Gunnett looked up from her pieces then, her black eyes glittering as she regarded Sabira for long moments. Weighing her words, Sabira thought.
Finally, the dwarf woman shrugged.
“Some might question whether your actions were truly worthy of the honor,” she said at last, moving her own siege engine opposite Sabira’s without taking her eyes off the board. Sabira recognized Sor’s Sacrifice, an intricate series of moves that would end in Gunnett losing her queen in order to take Sabira’s tower. It was a combination seldom used in play—the gain was not typically thought to be worth the loss. Wherever Gunnett had learned it, it hadn’t been from Aggar, because it wasn’t a move Sabira or Ned would have taught him.
“Hmm,” Sabira replied noncommittally as she considered her options. She’d obviously undervalued Gunnett’s skills as a Conqueror player. She wondered what else about the woman she might have overlooked.
Sor’s Sacrifice didn’t actually force a move. It only worked because it required a greater sacrifice to escape it, which most players were unwilling to make. In this case, Sabira would have to offer her up her siege engine, leaving her priest momentarily unprotected. In other words, bait.
She made the move casually, as if it were of no consequence.
“Most people would think ridding the Holds of Nightshard’s evil was worth the gift of a shard axe.”
“Evil,” Gunnett repeated, laughing. “Such a simplistic concept, really. People are rarely ever ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ despite what the bards and the priests tell us. Most are simply self-absorbed, and whether their actions fall into one category or the other depends entirely on who benefits from them, don’t you think?” She swooped her tower in, taking Sabira’s priest with a quick smile.
Sabira just stared, unable to believe what she was hearing.
“I’m sorry. Are you actually saying you don’t think Nightshard was evil? He killed more than a dozen people, including two children, whom he made claw out and eat their own eyes. And you don’t think that qualifies as evil?”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all, Marshal,” Gunnett replied calmly. “I just think it would be interesting, from an academic standpoint, to understand why Nightshard did what he did. If we’d bothered to find that out, perhaps we could have prevented this latest series of tragic deaths, and Aggar wouldn’t be in the situation he’s in now. And you wouldn’t have had to come back here.” The dwarf woman smiled again, this time sympathetically. “Orin told me you left a lot of bad memories in the Holds.”
Sabira almost snorted at that. Memories were the one thing she hadn’t been able to leave behind, and the one thing she most wished she could.
Turning her attention back to the game, Sabira pretended to ponder for a moment, then moved her remaining priest into a cluster of footmen.
“I don’t care why he did it. He killed my partner. He deserved what he got, and worse.” Much, much worse, if only Sabira could have given it to him.
“Did he, though?” Gunnett asked, moving one of her footmen to intercept the priest, exposing her archer in the process. “Kill your partner, I mean?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s just that I’ve heard different versions of the story. For instance, I’ve heard that you let your partner die so that you could keep the whole fee for saving Aggar for yourself, probably because you needed to pay off some gambling debt. I’ve also heard that you knew there was a position in the Marshals opening up, and you knew Leoned was far more likely to get promoted than you were, so you used the cave-in as a way to get rid of your competition and cover your tracks. I’m not saying I believe those versions, mind you,” Gunnett added, “but it does go to prove my point—who the villain is depends largely on who’s telling the story.…”
But Sabira had stopped listening. As if Gunnett’s words had opened a portal in time, she found herself back in Korran’s Maw, her vision filled with images of that terrible day. A bruised and bloody Leoned suspended upside-down over one of the cave’s many magma pools, his head close enough to the molten rock that she feared his hair might catch fire at any moment. Aggar, who’d followed her instead of waiting for help from Frostmantle, coming across the cavern and heading straight for a trap that would surely kill him. And Nightshard, twin rings sparkling in the fiery light as he taunted her with the knowledge that she couldn’t possibly save them both.
