The sailors cried out at the sight of the dot sweeping through the blue sky above the northern shore. Taegan Nightwind, whose avariel eyes were sharper than a human’s, made haste to reassure his companions: “It’s a metallic dragon. Brass, I think.”

“What’s the difference?” said Phylas, he of the shaggy hair and surly disposition, and Taegan had to admit he had a point. In such a grim time as the Rage, any wyrm, even a member of a species generally considered benign, could pose a danger.

The weather-beaten, almost toothless captain of the fishing vessel, however, chose to take the crewman to task.

“Swallow your tongue,” he said, which was evidently a Moonsea way of rebuking someone for speaking out of turn. “Not all dragons have turned wicked. Think of Kara.”

Despite his general distemper, Phylas had the grace to look abashed.

From what Taegan had gathered, Kara, Dorn Graybrook, Will Turnstone, Pavel Shemov, and Raryn Snowstealer had done Elmwood a considerable service by ridding it of a force of occupying Zhents. Accordingly, when the winged elf arrived in the village and explained that he was a friend of those very heroes, trying to catch up with them, the townsfolk had insisted on helping him cross the great freshwater lake called the Moonsea free of charge.

The brass dragon swooped down among the towers of Thentia and disappeared, without breathing fire or casting an attack spell, and without anyone ringing an alarm bell or shooting arrows at it. Presumably it was one of Kara’s rogues, carrying some new bit of information to the town’s community of wizards, those eccentric, fiercely independent arcanists who, by Pavel’s reckoning, constituted the best hope of unraveling the mysteries of the Rage before it was too late. The locals had likely grown accustomed to the wyrms coming and going.

His iridescent scales rippling with rainbows, silvery butterfly wings beating, Jivex flew across the deck. He too was a drake, a faerie dragon, though the members of his particular forest-dwelling species were tiny compared to their colossal kindred. From the tip of his snout to the end of his constantly flicking tail, Jivex was only as long as Taegan’s arm.

“You see,” Jivex said, jerking his head in the direction of the since-vanished brass dragon, “that’s how creatures with wings are supposed to get around. We ought to try it sometime.”

The reptile had suffered a bout of seasickness during the first few hours of the voyage, and in consequence had evidently resolved to despise all boats forever after.

“I humbly beg your problem,” Taegan replied, “for selecting this mode of transport. Silly me, I thought it might be imprudent to fly out over a large body of open water with no clear idea how far it was to the other shore, and nowhere to set down if our strength flagged.”

Jivex snorted. “Well, can we get off the boat now?”

Taegan realized that was a good idea. Why creep slowly on into port when their wings could carry them there in a fraction of the time?

He turned to the captain and said, “With your kind permission, I believe we will take our leave now.”

“It’s all right with us,” the sailor said. “The sooner we get back to netting fish, the better off we’ll be.”

“Well, then, Sune bless you all.”

Taegan leaped up from the deck, pounded his black-feathered wings to gain altitude, caught an updraft, and flew on over the purple-blue water. The sun warmed his outstretched pinions. Maybe spring truly had arrived, even in the chilly northern lands.

His wings a platinum blur, Jivex took up a position beside Taegan, close enough for the two to converse.

“What will Thentia be like?” asked the drake.

“I’ve never been there. All I know about the place is that it’s famous for its wizards.” Taegan’s fancy warmed to the idea. “So probably, the dogs and cats can talk, every woman saunters about cloaked in glamours to make her look as delectable as Lady Firehair herself, and the alchemists amuse themselves by turning all base metals into gold. Naturally, no one has to do any work. The mages have conjured demon slaves to perform every task, from chopping wood to swamping out the privies.”

“Do you really think the wizards can stop the Rage?”

Taegan realized from the unaccustomed plaintive note in his companion’s voice that Jivex was looking for reassurance. He must have suffered nightmares again the past night.

“I’m sure they can,” the avariel lied. “What one wizard can do, even if the mage in question is Sammaster, a whole coven of them can surely undo.”

They soared on over the docks and on into the center of Thentia. Peering down at the narrow, muddy streets and steeply pitched shingled rooftops, Taegan saw no wonders to betray the fact that the place was home to a plenitude of powerful mages. Thentia seemed a typical Moonsea town, a raw, rugged place that, for the most part, looked as if it had been knocked down and rebuilt so many times that the inhabitants had learned not to invest any time in creating ornate architecture or other civic amenities.

