Lost mark 3 The Queen of Death:

by Matt Forbeck

  The floor of the inn commanded Espre’s attention first. The dock outside the inn had been fashioned from wood, as had the roof, face, and every other part of the building that jutted out from the front of the canyon’s sheer face. Inside, though, the entire floor seemed to be made from a single, large flat stone cut to a perfectly flat surface.

  Espre couldn’t guess at what kind of dwarf architecture had been employed to keep the floor from toppling into the abyss. Perhaps it had been a natural shelf on the cliff face, or maybe the dwarves of Clan Nroth had carted up piece after piece and fitted them together so tight that no eye could find a seam.

  The walls of the rear part of the inn’s main hall were made of the same stone, and every surface bore some sort of carving, either runes or artistic depictions of the history of the clan or perhaps just Krangel’s direct line. A dozen wooden tables squatted about the place, each of them made for customers with the dimension of dwarves. While Espre could sit at one of these comfortably enough, she had to stifle a giggle at the thought of how Kandler, Burch, or especially Sallah would look perched atop the tiny, sturdy chairs sitting around the tables.

  "Come in! ” Krangel said. "It’s not often we get outsiders around here.” The snow-haired dwarf cocked a finger at a young dwarf behind the low, marble-topped bar. "Raumeese! Bring out the big folk’s table!”

  The dwarf, who’d been staring at the newcomers in stunned silence, leaped to his feet and scurried out of the room. The other patrons in the room—perhaps a dozen dwarves—snorted at Raumeese as he left. A few of them nodded a greeting to Espre and the others if they happened to catch their eyes, but the others returned to their food and drink.

  The smell of food made Espre’s mouth water. She’d not had a proper meal since her last night at Fort Bones, and that seemed like a lifetime ago. It had been far longer since she’d been in an inn of any kind. There never had been one in Mardakine.

  "You don’t get other airships through here?” Kandler asked. Espre heard the suspicion in his voice.

  Burch scanned the place pointedly. "Awful lot of effort to build a dock like that and not use it.” He spied a nervous dwarf woman staring at him and flashed her a toothy grin.

  She flinched and looked away.

  "We get some,” Krangel said, "just not as many as we’d like. Still, lots of clansfolk come up here for the view. When a trader airship comes through, you should see this place. People crushed in here from wall to wall, tighter than a collapsing mineshaft. Now, though”—he waved his hand around—"nothing but room to sprawl.”

  The door through which Raumeese had disappeared swung open again, and a round tabletop rolled out through it on its edge. Raumeese followed close after it, guiding it to an open spot in the floor near to where Krangel stood.

  When the young dwarf pulled the tabletop to a stop, Espre wondered if Krangel meant for his new guests to sit on the floor. With a slap of Raumeese’s hand, four legs sprang from the bottom of the table, and he tipped it up onto them. It stood at a level comfortable for humans, and the young dwarf trotted off again.

  He returned a moment later with a stack of wood in his arms. With one hand, he drew a bundle of wood from the top of the stack and snapped his wrist. The wood unfolded into a finely crafted chair made of thin dowels crisscrossed against each other to fashion a sturdy seat. He snapped out five chairs in all, then gave the newcomers a sharp, short bow and dashed back behind the bar.

  "Thanks for your trouble,” Kandler said. He didn’t appear impressed at all, just worried. "We can’t stay long, though. We just need some supplies: food, water.”

  Krangel’s face dropped. "We can help you with that, sure, but please impose upon our hospitality.” He looked them up and down. "I can’t remember the last time I saw a lot as needful of a break as you.”

  Sallah reached out and took Kandler’s hand. Espre felt a bit strange about seeing that. Since her mother’s death, Kandler hadn’t shown any interest in women. He’d thrown himself into helping build Mardakine and into taking care of her the best he could.

  Espre had heard some of the girls and the ladies in Mardakine whisper about Kandler. She knew that he could have taken up with many of them. She had to admit she’d been relieved that he hadn't. Now, though, as she watched Kandler pull his hand from Sallah’s, she felt a pang of regret for him.

