by James Wyatt
He had always been a tool in Kelas’s hand. It was time for a new face entirely—the face of a free man.
Tall—tall and proud. Like Kauth and Aric, but less bulky, less hard. Short, straight hair, dark but with a sprinkling of gray at the temples, distinguished. Brown eyes, warm—he would need a mirror to do those properly, but he sketched them in. Skin tanned from travel but not too weathered. He would retrieve a cache of money when he returned to civilization and use it to buy new armor and clothes, so his garb would match the nobility of his face and body. He liked this person already.
Now this noble figure needed a name. Haunderk Lannath, Auftane Khunnam, Darraun Mennar. Aura, Caura, Faura, Maura. He was not very creative when it came to names—they were all variations on his real name, with the AU in the first name and the double N in the last. Laurann only needed one name. Couldn’t he just be Aunn? No more secrets, no more lies?
“My name is Aunn,” he said aloud. “I am Aunn. No, just Aunn.”
Like Gaven—no family name. But Gaven was excoriate—he’d lost the right to use his name.
“I am Aunn,” he said again. “And don’t be fooled by my handsome face—I’m actually a changeling.”
He didn’t think he could be that honest.
CHAPTER
34
It was better than the prison of the dragon-king in Rav Magar, but Gaven was no less a prisoner in Kelas’s camp. The shackles never came off his wrists, and his legs were chained to a stake in the ground as well as each other. He might have been able to pull up the stake, but Haldren had spoken some ritual over it to root it in the ground. He got some food and ample water, but he remained out in the open, day and night, and the midday heat was nearly unbearable. He tried once to shade the sun with clouds, but any time clouds began to form in the sky, his guards beat him savagely. His head felt like more bump than bone.
He barely slept, and when he did nightmares plagued him. Looking for meaning, he sifted through the scraps of dreams, but found only horror and despair. He dreamed of Rienne—he saw her killed in terrible ways, wrenched from his grasp by demonic figures, and transformed into a hideous aberration or a demonic creature. He always woke with tears in his eyes, facing the Dragon Forge and feeling the evil presence at its heart. It filled him with loathing, and he was certain that it was responsible for the nightmares.
With every passing day, the Dragon Forge grew. He caught some glimpses of the apparatus the artificers were constructing at its heart—a strange thing with moving arms and long levers—but the walls going up around it soon shielded it from his view. Upon a framework of arching beams, the workers built a structure that vaguely resembled a crouching dragon. They shaped a sort of dome to resemble a dragon’s folded wings, open at the back around the blue crystal and the cylindrical receptacles, with enough space for the dragon-king to enter there. At the end of a long hall stretching forward into the canyon, they built a dragon’s head, its mouth open in a small archway leading into the heart of the forge.
From time to time, a new caravan of parts and supplies arrived in the camp, sparking a flurry of activity and some confusion. Each time, Gaven watched for an opportunity to escape, some kind of opening, but his guards remained as vigilant and brutal as ever. Wagons passed right by him, sometimes sending him scrambling to avoid their turning wheels, but only his guards seemed to notice him at all.
The days and nights blurred together. Weeks might have passed, but he could not track the time. As the Dragon Forge neared completion, Gaven started piecing together the fragments of his dreams. He was quite certain now that he had seen this forge—completed, burning with dragonfire—more than once in all his visions. He remembered looking down into the canyon, being led down an iron hall, the heat and bursts of fire—and when he followed the memories too far, excruciating pain. The memory of the pain was so vivid that it made his flesh tingle, particularly on his neck and chest, around his dragonmark.
He dreamed of that hall again, entering through the arch of the dragon’s mouth. He descended amid clouds of smoke billowing up from the heart of the Dragon Forge. Chains bound his hands and feet, clanking against the iron floor as he walked, then stumbled. A hand on his shoulder steadied him. Then it was shaking him gently, and he woke to a dark night.
“Gaven?” It was Cart.
Gaven tried to sit up, starting his chains rattling, but Cart gripped his shoulder again to stop him. “Quiet,” Cart whispered.
