Skein of Shadows

by Rockwell, Marsheila

  Of course, in Stormreach, you’d be a fool to ignore the less obvious exits—namely, the ladders. For just as Stormreach was a city of many eras, cultures, and races, it was also a city of many layers.

  There was the city proper, the only one that most people ever saw, where the more civilized races held sway—humans, elves, halflings, and dwarves. Sabira didn’t consider the half-orcs to be civilized, and after today, the idea of warforged holding anything resembling “sway” was clearly laughable, but Stormreach did have a sizeable population of both of those races, as well.

  Then there was the city below. Consisting primarily of the sewers formed from remnants of the giants’ ancient plumbing system, this underground world housed tribes of kobolds and troglodytes, gang hideouts, and all manner of wandering creatures.

  Finally, there was the city above, a series of rooftops, balconies, and wooden bridges accessed by the ladders that clung tenaciously to the sides of buildings and walls in every district of Stormreach. The domain of cutpurses and petty thieves who knew the Stormreach Guard was too lazy to follow them up into the heights, the city above also offered a way to cross most of any given district without ever touching the ground—as long as you were nimble of foot and immune to random attacks of vertigo, that was. Since Sabira was neither, she tended to steer clear of that part of the city almost as much as she did the sewers, and the Deneith and Kundarak enclaves. And the House Cannith enclave now too.

  Though give her another week here and she’d probably find herself forced to travel the heights just to avoid all the people out for her blood. Good thing she wasn’t staying even another hour.

  Since she wanted to avoid the Kundarak enclave, Sabira headed toward the Soulgate exit. As she led the group past the fountain, she spied Friar Renau on the other side. She paused, debating whether or not to ask the old man if he’d seen Greddark when the dwarf saved her the trouble by hurrying through the asylum gates, tucking something into his shirt. When he caught sight of Sabira, he jogged over to her. The last of the four bells was just beginning to ring.

  “What are you standing around for? We’re going to be late!”

  Sabira opened her mouth to respond and then thought better of it. He was right—even if his jaunt into the Catacombs was part of the reason they were behind schedule. It was just one more thing she would deal with once they were aboard the airship and headed out to the Menechtarun.

  If they ever actually made it that far. As they headed out of the courtyard toward Falconer’s Spire, Sabira heard a shout behind them.

  “Stop that dwarf!”

  Greddark cursed.

  “I think that’s our cue to run.”

  Sabira didn’t even bother to ask why; the crossbow bolt that whizzed past her ear told her all she really needed to know.

  “This way!” she cried, sprinting toward the western exit. They were halfway there when a group of men in silver armor walked into the courtyard in a group, laughing and chatting.

  Wonderful. She’d forgotten that the fourth bell was shift change.

  As the Silver Flame guards behind them started yelling at the guards in front of them, Sabira changed direction, making for the northwestern exit instead. She offered up a quick prayer to Olladra that Arach wouldn’t choose that precise moment to walk out of the Kundarak enclave with a dozen of his own guards in tow, but Sabira wasn’t sure the goddess of luck could hear her over the indignant cries of the Flamers—or that the Sovereign would answer Sabira’s supplications even if she could hear them.

  But it seemed her luck hadn’t completely run out, for the walled area outside the courtyard was empty, save for a dwarf panhandler who shouted dire warnings at them as they passed by.

  She led her motley group past the stump of a massive giantish pillar that separated the gates to the neighboring Kundarak and Jorasco enclaves. Magewrought notice boards floated at the base of the stone edifice, offering jobs for those either in need of coin or in want of fame. As the first of the Silver Flame guards entered the grassy enclosure behind them, Sabira had an idea. She stopped near the closest board and grabbed one of the metal dragon wings that formed its edge.

  “Guisarme, Jester! Help me with this. Gred—er, whatever—you and Skraad grab that one!”

  She tried to pull it around, but even with the help of the two warforged, it wouldn’t budge.

  “No, like this!”