“No,” Sabira said vehemently, shaking the memories away, denying them as she denied Gunnett’s preposterous theories. “That murderous bastard was the only villain, believe me. All the rest of us were just his victims.”
Then she slid her forgotten paladin out from his place in the back rank and captured Gunnett’s archer, the only piece protecting the black king.
“That’s mate,” she said, holding out her hand to the stunned dwarf. “Good game.”
As Gunnett slowly took her hand, still staring in disbelief at the board, the office door opened and Elix hurried in, a grave look on his face.
“Lady Mountainheart, Sabira. I need you to come with me. Now.”
Sabira stood quickly, responding to the urgency in his tone as much as to his words. She slapped her urgrosh into its harness and strode toward the door.
“What is it? What’s happened?” she asked. Had Mountainheart taken a turn for the worse? Olladra forbid, had her trick with the ironspice actually killed him?
“I just received word from Krona Peak. They’ve moved Aggar’s trial up. It starts tomorrow.”
It was raining when they exited the building, the sky cold and gray, and Sabira realized she’d left her cloak back in Elix’s office. There’d be no going back for it; Elix was in too much of a hurry. He strode briskly through the wet streets, avoiding cloaked pedestrians and puddles and explaining as they went.
“The Deneith airship isn’t ready to go—some sort of issue with a control fin, they tell me. But I was able to get you seats on an airship that’s leaving right now—they’re holding the gangplank for you. It’s a passenger run, since the lightning rail’s out of service, so it will be crowded, but it should get you to Krona Peak by daybreak. We’ll cut through here.”
Elix turned a corner and led them into a wide courtyard filled with carts and vendors who hid beneath drenched awnings and hastily erected tarps, unwilling to close up shop even in this foul weather. There were more cloaked figures here, darting from cart to cart, likely hapless servants who needed to procure some vital bauble for their lords and ladies, rain or no rain.
This was not an official marketplace but rather one of those that tended to spring up in any available space whenever shipments came in from Irontown and the Mror Holds, where prospectors, artisans, and hunters could peddle wares the dwarves either wouldn’t take or didn’t want. The items—usually animal hides or horns, chunks of raw ore and uncut gems, or jewelry and weapons made from them—were deemed inferior by the dwarves, though Sabira had often seen them fetch high prices in Khorvaire’s larger, more cosmopolitan cities. She had herself purchased trinkets at similar markets that she later sold in Aundair or Breland for twice what she had paid.
That had been a long time ago, though. She’d managed to avoid Karrnath completely for going on three years, and hadn’t set foot in Vulyar for more than seven.
But if the market was a testament to all the things she’d lost when she’d run from this place so many years ago, it was also a reminder that there were some things she’d simply let go, and not all of those had been bad.
She glanced over at Elix, with the rain sparkling in his dark hair like diamonds and his dragonmark curling across his jaw like a lover’s caress.
She just hoped, when all of this was over, that the good things could still be salvaged.
Gunnett paused at the base of the docking tower.
“I’d like to go with you to Krona Peak,” she said, squeezing the rain out of her hair as she stood in the relative dryness of the tower’s shadow, “but there’s no way I can leave without checking on my husband fir
st, and I know time is of the essence.”
“With Orin unable to attend the trial, it really would be best if you could be there,” Elix replied, frowning.
“How long will it take to get that fin fixed?” Sabira asked. “Maybe she can just follow me when it’s ready? I can’t imagine the trial is going to be over in half a day.” Not unless she turned out to be the world’s worst advocate, which was, unfortunately, a very real possibility.
Elix looked questioningly at Gunnett, who considered for a moment, then nodded.
“I’m not sure what good my presence will do you,” Gunnett said, “but if I can help, I will.”
She held her hand out first to Elix, and then to Sabira.
“I enjoyed our game, Marshal. Perhaps we’ll get another opportunity to play when this is all over,” Gunnett said as Sabira returned her handclasp. “Until tomorrow, then.”