“What do you want?” Gaven asked, too loudly.
Cart looked around nervously at the sound. “Gaven, please. If Haldren sees me talking to you—”
“He can’t make it any worse for me. The rest is your problem.”
Cart looked down. “We parted on good terms, Gaven.”
“I think that changed when I found you in league with the people who captured me, the ones who’ve been starving me and beating my head in.”
“I had nothing to do with your capture.”
“But here you are. What’s happening, Cart?”
“Haldren only just told me, this evening. I swear, if I had known before, I wouldn’t have let them—”
“If you’d known what?”
“What the Dragon Forge is for.”
Gaven’s breath caught in his chest as a vague memory of dreams full of fire and pain stirred in his mind. “And what’s that?” he asked.
“They intend to harness the power of your dragonmark. To strip it from you—”
“They’re siphoning the power of the things imprisoned here in order to harness the power of my mark? Then what? Use it to get power from something else?” Cart’s words finally caught up with Gaven. “Strip it from me?”
“I told you, if I’d known—”
“Cut it from my skin, like they used to do with excoriates?” Gaven shuddered with the memory of pain, the excruciating pain of his dream. “And then use it …”
“As a weapon of war.”
“When?”
“I’m not certain. I don’t think Kelas is either. They’ll use the weapon as leverage with the queen—”
“I mean when are they taking my mark?”
Cart hesitated. “Tomorrow.”
“So we have to get out of here tonight.” Gaven’s chains rattled again.
“I’m sorry, Gaven.”
“What?”
“I told you before, my place is with Haldren.”
The pang of disappointment Gaven had felt when he first saw Cart returned, accompanied by a sick feeling in his stomach. “You could be so much more than Haldren’s aide.”
“Why do people keep telling me that?”
“Because it’s true. Once you stood on the threshold of godhood—”
“And like you, I turned away.”
“Yes, and now you need to take your destiny into your own hands. As I did.”
“I have.” Cart’s voice was quiet and low. “I’ve chosen to do my duty.”
Gaven’s disappointment soured into disgust. “Duty? Duty is a soldier’s excuse for his crimes, a coward’s excuse—”
“You call me a coward?” Cart’s voice was more incredulous than offended.
“—for not doing what he’s too afraid to do. It’s the master’s hold on the slave, the father’s claim on his son.” His father’s face flashed into his mind, the forced smile he wore after Gaven’s failed Test of Siberys. Gaven had always failed to live up to his duty.
“Duty is what holds society together,” Cart said.
“That’s what the generals, queens, and fathers want you to think. Duty’s what keeps you from protesting when they enslave you.”
“The words of a true fugitive from Dreadhold.”
Gaven bit back a retort about Haldren and shook his head. He was making no progress, and he wasn’t sure why he was trying. “Why did you come here, Cart? Why warn me? Is that part of your duty?”
“You were never a soldier,” Cart said. “Let me tell you something. Sometimes in the war we fought the Brelish,
sometimes we marched beside them to fight the Thranes. Once I met a war-forged soldier from Breland, Dodge was his name. We fought the Thranes together at Harrow’s Pass in the Blackcaps—not too far from here, actually. We talked in the camp while the others slept.”
The Blackcaps were not too far—that was Gaven’s first hint of where they were.
Cart’s voice grew hard. “A month later, the tides of war shifted and Breland was our enemy again. At the battle of Silver Lake, I met him on the field. Now, we were enemies. That didn’t mean we hated each other. We saluted each other with the greatest respect. He had been my friend. But duty demanded that we fight, because the victory of one of us could mean victory for his nation. So I killed him.”
“And did Aundair win the battle?”
Cart stood and looked down at Gaven where he lay, still in chains.
“You completely miss my point,” the warforged said. “But yes, we did.”
“What is your point, then?”
“I salute you, Gaven Storm Dragon—with nothing but respect. I hold no hatred for you. I am proud to have known you.”
“And Dodge returned your salute, did he? Faced death like a dutiful soldier?”
Cart stared down, impassive as always.
