Chapter 5
The red dragons attacked at close to the noon hour.
Phage Marrowice was inside the Graveyard, trying to find a way to increase his ghouls' armor without using his precious store of lumber, when he heard a banshee shriek:
"Dieeeeee!"
Then he heard his two functional Nerubian towers began their hissing barrage. He sped from the Graveyard in time to see one of his ghouls incinerated by a blast of dragon flame. A pile of ash crumbled to the ground where it had been.
"Wonderful," Phage said. He turned to survey the giant saurians. They seemed to be turning toward the nearest tower. The one free banshee followed them, screaming, but even at a low hover they were out of her reach.
One dragon was much larger than the other. The small one darted back and forth around and above it, occasionally emitting smaller gouts of flame.
"Where is Ner'zirhud?" Phage demanded of the camp at large, shouting to be heard above the sound of towers, dragons, and one increasingly frustrated banshee. The acolytes were nowhere in sight. Presumably they were hiding.
"Here, Milord!" came the necromancer's quavering voice. Phage turned to see a pair of horns extending around the edge of the door to the necropolis.
"Ner'zirhud, get out here and kill the dragons before they destroy all of our food!"
The horns vibrated. "Must I?"
"Yes, curse you! Get out here this instant or I will personally rend you limb from limb!"
This was unlikely, given the difficulty in acquiring enough leverage to rend anything when one has no feet to brace against the ground, but it seemed to work. The necromancer scurried out of the necropolis and toward his Lord and, presumably, Master. "But what can I do, Lord Marrowice? Magic is of no use against these creatures!"
"I know," Phage snapped. "Or I'd be using it myself. Now is the time for you to use those corpses you've been saving and make us some skeleton archers."
"But Lord!" Ner'zirhud protested. "I only have the three we dug out of that burial mound! They're hundreds of years old. They won't last two minutes against dragons!"
Marrowice resisted a powerful urge to seize the man by the throat and shake him. If all my crypt fiends hadn't been killed the first week…
"Then maybe you can buy us enough time for the towers to kill them," he said finally. "Now go."
"The dead shall serve!" Ner'zirhud proclaimed nervously, and turned to run for the Graveyard.
Probably-not-Lord Marrowice turned back in time to see an acolyte emerge from the gold mine. The thin figure darted toward the besieged towers, one of which was now wreathed in flames. As Phage watched, the acolyte ducked under a dragon wing and began waving his or her arms frantically, performing a hurried Repair spell.
Scratch one more acolyte, Phage thought. Great. He could always have Ner'zirhud procure another skeleton from the body, but bodies were still easier to come by than willing acolytes. Phage turned his skull to look at the Graveyard, where he saw no sign of the necromancer. He's probably hiding behind a mound.
Phage sighed and began to call up mana, wrapping the incorporeal structure around his body as he prepared his spell. He'd become rather good at it in the last few weeks, and it only took a few seconds. He raised his arms, and a faint steam in front of his face became a roaring sphere of frost that flew through the air and slammed into the larger dragon. The beast was momentarily plastered with a wall of ice.
For a mere instant, Phage thought it might work. Then the frost evaporated, streaming off the dragon's flanks like smoke. The dragon, apparently unharmed and definitely very angry, turned in midair to look for the source of the annoyance.
Underneath its belly, the acolyte finished repairing with commendable speed and scooted toward the next tower, which was currently under attack by the smaller dragon. Behind them, a taller acolyte left the gold mine and started for the first one.
And Phage Marrowice found himself face-to-skull with several tons of fiery destruction.
He held his ground as the dragon swept closer, its leathery wingtips almost brushing the ground. It held its flame for a moment, turning its great head to bring a yellow eye to bear on him.
Phage swore silently, waiting for his mana to recharge. Not that it really mattered. Nothing he could do would make an impression on a dragon. He was looking at the end of his very short unlife. I was a failure at being a peasant, a failure at being a footman, and now an extremely failed Lich. Now that I come to consider it, this moment was probably inevitable.
The dragon moved in closer. Phage found himself looking into its gaping maw, where a yellow light was just beginning to glow.
It was at that precise instant that a skeleton in rags leaped from the peak of the necropolis onto the dragon's back.
The dragon snorted, forgetting the Lich, and turned in midair as it tried to see what was clinging to its spine. Phage watched as Gray clambered forward between the animal's wings. His rib cage glowed bright purple now, and Phage heard a familiar wailing song over the sound of beating wings.
Surely she can't possibly plan to - ?
She did.
The purple glow shot from between the skeleton's ribs and dove down the dragon's throat. Phage watched with limited interest, all his faculties still busily concentrated on the fact that he was about to die. Figuratively speaking.
He never considered that, while banshees are known to be unable to possess air units, this might be because no one has ever gotten a banshee that far off the ground.
The purple gleam expanded into a blinding violet flash. Phage did not close his eyes, because this was not, technically, possible, so he was the first to see it subside. The dragon hung there in the air, placidly beating its wings. Gray sat straddling its neck with his bony legs, chattering his teeth at it in what was probably an affectionate manner.
"Are you in there?" Phage said, when he finally remembered how to speak without any vocal cords.
The dragon turned its head, showing an eye that was now definitely purple in color.
"Excellent," Phage said weakly. "Go kill the other one, will you?"
Gray clattered and nudged the dragon with his patella. The dragon turned and flapped off toward the Nerubian towers, where the smaller dragon was making little headway.
It was then that Phage noticed the acolyte lying prone on the ground between the towers. Felwyn's clothing was scorched, and in some places it had disintegrated to show burned flesh beneath. Her hood had fallen back, and he could clearly see a wide eye fixed on Mir'noj's face as the tall man leaned over her with a long knife.
Liches can move quite quickly, when they wish.