The Road to Death: The Lost Mark, Book 2

by Forbeck, Matt

  It seemed that no living creatures stood on the ship, that they had all gone to the guest barracks in the fort below, leaving their crew of Karrnathi skeletons behind. These were not so well armored as the ones working in the fort, who served as guards full time. Instead, they had little clothing at all, making it easier for them to move about the ship at speed. Each of them wore a black vest lined with crimson silk and many pockets to give them someplace to store tools and the like. Each also had a long knife in a leather sheath strapped to its right femur. Some of them had a brightly colored bandanna either tied around their neck or wrapped around their naked skulls. Te’oma couldn’t be sure, but they seemed to be some indicator of either rank or position. She supposed you might need such a thing to tell the creatures apart if you were trapped on a ship with dozens of them for a week or more at a time.

  None of the creatures moved a single bone as they waited for their visitors to board their ship. The silence among so many creatures made Berre’s skin crawl over the changeling’s flesh. She expected them to burst into lethal action at any moment and wasn’t sure she could stand waiting for that any longer.

  Te’oma brushed past Ibrido on the gangplank and stepped onto the ship’s wide, polished deck. This seemed even more like a boat than the other airship, wide enough that she could ignore for a moment the fact that the craft hung floating high in the air rather than in an open sea.

  A gaunt, sunken-eyed man wearing a black, silk bandanna tied around the crown of his head stepped forward as she boarded the ship. Some of the skeletons aboard the ship seemed to have more mass than this lean figure, who stepped forward and saluted Te’oma. “Bosun Meesh, at your service,” he said in a dry, unused voice.

  “I am Berre Stonefist, Captain of Bones, in charge of this fortress and all who come within its bounds. I am taking command of this ship. Prepare to cast off.”

  The bosun stared at Te’oma with his cavernous eyes, his lips frozen for the moment. The changeling felt like she might vomit. She had no idea how the Karrn maintained a chain of command over these soulless creatures, and she feared that they were as likely to tear her to shreds and feast on her flesh as accept her orders.

  Ibrido reached around Te’oma’s chest and pulled a fold in the cloak open to expose a silver wolf’s head embroidered in profile there. A set of three knucklebones rested beneath these, stitched fast to the cloak’s fabric in a triangular pattern.

  At the sight of these, the black-capped man developed a thin-lipped smile and said, “Aye, aye.” Then he turned and made a complex signal to the ship’s skeletons, each of which had been gazing at him with an empty stare. They launched into a burst of chaotic activity, working fast to remove the moorings and pull the gangplank up behind Ibrido.

  “Soon we will be on our way,” the Karrn said as he carried Esprë’s body to the captain’s quarters in the ship’s forecastle. “Then no one will be able to stop us.”

  Te’oma smiled at those words as she followed Ibrido, hoping they were true.

  We need to open that gate,” Kandler said. “If we do that without removing that guard, he’ll bring the entire fort down on our heads. It’s him or us.”

  Sallah nodded, then shouldered past the justicar. “Wait here,” she said.

  Flummoxed, Kandler watched as the lady knight strode straight up to the ladder. She climbed up into the guard’s post in a small niche along the narrow walkway that lined the upper edge of the wall just high enough to let a man peek his head out over the crenellations.

  “Hello,” he heard her say. “I think I’m lost.”

  “True enough,” the guard said, amused. “You’re a long way from Thrane.”

  Kandler crept over to the barred gates, still listening.

  “It’s been a long, lonely trip,” she said. “I was hoping to find some civilized company here.”

  The guard laughed. “There’s little of anything civilized out here on the edge of nowhere, but I’d be pleased to do what I can to please you.”

  Kandler heard Sallah try a girly giggle, but it fell flat.

  “Are you all right?” the guard said. “Something caught in your throat?”

  The lady knight coughed. “I’m fine,” she said. “It must be the night air.”

  A pair of skeletal guards converged on the post from opposite directions. Kandler could hear their booted feet stomping along the wooden walkway above, and he pressed himself harder against the gates. He put his hand on the pommel of his sword, ready to draw it at a moment’s notice, but fearful that the sound of it clearing its scabbard would give him away.