  She looked over to see Greddark cutting off the ballast bag that hung from the stylized dragon tail on one side of his notice board. As the heavy sack hit the ground, the board canted at an angle and he and Skraad were able to move it. Working together, the duo forced it out onto the pathway, where it would hamper their pursuers. Then they quickly began dismantling another notice board.

  She and the warforged followed suit and they soon had six listing notice boards strung out across the small enclosure, forming a bobbing blockade that would provide some protection from the crossbows the guards carried and would slow down their pursuit for a few moments, at least. Hopefully, that would be all the time they needed.

  With Sabira back in the lead, they sprinted for the exit in the western wall. She almost thought they were going to make it out, but then she caught a glint of silver through the arch and realized that some of the Flamers had circled back through Soulgate to cut them off.

  Greddark saw them at the same time and slowed to a stop.

  “What so we do now? We’re trapped!”

  Sabira cast about frantically for a way out and her eyes fell on the ladders on either side of the archway.

  “Up!” she said, heading for the ladder to the left. As she scrambled up the rungs as fast as she could, she felt a rush of wind. A crossbow bolt with silver and white fletching buried itself into the stone mere inches from her face, but Sabira ignored it and kept going.

  There was a cry below her as one of the bolts struck home. A quick glance showed Skraad just behind her, breaking the bolt in his arm off with his teeth while he fired his own crossbow with his other hand. His aim was truer, and one of the Flamers on the other side of the notice boards went down with a quarrel in his shoulder.

  That left only one crossbowman to worry about; all the rest of the Silver Flame guards carried melee weapons.

  She reached the top of the wall and leaped over a low railing while the others clambered up behind her. Greddark was last, and once he was clear of the ladder, he primed his alchemy blade and struck the top rung, setting the wood aflame. Nobody would be following them up.

  Unfortunately, it also left them with no way to get down. Unlike most of the city above, the section of the wall they stood on didn’t readily connect with any other structure. There was only another ladder attached to the side of a pillar, leading farther up.

  Greddark, realizing their predicament, looked over at her, and she shrugged.

  “Might as well go as far as we can,” she said, and headed up the second ladder.

  From the top of the pillar, they could just see the argent fire that topped the Sanctuary over to their right, and the draped awnings of the Marketplace’s Remembrance Plaza behind them, to the left. The iconic red tent was too far away to jump to, and wouldn’t have done much to break their landing in any case.

  To the north stood their goal, rising up over the Marketplace, glowing blue in the late afternoon sun—Falconer’s Spire. So close and yet so utterly out of reach.

  A red-winged airship that must be Kupper-Nickel’s was just taking off from the docking tower.

  “That our ride?”

  Sabira nodded to the orc.

  “It was.”

  As the blue elemental ring encircling the airship hummed to life, Sabira could just make out the tiny figures moving about the deck. She wondered if any of them could see her—if any of them were even looking.

  “Onatar’s cold forge, but I wish I had a spyglass,” she muttered.

  Something passed in front of her face, hovering a hair’s breadth from the tip of her nose. She pulled her he
ad back to focus and saw it was the requested spyglass, being offered to her by the red-armored warforged.

  “My lady commands,” he said with a bow.

  Sabira took the proffered glass and held it up to her eye. Suddenly it was if she were standing on the deck of the Wayfinder’s airship, not on top of a pillar over more than a hundred feet away. She could see Kupper-Nickel standing near the wheelhouse, talking to the Lyrandar pilot. If only there were some way to get his attention.…

  “Gred—” Damn it, what was she supposed to call him? “Make your sword flame up again!”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” the dwarf protested, drawing the blade to show her. “See, first I have to prime it, like this, then I have to hit some—”

  Sabira tossed the spyglass back to Jester and yanked the hilt from Greddark’s surprised grasp. Then she whirled, slamming the flat of the blade up against Guisarme’s back with an echoing clang. The short sword erupted in flames, and Sabira pulled it back before it could harm the warforged. Then she began waving it back and forth over her head.

  “Jester, the spyglass! Do they see us?”

  The red warforged put the glass up to his rubylike eye and peered toward the tower.

