The Road to Death: The Lost Mark, Book 2

by Forbeck, Matt

  “Let me help you with that,” Sallah said. The lady knight sheathed her blade and walked over to put her hands on the cut. She chanted a few words to the Silver Flame, and Kandler watched as a golden light suffused her hands then spilled off them to soak into the justicar’s injured flesh.

  When Sallah removed her hands, she wiped the blood on the arm away with her fingers. The skin beneath was unmarred, healed as if it had never been cut open. She smiled up at Kandler as she cleaned her hands on the edge of her tabard. He noticed that the fabric was the same color as his blood, and he wondered if the Knights of the Silver Flame had chosen that hue on purpose.

  “We’ve got two airships,” Burch said. “Now what?”

  Kandler grimaced at his friend as he thanked Sallah. “This is just the first step. We’ve cut Ibrido off from his escape. There’s no way he can get away from us. Now all we have to do is find him.”

  “When we find him, we find Esprë,” Sallah said.

  “Exactly.” The justicar looked around. “We don’t have enough hands to fly both ships at the moment, but we need to make sure that Ibrido can’t get his hands back on this one.”

  Kandler walked over to the gunwales and started hauling up the mooring ropes hanging over the edge of the ship. Sallah and Burch joined in as well.

  When they were done, they had one rope left. Kandler slid down it first, drawing his sword as soon as his feet touched the small, flat shelf on the rocky slope. Sallah came down after him, with Burch coming last.

  “What about this rope?” Burch said.

  Sallah drew her sword, which burst into silvery flames. She touched it to the rope and ran it up and down the fibers as far as her blade would reach. It caught fire quickly, and the flames began to work their way up the length, toward the ship above.

  “Good thing these airships are fireproof,” Burch said. The ring of fire surrounding Keeper’s Claw seemed to grow louder to punctuate his words, as if the elemental within wished it could find a way to consume the craft to which it was bound.

  “Which way?” Kandler said.

  Burch stretched and growled, drawing upon the blood of the werecreatures that ran through his veins. Those ancient ancestors might be long dead, but they still lived on in the way the shifter could call on their legendary powers.

  As long as Kandler had known Burch, this still made him a bit uncomfortable. When the shifter called on his animalistic side, he became less like the justicar’s friend and more of the kind of savage beast some of the “civilized” folk from Sharn assumed all of his kind to be. In any case, it was part and parcel of who Burch was, and Kandler had to admit it came in handy at times like this.

  Burch knelt down toward the rocky ground and sniffed about like a bloodhound hunting for a scent. He wrinkled his nose more than once, then performed a crouching walk in a circle around the entire shelf. His search complete, he stood up once more and pointed off to the south, along the mountain’s slope.

  “Follow me,” he growled.

  Kandler trotted along straight after Burch, with Sallah falling in behind him, her sword still out and ready. Kandler drew his own blade, wanting to be prepared for anything that might happen. They had no idea where Ibrido and Esprë were, after all. The last they knew from Te’oma, the pair had somehow entered the mountain to find his master, but anything could have happened since then. They had to expect that the dragon-elf might be cautious about people following after him. Around any corner, there might be another pack of skeletons waiting to—

  “Halt!” a low voice shouted in a thick-accented version of the common tongue of the Five Kingdoms of Khorvaire.

  Burch looked up from where he’d been bent over the narrow trail that cut along the mountain’s slope, still sniffing out Esprë’s path. They’d reached a small shelf where the trail switched back, and a dark hole appeared in the face of the rock before them.

  Kandler swung his neck around and spotted a pair of dwarves coming up the path behind them. They were stunted creatures, even for dwarves, and their pasty skin and squinty eyes told Kandler that they rarely saw the light of day. They wore light suits of armor and metallic helmets covered with dirt and dust the same color as the mountain itself, allowing them to blend in. They each bore an axe or hammer and carried a loaded crossbow that was pointed straight at Kandler, Burch, and Sallah.

  “Surrender or die!” one of the dwarves on the lower trail called up at them.