  Esprina had been dead for years now, and their marriage vow had always been "until death.” Of course, at the time of the wedding everyone had expected Esprina to outlive Kandler by hundreds of years. No one had thought that she wouldn’t find love again after his death—not even Kandler, and especially not Espre.

  Sallah’s lips drew tight across her face, but she bit back whatever might have been on her tongue. Regret tinged Kandler’s eyes when he glanced back at her, but he pushed it aside and addressed Krangel instead.

  "We don’t have a lot of time,” he said, "and we have a long way ahead of us.”

  Duro arched an eyebrow at the justicar. "It’s never a good idea to refuse a dwarf’s kindness,” he said. "It’s not likely to come around again.”

  Espre reached for Kandler’s other hand before he could reply. Instead of pulling away from her, he grasped her hand tight, her fingers nearly disappearing in his grip. He looked down at her, a question on his lips.

  "It seems like such a nice place,” she said, flashing Krangel a smile, "and it’s been years since we've dined at an inn. Can’t we?”

  Kandler tried to summon up some resistance to the girl’s request, but he gave up almost instantly. He reached out and tousled her golden hair instead. "We’ll stay for a bite.”

  The justicar looked to Burch. The shifter gave him a half grin. "On it, boss.” He turned to the dwarf and put a hand on his shoulder. "Let’s you and me talk business while they eat.”

  "Aren’t you, er, hungry?” Krangel said, staring wide-eyed at the furry hand on his shoulder.

  "Dwarf cooking don’t do a thing for me,” Burch said as he led the innkeeper off to a low table in the room’s back corner.

  Raumeese bustled up to the table with a tray of bowls and slapped one of them down in front of Kandler, Sallah, Duro, and Espre. The young elf leaned over the bowl and sniffed a lungful of the steaming scent. It smelled delicious. She grabbed for her spoon and dug in.

  The others set to their food straight away too. Duro inhaled the food as if it might be the last he’d ever see. Given the direction the Phoenix was headed, Espre realized it might well be the last bit of dwarf cooking he’d have for a good, long time.

  The girl put down her spoon for a moment. "Shouldn’t we invite the others in to join us?” she asked.

  Duro’s mouth bulged with so much food that Espre wondered if he might get stuck that way. Sallah, who’d barely touched her soup, started to speak, but Kandler interrupted her.

  "Xalt doesn’t eat. You can call Monja in if you like.”

  Espre smiled and got up from the table. She walked to the open door and the wooden dock that stretched out over the Goradra Gap. Monja and Xalt stood staring over the opposite railing, taking in the majesty of canyon as daylight plumbed farther into its depths. The halfling sat atop the warforged’s shoulders and leaned far over the open hole.

  Someone screamed from high overhead. At first, Espre thought it might be a raptor diving down from the skies, trying to flush nervous prey before it, but the scream sounded like it had words.

  "Run!” it said. "Run!”

  Espre froze, unsure of which way she was supposed to run—or even if she should. She saw Monja and Xalt turn back to look for the source of the scream. As they did, a handful of arrows zipped through the air over Espre’s head.

  One of them caught Xalt in the shoulder. As he slumped to the deck, another shaft went straight through Monja’s side and knocked her off Xalt’s shoulders.

  As she watched the halfling tumble over the side of the Phoenix’s rail and into the open air above the Goradra Gap, Espre heard someone screaming again.

 
; It was her.

  Chapter

  6

  Kandler launched himself out of his chair and dashed for the door, but Burch got there before him. The shifter reached out and snatched Espre back through the doorway by the back of her shirt. He tossed her back to Kandler, who wrapped her in his arms.

  "What is it?” the justicar said. As he spoke, he saw Te’oma’s winged form plummet past the Phoenix’s far railing as if she’d been flung from a catapult pointed straight down. The changeling had turned on them, just as he’d expected her to.

  Kandler set Espre down on one of the chairs, right next to where Duro stood. "Guard her with your life,” he told the dwarf.