  “I don’t believe—no! I mean, yes! The warforged sees us! He’s pointing and yelling at someone!”

  The airship turned and began heading toward them.

  Sabira thumbed the same button Greddark had used to prime the alchemy blade to extinguish the flame and handed the sword back to him with a satisfied smile. Then she turned to Guisarme.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” she said with a small, apologetic shrug. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “I have no doubt.” The warforged’s tone was noncommittal, but Sabira thought she detected a trace of sarcasm.

  “Glad we’re all still friends,” Skraad interrupted, “but do you think we could see about something a little more important, like getting the rest of this crossbow bolt out of my arm?”

  As Greddark sheathed his blade and moved over to examine the wound, the orc looked at Sabira.

  “Oh, and by the way—that fee we talked about? You’re gonna need to double it.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mol, Barrakas 9, 998 YK

  Zawabi’s Refuge, Xen’drik.

  The sky was just shading from amethyst into rose as Kupper-Nickel’s airship left the ocean behind and began its lofty passage over the sands of the Menechtarun. Even this early, Sabira could feel the heat rising up from the desert below. If it was this bad in the air, she could only imagine how much worse it would be on the ground, once the sun actually rose. She hoped the airship would follow the coastline the rest of the way to the Skyraker Claws and Trent’s Well. The towering mountains, still a good day’s flight away to the west, were already a blue-black smear against the lightening sky.

  To her surprise, though, the airship turned south, heading deeper into the gold-orange sea of dunes. She crossed the deck to the wheelhouse and found the Wayfinder giving instructions to the Lyrandar pilot, a half-elf woman who didn’t look too pleased at being told how to do her job.

  “Why are we heading into the desert?” Sabira asked. “Wouldn’t it be faster—and cooler—to just keep flying over the ocean until we reach the mountains? Then turn inland once we get there?”

  Kupper-Nickel had shown them the map shortly after he’d rescued them from the burning pillar in the Stormreach Marketplace. Trent’s Well was located at the base of the Skyrakers, which formed the northwestern border of the Menechtarun, separating the desert from the Barren Sea. The excavation site was on the southern face of the mountains, so it seemed logical that they would follow the path she’d just described. There was no reason to go inland any sooner, and plenty of reasons not to.

  “You are awake.”

  Sabira blinked at the warforged’s statement of the obvious, then realized he was expressing surprise at seeing her up so early. Since the living constructs didn’t need to rest themselves, the sleeping habits of other races seemed to be a constant source of fascination for them.

  This wasn’t the first day of the trip she’d been awake at this Hostforsaken hour; far from it. Her sleep had been restless ever since they got to Xen’drik, and her dreams had become more vivid and intense the farther south they’d gone. Awful scenes of Tilde being overwhelmed by vague, faceless creatures in some dark cavern, her screaming face made nightmarish in the nacreous glow of fungus that was the only source of light in the depths. Of the sorceress cocooned in bloody webs and strung up over a bottomless pit, her blonde hair hanging down over her face like some ghastly parody of a bridal veil—or a funeral shroud. Of her turning to look accusingly at Sabira, who was incorporeal in this dreamworld and helpless to do anything more than watch as something devoured Tilde from within in the space of a few agonizing moments, leaving only her eyes staring out of a grinning skull—brown eyes that were the mirror image of Ned’s.

  And then she was in another cavern, this one in Korran’s Maw in the Mror Holds, and it was Leoned who hung there, not Tilde, wrapped in chains instead of silk and dangling over a pool of scorching magma. He stared at her with that same accusing look, begging her to save him even as the roof collapsed and he plunged to his death in the magma below, his cries of “Save me, Saba!” echoing in her ears, even though he’d never uttered those words in life.

  But that wasn’t the worst part. Because, in the dream, as he hit the bubbling surface of the molten rock, his features changed yet again. She’d woken up three nights in a row now with the sight of Elix’s face disappearing beneath the magma, his hazel eyes filled with angry recrimination.