  Kandler glanced at Burch and Sallah. “I don’t like the looks of that hole much,” he whispered.

  “Esprë went in there,” the shifter said.

  Kandler grinned. “All of a sudden, I like it a lot more. On my mark, we charge into it. Ready?”

  Before the justicar could get to “set,” another handful of dwarves emerged from the blackness, their double-sided axes out and ready to taste blood.

  The dragon waited for Esprë to stop screaming before it spoke. Its low, rumbling voice sounded like a pair of giant millstones being ground against each other, and its breath smelled like a charnel house on a hot day.

  “Finally,” it said. “The Mark of Death returns.”

  Esprë wanted to scream again, but she’d already run herself hoarse. Instead, she stood there mute, with the swirling waters bubbling around her knees, and stared in horror at the massive beast.

  She had heard stories about dragons before, but they were nothing like meeting one in the scale-decked flesh. She felt grateful that she could not see the entire thing at once. The light from the everburning torch she held didn’t stretch far enough to encompass the entirety of the beast in its glow. She could only see its long, horned head, its sinuous, snakelike neck, and the broad expanse of its chest.

  Black scales covered all of these, ebon-colored bits of mail that could turn aside the mightiest sword. They fitted seamlessly over the beast, stopping only at its mouth, nose, ears, and eyes. Its toothy mouth dripped with some disgusting green fluid that reminded her of nothing more than distilled stomach bile. Its nostrils flared at her as the stale atmosphere of the cave hacked its way in and out of its phlegm-coated lungs. Its batlike ears waved at her independently of each other, as if batting at tiny creatures that lived inside their tattered flaps. Its orange eyes seemed to glow with a fire that threatened to devour her body if not also her soul.

  Every bit of Esprë wanted to run, but something in her brain kept it from happening, some instinct that told her to freeze when confronted with something so large. Despite her fear, she listened to that instinct and held her ground.

  “You have done well, half-breed,” the dragon said to Ibrido. “Capturing the bearer of the Mark of Death is not something done lightly. Is she …?”

  It reached out with a taloned claw that stretched as long as Esprë’s arm. Its breath wrapped around her, and she struggled not to gag on the stench. Her eyes began to water, and she couldn’t say if it was entirely from the smell or not.

  “Unharmed?” the dragon finished. The green fluid spilled from between its long, sharp rows of teeth as it spoke. Where it landed, the blackened waters fizzed and foamed in protest.

  Ibrido stepped forward, a half pace in front of Esprë. “For the most part, Nithkorrh. The journey here was not an easy one for her. Before she came into my care, she was in an airship crash.”

  Two, Esprë thought, but she didn’t wish to correct the dragon-elf at that moment.

  “Yet she survived?” the dragon said.

  It bared all its teeth in a way that Esprë could only guess was a dragon’s means of smiling, just as she’d seen on Ibrido’s face. On such a massive scale, though, it scared her all the more.

  “Fate would not have placed the Lost Mark on a creature unblessed with a certain amount of luck,” the dragon said, “or so the prophecies would have us believe.”

  “I …” Esprë started to speak and then thought better of it and let her voice trail off.

  “Yes?” The dragon craned its neck back around toward her, inching its face closer to
her as it did.

  Esprë remained mute. She’d brought the creature’s full attention to her, and it had addressed her directly for the first time. She knew it expected an answer, but that was the last thing she wanted to give it.

  “Answer the great Nithkorrh,” Ibrido asked. “Dragons do not like to be kept waiting.”

  Esprë tried to keep her lips sealed, but this meant breathing through her nose, and the scent of the dragon and the place in which it lived soon made her nauseous. She parted her lips so that she could breathe without smelling the stench, and the dragon leaned in even closer. She could feel the chill from its cold-blooded breath. It stank like a sodden garbage pit.

  Esprë looked up into the dragon’s eyes—twinned orange lanterns floating in the darkness before her—and found it difficult to tear her gaze away. Still, she managed to glance over at the dragon-elf and down at the remains of several flesh-bare skeletons staring up at her from under a thin veil of water. Then she looked back up into Nithkorrh’s eyes.

