Scream of Stone by Philip Athans

Author:Philip Athans
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Epic, Juvenile Fiction, Revenge, Fantasy & Magic, General, Fantasy, Wizards, Fiction, Forgotten realms (Imaginary place)
ISBN: 9780786942718
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Published: 2007-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

40

25 Eleint, the Year of Rogue Dragons

(1373 DR) Pristal Towers, Innarlith

Iristoleph sat on a cool marble bench, letting the late summer sun that shone through the skylights and windows warm his already burning hot skin. The room was the uppermost floor of the second tallest tower of his magnificent manor home. From nearly a hundred feet in the air, the city looked peaceful, even beautiful, and Pristoleph often found himself drawn to that lofty space to sit alone and think.

His eyes drifted lazily from one of the sixteen triangular windows to one of the sixteen statues lined up along the walls of the octagonal room. He'd collected the statues for years, finding them in all corners of the world. Some were very old-older even than the ancient empire of Netheril- and others he'd had commissioned from the artists himself, the newest one only a few months before.

He turned his face back up to the skylights, which, like the windows in the tall, straight side walls, were triangles cut from the pyramidal roof. Through the skylights he could see the long orange pennant spreading itself along the gusty wind from its pole at the apex of the pointed roof.

Uncharacteristically calm, even content-if such a thing could be imagined from a man like Pristoleph-he took a deep breath and smiled.

But his smile faded almost as quickly as it came to his lips. A strange feeling nettled at the back of his neck, and though he didn't remember hearing anything, he could swear his ears had something akin to an aftertaste, the feeling of having heard something. He turned to look behind him but he was still alone in the big room. The statues all stood mute sentinel around the perimeter, staring out at nothing with eyes of marble, bronze, and wood.

In the center of the room, ringed by an ornamental railing of polished brass, was a hole down which a spiral stairway sank into the room below. Even as Pristoleph assured himself that there was no one on the stair, a scuffle of booted feet sounded from below, and the head of one of his black firedrake guards appeared, scanning the room with a furrowed brow over his coal-black eyes. He saw Pristoleph and came up to the top of the stairs.

"Ransar?" the firedrake said. "All is well?"

"I believe so, Sergeant Nevor," Pristoleph said, "but I have the strangest-"

Pristoleph was silenced by the black firedrake's shuddering, strangled cry of shock and pain. The dark-skinned, black-clad man's knees buckled and he dropped to the floor-not dead, but nearly so. His longaxe clattered onto the wood floor next to him. Pristoleph stood as the huge, terrifying form of a water naga shimmered into existence. It stood just at the top of the stairs, behind Nevor, and by the way it held its right hand, Pristoleph could tell that it was the naga's touch that had felled his guard.

But not his only guard.

"Firedrakes!" Pristoleph called.

The naga, slithering on its blue-green scales, charged him, its clawed hands out in front of it, its fangs bared and its forked tongue flicking in and out of its mouth.

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