  Duro wiped the soup from his beard with one sleeved arm then hefted his axe with the other. A sharp nod told Kandler he understood. The other dwarves pulled weapons of their own from various stashes located around the room. They hadn’t looked armed when Kandler and the others had entered the place, but the justicar had suspected that they wouldn’t be so foolish as to leave themselves defenseless.

  Kandler drew the dragonfang sword and made for the door, but a signal from Burch held him up short. The shifter had already stopped Sallah as well, despite the fact that the knight’s eyes burned at least as hot at the blazing sword now crackling in her fist.

  Using the complex set of handsigns they’d employed on the battlefield during the Last War, Burch told Kandler there were people on the roof—at least three, maybe more. In battle, they’d used the signs because the clash and clang of such conflicts made it hard to hear anyone do more than howl. Since then, though, they’d often used the signals to communicate when they didn’t want to disturb the surrounding silence.

  Kandler pointed to the two, wide unshuttered windows that stood to either side of the doorway. Burch winked then slipped over the sill of the one to the right. Kandler headed for the one on the left. As he went, he gestured for Sallah to walk straight out through the door.

  "Of course,” she said, understanding. "I’m the one wearing all the armor.”

  The tension between the two of them had disappeared, rent to pieces by Espre’s scream, the fragments displaced by the current crisis, whatever it might be. Kandler found himself feeling grateful for that and then hating himself just a bit for finding he preferred facing danger alongside Sallah rather than dealing with her head-on.

  There was no time for that now. He slipped over the windowsill and peered out at the Phoenix. He couldn’t see Xalt or Monja, and the realization made him ill. He thought he heard a scream being carried farther away, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just a trick of the winds rushing through the canyon.

  Sallah strode out through the doorway and stood there under the eaves, her armor clanking and scraping as she moved. Even as well built as the armor of the Knights of the Silver Flame might be, it sounded as loud as a military marching band compared to the movements of Kandler and Burch. When Sallah stopped, though, Kandler heard nothing but the soft whispers of the whirling winds and the hungry crackle of the knight’s blazing blade.

  Burch waved for the other two to freeze. The shifter cracked his neck, the pupils of his yellow eyes squeezing together into slits as he let the animalistic part of his nature take over. He pulled back his lips in a silent snarl and stretched his neck back and up until his nose pointed straight up at the eaves overhead.

  The shifter raised his crossbow, moved one step to the right, and pointed it toward the eaves. Then he pulled the trigger.

  The bolt slammed through the shingles overhead and stuck there, embedded halfway. From above, someone shouted in pain.

  Kandler gripped his sword tighter and watched Burch slap another bolt into his crossbow as he slipped back over the windowsill. Sallah looked at him, a question on her lips. Before she could ask it, though, a figure swung down from the edge of the roof and slammed into her, knocking her back into the inn.

  Kandler only got a glimpse at the figure, but what he saw was horrible. It was shaped like a man, but its skin was as pale and drawn as that of a long-dead corpse. Kandler turned to charge after Sallah and her attacker, who’d already gotten closer to Espre than he would have liked. Before he got three steps, though, two more of the ghost-faced intruders flipped down from the roof and landed in front of him.

  Both of the newcomers looked like the one who had just flitted past. They wore identical outfits, loose-fitting clothes the color of wet ash, with a headpiece that wrapped around the skull, exposing faces that looked to have been painted to resemble grotesque skulls.

  Ready for battle, Kandler slashed out with the sword he’d taken from Ibrido. The serrated blade passed through the nearest intruder’s chest like a scythe through wheat. Kandler expected the creature to ignore the wound and come howling at him, but instead it fell over with a soft gurgle, clutching at the blood pouring from the open wound as if it held some hope of keeping it from spilling from its body.

  Kandler brought his sword back up and saw the other creature lying next to its compatriot, a crossbow bolt jammed through the front of its throat and jabbed out of the back of its neck.

  Burch was already reloading his weapon. The shifter scowled down at the two cooling corpses as growing pools of blood stained the decking around them. "Bleed better than any undead I’ve ever—”

  Three bodies swung down from the roof. The first hit Burch in the head as he tried to duck away. The momentum knocked them both through the window behind the shifter and into the inn. Then the second and third followed close behind, tumbling after the others.