  “This doesn’t seem very lucky to me,” she said.

  Esprë felt Ibrido freeze next to her, unsure as to how the dragon would react to such impudence. She discovered that she didn’t care any more. If the creature killed her, then at least this ordeal would be over.

  Robbed of an elf’s centuries-long life, she could still expect to be reunited with her mother in the afterlife, the limbo reserved for those elves who died before ascending to the Undying Court. Such a dark and dreary place was meant to be torture for those who aspired to a more meaningful existence, but Esprë could only think that it might be a wonderful respite for those who had grown tired or terrified of this capricious life.

  The dragon snorted down at her, and the cloud of green mist that it expelled burned at her face and eyes.

  “Elfling,” Nithkorrh said, “you may be too young to know better. There are far worse fates than this. You shall learn this soon enough. Some of them lie in your future.”

  Esprë heard Ibrido breathe a sigh of relief. Perhaps he worried that Nithkorrh would kill her on the spot. Dragons had a reputation for acting impulsively. How would the dragon-elf explain the results to any other dragons interested in her fate? Chances were that Nithkorrh would kill him as well to remove any witnesses to his crime.

  No, Esprë corrected herself. To a creature such as Nithkorrh, there were no crimes, only errors.

  “The dragon kings will be thrilled to meet such a creature,” the dragon said, more to Ibrido than her. “We have been waiting a long time. I was barely a hatchling myself when we launched our crusade to destroy the House of Vol.”

  The dragon leaned closer to Esprë, so much that it had to turn its head and focus just one of its burning orange eyes on the young elf. “You have no idea of the carnage your emergence shall beget.”

  Esprë trembled despite her newfound resolve. It was one thing to decide that death wouldn’t be so bad. It was another to die.

  “Turn around,” Nithkorrh said. “I must see it.”

  Esprë remained as still as a statue.

  “He is speaking to you,” Ibrido said. “You must obey.”

  Esprë shook her head. This dragon didn’t have any hold over her, or so she told herself. She just stared ahead, remaining mute.

  Ibrido reached over and grabbed Esprë by the arm. He swung her about so her back faced Nithkorrh, and he presented her to the dragon.

  “The mark is on her back,” he said, “between her shoulder blades.”

  “How do you know that?” Esprë asked. “You’ve never seen it.”

  She could feel the mark start to itch around its edges. In her mind, she could see the pattern it cast on her skin, although she’d only seen the mark once herself, in a mirror in her home back in Mardakine. The black lines that made up the mark seemed more solid than those of any tattoo. It had looked angry and red around the edges, even then when it didn’t itch at all. From the way it felt right now, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn her skin was blistering there, with large pustules of burnt skin ready to pop and ooze down her back.

  As the itching turned to scraping and then to burning, Esprë ached for that kind of release. She didn’t know what was happening with her dragonmark. She knew only that something had to give, and soon.

  She heard the dragon creeping closer to her, sloshing through the black waters in which they all stood. She felt it reach out with a serrated talon, caked with mud and other unclean things. She could smell the rot in its own flesh, sitting there underneath scales that spent most of their time immersed in the stale waters in this frigid, underground lake.

  Then the talon hooked in the back of her shirt collar and pulled it back. Nithkorrh’s touch was gentler than Esprë would have thought possible. She never would have guessed that such a large creature could have such delicate control. It dragged the collar of the shirt back until the front of it pressed against her throat, choking her.

  She could tell, though, that the dragonmark was exposed to the air, as it began to burn even warmer, so hot that she was surprised her shirt didn’t catch fire. She leaned forward, gasping in pain, and Nithkorrh let her go.

  “Yes,” the dragon said. Esprë looked back and saw that it had bared its teeth again, showing more of them than ever before. “That is it. I saw it once on Vol herself before she disappeared. Hers was larger, of course, but she was full grown, and she had mastered its use.”

  Esprë’s mind reeled at this. The thought that the mark could be larger than it already was seemed ludicrous. It felt as if it could consume her right now.