Sabira and Elix watched until the dwarf woman disappeared into the rain and then they turned and entered the tower. Elix didn’t need to flash his chimera brooch; the guards here all recognized and seemed to genuinely like him, greeting him with smiles and sharp salutes. He made a good Marshal, Sabira thought, and a better captain. Host knew, there was no way she’d ever have that kind of heartfelt respect from her fellows, unless they were under the influence of some powerful mind control spell. She supposed she could always pass out helmets embedded with Khyber shards attuned to her will.…
“Elix, wait!”
He was at the top of the docking tower, just about to step back out into the rain.
Sabira rooted around in her pocket for a moment before coming up with the dragonshard that she’d dug out of the yrthak’s head. She handed it to him.
“Can you have Tilde take a look at this? It’s been bothering me ever since we left the Dust Dancer, and I just want to make sure it’s nothing we should be worried about.”
“Tilde?” Elix repeated, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice. Donathilde ir’Thul was the Vulyar office’s resident sorceress, formerly an instructor at Arcanix. She’d retired early when one of her favorite students died in the Maze of Shadowy Terror, a test she personally administered to graduating wizards as part of their final exams. Her protégé—and some said he was more than that—had snuck into the maze on his own the night before the test was scheduled. Whether he’d done it on a dare or was trying to prove himself, no one really knew. There were even rumors that he’d been trying to set up some sort of elaborate class prank, but whatever the reason, the end result was not in debate: He’d fallen prey to one of the magical creatures inside. Tilde had found him too late and had held what was left of him in her arms as he died.
The experience probably should have made her and Sabira fast friends, considering. Except that Tilde also happened to be Leoned’s older sister, and the only surviving ir’Thul sibling. And she hated Sabira with a passion, convinced that Ned would never have died if he’d only had a better partner. An accusation Sabira was sadly unable to refute.
“You think the yrthak attack was deliberate?”
“I’d like to rule out the possibility, for my own peace of mind.”
Elix shrugged and secreted the shard inside his shirt. “I’ll make sure she gets it.”
She followed him out onto the deck of the docking tower, where a Stormglory Bolt ironically named Lightning waited. At the gangplank, he introduced her to the ship’s first mate, then turned to leave with the barest of goodbyes.
Sabira grabbed his arm. She wasn’t sure when—or if—she’d see him again once she boarded the airship to Krona Peak, and she needed to know something.
“Back on the Dancer—”
“That was some nice singing, by the way. Though I’m not so sure about your choice of songs.…”
“Elix, I’m serious. What you said to Thecla. Did you mean that? ‘Men are fools when they’re in love.’ ”
“We both told a lot of lies onboard that ship, Saba,” he replied, his eyes shuttered and his face offering her nothing. “Why start being honest now?”
And with that, he turned and ran for the cover of the stairs as the downpour began in earnest.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mol, Nymm 16, 998 YK
Krona Peak, Mror Holds.
The Lightning reached Krona Peak just after sunrise the next day. It stormed the entire way, forcing the passengers to remain belowdecks. Sabira had been stuck in steerage, since Elix had only been able to secure her a seat, not a private cabin, which had all been reserved for paying customers. Not by her choice, she was crammed onto a bench in the middle of the cabin between two unsavory passengers. One was a warforged who sported a lute and a grand, feathered hat whose plumes kept getting in her face. And the other was an old man who kept bumping up against her and whom she was certain was either a lecher or was trying to steal her money pouch. By Balinor’s twisted horns, if he did it again, she was going to smack him over the head with the warforged’s lute, and then arrest them both for disturbing her peace.
An appreciative murmur went up from those closest to the portholes as the airship finally descended out of the cloud cover and the city was revealed in all its austere splendor below them.
