The Binding Stone: The Dragon Below Book 1

by Don Bassingthwaite

  In the half-dark of early evening, the docks of Zarash’ak were far from abandoned, however. People turned to stare at them—and up on the deck of the ship, Vennet and Ashi leaned out over the rail. Singe scrambled to his feet, grabbed Geth with one hand and Dandra with the other, and pushed them across the dock into the nearest and deepest shadows.

  “Keep going!” he spat. “Dandra, keep your feet on the ground—we don’t need any more attention!”

  The shadows were the mouth of a narrow alley and Singe found himself squeezing between tight walls toward ruddy light at its far end. Geth, with a broader chest, had to force himself through. His great-gauntlet, wrapped up and stuffed in a bag that hung across his back, scraped the walls harshly.

  “What happened back there?” the shifter asked. “I start back up onto the ship and all of the sudden Dandra’s screaming in my head, Ashi’s jumping out at me, there’s fire and wind …”

  “Vennet has loyalties to more than just House Lyrandar,” said Singe.

  “He follows the Dragon Below! He was going to sell us out to Dah’mir!” Dandra’s voice was hot with outrage, but Singe shook his head as he squeezed another pace closer to the alley’s exit.

  “You, Dandra. I’m pretty certain he was only selling out you. I don’t think Geth and I figured as anything more that obstacles. Like Natrac.”

  “Natrac?” grunted Geth. Singe told him what he had discovered in the half-orc’s cabin. “Tiger’s blood!” cursed the shifter.

  They popped out of the alley onto the edge of a market, still bustling in spite of the gathering night. Singe breathed a prayer of thanks for undeserved blessings and led the way into the crowd, slowly and casually. “Follow me,” he ordered. “Geth, keep an eye out behind us.”

  The crowd in the market was mixed, mostly humans mingling with brawny half-orcs, but a few full-blooded orcs, delicate-looking elves, and lithe little halflings moved through it as well. Geth’s shifter features and Dandra’s exotic beauty barely stirred a second look. Singe himself felt practically invisible. Still, it seemed like forever before the press of bodies opened up ahead of them and they were on their own again, heading deeper into Zarash’ak with the crowded market between them and the docks. Singe let a little of the tension to ease out him. “Geth?” he asked cautiously.

  The shifter shook his head. “No sign of Ashi or Vennet,” he reported.

  Singe gave a slow sigh of relief. “Twelve moons. We’re away.”

  “We are,” said Dandra thinly. Singe glanced at her. Her face was pale. “Light of il-Yannah, Singe—Vennet still has Natrac!”

  It took an effort of will to hold back the memories of the horrors Dah’mir had inflicted on her. The thought that Natrac might suffer similar tortures was almost too much to bear and sent Tetkashtai retreating to the furthest recesses of her mind. When Dandra looked at Singe and Geth, though, she saw only harsh determination on both men’s faces. They shared a glance—and pressed on along the street, putting more distance between them and the docks. Dandra stopped dead. “We can’t leave Natrac as Vennet’s prisoner!” she protested.

  Singe paused long enough to hook his arm around hers and pull her forward. “Dandra, I know.” He glanced into her eyes. His gaze was dark. “We shared your memories, didn’t we? But we can’t go back to Lightning on Water, not tonight. They’ll be waiting for us.”

  “Vennet and Ashi? There are three of us and two of them!”

  “You have a go with Ashi then, Dandra,” said Geth. The shifter’s voice was a quiet rasp. “She was tough with her fists and now she’s got her sword back. Have you watched the way she moves? She’ll be waiting if we go back. If she gets a chance to ambush us in the dark, the odds won’t be in our favor for very long.”

  Singe’s arm tightened on hers. “And remember, it’s you they want. If we go back, we’re delivering you right to them.”

  Dandra tensed. “But Natrac …”

  “Vennet went to the trouble of drugging him,” Geth pointed out with cool practicality. “He’s not going to kill him now. He’ll be all right until the morning.” His hands tightened on the bag containing his great-gauntlet. “We’ll go back then.”