It did have a couple notable structures, though. One was a white marble temple whose stained glass windows bore the eyes-and-stars symbol of Selûne, goddess of the moon. Another was a tower painted in the most garish manner imaginable, with vertical streaks of red, yellow, and orange. The brass dragon had landed in the spire’s courtyard and crouched with its head and neck stuck through the principal entry. As Taegan and Jivex swooped lower, the wyrm flattened its wings against its back and crawled completely inside, passing through the high, wide double doors with scarcely an inch to spare.

Taegan landed and started to follow, with Jivex flitting along beside him. A burly doorman with battered ears and a broken nose, clad in livery of the same bright hues disfiguring the tower, started to block the way, then goggled as he took a better look at the newcomers.

“The avariel,” he said.

Taegan didn’t actually like being called an avariel. Years before, he’d thrown in his lot with the human race, which, in his view, had built a splendid civilization while his own timid, primitive folk hid from the rest of the world. But he supposed that in this situation, the important thing was that the servant had heard about the winged elf who’d acquired Sammaster’s folio.

“That’s correct,” he said, “I’m Maestro Taegan Nightwind.” Maestro of nothing, some might say, since the Cult of the Dragon burned his fencing academy to the ground, but entitled to the honorific of a master-of-arms nonetheless.

“And I’m Jivex,” the faerie dragon declared, “Lord of the Gray Forest. Well, part of it. Sort of.”

“Kara said you might come,” the doorman said, “when you finished your work in Impiltur.”

“When we parted, I had no idea I’d do any such thing, so I can only marvel at her perspicacity,” Taegan said with a grin. “Is she here? Or Dorn, or Pavel?”

The big man shook his head. “No, none of them. They’ve all traveled to one godsforsaken place or another, looking for the information the wizards need.”

“Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I actually came to join the search for knowledge. I simply need the wizards to assign me a task.”

“I’m sure Firefingers—Flammuldinath Thuldoum, my master—will be glad to oblige.”

Dorn had mentioned “Firefingers,” and Taegan suddenly understood the colors of the tower, and of the doorman’s livery. “Your employer painted his home to resemble a flame,” he said.

“Well, obviously,” said Jivex in a superior tone. “I saw that right away.”

The doorman tried to smother a smile. “I’ll show you in.”

At its base, the tower swelled into a ground floor the size of a villa. Once he entered, Taegan observed that much of the space constituted a single room, one Firefingers had evidently dedicated to the effort to end the Rage. The leaves from Sammaster’s folio lay scattered across several long tabletops, mingled with books, scrolls, scribbled notes, quills, and inkwells. Charcoal rubbings of inscriptions from ruins and tombs hung along the high plaster walls, among jottings and diagrams scrawled in multicolored chalk. The mages had likewise drawn intricate pentacles and conjuror’s circles in the open space in the middle of the floor.

Taegan was reasonably certain he could spend tendays poring over the scholars’ work and emerge little wiser than before. He actually enjoyed considerable mastery of the specialized swordsman’s magic called bladesong, but that scarcely provided the breadth or depth of esoteric knowledge that a genuine wizard possessed. He could only hope that Dorn’s “partners,” who had for some years created the enchanted weapons the half-golem and his comrades used as beast hunters for hire, knew what they were doing.

What they were doing at the moment, of course, was conferring with the brass dragon. Hunkered in the center of the room, its smooth, massive head plates nearly bumping the ceiling even so, the wyrm gleamed yellow in the white light of the floating orbs that provided illumination. Sharp blades grew from the underside of its lower jaw like extra fangs.

A dozen mages clustered around the brass, too many for Taegan to take in all at once, but a few stood out from the crowd. Robed in scarlet, gold, and orange, the stooped, wrinkled codger with the white beard must be Firefingers. He looked like some fortunate child’s doting grandfather. In contrast, the colleague at his side, a beefy, middle-aged man with a square, florid face, slicked-back raven hair, and a patch covering his left eye, carried himself with an air of prickly self-importance. An elf with an alabaster complexion, a slender frame, and pointed ears like Taegan’s own listened to the conversation with his head cocked and a frown of concentration. A small, impish-looking lass in the silvery robes of a priestess of the Moonmaiden—she must be clever, if, young as she was, she’d mastered arcane and divine magic both—took notes on a slate, the chalk scritch-scritching away. While in a corner, apart from the rest, head bowed, stood a figure so thoroughly shrouded in a cloak and cowl that Taegan couldn’t tell if it was male or female, human, elf, or orc.

“Wait here,” said the doorman, “and I’ll announce you.” He strode away.

“This is stupid,” Jivex said. “We could announce ourselves.”