The first glimpse of the dwarven stronghold never failed to impress, but it was most spectacular in the evening. Great stone ramparts rose up out of the mountainside, their sheer vertical faces reflecting the western sun so brilliantly that they seemed to be made of gold. The surfaces of the walls had been revetted with volcanic glass, quarried and transported from the ancient lava fields surrounding the Fist of Onatar, more than five hundred miles away. The effect was always startling, regardless of the time of day—the walls still shone even in this weak morning light, but like black ice instead of molten ore, and under the shadowless light of the noonday sun, they looked as though rivers of silver had rushed down their sides, only to be frozen in time by some legendary mage.
While many visitors assumed from the mass of the ramparts that they, along with most of the city, had been carved out of the mountain itself, the truth, as with most things dwarven in nature, was actually both simpler and far more complex. The walls had indeed been chiseled from the side of Krona Peak, but they were no longer attached to the mountain, at least not directly. Sabira didn’t pretend to understand the mechanics of it, though Aggar had tried several times to explain it to her. The ramparts had been excavated out of the mountainside to form a sort of bowl in which the city proper rested. If they remained connected to the mountain, in the absence of all the earth that had once been where the city now stood, they would be in danger of sheering off at their bases and collapsing during the area’s not infrequent earthquakes. To neutralize this threat, the dwarves had isolated the bases of each section of the walls, deep below ground level. It seemed entirely counterintuitive to her that the dwarves could keep the huge blocks of stone from moving by allowing their bases to do so, but Aggar had assured her that it worked, muttering something incomprehensible about energy absorbance and transference. And Sabira had no cause to doubt him: During the one temblor she herself had experienced while in Krona Peak, she’d been knocked from her feet and some of the buildings around her had swayed, even deformed. But the ramparts had not seemed to move at all, and not even the tiniest crack could be seen in the glossy black expanse of their seamless veneers. They remained unchanged.
As did everything about the city. Sabira was too far away from any of the portholes to get a good look at the dwarven capital, but she remembered the sight well and imagined she could reconstruct it in exact detail from memory alone. Unlike the human cities where she spent the bulk of her time, nothing here would have changed—the same clans ran the same businesses out of the same buildings that they’d used for generations. Even if an establishment had changed hands in the relatively short amount of time that she’d been gone—short to a dwarf, anyway—the name on the placard would remain the same, because one of the virtues dwarves valued most was constancy. Thus, the little weapons shop on th
e Street of Songs was still Frin’s Fine Arms, even though Frin Soranath had died sixty years ago, leaving no heirs, and the business had been operated by the Mroranons ever since. And the bakery two blocks over on Delver’s Way still served the same eponymous sugar and sourfruit cakes that had made it famous across Khorvaire for half a century; while the bakers might change, the recipes never did.
Just then, the old man leaned across her chest, craning his neck as if to get one last look at the great black bulwark before the airship docked with the tower just outside the city gates.
The only problem with that, of course, was that if Sabira couldn’t see from where she sat, there was no way the oldster next to her—who was even farther from the porthole than she was—could, either.
Sabira grabbed the back of the man’s collar with one hand while pulling her Marshal’s brooch out from beneath her shirt with the other. Then she pulled him close, so the Deneith chimera filled his vision.
“Is this what you’re looking for, old man?” she asked, pitching her voice low and dangerous. On the other side of her, the warforged noticed, and tried to discreetly inch away, much to the vocal dismay of the passengers caught between him and the hull.
“Eh, what? I say now, unhand me, you young cluck!” the man demanded, his words breathy and high-pitched, and for a moment Sabira felt a pang for treating him so harshly. Then she felt him shift, just slightly, looking for all of Eberron as if he were simply trying to lessen the pressure on the back of his neck. But she noticed the change in the weight of her boot immediately.
Yanking his head back, she reached down and caught his wrist just as the second pouch she’d hidden in her boot was disappearing into his shirt.
“Well, now, how did that get there?” the old man asked, feigning surprise. Then he glared up at her, his voice rising in protest. “What are you, some sort of marauding wizard, riding the skies in search of harmless old men to harass?”
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