“Well forget that.” Gaven spat at Cart’s feet. “The war’s over, Cart. You’re as much a criminal as I am, and a more cold-blooded killer. I used to respect you, but I don’t any more.”
Cart’s unblinking eyes fixed him for a long moment, then he turned away without another word.
A crash of thunder brought two guards running to knock Gaven out again.
He stood on a floor like glass, traced with coiling lines of light. He walked along the twisting path they formed, and they rose up behind him as he walked, a tangled spiderweb hanging in the air. Recognition slowly dawned on him. The lines were his dragonmark, the Siberys Mark of Storm. Suddenly the path was not a line of light anymore, but a round tunnel carved through rock. He trailed his fingertips along the rough walls as he walked, and the winding tunnel spoke to him of the Prophecy and his place in it.
The dream-words made no sense to his sleeping mind, but they made him sad. He was lying in a swinging cot, and Rienne’s fingertip was tracing the path on his skin, and he kissed her forehead. Her eyes, full of tears, looked into his, then she was wrenched away from him into the darkness.
He slowly surfaced toward consciousness, dimly aware that he had not said good-bye to Rienne and he might not have a chance to. Then a kick to his stomach jolted him fully awake.
It was the Thuranni, Phaine, standing over him, wearing a malicious grin. “Wake up, Gaven,” he said in his whispery voice. “It’s time to play your part.”
His head still muddled from his dreams, Gaven allowed himself to be lifted to his feet. They led him on a winding path to reach the rim of the canyon. Phaine followed behind until they reached a spot directly above the Dragon Forge. The dragon-king was there, head high as it looked down on the completed forge. Kelas, looking somber and suspicious, watched Gaven approach. Haldren watched him too, but Cart did not look his way. There was a woman at Cart’s side, whispering to him and pointing down at the forge, but Cart seemed oblivious. A few others Gaven didn’t recognize filled out the knot of people.
“It begins,” the dragon-king said, and a burst of fire rose up around the forge below. In the distance, a horrible rumbling howl arose, starting with a single voice and growing into a ghastly chorus before fading away again. The guards led Gaven to the cliff edge and he saw the forge complete and ready for him.
He was back in his dream—the vision he’d had months ago, as he and Senya rode the lightning rail out of Zil’argo. In stark contrast to his first view of the canyon, the earth around it was desolate, and the canyon had taken on the appearance of a gash torn into the earth. At the heart of this gaping wound was a cloud of smoke and steam billowing up from the canyon floor, from the trenches dug into it, from the base of the Dragon Forge.
The dragon-king’s neck swung around and its burning eyes took in the people gathered at his feet, lingering longest on Kelas. “You suspect the significance of this moment,” he said, “but you know only a glimpse of it. To you, the completion of the Dragon Forge is the climax of your plans and schemes, or this stage of them. It paves the way for the next, greater stage.”
Gaven wondered how many of the assembly understood the dragon-king’s words. Kelas, certainly. How would he react to the revelation that his mighty schemes were a tiny part of Malathar’s much larger plans?
The dragon-king raised his head higher, so he was looking down at Kelas. “It plays much the same role in the history of the world,” he said, “though you see it not. We stand at an axis point, the very center of history around which all the rest revolves. An age of the world has ended, a new one is about to begin, and we are in the Time Between.”
The center of history—Gaven had described it to Rienne as a point that history revolves around. He’d been right, then. To Malathar’s mind, the Time Between was the pivotal moment in history, with the Time of the Dragon Above merely its prelude, and the Time of the Dragon Below its aftershock.
The Time Between begins with blood and ends in blood.
Blood is its harbinger, and blood flows in its passing.
“At the birth of time,” the dragon-king continued, “the three dragons were united, but they broke apart. In the Time Between they are united again. At the end of the ages, they will be united a third time. What you have accomplished here speeds the world on its course to completion.”
Kelas shifted impatiently, and Malathar dropped his head to stare right into his face. Kelas stumbled backward. “Do my words bore you, meat?”
“Of course not,” Kelas said. “Only look at the sky.”