“It’s a custom,” Taegan said. “People of a certain stature have servants to—”

The brass roared, the bellow deafening in the enclosed space, and cocked its head back. Fighting the Cult of the Dragon in the Gray Forest, Taegan had faced enough hostile wyrms to understand what was happening. The brass was about to discharge its breath weapon.

The air was warm, and even in the foothills of the harsh Galenas, patches of new green softened the stark contours of the slopes, while a first sprinkling of tiny white and purple wildflowers adorned the winding, ascending trail. Kara’s throbbing soprano voice made the landscape even more beguiling. Wearing her willowy human form, partly to shield herself from the Rage, mounted on a white mare, her flowing silver-blond hair shining in the sun, the dragon bard sang a poignant song of love lost and ultimately regained.

As was often the case, to Dorn, the pleasures inherent in the moment felt like mockery, and why not? The simple truth was that things had turned to dung as usual. He, Kara, Raryn, and Chatulio wanted to reach their destination quickly, yet the need to avoid a flight of frenzied dragons had forced them north, off their chosen route and away from their goal. Moreover, he suspected that they were lost, despite Raryn’s uncanny sense of direction and Kara’s assurances that she knew the Galenas well.

So glum was his humor that he almost told Kara to hold her tongue. Not long ago, he would have, particularly since she was really a dragon. He had, after all, spent decades hating wyrms, and indeed, despised them still. But since meeting Kara there were times when the loathing softened, moments when it even felt mean and wrong. It disturbed him to imagine that he might one day lose it entirely. It was who he was.

Then Chatulio hissed, “Enough!”

Though no shapeshifter like Kara, the copper dragon was a master of illusion, and he wore the semblance of Dorn’s huge—and comically ugly—swaybacked, cross-eyed, scrofulous piebald stallion. No actual horse, even the strongest, could have carried the weight of the half-golem’s massive frame and enchanted iron arm and leg up and down the steep trails for very long.

Everyone else regarded the copper in surprise. Dorn belatedly realized that, wallowing in his own foul mood, he hadn’t noticed that Chatulio hadn’t cracked a joke or played a prank in several hours. That, coupled with the display of ill temper, was cause for concern.

“Rage eating at you?” asked Raryn, seated on his shaggy brown pony. As always, it was difficult to tell where the squat arctic dwarf’s long white hair and goatee left off and his polar bear fur tunic began. His exposed skin was a flaking, sunburned red that would have been excruciating for a human, but caused his folk no distress whatsoever.

“What do you think?” Chatulio snarled. “Of course it is, and that constant shrillness scraping at my brain …” He drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry, bluebird. I didn’t mean it. You know I love your singing.”

“It’s all right,” Kara said. “Too much of anything, even music, can wear on the nerves. I just went on and on because it helps me quell the frenzy in myself. Why don’t we play the riddle game instead?”

Chatulio snorted. “We’d better play teams, and each partner up with one of the small folk. Otherwise, they won’t stand a—”

“Hush!” said Raryn, holding up one broad, stubby-fingered hand. The dragons possessed inhumanly acute senses, but the dwarf ranger, relaxed as he often looked, was ever vigilant, and evidently he’d detected some sign of possible danger even before his reptilian comrades.

After another moment, Dorn heard the same thing: clopping hooves, the creak of leather, and the clink of metal—riders coming down the trail.

He cast about for a place to hide, but didn’t see one.

Discerning the tenor of his thoughts, Kara said, “Chatulio or I can cast a magical concealment.”

“And what then?” asked Dorn. “They’ll just bump into us, unless we turn and flee before them, back the way we came—or unless you sprout your wings and we all fly away, leaving the mounts behind. I say, let’s not bother. It’s people approaching, not crazed wyrms. We have no reason to think they mean us ill, and if they do, I reckon we can handle it.”

“Sounds all right to me,” said Raryn.

They headed cautiously on up the trail, rounded a bend, and came face to face with eight mounted warriors.

By the look of their mismatched weapons and armor, kits plainly assembled from whatever gear they could get, the men-at-arms likely constituted the retinue of the petty lord of some tiny fiefdom thereabouts. The rider in the lead, a stout, graying man with a hawk-and-lily device painted on his kite shield, was evidently the nobleman himself, considering that a youth who strongly resembled him was carrying a banner embroidered with the same arms.

Their spears and swords ready to hand, the men-at-arms eyed Dorn and his companions askance. The half-golem was used to it. His grotesque appearance, the talons and knuckle-spikes on his oversized iron fist and the gray metal half-mask encasing his left profile, often made strangers shy away from him. But even after all those years, it still brought a twinge of resentment jabbing through his guts.