  Singe still had a little money left from the sale of their horses in Yrlag. They found a small inn well away from the docks and took a room for the night. The innkeeper looked at Geth, but a smile and a word from Singe eased his worry. Once they were in their room, Geth flung himself down on one side of the bed and seemed to be asleep almost instantly. Dandra stared at him.

  “How does he do that?” she asked. “How can he do that?”

  “He’s been able to sleep whenever he wants for as long as I’ve known him. No matter what’s been happening, give Geth a moment of quiet and he can go to sleep.” Singe shook his head in awe. “It’s a valuable gift when you’re a mercenary.”

  The wizard turned away, moving to the room’s window and throwing back the shutters. The window faced away from the street and out over the low rooftops of Zarash’ak’s ramshackle sprawl. A cool breeze drifted in from the distant sea, pushing back some of the pungent marsh smell that clung to the city. After a moment, Dandra slipped across the room to join him.

  “You haven’t said much about the time that you and Geth served together in the Blademarks,” she said.

  Singe looked down at her, then away. “No, I haven’t,” he said.

  “Being an inanimate crystal gives you a lot of time to watch what’s going on around you. The only time I’ve seen people with the depth of anger you two have is when they were friends before they became enemies.”

  Singe’s face twisted. For a moment, Dandra wondered if maybe she’d pressed too hard, but then his eyes closed and he let out a long sigh.

  “Not too long after I joined the Frostbrand—our Blademarks company—the commander of the company, Robrand d’Deneith, took a few of us on a recruiting mission,” he said in a low voice. “Folk from the Eldeen Reaches generally make good scouts and the Frostbrand had developed a specialty in taking winter assignments, so we headed into the northern Eldeen. Not quite so isolated as Bull Hollow, but still more wild than civilized. In a little place that was hardly more than a crossroads, Robrand started his recruiting speech.” Singe’s expression grew nostalgic. “Twelve moons, the old man could talk! Recruiting was a hard sell in that region—the Eldeen Reaches had seceded from Aundair only a generation or so before and most Reachers didn’t want to have anything to do with the world outside their forests. But there was one eager young shifter who came forward with a hunger for adventure in his eye and signed up on the spot.”

  “Geth,” said Dandra and Singe nodded.

  “There’s a tendency in every Blademarks company for new recruits to band together. Eight of us joined the Frostbrand within a couple of months of each other. I was the first, Geth was the last. The bunch of us were practically inseparable for the next five years.” He reached up and ran a finger along his cheekbone, high under his left eye. Dandra looked closely and saw a thin scar. “Geth gave me that during a tavern brawl in Metrol. He was aiming for the Cyran soldier who was holding me from behind and missed.”

  “That can’t be what broke you up though.”

  “That was nothing. We laughed about it.”

  “Then what happened?” Dandra hesitated, then said, “Tonight when Vennet mentioned ‘Narath’… you’ve said that name to Geth before and he doesn’t like to hear it either.”

  The wizard gave no response.

  “Singe,” Dandra said, “what happened at Narath?”

  “Go to sleep, Dandra,” said Singe. His voice was cold and empty. “Take the bed next to Geth if you want. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  Dandra glanced at the bed. There was plenty of room for three people to lie side by side. She looked back to Singe. He was still staring out of the window, his face a harsh mask. Dandra held her tongue and turned away, leaving him to whatever dark memories were running through his head.

  The sound of the room�
�s door closing woke her. Dandra sat upright, her mind snapping alert and the drone of whitefire throbbing on the air. On the floor under the window, Singe came to his feet with his rapier in his hand.

  Geth stood inside the door, a big bundle of rags and three broad conical straw hats in his arms. He looked at both of them critically. “I walk out of here and you don’t stir, but I come in and you’re both ready to strike me down?” He walked over to the bed and dropped the bundle. “Here. I’ve been to market.”

  The rags were clothes, simple and well worn—by fisherfolk previously if the smell that rolled off them was anything to judge by. Dandra wrinkled her nose. Singe stared. “Did you actually pay for those?” he demanded.

  “More or less.” Geth tossed a muddy brown shirt to the wizard. “We can’t just walk up to Lightning on Water. We need something to disguise ourselves.”

  “No one will recognize us by smell at least,” Dandra pointed out with a grin. Singe gave her a dim glower.

