The dwarf reached inside his waistcoat.
In his hands he held the dwarven Heart of Aer.
The rocks shattered before Belag’s face, collapsing in front of him into a blue haze. The manticore instinctively fell back away from the powerful eye of the Iblisi staff that was searching him out among the rocks, and he tumbled down the seawall.
“Ouch! Get off!”
Belag rolled over, pushing up off the sand while throwing himself against the seawall. “Ethis! We need to get closer to them!”
“Closer?” the chimerian shouted over the roar of the fires burning from the shore to the heart of the village. The Iblisi were incinerating them from thirty yards away.
“We can’t hurt them if we’re not close enough for our weapons.”
“What about the Sondau?” the chimerian asked over the din. “Don’t they have archers?”
“Great ones, but their volleys aren’t hitting their marks,” the manticore answered, his face peering over the sands toward the advancing enemy. “Something is deflecting them.”
“I can only imagine what that might be,” Ethis groused.
“If we can get around their flank,” Belag said, licking his incisors. “Then we’d be close enough to taste their blood.”
“Around their flank?” Ethis drew himself up next to Belag. “Do you see a flank?”
“At the water’s edge,” Belag pointed. “We just need to draw them closer to the village. .”
Two small hands clapped them both on the back at the same time.
“Fellow warriors, take heart! The Wind-princess of Nordens has come to your aid!”
With that, the Lyric leaped blithely over the seawall and began running with all her might toward the burning village.
“NO!” Belag roared.
Drakis floated upside down in the night. He had to close his eyes from time to time to avoid being dizzy, but he clutched his sword in his right hand so hard he thought the grip might snap.
The fires spread by the Iblisi drifted below him. The heat from them was making him sweat, and this worried him as much as anything because he somehow knew that a single drop falling from his brow could easily call death upon him.
He twisted slightly as he opened his eyes. The dwarf was back behind the ridge of stone beyond the lane of fire. Trust the little fool not to mention that he had some skill in magic. Just when was he going to tell the rest of us, Drakis thought, at my funeral or after?
Beneath him he could see his target: a robed Iblisi just below him, his staff gushing fire across the landscape only three feet below him. Drakis opened his left hand, readying it for the plunge, his right hand coiled with the sword, ready to strike.
The dwarf had said they never look up.