“It’s all right,” said Kara, holding up her empty hands to convey peaceful intentions. “We’re simply travelers, the same as you.” Maybe she was using magic to allay the warriors’ misgivings, but if so, the charm was subtle enough that Dorn couldn’t tell.

The nobleman studied her face for another moment, then waved his hand. His entourage relaxed.

“Well met,” he said. “My name is Josef Darag, master of Springhill. The lad is my son, Avel.”

Kara made the introductions on her side.

“What can you tell us,” Josef asked, “of the road that lies ahead?”

“There was a dragon flight to the south,” Raryn said, “but as long as you stay on this trail, you may be all right.”

Josef smiled a mirthless smile and said, “I suppose that in these times, that’s as much reassurance as anyone can expect.”

“What waits ahead of us?” asked Dorn.

“Trouble,” Josef said. “The Bandit Army has overrun a village.”

Dorn frowned. “The which?”

“Just brigands, basically,” Josef said, “for all their pretensions, who operate out of a hidden stronghold to the north. The king’s men have wiped out scores of them, but never seem to catch them all. By now, the ones up ahead are taking their pleasure with the captive women, and torturing folk to find out the location of any hidden wealth.

“We almost rode right into the middle of the trouble,” the noble continued, “but at the last second, Avel made out what was going on, and we turned around before the raiders saw us. Luckily, we knew of another path that let us swing wide of the village. You can use it, too. When you come to the fork, go left.”

“Thank you for the advice,” Kara said, then hesitated. “But I don’t understand. Surely you and your followers are some of ‘the king’s men,’ too. How can you turn your backs and leave the villagers to their fate?”

Josef glared. “Are you presuming to instruct me on my duty?”

“You have the air of a valiant knight,” Kara replied. “I’m sure you require no such instruction from me or anyone.”

“Well, you’re right!” Josef took a breath, then continued in a softer tone, one that perhaps betrayed a hint of shame. “When we left Springhill, we were riding out to help our neighbors, to help all Damara, despite the risk involved in leaving our own home all but unguarded. We meant to join one of the companies the king was assembling to fight the dragons.”

“What changed?” Raryn asked.

“We heard that the Witch-King has risen, taken the Gates, and led his orcs into Damara once more. And Dragonsbane is dead. His officers deny it, but the word’s gotten out.”

Raryn scratched the chin concealed within his short ivory beard and said, “Seems to me that gave you even more reason to go ahead and enlist in your band of warriors.”

“You’re an outlander,” Josef said, “so you don’t understand. The king was the only champion who could defeat Zhengyi, just as he was the only leader who could make the dukes forget their squabbles and stand together to serve the common weal. Without him, Damara will fall apart. By all accounts, it’s happening already. That means every lord must concentrate on protecting his own vassals, and I’m working on getting home to look after mine. So perhaps you could let us by.”

“As you wish,” Kara said. She guided her mare to the edge of the trail, and Raryn followed suit with his pony. Chatulio naturally needed no prompting, though it must have taken some effort for him to make sure none of Josef’s company brushed against an unseen folded wing, scaly flank, or serpentine tail.

Once the warriors disappeared around the bend, Dorn growled, “Wonderful. It sounds like nobody can travel anywhere in Damara without wading through goblins, bandits, necromancers, and the Beastlord only knows what else. And according to Pavel, we seekers have plenty of sites to visit hereabouts.”

“It can’t be much worse than contending with dragon cultists and Zhents,” Raryn said. “We’ll solve the problems as they come, the way we always do. The one we’re facing now is that village.”

“If a Damaran knight thinks it’s none of his business,” Dorn said, “then it’s certainly not ours, either. Our job is stopping the Rage, and if we let every farmer’s hard luck distract us …” He spat. “Ah, to the Abyss with it. It’s just a few bandits. It’ll probably take less time to smash through them than it would to go the long way around.”

Kara gave him a smile of approval and amusement, too, as if his initial display of reluctance had been a kind of private joke between the two of them. It made him uncomfortable, and his impulse was to turn away, but he surprised himself by responding with a fleeting twitch of a grin instead.

Pavel paced back and forth and turned in circles, his gold-plated, garnet-studded sun amulet, symbol of Lathander, god of the dawn, clasped in one leather-gloved hand. Using the sensitivities his prayers had given him, the priest probed at the eroded stubs of what had once been standing stones, the patch of barren ground supporting them, and even the scummy, malodorous green surface of the lake that bordered it. By rights, his magically enhanced perceptions should reveal any hidden opening or lingering aura of enchantment in the area.