  “Just let me put these two at ease,” the guard said. “They don’t talk much, but they listen to orders.”

  A moment later, Kandler heard the skeletal guards pacing back off in the directions from which they’d come. He breathed a silent sigh of relief.

  “Now,” the guard said to Sallah, moving closer to her, “let’s see what I can do for you.”

  “Why don’t you join me down below?” Sallah said. “I feel a bit too exposed up here. Anyone could see us.”

  “An excellent idea,” the guard said. “Ladies first.”

  Sallah came down through the hole in the flooring, picking her way carefully down the ladder to the ground. As she cleared the decking, she waved Kandler into a nearby patch of shadow to wait.

  The lady knight stood at the foot of the ladder until the guard joined her. “Now,” he said with a leer, “just what was it you were hoping I could do for you, my pretty lass?”

  Sallah sidled closer to the guard, running her hands up his chest until they rested on the front of his breastplate. “I just have one simple request,” she whispered in his ear. “Keep quiet.”

  She shoved the man back into Kandler’s arms, where he put a knife to the man’s throat. The guard’s eyes grew wide, but he pressed his lips shut as if he feared some sound might accidentally escape.

  Sallah tore off the guard’s tunic and used strips of it to gag and bind him. He didn’t struggle a bit. Just before she stuffed a ball of fabric in his mouth, he whispered, “My thanks to you. This job’s not worth dying over.”

  “See,” Sallah whispered with a smile as she and Kandler each grabbed an end of the bar holding the gates shut, “there can be a better way.”

  “Hey,” said Trisfo, the Karrn who hoped to fly Phoenix to Fort Zombie and back the next day, “do you see that?”

  Xalt froze stiff. These were some of the words he dreaded to hear most in what had been a pleasant conversation so far, covering subjects ranging from the vegetation of the Mournland to the airworthiness of ships like Phoenix.

  Monja smiled. “I can’t hear much of anything standing this close to the ring of fire.”

  Trisfo stepped between the halfling and the warforged to peer toward the fort’s gates. “I said, ‘Do you see that?’ Puakel’s gone from his post again.” He pointed up at the guard post above and to one side of the gates. “He’s going to spend a year in Khyber for that if Berre catches him again.”

  “He’s probably just gone to relieve himself,” Xalt said. When Monja stared at him, he added, “I understand humans have to do that all the time.”

  “Warforged don’t?” Trisfo asked, intrigued.

  “No,” said Xalt. “Compared to breathers, we have a tremendous amount of control over our bodies.”

  “If you don’t eat, how do you stay alive?” Trisfo asked, still keeping one eye on the gates.

  “It’s complicated,” Xalt said, warming to the subject, happy to be talking about anything but guards and gates—especially guards near gates. “Mostly we are motivated by a complicated system of magical means, much like a golem. We don’t need any more sustenance than that. However, the wizardly researchers who designed us wanted us to have some measure of free will—as much as any other self-aware creatures, it seems. To that end, the running theory is that they decided to make us as much like breathing people as possible.”

  “Fascinating,” Trisfo said, now
completely engaged by the conversation again. “You mean to say that you have a heart, lungs, a brain?”

  “In some sense, yes,” Xalt said. “You might even recognize them as such if you were to dissect one of us. They have the same form, even if they are not constructed from the same substances.”

  “Then there is no flesh to you nor bone?”

  “Not, again, in the traditional sense. I have an underlying framework that is just as strong as bone, and I have fibers that move in much the same way as your muscles, but they do so without need for food, drink, or even—”

  A heart-stopping howl rang out in the night, and for a moment Xalt forgot from where such a horrible sound could have come. Monja reached up and grabbed the warforged’s hand and started pulling him toward the gates. As he turned, he saw them start to creak open.

  “What’s going on here?” Trisfo said, stunned. Then he shouted at the top of his lungs, “The gates! Puakel! The gates!”