The dragon-king swung his neck to look upward, to see the clouds gathering there in answer to Gaven’s distress. “No matter,” he said. “The storm will not answer him much longer.”
The dragon-king raised his skeletal wings and took to the air, their tattered flesh lifting him without a breath of wind. He swooped at Gaven and snatched him up in one great claw, tearing him from the grasp of the guards who held his chains. Gaven watched below as he fell with the dragon-king into the canyon. The ground and the metal wings of the Dragon Forge rushed up at him as it had in his dream among billowing clouds of hot smoke.
Malathar swept into the wide gap between the crystal prison and the walls of the Dragon Forge and set Gaven down inside. Waves of heat assaulted him, rising from the furnaces below. The iron dragon’s wings formed a dome that arched high above Gaven’s head, leaving the dragon-king just enough room to rear up to his full height. The bizarre apparatus Gaven had glimpsed during the forge’s construction towered over him like a massive pillar, silver tracing forming twisting symbols across its surface. Tubes and rods, gemstones and glass clustered around its lower portions like barnacles encrusting a stately galleon. Its bottom disappeared into the smoke and fire below.
Metal grates formed the floor around the apparatus, covering a trench dug like a moat protecting it. On scaffolding below, a few people moved around, wielding strange tools to adjust a pipeline here or a cylinder there. Jets of flame burst in erratic rhythm from spouts shaped like dragon heads beneath them, the crimson light of the fire turning them into sinister shadows, like devils tending the flames of Fernia. A dragon snaked into his view, crouching low to the scaffold, wings folded so they didn’t brush the grating above. It looked up and met his gaze, then hissed angrily, loosing plumes of smoke from its nostrils. A wave of vertigo washed over him as he stared down into the raging furnace.
A heavy hand on his shoulder steadied him, and he grabbed at it. The metal of Cart’s hand was warm against his skin. He tore his gaze from the fire and turned to look at the warforged, but the sight of the crystal prison behind Cart stopped him. The dark figure inside was clearer than Gaven had ever seen it, pressing its hands against the inside surface, an impression of a snarlin
g feline face above them. A silver serpent writhed around it, clearly trying to pull it back, to hold it fast. Palpable waves of fury emanated from the blue stone, and silver fire sparked from the slender filigree connecting the torc to the receptacles on either side.
“Gaven,” Cart said beside him.
“Two spirits share one prison beneath the wastes, secrets kept and revelation granted.” Gaven spoke as if in a dream. “They bind and are bound, but their unbound whispers rise to the Dragon Between, calling to those who would hear.”
“Gaven, you were right.”
Flame burst up from the furnace below, great spouts of it erupting around him, searing his skin. He heard the clank of metal as Cart’s adamantine axe cut through the chains that bound his legs.
“Now, Gaven!”
Cart had his axe in hand, and with his shield he pushed Gaven forward. Gaven stumbled toward the fire, then realized that Cart was hurrying him toward the narrow entrance at the far side of the Dragon Forge. Cart was trying to help him escape.
Gaven’s dragonmark tingled cool in his hot skin, and he felt power prick his scalp and his arms. Soldiers running to intercept him were blasted aside with thunderous explosions of air. But then Kelas and Phaine blocked his path, and Haldren behind them, and they stood their ground as the wind whipped at them ahead of Gaven’s charge.
Gaven saw Haldren raise his hands, and waves of freezing air crashed over him. His legs went numb and he stumbled. Every muscle, already weak from hunger, felt too stiff to move. Another spurt of flame warmed him, but it also brought back memories of his dreams. His fate was inevitable, it seemed—was it not bound to take place as he had seen? The agony—
A jolt of pain ran up his leg as Kelas kicked at his knee, which buckled under him. Chains still weighing down his wrists, Gaven felt like a captured beast, harried by goads and unable to fight back. He roared in pain and fury, and the air shook with thunder. A blast of lightning shot from him—from his arms, his chest, his whole body—and shot through Kelas first, then Haldren. Then Cart was pushing him forward again, toward the tiny doorway that seemed to whisper freedom.