  “Yes, I’m awake,” she said, giving herself a mental shake. These weren’t the first nightmares she’d had, and with the life she led, they weren’t likely to be the last. And even if they were some of the worst she’d ever experienced, they were still just figments of an overworked, overtired imagination, and worth no more attention. “Now, why are we going inland?”

  “I received word from Wayfinder ir’Kethras in the night. He is not at Trent’s Well, as I had thought, but in Zawabi’s Refuge, a small oasis just south of us. We will meet him there, and you can continue your journey overland.”

  “Overland?” Sabira asked incredulously. “Why in the name of Dol Dorn’s notched blade would we want to do that?”

  “Traveler’s Curse,” the Lyrandar pilot supplied. “I’m none too happy going as far inland as the oasis, but at least the effects there seem minimal. There’s no way I’d go all the way to the Claws by airship overland. Even flying over the sea to get there was going to cost three times my normal fee.”

  Sabira had heard of the curse, of course—you couldn’t travel anywhere in Xen’drik and not know about it. The time- and distance-twisting magic was named not for how it supposedly affected those journeying into the heart of Xen’drik, but for the Traveler, the Sovereign God of Chaos and Change. Though why the god would choose to visit his discord in such a direct way only on the jungle continent and not across the face of Eberron was anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was some remnant of the ancient war between dragons and giants that had shattered Xen’drik so many millennia ago.

  Whatever its source, the Traveler’s Curse was used to explain why no two parties that followed the same path to the same destination ever got there in the same amount of time—or if they got there at all. Sabira had always chalked it up to lazy or incompetent captains trying to find something besides their own failings to blame when someone else beat them to the prize, but the Lyrandar didn’t seem to fit that profile. And Kupper-Nickel himself was nothing if not efficient. Maybe there was some truth to the stories after all.

  Or maybe Kupper-Nickel had realized the work Greddark had done to repair his arm wasn’t worth the Lyrandar’s ridiculous fee, and so had decided to cut his losses.

  “Tell me he’s at least got earth sleds?” Piloted by dragonmarked members of House Orien in much the same way those of House Lyrandar commanded
their airships, earth sleds were land barges that harnessed earth elementals to allow them to skim over the ground like their waterborne counterparts skimmed over waves. She’d only ridden on a sled once, back in the Holds. Her hearthfather, Kiruk Tordannon, had lent her his own private vehicle on her way from Krona Peak to Frostmantle and the sled had traveled twice as fast as any caravan could have made the trip. If she absolutely had to traipse through the Hostforsaken desert heat, she wanted to do it as quickly as possible.

  “Not to my knowledge, no. I believe he uses wagons, drawn by camels.” At her look, he added helpfully, “Magebred camels.”

  So they might move at three tortuous miles an hour, instead of two. Wonderful. She looked out over the starboard railing to the Skyraker Claws in the hazy distance. They were at least five hundred miles away. Even assuming the House Vadalis-trained animals needed minimal rest, it would still take well over a week to reach the mountains. Unless, of course, the Traveler’s Curse were real and worked in their favor, something not even a gambler like herself would risk actual money on, let alone people’s lives.

  Tilde’s life.

  “There’s got to be another way.”

  “Got to be another way to do what?” Greddark had come above while she and the warforged had been talking and now moved so that he was standing beside Sabira.

  “Cross the desert between Zawabi’s Refuge and Trent’s Well.”

  The dwarf took a moment to digest the implications of that.

  “I’m guessing we won’t be using Greddetta, then?”

  Greddark had named the airship after himself soon after they boarded, using a bottle of Old Sully’s left over by a previous passenger. He’d been affronted that Kupper-Nickel hadn’t had the vessel properly christened, calling it foul luck. The Wayfinder had argued—convincingly, Sabira thought—that it made no sense to name a tool. Even warforged had only been numbers to their creators before the Treaty of Thronehold, or else they had been called by the names of the weapons they bore or the tasks they performed. It was an insult to the constructs who had actual souls and personalities and yet were treated with less respect than a ship which had neither. When the ship could choose a name for itself, then Kupper-Nickel would honor its choice. Until then, it was simply “the airship.”