Free Annihilation by Philip Athans

the dragon off balance and to keep his own mirror images moving frenetically around him. The drake clawed another one into thin air then bit the third out of existence.
    Valas watched the image disappear and followed the portal drake’s neck with his eyes as it passed half an arm’s length in front of him. He looked for cracks, creases, for any sign of weakness in the monster’s thick, scaly hide.
    He found one and sank a kukri between scales, through skin, into flesh, artery, and bone beneath it. Blood pumped from thecreature in torrents. The dragon flailed at Valas, though it couldn’t quite see the scout. As the creature died, it managed to brush a claw against the last false drow. The drake started to fall, and Valas skipped out of the way. The narrow head whipped around on its long, supple neck, and the jaws came down on Valas’s shoulder, crinkling his armor and bruising the black skin underneath.
    The scout pulled away, rolled, and came to his feet with his kukris in front of him.
    No attack came. The portal drake splayed across the floor of the cavern. Blood came less frequently and with less urgency with every fading heartbeat.
    “Always knew …” the dying dragon sighed, “it would be … a drow.”
    The portal drake died with that word on its tongue, and Valas lifted an eyebrow at the thought.
    He stepped away from the poisonous corpse and sheathed his kukris. There was no sign of Danifae. Valas didn’t know if she’d kept running back the way they’d come or if she was hiding somewhere in the shadows.
    With a shrug and a last glance at the portal drake, Valas turned and went to the abandoned monastery. Assuming that the Melarn battle-captive would eventually return to the cavern and the portal that was their goal there, Valas climbed into the great downturned mouth.
    Inside the semicircular structure were two tall, freestanding pillars. Between them was nothing but dead air and the side of the tall cavern wall. The interior was shrouded in darkness, and from it came the sharp smell of the portal drake’s filth.
    Danifae stood between the pillars, her weight on one foot, her hand on her hip.
    “Is it dead?” she asked.
    Valas stopped several strides from her and nodded.
    Danifae looked up and around at the dead stone pillars and the featureless interior of the huge face.
    “Good,” the battle-captive said. “Is this the portal?”
    When she looked back at Valas, he nodded again.
    “You know how to open it,” she said, with no hint that it might be a question.
    Valas nodded a third time, and Danifae smiled.
    “Before we go,” she said as she pulled a dagger from her shapely hip, “I want to harvest some poison.”
    Valas blinked and said, “From the portal drake?”
    Danifae walked past him, smiling, spinning her dagger between her fingers.
    “I’ll wait here,” he told her.
    She kept going without bothering to answer.
    If she survives that, Valas thought, she might just be worth traveling with.

    Pharaun traced a fingertip along the line of something that hadn’t been there the day before: a vein. The blood vessel followed a meandering path along the length of the bone rail of the ship of chaos. At random intervals it branched into thinner capillaries. The whole thing slowly, almost imperceptibly, pulsed with life—warm with the flow of blood. When they’d first come aboard the demonic ship, the railing was solid, dead bone. Half a tenday spent gating in minor demons and feeding it to the ship was changing it. It was coming to life.
    “Will it eventually grow skin?” Quenthel asked from behind him.
    Pharaun turned and saw the high priestess crouching, examining the deck the same way he was examining the rail.
    “Skin?” the wizard asked.
    “These veins it’s growing seem so fragile,” she said. Her voice sounded bored, distant. “If we step on them won’t we cut them?”
    “I don’t know,” Pharaun said. What he meant was that he didn’t care. “What difference could it