  Nithkorrh’s talon fell on Esprë again, this time across her shoulder. The dragon pulled on it, spinning the young elf around to face it.

  “Do you have any dragon blood running in your veins, I wonder?” Nithkorrh said.

  “I’m told her mother was a sorcerer of some repute,” Ibrido said. “Many scholars have long theorized that the talent for sorcery is inherited by those honored to include dragons in their ancestry.”

  Esprë frowned at that. “We are elves, pure-blooded, through and through.”

  Ibrido chuckled. “You should be honored to have even a dash of such regal parentage.”

  Esprë shook her head. “I’d rather have nothing to do with dragons at all. I wish they would stay in my childhood stories and never come to life.”

  Nithkorrh snorted, and an acrid green mist engulfed the young girl, burning at her eyes and lungs like bitter smoke. “My kind predates your stories, elfling. We were here before your kind could even speak, and we will be here long after. Eberron is our world. The word ‘Eberron’ means ‘the dragon between.’ All of your other so-called ‘races’ are just visitors here, transients who will fade away with the cycles of time like the bothersome insects you are.”

  Esprë couldn’t hold back her disgust and anger any longer. If the Mark of Death wanted to be free, if it wanted to kill, then she would let it. She had never found any creature more deserving of an untimely death than Nithkorrh, and she was ready to hand it to it.

  She had to get the dragon closer to her, though. She’d learned her lesson with Ibrido. While she had the power to kill, she needed to get close enough to use it. Otherwise, she would fail for sure.

  She had to make sure that Ibrido and Nithkorrh could not see the blackness snaking along her arms and glowing from her hands. She wasn’t sure if their eyes could see such things in total darkness, but she knew they could see them in the light.

  “Whoops!” she said. She bobbled the everburning torch in front of her, finally smacking it away from her as she dropped it, knocking it to the right of the dragon.

  Ibrido snickered at what Esprë hoped he thought was her misfortune. “Now,” he said, “you will have to make your way out of here in the darkness.”

  The cave wasn’t entirely dark though. Esprë could see the torch still glowing as it sank through the black waters to the muck-covered bottom of the lake. There wasn’t much light from it now, but just enough for h
er to detect the silhouette of the dragon and the dragon-elf, and she could see the dragon’s glowing eyes as well.

  “I think Nithkorrh should make you go get it,” Esprë said, taunting Ibrido. “After all, I’m worth more to him than you are.”

  “Do not think yourself so valued,” the dragon rumbled. “The dragon kings don’t need much of you to work with. If you somehow die before you get there, it just makes transporting you that much easier for the half-breed here.”

  Esprë spat out into the darkness. “Which of you has the guts to try it?” she shouted, letting her anger loose now, feeling the dark, cold energy snake along her arms and envelope her hands in its bone-freezing blackness. “You live down here in the darkness, thinking you’re something important, some kind of king. You’re just a coward, hiding here from the ‘insects’ who could sting you to death.”

  “Check your tongue, elfling,” the dragon said, frustration edging into its voice. “You do not know of what you speak.”

  “Dragons are magnificent, powerful creatures who fly through the sky and command respect from all who see them. You’re no dragon,” Esprë said. “You’re a catfish, a bottom-feeder who swims in the coldest, deepest parts of the river where no self-respecting creature would go, living on the rotted refuse of the insects who outnumber you ten thousand to one. You’re no better than a maggot chewing on a year-old corpse!”

  “I have heard enough!”

  The dragon’s eyes, still glowing in the dark, lunged forward. Its snout shoved Esprë back, and she fell into the water, which closed over her head. She thrashed about in the freezing lake for a moment, wondering why she hadn’t realized until now that she could no longer feel her feet.

  Then a set of what felt like long, serrated knives closed on the front of Esprë’s tunic and hauled her back to the surface, sputtering and gasping for air. As she came up, she reached forward with both hands and grasped the dragon’s hard, scaly snout. She focused all her anger and all of the power from her dragonmark—which burned so hot now she was surprised it hadn’t boiled the lake when she fell—into her hands and channeled it out of her fingertips and into Nithkorrh’s face.