Strike Him Down

Opening

The mace had already done its work. Where Lightbringer's head had come down on the guard's shoulder, a sluggish weight now hung on the man's sword arm — sap, Zuktind called it, and it meant the next swing would come slow and clumsy. Around them the warehouse was all hard angles in the dark: stacked crates rising into shadow, a catwalk somewhere above, the smell of pitch and dust and river damp seeping up through the floorboards.

They had come to keep Vorath and Meridian from walking out of Neverwinter with the stolen documents. That was the whole of it, and the whole of it was still in doubt. Somewhere above, a red-scaled shape waited on the boxes with a woman in his arms and murder in his throat. Below, the party held the floor — Zuktind and Telno on their wings, Yeltsu moving under the hum of a Haste that had not yet run out, Rathenfall planted like a post among the guards, and Rusty, Zuktind's steel defender, wheeling for an opening it kept failing to find. Lissandra held the door from outside.

Vorath had said a thing, earlier, that Zuktind had not yet answered. That his line of Dragonkin were traitors. That they had betrayed our mother.

Zuktind was holding the answer. He was waiting for his turn.

The Warehouse Floor

Yeltsu went first, and Yeltsu went carefully. The crossbow came up, a bolt took a guard, and then he stopped himself before reaching for anything brighter. Fire would climb the crates. An explosion would ring through half the district and bring the watch down on all of them. So he chose the quiet knife instead — a Cloud of Daggers, poured out at the height of his power, hung shimmering in the air where Vorath stood. The blades bit once, and then bit again a breath later, and the red drake wore both.

Out past the threshold, the night had gone wrong for Della. The rescued girl was still invisible, and being unseen had not made her calm — it had made her frantic, sure the fighting inside would spill out and take her back. It was Lissandra who reached her, low and even: no one can see you. No one would stop her. She could run to her father right now and no hand in the world would land on her. And Della ran, and the dark took her, and she was not heard from again. Whether she would tell her father who had pulled her out of that place — that was a thing they would have to hope for later, when there was room to hope.

Inside, the bells began.

They rang from outside and from the floor above at once, frantic, the way bells ring when a hand is hauling on the rope over and over. Through the clamor a woman's voice found Vorath — Meridian, sharp with urgency: they have the documents. And then, colder: do it.

Traitor

Vorath turned on Zuktind.

Smoke was already leaking from his nostrils, and his eyes had gone to coals. He named him traitor. He named him a shame to his kind, the worst there was — and on the last word he opened his throat and let the fire come, a wash of cinder and smoke rolling across the floor. Zuktind rode it out. His Dragon Guard argued for mercy on the roll, though the fine print turned against him — Dragonkin, it seemed, counted as monstrous humanoids and not as true dragons, and the guard's grace against dragonfire did not answer — but it made no difference in the end. His own footing was good enough without it. He came through wreathed in smoke and only half-burned.

The drake beat his wings and hauled himself up and back, and got one raking blow in as he went. Zuktind spent the last of his Shield to turn it — a shimmer of force flaring across his guard — and the claw skated off.

Then it was his turn, and he had waited long enough.

He put away the mace and brought up the musket, and as he sighted down it he finally gave Vorath his answer. "It is not a betrayal to leave an abusive parent," he said. "We merely wanted to ask why. And she said no." Then the gun spoke four times, Hasted and true, and the shots hammered home one after another, and a jolt of arcane force chased the last of them into the drake's hide.

Around him the fight kept its shape. Yeltsu let his own daggers dissolve so Zuktind could move without walking through them. Telno raised a hand and called the light of Bahamut down on Vorath — may the light of Bahamut strike you down — and sacred fire fell where he hung in the air, unhurried and unblinded by his dodging. Rusty lunged at the guards and found nothing but air, again, and again.

Turning Point — The Stack Comes Down

Vorath climbed to the top of a tall stack of storage crates, and from up there he made his choice. He set his weight against it and shoved, and the whole structure came apart — boxes, merchandise, the raw weight of the thing — and it all fell toward Rathenfall.

Rathenfall threw himself clear. He came out the side of the collapse with the world raining down behind him, no more than bruised, and by the time the dust settled the drake was already gone — up into the catwalk, out of sight, carrying Meridian into the rafters.

Zuktind gave chase. He beat up to the upper level, out over the catwalk, and there was Vorath in open air with the woman clutched against him — nowhere left to hide. The musket came up again. The shots found him. And Vorath fell. He dropped Meridian as he went, and the two of them came down hard onto the crates below — prone, dazed, sprawled among the merchandise, not into the black water they had almost fallen toward, but onto the boxes at the last. A jolt of force rode the shot down after them.

Below, the front door had opened. Two more guards were coming in from the night.

The Break

The reinforcements did not steady the room. They watched it crumble.

One of the security men looked at Vorath sprawled among the crates, looked at the wreckage of the stack, and let his sword fall to the floorboards. "I'm dying for no gold," he said, and stepped back with his hands empty. Another followed him. The party let them go — Rusty pulled its attacks, and Rathenfall stooped and gathered the surrendered blades off the ground, too long for any pack, and carried them in one fist. When he could not cow the last of them by mercy alone he loosed a Daunting Roar, and the sound of it broke one man's nerve outright; the other only flinched and put his palms up. Chill, the man said. I'm just security. I already dropped my weapon.

But one of them would not fold. He drew his sword back out and turned on his own — we need to kill these motherfuckers — and stayed in the fight while the rest bled off around him. Yeltsu, still choosing his spells for silence, passed over an ice storm that would have sounded like boulders falling from the sky and laid another Cloud of Daggers across the holdouts instead, then a lance of frost to finish the thought.

And up among the crates, Vorath dragged himself back to his feet.

Closing

He spent what movement he had left standing, hauled Meridian upright, took her against him again, and beat up into the air — thirty feet, straight up, out over Lissandra where she watched the door. She looked up and for half a heartbeat took the flying shape for Zuktind in his disguise, and then understood: not Zuktind. Running. She had no turn to spend on it, no spell to throw. The drake dashed for the doorway and was through it.

Zuktind measured the last chance he had. There was a window near where Vorath had gone — glass, or shuttered wood, and behind it what might have been iron bars, round and dark. To smash through it Hasted would cost him blood and might cost him more than that if the bars held. He weighed the glass and the wood and the iron, and he would not take the wager blind. Instead he ran — through the door, out into the dark after them, trusting his Haste to close the gap the honest way.

Beyond the warehouse wall the river ran black and cold, and Vorath was already over open ground with Meridian in his arms, climbing, gaining. For tonight he was loose — out of the building, out of easy reach, the documents still in the party's hands and the drake still in the sky.

The chase went out the door into the night, and the river was waiting for it.