“Well?” Will demanded. Clad in his brigandine, warsling dangling from his belt and his seemingly oversized curved, broad-bladed hunting sword hanging at his hip, the halfling with his black lovelocks stood holding his dappled pony and Pavel’s roan gelding while keeping an eye out for trouble. The two hunters had already discovered that in the so-called “Great Gray Land” of Thar, a hilly, windswept desolation inhabited primarily by orcs and ogres, danger was always close at hand.

“Nothing,” Pavel admitted.

“Charlatan,” Will sneered, but without the usual gusto. He was evidently discouraged, too, so much so that even their perpetual mock feud was losing its power to amuse.

“We can keep trying tomorrow,” Pavel said. “After I pray for more divinatory spells at dawn.”

“We’ve already been around the whole lake,” said Will.

“I know.”

Pavel walked to his horse, lifted a canteen from the saddle, and took a drink. The water, which he’d conjured into existence after they’d failed to find a wholesome-looking natural source, had grown lukewarm, but eased his dusty throat nonetheless.

“Maybe we should give up on this site,” the halfling said. “You said yourself, Sammaster probably explored some places where there was nothing to find, or where the information was the same as what he’d already picked up elsewhere.”

“True,” Pavel said, “but he wrote fifteen pages about this site, wherever it is. We can’t afford to ignore it.”

“We can’t afford to spend years looking, either. So for once in your worthless life, you’d better come up with an idea.”

Pavel only prayed he could, for his present failure had cured him of the cockiness from which he’d suffered ever since figuring out how to use Sammaster’s indecipherable notes. That success had made the priest of the Morninglord feel very clever indeed, until he and Will had come to Thar only to find nothing at all where, Pavel had been certain, an important site supposedly awaited them.

His horse abruptly raised its head high. Its nostrils flared, and trying to back up, the animal pulled on its reins, dragging Will off balance. Pavel grabbed hold of the horse’s halter.

“Something’s coming,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“It’s nice you can figure something out,” Will said. “If it’s obvious enough.” He pointed. “See that hump of ground with the thorn bushes on top? We can hide behind it.”

They urged their mounts to the cover. Pavel, who didn’t trust the skittish animals to keep quiet, murmured a prayer and swept his pendant through a mystic pass, scribing a symbol on the air. Points of light burned inside the garnets, and the moan of the wind and every other noise abruptly fell silent. While the spell lasted, no sound could exist in the space where the hunters crouched, which meant none could exit it to betray their presence, either.

Pavel peered out at the ground along the shore, just in time to see a troupe of ogres tramp into view. Half again as tall as a tall man, long-armed, short-legged, covered in moles and warts, ogres were marauding, barbaric worshipers of the powers of darkness and a perennial scourge to humanity.

But the band didn’t look as if it would bother anybody anytime soon. Apparently survivors of an encounter with one or more Rage-maddened wyrms, many limped, or bore ghastly wounds, huge, suppurating burns or long, bloody gashes. Perhaps the ogres had forsaken their usual territory to march to what they hoped would be a place of greater safety.

In any event, only one of the brutes still carried itself with the air of belligerent arrogance Pavel would have expected. The largest, a male, swaggered at the head of the procession, its oversized head with its bristling mane thrust forward, the fangs of its protruding lower jaw jutting over its upper lip. Like many of its fellows, it too bore a fearsome wound, but not a recent one. At some point, something had torn the right side of the ogre’s face open. As a result, too much of the eyeball showed, especially at the bottom, and the entire orb was a bloody red. The giant-kin wore only a bearskin wrapped around its waist, the better, Pavel assumed, to display the sigils of Vaprak and other malevolent spirits branded into its flesh—it must be the clan shaman.

Pavel waited for the ogres to trudge out of sight, then gestured to convey the idea that he and Will needed to shadow them. Unable to ask verbal questions or argue inside the pocket of silence, the halfling settled for giving his human partner a dubious look, then shrugged and patted the pouch on his belt, reflexively making sure he still had a good supply of skiprocks for his sling.

The mages of Thentia might be powerful, but they could be surprised like anyone else. Startled by the brass dragon’s sudden aggressive display, they froze.

Taegan drew his cut-and-thrust sword and leaped. Wings pounding, he hurtled forward over the worktables and chalked pentacles on the floor. Jivex streaked along beside him. They reached the brass an instant before it would otherwise have spewed its fire. The avariel drove his point into its haunch, and Jivex bathed a patch of its scales in his own sparkling—and if they were very lucky, euphoria-inducing—breath.