  Kandler started after them as three more of the attackers swept down from the roof at him. His lurch toward the open portal put them behind him, and they landed on the decking like a giant knocking on a door: bam, bam, bam.

  Kandler turned and glared at the three assassins as they fanned out to try to surround him. They meant to cut him off from the others inside.

  The justicar glared at his attackers—and heard the sounds of battle erupt from within the inn—when he realized that the people facing him were not some Karrnathi nightmares forged in a necromancer’s terrible lab. He could see their eyes—blue, brown, and gray—and he could hear their panting breath. While they looked like some sort of undead, they were as alive as he was.

  Kandler knew then that Espre could handle herself in the inn. With Sallah, Duro, and Burch by her side, not to mention the dwarves who ran the place, she had little to fear. Monja and Xalt, however, were another question.

  One of the assassins’ blades licked out at Kandler. Instead of charging the attacker and being forced into taking on three blades at once, Kandler spun on his heel and raced straight for the Phoenix. He smiled as he heard the footsteps of his attackers pursuing.

  As Kandler dashed up the gangplank that led to the Phoenix's main deck, however, his grin vanished. Just as his feet left the dock, one of the assassins leaped at the justicar. Long, spindly arms wrapped around Kandler’s legs and brought him to the plank. His fangsword spun out of his hands and landed on the ship’s deck.

  Chapter

  7

  Monja knew she was dead. She d stopped screaming after the first few seconds. When the shock of having an arrow stuck through her side wore off and the pain started in, she began to scream again.

  She’d tumbled forward off of Xalt’s shoulders, and now the constant spinning threatened to make her vomit. Despite the pain in her side, she flung out her arms in a desperate attempt to stabilize herself. As she did, the arrow tore free from her shirt and twirled away into the air. The wound burned like fire, and the arrow took a good chunk of her flesh along with it, but this told her that it hadn’t gone as deep into her as she’d feared.

  The rushing wind whipped her long hair around her and tore at her eyes, making it hard to see. She realized she was facing downward now, and through the tears, she saw nothing straight below her but darkness. There might have been a reddish glow in the center of the gap, but it could just as easily have been her imagination filling her t
error-stricken mind with traditional images of Khyber.

  Monja fought through the pain for another deep breath and screamed again. She’d been destined to lead her clan to great things, or so her father had always told her. Now it looked as if destiny had other plans for sealing her fate. She flung her arms out farther, as if she were one of the glide-wings that her people rode in the sky.

  When she’d been but a child, she’d seen her uncle knocked from just such a beast during a skirmish with a flight of harpies that had been terrorizing her people. As he’d fallen, he’d thrown out his limbs out like this, forming his body into a large X, and had managed to even use the winds to angle himself toward the nearby River Cyre, like a giant bird with shredded wings. Still, in his own way, he’d flown. Perhaps Monja could do the same.

  Of course, her uncle had hit the river’s surface like a rock, and he had never come up again.

  Monja tried to will herself to move about in the winds, but nothing happened. She just kept falling straight down. She moved her left hand up and felt herself tipping to the right. She smiled at the thought of any kind of control returning to what little might be left of her life.

  Then she frowned again. Even if she managed to figure out a way to steer herself toward the nearest of the gap’s walls, what good would that do her? She had no way to slow her descent, only guide it, and if she hit anything at her current speed, she had no doubt the impact would turn her bones to jelly.

  Monja closed her eyes then and prayed to the spirits that watched over her and her people. She couldn’t see what they could do for her, but she’d relied on them throughout her life. This didn’t seem like the right time to stop.

  She had trained to be the shaman of her clan, to take over for old Wodager when he retired or died. Prayer had sustained her in her darkest hours and had made her a leader among her people, despite her tender years. Her father, their clan’s lath—now lathun of all the clans of the Talenta Plains—often said that the spirits listened when she whispered. If so, she hoped they would hear her as she shouted for their aid, straining to even hear herself over the wind roaring in her ears.