  Burch came charging out of the stables, still howling as he rushed up behind Xalt and Monja. “Stay here!” he snarled at them as he bounded past, faster than either of them could move.

  Xalt halted in midstride and nearly tripped over his own feet. He turned to face Monja, who stared at him with horrified eyes.

  At the same time, Trisfo kept shouting for help, screaming for Berre and anyone else to come to his aid. Skeletons came slipping down from the deck of Phoenix on mooring lines, landing all around the pair, weapons drawn.

  “The gates!” Trisfo roared at them. They sprinted off toward the tall, wide, iron-banded doors as they peeled open inch by inch, foot by foot. They ran with what Xalt would have thought was bone-breaking speed, like death chasing after the fleeing shifter.

  “This,” Xalt said, “cannot be good.”

  “What?” Kandler yelled as Burch came sprinting toward him across the open yard, letting everyone in the place see that he and Sallah stood in front of the now-open gates. “What is it?”

  With anyone else, Kandler might have been angry. He’d been in tense situations like this time and again, and he’d seen a lot of people crack under the strain. More than one perfectly good plan had gone all to pieces when someone decided to panic at the exact wrong moment.

  The justicar knew that Burch, though, was as solid as they came. If he came screaming and howling at him in the middle of a delicate operation, he knew something had to be horribly wrong.

  “Brendis is dead,” the shifter said as he came panting up to Kandler and Sallah and crashed into the justicar’s arms.

  “No,” Sallah breathed. Kandler could feel the horror strike her. She’d lost three of her fellow knights already. With Brendis gone, she alone bore the responsibility of completing the mission with which five Knights of the Silver Flame—including her father—had been charged.

  He had problems of his own though.

  “Is Esprë all right?” He dreaded the answer. Although he suspected that Burch would have brought him bad news about his daughter first, he didn’t see anyway that a story that began with “Brendis is dead” could end well.

  “Don’t know,” Burch said. “Found his body in the stables. It was cold.”

  “But …” Kandler’s voice trailed off, unable to keep up with the thoughts whirring through his head.

  If Brendis’s body was cold, that meant he’d been dead for hours, but he’d seen the young knight with Esprë only minutes ago. That meant …

  “The changeling!”

  Burch nodded. “She can’t be too far.”

  Kandler grimaced. “So much for a clean escape. We need to rouse Berre and sound the alarm. Maybe we can still stop her, whatever her plan is.”

  At that moment, the new airship, the one with the grotesque masthead, caught his eye from across the whole of the fort. “That’s it,” he said. “She has to be going for it.”

  As he spoke, he thought he could make out two figures walking up the gangplank and on to the ship. The larger of them carried something slung over its shoulder.

  “They’re on the—”

  Before Kandler could finish his sentence, a voice rang out. “Hold! If you move a muscle, you will die!”

  Kandler spotted Berre dashing toward them from across the yard. As he glanced around, he saw at least two score Karrnathi skeletons leveling crossbows at them. It seemed that the Captain of Bones didn’t make idle threats.

  Te’oma heard the howl just as she opened the door to the captain’s quarters. It ran icicles through her veins. She shivered as she froze in the doorway. Indecision transfixed her as she tried to determine what she should do.

  Ibrido pulled her into the cabin and slammed the door behind her. She heard the latch fall shut as she picked herself up off the crimson rug that covered most of the floor. She noticed Esprë laid out on the red-velvet couch in front of her. The young elf slept there peacefully oblivious, not a mark on her pale skin. The fort infirmary had been good to her, unnaturally so. Te’oma suspected that the Captain of Bones had slipped a healing potion of some sort into Esprë’s drink, something she was equally sure hadn’t been wasted on herself.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Te’oma said as she spun to face Ibrido. “We need to cast off.”

  The soldier stared at her with his unblinking eyes. “The crew is set to that task already. We will be off as soon as we can.”

  “Is there a good reason, then, for locking us all in here?”

  Ibrido bared his teeth. “There are a few details I need to take care of before we go. As an added bonus, they may help delay any pursuit for a vital few minutes.”