Its sweeping tail smashing furniture and knocking mages off their feet, the brass rounded on its attackers without bothering to spit flame at its original targets. As Taegan had feared, the immense yellow wyrm looked anything but giddy. Jivex’s breath was potent against hobgoblins and such, but less efficacious against drakes a hundred times larger than himself.

“Watch out!” Taegan shouted, springing to one side.

The plume of flame erupted from the brass an instant later, and missed him by inches. Squinting against the brilliance of the flare, he couldn’t see Jivex, and didn’t know whether the faerie dragon had successfully dodged.

Taegan kept on scrambling, trying to stay ahead of the wheeling brass’s jaws and foreclaws, and jabbered an incantation. He didn’t have any enchantments in place to enhance his prowess—he hadn’t expected to require them—but he needed to conjure some quickly, before his adversary overwhelmed him.

Power whined through the air, and the brass struck at him like an adder. He saw that it was going to miss, though, no doubt because of his first trick. At the moment, it was seeing him slightly offset from his actual location. Its prodigious fangs clashed shut on empty air, and before it could whip its head away, he cut at its throat. Unfortunately, the sword glanced off its scales.

At the same instant, Jivex, seemingly unharmed, soared up behind the brass and hovered, staring at it intently. Probably he was trying to use one of his magical abilities against the larger wyrm, but to no apparent effect. The brass flicked a wing, and Jivex had to break off the effort to dodge the huge vaned membrane with the tarnished-looking green edge that would otherwise have swatted him like a fly.

Taegan spread his pinions and flew. He had to keep moving, too, didn’t dare let the brass maneuver into a position where it could use its fangs, claws, flame, and other attacks to best effect. His subtle defensive illusion wouldn’t save him from that. As he climbed almost to the ceiling, then dived nearly to the floor, trying to confuse his adversary, he recited another incantation, and caught a glimpse of some of the mages.

It didn’t look as if any of them were dead, or even maimed. He and Jivex had succeeded in keeping the brass’s attention locked on them. But he almost regretted that because, instead of attacking the crazed wyrm, a number of the wizards were fleeing. A couple blinked out of sight, translating themselves to some safe location. Others scurried along the wall, making for the door.

Though not everyone was running. The man with the eye patch and the lass dressed in a moon priestess’s silvery vestments were throwing spells at the brass. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to be hurting or hindering it any more than Jivex had.

Meanwhile, Firefingers battled a different foe. The brass’s blast of fiery breath had set books and documents alight. Indeed, if unchecked, the blaze might well spread to devour Sammaster’s notes themselves and all the scholarly resources the mages were using to try to make sense of them. Weaving his arms in cabalistic passes, the old man in the garish robes crooned to the flames, coaxing and cajoling them. A bit at a time, the blue and yellow tongues floated up away from the paper and drifted to envelop his hands, which burned like torches.

The brass spun and whipped its tail at Taegan. Caught by surprise, he only just dodged, and in so doing, lost track of the wizards.

On the final word of his own conjuration, he swiped powdered lime and carbon down his blade, and the steel glittered and burned cold beneath his touch. While the spell lasted, his sword would be sharper than any ordinary blade.

The room, spacious as it was, was only barely large enough to accommodate a flyer his size. With difficulty, he zigzagged through the air to befuddle his foe, and spotted Jivex clinging to the larger drake’s spine. Tearing with his talons, he swooped to the brass’s flank, and thrust his sword between its ribs.

The brass jerked and roared. Taegan yanked his weapon free, mindful not to stop moving, and flew on toward its tail. He began another spell, one intended to make him preternaturally fast.

Wind howled through the room. A brutal downdraft smashed Taegan to the floor and slammed the breath out of him. Heedless of the darts of ice and scarlet light battering it, the brass, which had no doubt conjured the artificial gale, glowered at him. Its long throat swelled.

It was about to breathe out another cone of flame, and with the screaming wind still pressing down on him, he couldn’t dodge fast or far enough to evade it. He rolled, fetched up under a table, and hacked at the legs on one end. Though his sword was scarcely intended for such a task, its magically honed edge served to chop through the wood. That side of the table crashed down, cutting off his view of the brass.

The wyrm’s breath engulfed the floor in a mass of flame that blistered him and filled his lungs with excruciating heat. Still, his makeshift shield blocked out the worst of it, and a moment later, the fierce winds halted as suddenly as they’d begun. Evidently one of the mages had countered the dragon’s power with his own.

Maybe the sudden cessation of the winds had caught the wyrm by surprise. If so, it was possible that Taegan could rush in close and strike a telling blow while it was distracted. He scuttled out from under the table, leaped up, and flew at the reptile through the countless papers, embers, and scraps of ash adrift in the air.