  It was the middle of the morning by the time they left the inn and stepped back onto the street. Zarash’ak was alive around them. The air was humid and close, but the people of the City of Stilts moved around in a hurry, as if eager to get their errands finished before day grew any hotter. Dandra found herself staring around as she, Geth, and Singe wandered back toward the docks, unexpectedly aware of what she had missed of Zarash’ak when she had passed through as a crystal around Tetkashtai’s neck. The city had sounds, sights, and smells she hadn’t really appreciated before. Musicians on a street corner made strange music that mixed a chirping stringed instrument with a deep, thrumming pipe. On streetside grills, vendors cooked long strips of meat brushed with a thin sauce that smelled both spicy and sour. Other vendors made thick rounds of dark gold bread, flapping a pale yellow dough back and forth between their palms before slapping it onto hot iron griddles. People seemed to buy the yellow bread at one stall, then wander on to another to buy meat or blackened roast vegetables to stuff inside.

  “What is that?” she asked as they passed one grill stall.

  “Snake,” said Geth. He pointed at the bread. “That’s made out of a flour pounded from a kind of marsh reed called ashi.”

  “When it’s cooked, it’s the same color as Ashi’s hair.”

  Geth grunted at the observation. “Let’s buy some and ask her about it, shall we?”

  They followed a different route to the docks than the one that they had taken the night before and approached Lightning on Water from a distance. Singe had suggested they would find Vennet’s crew busy unloading the ship—the half-elf might be a treacherous serpent, but he was also a Lyrandar captain and clearly took his business seriously. To Dandra’s surprise though, they could see as they approached that activity on the ship was subdued. Most of the crew seemed to be hanging over the side, watching as crowds surged around on the dock below. Geth held both her and Singe back while he scanned the dock and the ship thoroughly for any sign of Vennet or Ashi. Finally, he shook his head.

  “I don’t see either of them,” he reported.

  “What do you think’s happening on the dock?” asked Dandra.

  “Let’s find out.”

  Dandra tilted her hat slightly toward the ship as they passed, trying to conceal her distinctively dark skin from the sailors above. Although it didn’t seem likely that any of the crew shared their captain’s vile faith, even a casual greeting could give them away. Once they were among the crowd, it was a little easier to hide and she relaxed a bit—at least until she realized that the attention of the shifting, gawking crowd was focused on the narrow alley down which she, Geth, and Singe had made their escape. The three of them pushed their way carefully to the front of the crowd.

  A long, thick stain of dried blood painted the wall to one side of the alley mouth. At the top of the stain was a deep ragged hole, as if a spike had driven into the wood. The hole was also bloodstained.

  Beside the stain, two words had been scratched into the wood: blue doors.

  “Rat!” breathed Geth. He nudged the man who stood next to him. “Do you know what happened here?”

  “Dagga. Word is that the ship over there”—the man gestured to Lightning on Water—“was transporting a mad woman. I hear she got loose, kidnapped someone from his cabin, and even tried to set fire to the ship. When that didn’t work, she came down here, hacked off her prisoner’s hand, pinned it up to the wall, and ran off with the rest of him!”

  “It was more than his hand!” chimed in a half-orc woman on his other side. “It was a whole arm. My boy saw it hanging there before the watch and took it away!” She held up one hand and made a circle over it with the finger and thumb of her other hand. “Big ruby ring on it too! The woman would have to be mad to leave that behind.”

  Natrac’s ring, Dandra realized. Her hand sought out Singe’s and squeezed it tight. If they’d come back last night, they could have stopped this.

  The wizard must have realized the same thing. He looked slightly pale. “The watch,” he said, “will they investigate? Will they look for the man whose hand or arm it was?”

  The half-orc woman laughed. “Not unless someone wants to come forward and pay the fee!”

  “Or unless this mad woman starts cutting off more parts,” said the man darkly with a glance at the woman. “Only the cult does that and not even the watch will stand for their type in the city!”

  “Any idea what ‘blue doors’ means?” asked Geth.

