stone beneath him whenever the ritual called for it.When he’d written all twenty-five, he slit the hide on his left foreleg and started to flay himself.It wasn’t easy.Even though the undead were less susceptible to pain than the living, the discomfort was considerable.And on top of that, the skin was damaged.Tchazzar had burned it, death had rotted it, and the fights Alasklerbanbastos had gotten into since occupying the body hadn’t done it any good either.Yet he needed to remove it in just a few pieces.Cutting or inadvertently tearing it into too many would spoil the magic.Finally the painstaking task was through.He laid out the sheets of hide in the proper places, refocused his concentration, and whispered the final rhyme.The darkness seemed to spin around him.Disembodied voices wailed, and a stench like vomit filled the air.Broken bones jerked and rattled.Blue light danced where one sheet of scaly skin touched another, fusing them back together.Then the hollow, flapping but united thing they’d become heaved itself up off the floor.It whipped around toward Alasklerbanbastos and opened its jaws, revealing the hard, serrated ridges that had formed to substitute for fangs.But Alasklerbanbastos had expected resistance.He grabbed the dragon shell by the neck, slammed it to the floor, and held it there while it tried to wrap around him like a python.He bound it with words of command [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]