He’d guessed correctly. The brass had turned away from him to lunge at Firefingers. Taegan’s blade punched deep into its breast. It jerked back around, reaching for him with its claws, and Jivex balked it by whizzing into position to scrabble at its eye. Jaws gaping, it whipped its head around to snap at the faerie dragon, at which point sheets of liquid hammered from the empty air like rain from a tiny, invisible cloud. Where the torrent washed over the brass, its flesh smoked, sizzled, and charred.

The yellow drake collapsed, rolled, and convulsed, nearly crushing Taegan beneath its bulk before he flew clear. The reptile kept thrashing for half a minute, then finally slumped inert. The stink of its acid-seared flesh combined with the smoke in the air to sting the fencing teacher’s eyes and put a vile taste in his mouth.

At least the room wasn’t on fire anymore. Firefingers had collected all the leaping, rustling flames. Still murmuring words of power, he rubbed his hands together as if he was washing them, and the blaze went out. His skin wasn’t even pink from the heat.

The elf wizard hurried over to Taegan. Seen up close, his fair complexion had a slight bluish tinge, as did his shoulder-length dark hair. Something about his pleasant, forthright face reminded the avariel of Amra, the kindly elf ghost, if that was the right word, he’d encountered in the Gray Forest.

“How badly are you hurt?” the magician asked.

Taegan tried to respond, but a fit of coughing overwhelmed him.

“It’s all right,” said the elf. “One of us is a healer, and happily”—he pulled a wry face—“she’s one of the ones who didn’t run. Sinylla, come here, please!”

The moon priestess hurried in their direction.

“The body!” Firefingers panted. “Don’t let the leakage dirty any papers!”

“I’ll get rid of it,” said the one-eyed man. He started the process by murmuring a rhyme and lashing his hand through a complex pattern, whereupon the brass shrank to a fraction of its former size.

The elf wizard looked sadly at the ravaged, diminished remains. “Poor Samdralyrion,” he sighed. “To all appearances, he was one of the most stable of all Kara’s allies. I didn’t notice any warning signs at all. The Rage took him all at once, in a heartbeat.”

Taegan frowned at the suspicion that popped into his head.

Dorn stood in his customary fighting stance, iron half forward, vulnerable human parts behind, long, heavy hand-and-a-half sword cocked back in his fist of flesh and bone. The two bandits edged apart, trying to flank him, and he lunged and snapped his massive metal arm in a backhand blow. His target likely didn’t expect anyone who looked so ponderous to pounce that quickly, and the attack caught him by surprise. The knuckle-spikes smashed his skull, and he dropped.

The other raider turned tail. Dorn started to pursue, but then Kara stopped singing her battle anthem to snarl instead. Alarmed, the half-golem pivoted in her direction.

Lithe and lightning-quick, a sparkling crystal-blue in her dragon form, Kara was fighting in front of one of the sod huts that comprised the village. As far as Dorn could tell, nothing had hurt her, nor had any worthy foe appeared to challenge her. Rather, all the surviving brigands in her vicinity were routing. Yet she’d abandoned her music to growl like an angry beast.

As Dorn had predicted, two dragons and a pair of warriors as able as Raryn and himself had experienced no real difficulty defeating a motley band of marauders. Yet the situation had presented a genuine peril nonetheless, the risk that the excitement of combat would cause one or both of the drakes to succumb to the Rage.

Dorn had to stop Kara before the fury deepened, before she gobbled down one of the bandits, lashed out at her own allies, or attacked the villagers.

“Kara!” he called. “Kara!”

She whipped around to face him, amethyst eyes glaring.

He set his bloody sword down on the ground. Fresh gore stimulated the Rage, and he wished he could thoroughly clean his iron hand as well, but knew there wasn’t time.

He eased toward Kara, murmuring to her in as soothing a manner as he could manage: “It’s all right, the fight’s over, you can stop now. Just breathe slowly, and calm down. You can shake the anger off, I’ve seen you do it before.”

She shuddered and bared her fangs. The air smelled like an approaching storm. He was only a few paces in front of her, and drawing nearer with every step. If she chose to attack him with her breath weapon, a plume of vapor charged with the essence of lightning, it would be all but impossible to dodge.

He kept on closing the distance anyway, though he wasn’t sure why. It didn’t seem as if his prattle was having any effect. In another moment or so, she was going to snap.

Dorn wracked his brain for a way to reach her, and after what felt like a long time, an idea came to him. He sucked in a breath and started singing one of the first songs he’d ever heard her perform, the one about flying high on the wind and beholding all Faerûn spread out below.