  The man and woman shook their heads, but Dandra seized Geth’s hand as well as Singe’s and pulled both men out of the crowd and down the dock. When they were out of sight of Lightning on Water, she stopped and looked at them. “I know what ‘blue doors’ means.” She took a deep breath. “When Tetkashtai, Virikhad, and Medalashana came to Zarash’ak, they met Dah’mir in a house with blue doors.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Singe.

  She nodded. “It’s all a message for us,” she said. “Do you remember what Natrac said after the fight with Ashi? The cult of the Dragon Below kidnapped his cousin and left parts of him in the canals. Vennet and Ashi left Natrac’s hand and ring as a message to say that they had him. They left the words to show where they’ve taken him, knowing I’d understand but not anyone else.”

  Singe’s eyes narrowed. “But how could Vennet know about this house?”

  “The crystal band,” Dandra told him grimly. “Vennet has used it to contact Dah’mir and Medalashana. One of them must have told him what to do.”

  “Twelve bloody moons,” cursed Singe. He looked at Dandra. “Suppose Dah’mir wants to come to Zarash’ak. How long do you think it will take?”

  “More than a week,” Dandra answered. “Even if he left the Bonetree mound as soon as Ashi told Medalashana we were coming to Zarash’ak, he’d still be days away from here.”

  “And you can find this house with blue doors again?”

  She nodded.

  A growl rumbled up out of Geth. “It’s going to be a trap—and after all that last night about not going back because we’d deliver you right to them …”

  “I know,” Dandra answered.

  Tetkashtai’s presence shook inside her. Dandra, this is too much! We don’t even know that Natrac’s still alive. Light of il-Yannah, he’s had a hand cut off!

  Then we have to go to make sure he’s dead, Dandra said. I won’t leave him to the cult of the Dragon Below.

  Dah’mir and Medalashana will know we’re in Zarash’ak for certain now.

  The suggestion sent a tremor through Dandra’s belly, but she forced it away. All the more reason to confront Vennet and Ashi and get the crystal band back. She glanced up at Singe and Geth. “When should we go?”

  “I don’t think we have anything to gain by waiting.” Geth tapped a fist against his right arm. Hidden under a loose sleeve, the metal of his great gauntlet rang solidly. “Let’s go now.”

  Dandra looked to Singe. The wizard nodded. Dandra steeled herself. “All right then,” she said. �
�This way.”

  The ship that Tetkashtai and the other kalashtar had taken from Sharn had made port at another part of Zarash’ak’s dock.

  Dandra led Geth and Singe along the waterfront until she found the point where the ship had berthed. Dredging her memory, she began pacing through the city, following landmarks and tracing the route that the kalashtar had taken those months ago. At one intersection, though, she had to stop. To the right, the plank street broadened into a wide and busy thoroughfare lined with fine, large homes.

  To the left, it became narrow and crooked, leading away into an older, more rundown part of the city.

  It would have made more sense for the house with blue doors to be to the right—it was big and very pleasant and would have fit that neighborhood. Memory, however, suggested that the kalashtar had turned left at this spot.

  Tetkashtai, she asked, which way?

  The frightened presence confirmed her memory. Left. Dandra moved on, turning where memory prompted her. The district, however, was nothing like she remembered. Empty windows gaped like black eyes form the faces of dilapidated houses. Occasionally, feet scampered on the wood ahead as figures scrambled back into the shadows.

  “Squatters,” said Singe.

  Not all of the figures ducked away. A lanky orc—full-blooded, with coarse features, lean muscles under his gray-green skin, and heavy tusks that made Natrac’s look small—stared at them from the shadows of one house, red eyes gleaming. His clothes were rough and swamp-stained; he looked like some kind of marsh nomad, looking for easier prey in the lawless places of Zarash’ak. Dandra’s grip tightened on her spear and Geth made sure that the orc saw the heavy sword at his side.

  “Dandra,” he asked, “are you sure about this?”

  “Yes,” she said. She turned a corner.

  In her memory, the house with blue doors was a grand and luxurious building, three stories high with dormers along the pitched roof. It stood alone on its own platform, surely a luxury in a city where walkways and platforms had grown haphazardly together over time. The doors that had stuck in her memory and in the minds of the kalashtar were tall and striking, their bright polished surface painted a deep blue that was exactly the color of an autumn night’s sky.