  “What in the Dark Six’s most damned names are you blathering about?”

  Ibrido smiled as he rubbed a ring he wore on the pinky of his left hand. “I am afraid I have let you labor under a misconception,” he said, his voice as even as if he were describing the weather.

  Te’oma narrowed her eyes at the creature. “What do you mean?” she said. As she spoke, she reached out with her mind, probing Ibrido’s thoughts, hoping to determine the truth behind his mysterious comments. Something frustrated her efforts though. When she reached out for him, it was as if he wasn’t there at all.

  “Do you think I would be so indiscreet as to allow you unrestricted access to my innermost thoughts?” he asked, a soft snigger in his voice. “That would not make me much of a spy, now would it?”

  Te’oma’s hand went to the sword hanging from Brendis’s weapon belt, the sacred, burning blade of a Knight of the Silver Flame. Before she could get it clear of the scabbard, though, Ibrido was on her.

  The soldier smacked her to the floor with the back of his hand. She reached up to feel her face and brought her hand away slicked with blood trickling from her nose.

  “Are you mad?” she asked, more shocked by the betrayal than the injury. “The Lich Queen will skin you alive for that. I’m to bring this child to her in Illmarrow Castle. There is no more important mission.”

  “The Lich Queen?” Ibrido laughed. “You think I fear that fragile bag of bones? There are greater things in this world than long-dead elves who refuse to relinquish their hold on it.”

  Te’oma stared at the Karrn, unable to make herself understand what he meant.

  “Even if I cared about her, what makes you think I need you anymore?” Ibrido said as he delivered a vicious kick to Te’oma’s ribs. She felt her ribs crack as she tried to scramble away. “The Lich Queen wants the child who bears the Mark of Death. I doubt she’ll mind it if there’s one less changeling thief in the world.”

  Te’oma mentally unfurled her cloak, commanding the symbiont to transform itself into a set of batlike wings that could carry her to safety. When the tips of the wings rapped against the ceiling, though, she understood why Ibrido had hauled her into the captain’s cramped quarters before confronting her.

  The Karrn slammed into the changeling from below, smashing her wings flat against the cabin ceiling above her. She felt something in them snap, and pain stabbed into he
r through the nerves she shared with the parasitic creature. She closed her eyes as she flinched in pain, and when she opened them something terrible stood in Ibrido’s place.

  The creature holding Te’oma against the ceiling looked something like the Ibrido she knew but different. Shimmering green scales covered him from head to toe. His crimson eyes were slit like those of a serpent, and his thin, black tongue flicked about the rim of his slash of a mouth when he wasn’t using it to speak. His scale-covered ears were pointed like an elf’s. He was taller than before and stronger too, and when he drew back his lips all Te’oma could see were rows of vicious, knifelike teeth.

  Under any other circumstances, this revelation—that Ibrido was a half-breed that bore the blood of both dragons and elves—might have made Te’oma fall to pieces. To have Esprë stolen from her by such a creature, just as she was about to make off with her for good, would have been enough to drive her mad. As it was, though, her every thought was consumed with keeping herself alive instead. She had killed enough people in her time to know when someone was ready to commit murder, and Ibrido bore all the signs.

  Te’oma reached down with her mouth and bit the hand that Ibrido was using to hold her against the ceiling. The dragon-elf shouted in surprise and pulled back his injured fist, letting the changeling drop to the floor in front of him. He steeled himself for a follow-up attack from Te’oma, but it never came.

  Instead, the changeling turned and made a mad dash for the set of windows that lined the back of the room, designed to give the captain of the ship a panoramic view of the lands before them. The frames of the windows formed from the ribs of the airship’s monstrous masthead, pale and thick as a giant’s bones. She smashed into the windows at full speed, hoping to burst through into the open air beyond. If she could get free, if she could survive, she could lick her wounds and come back to take Esprë from Ibrido when the time was ripe. She’d managed to take her from Kandler and his friends. She could do it again.