As he could have predicted, it sounded awful, harsh and off key, the rhythm stumbling. He hadn’t tried to sing since the day the red slaughtered his parents. The impulse was something the wyrm had ripped away along with his arm and leg.

But bad as it sounded, it gradually stopped Kara’s shaking. When, still singing, he drew near enough, he gingerly stroked the song dragon’s mask.

Kara sighed, closed her eyes, and shrank, melting into her human guise. When the transformation was complete, she put her arms around him and clasped him tight.

“Thank you,” she said.

As always, her touch made him feel soft and strange inside, and that was disturbing. Still, he suffered the embrace for a moment or two before breaking it off.

“You would have mastered the frenzy anyway,” he said.

“Perhaps not. It’s growing worse.”

“I know, which means I was wrong to let you fight an unnecessary battle.”

Kara smiled and said, “As if you could have stopped me.”

Dorn felt his lips stretch into an answering grin. “Well, there is that.” Then he was uncomfortable once more, and needed the moment to end. “We should find out what’s happening.”

She lowered her head as if to conceal a change of expression. “Yes, of course.”

It only took a few moments to determine that Raryn and Chatulio were unharmed, and that the copper had resisted the frenzy. After that, the seekers turned their attention to the villagers.

The simple folk cringed from them, despite their efforts on their behalf. It put a bitter taste in Dorn’s mouth, but he figured they were right to fear any wyrm in a time of Rage, and knew only too well that he himself resembled some sort of troll or demon. Even an arctic dwarf like Raryn was an oddity in the hinterlands of Damara, hence an object of mistrust.

Kara sang a rhyming couplet under her breath, and she grew even fairer than before. Dorn had to struggle not to stare at her. Yet the transformation did more than enhance her beauty. She seemed manifestly virtuous, a saintly creature whose every word carried the weight of wisdom and truth.

Cloaked in the enchantment, she was able to allay the villagers’ fears and begin the work of setting the hamlet to rights, assigning tasks as necessary. Soon, folk who were still well tended those who were injured. Women cooked, and herders set forth to round up scattered sheep and goats. Employing his illusions, Chatulio created the equivalent of a comical puppet show to help the younger children forget the horrors they’d witnessed. When her other self-assumed responsibilities allowed, Kara devoted herself to those hardest hit by the cruelty and bereavement they’d suffered. She listened to their anguish, held their hands, and murmured words of solace.

Dorn watched it all at a distance, feeling that he had no aid to give. He had no knack for speaking gently. All he knew was how to kill.

In time, Raryn strolled up to loiter beside him. The dwarf still had spatters of bandit blood on his cheeks and in his white goatee. The gleaming head of his bone-handled ice-axe, however, was clean. The ranger was scrupulous about caring for his gear. He’d once explained that on the Great Glacier, where he’d spent his youth, weapons and tools were too hard to come by to treat carelessly.

The two hunters watched Kara discover a maimed dog in the shadow of a hunt, soothe it with her voice and caress, then kill it suddenly and cleanly with a thrust of her knife.

“She’s a good woman,” Raryn said.

“She’s not a woman at all,” Dorn replied

“Near enough.” The dwarf grinned. “By my standards, anyway. Of course, tribal legend has it that some of my forefathers married bears.”

Dorn grunted.

“Starting off,” Raryn said, “you hated her just for being a dragon, but I don’t think that’s true anymore.”

“Maybe not.”

“So I ask, what are you waiting on? This is risky business, chasing all over the North with mad wyrms and other dangers lurking at every turn, sticking our noses into accursed crypts and haunted tombs. I like to think we’re tough enough to win through, but I wouldn’t bet my mother’s teeth on it.”

“You’re imagining something that isn’t there. I may not hate Kara, but I don’t desire a creature like her, either.”

Raryn shrugged his massive shoulders. “Fair enough, if you truly feel she isn’t right for you. I’m just worried the real problem is that, deep down, you think you aren’t good enough for her. If so, you’re mistaken.”

An hour later, they were traveling again, on a trace the villagers claimed was a shortcut to their destination. Apparently they were nearly there. Raryn and Kara had known where they were headed after all.

Accordingly, Dorn was eager to reach the place, but his enthusiasm curdled when they crested a hill and he caught his first glimpse of the gray crags, the imposing walls and spires hewn from the same rock, and the white expanse of ice. Specks of color glittered on the landscape far ahead, and if he could even see them at such a distance, Dorn knew they must be huge.

With his keen eyes, Raryn could make them out more clearly.

“Bugger,” said the dwarf.