Skein of Shadows

by Rockwell, Marsheila

  Then she felt something bump into the rubbery hull of the boat.

  “It’s under—” she began, but before she could get the rest of the warning out, the prow of the boat lifted out of the water, dumping Xujil and Jester into the dark drink. Sabira dropped her oar as the boat continued to rise, grabbing her urgrosh in one hand and clutching at the lip of the cap with the other.

  And then the boat was flying through the air, her and Greddark along with it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Far, Barrakas 27, 998 YK

  Tarath Marad, Xen’drik.

  As Sabira splashed into the icy water and went under, she caught a glimpse of something huge, yawning, and full of teeth snatching the upended mushroom cap out of the water and disappearing back beneath the surface.

  As the thing submerged again, Sabira could feel the pull of its wake carrying her down. She fought against it, hampered by the shard axe in her hand but unwilling to release the weapon. The frigid water leeched both the warmth and the strength out of her limbs and her lungs were burning by the time she breached the surface.

  Treading water, she fumbled her urgrosh back into its harness and cast about frantically for her companions. She saw a blue light bobbing off to her left, then begin moving toward land. That must be Greddark. She peered ahead, trying to make out Xujil, who had not been wearing a helmet, but she couldn’t find him. And though she swam in a circle, scanning the water all around her, there was no sign of Jester.

  Sabira struck out for the shore, expecting at any moment to feel the jaws of the leviathan closing around her, but she reached the shallows without incident. She climbed wearily to her feet and waded toward Greddark’s light. Xujil was helping him up out of the water and as she neared, she saw a deep gash in his thigh where he’d been scored by the behemoth’s teeth. She hurried forward and grabbed his other arm, and together she and the drow half-carried, half-dragged him up the rocky beach until they found a flat rock they could set him on.

  Once he was propped up, Sabira pulled the pack that was still miraculously on her back off and handed it over to the drow.

  “See what you can find to help him.”

  As she turned back to the lake, her hair a sodden copper veil in front of her eyes, Greddark stopped her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going back for Jester,” she said, brushing wet locks out of her face in annoyance.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Sabira. He’s a warforged; with all that metal, he would have sunk to the bottom by now. You’re not going to be able to find him, no matter how deep you dive.”

  “But I—”

  “—he also doesn’t need to breathe,” Greddark said, speaking over the top of her, “so he can just walk along that bottom until he reaches the shore. If we wait, I’m sure he’ll come climbing out of the water in proper bardic fashion in no time.”

  They did wait, into the night and for most of the next day, but Jester never resurfaced. Sabira spent much of her time walking along the edge of the lake peering into its impenetrable depths, searching vainly for the faintest glimmer of blue. Greddark gave up trying to dissuade her early on, instead turning to drying out their cloaks and the contents of his myriad pouches, and taking stock of their now very limited supplies. He’d quaffed the last healing potion and the wound on his leg was already a faint scar. When Sabira returned from her latest circuit up and down the lake shore, she saw him paging through what was left of the Draconic dictionary.

  He looked up as she approached.

  “Ruined,” he said regretfully, showing her the ink-smeared pages. She could make out a few individual words here and there that hadn’t been destroyed by the water, but by themselves, they meant nothing. “I can’t believe they didn’t ward it against water damage.”

  “I doubt they were expecting any rain in the Catacombs,” Sabira answered, but the sarcasm was perfunctory. Her mind was still out on the lake. Under it.

  “Though it does look like a few entries survived here where the pages stuck together … hmm …,” the dwarf trailed off as he set the book back in his lap and began gently prying the leaves apart.

  “How long do you intend to wait here, Marshal?”

  Sabira looked over at Xujil, who’d returned from his own reconnaissance of the lakeshore, though he hadn’t been looking for Jester. He’d already written the warforged off.

  “As long as it takes.”

  “I should think that is highly inadvisable. The Spinner’s followers do patrol this lake, however irregularly. And there is still the matter of the sorceress, and your rescue miss—?”

  “Don’t you dare try to tell me my duty,” Sabira snarled, interrupting him. “Nobody knows that call better than a Deneith, and no one answers it faster.”

  She clenched her fist at her side to keep from punching him in the face. Mainly because he was right.

  Xujil blinked at her.

  “And stop doing that! What are you, some Hostdamned bird?”

  The guide was spared from trying to formulate a response that wouldn’t get him hit by Greddark.

  “Ha! I was right!”

  Shooting Xujil one last furious look, Sabira turned back to the dwarf, attempting to rein in her temper.

  “Right about what?”

  “The translation. It was ‘the Warder dreams,’ right? If it had really been referring to Vult, the Warding Moon, going dark, it would have used this phrase here.” He pointed to an entry still legible through the wash of indigo ink. “That’s the phrase used about Rhaan, the Scribing Moon, in the first part of the couplet—‘the Book is closed.’ So that bit really is talking about the dark phase, but the dreaming part, that’s wrong. The word used is actually this one.” He flipped the page. “Dormant.”

  “Dormant, dreams, what’s the difference? Maybe it just didn’t fit the rhyme scheme.” She didn’t want to talk poetry with the dwarf. It reminded her too much of Jester.

  “The word is the same one used for a dragonmark that hasn’t yet manifested.”

  That brought Sabira up short. Each of the twelve moons of Eberron was associated with one of the dragonmarked Houses. Olarune, the Sentinel, was the moon tied to her own House’s Mark of Sentinel. Vult was linked to the Mark of Warding.

  To House Kundarak.

  “So you’re saying the actual translation is talking about an unmarked member of your House?”

  “I am.”

  “And are you? Unmarked, I mean?” She hadn’t seen a dragonmark on him anywhere, or noticed him using any powers she would associate with one, but that was hardly conclusive. The mark could easily be hidden beneath his clothing, and they hadn’t really needed any warding.

  “I am,” he said again.

  So the snippet of Prophecy that she refused to believe in mentioned both a “daughter of stone and Sentinel” and an unmarked member of House Kundarak. Both of which happened to be here, now, five days before Rhaan was set to go dark again. Wonderful.

  “What about the silent Anvil part?” she asked, dreading the answer.

  “I don’t know,” Greddark admitted, shaking his head. “That part of the dictionary is completely ruined. I don’t know what it’s referring to—only that it’s not referring to Eyre going dark.”

  Eyre was the Making Moon, associated with House Cannith. Sabira couldn’t help but wonder if Jester would have been able to help them figure it out.

  Then another thought struck her.

  “But Tilde didn’t have any dwarves with her. So if that’s really what the Prophecy is talking about, she couldn’t have fulfilled it, or opened any locks.”

  Greddark shrugged helplessly.

  “But I—we—can.”

  “Maybe.”

  Sabira frowned in disgust.

  “Do you ever feel like a piece on the world’s biggest Conqueror board?”

  The corner of Greddark’s mouth twitched.

  “Well, that is sort of the point of a prophecy, isn’t it?”

  And it was
exactly why she hated it. Bad enough being manipulated by other people. Throw in the Sovereign Host or the Silver Flame or the dragons or something greater than them all, and it was like saying nothing you did mattered. No choice you made was truly yours; it had been preordained millennia before your race was even born. You were nothing but a performer in some cosmic play, acting out a script you could never see but were doomed to follow, regardless.

  To give credence to prophecy was to admit that life was meaningless, and that was a worldview she simply would not—could not—ascribe to.

  “Well, to Dolurrh with that,” she spat. “We’re not here to fulfill any Hostforsaken prophecy. We’re here to get Tilde, get that artifact, and get out. Nothing more.”

  Greddark’s grin widened above his short, straggly beard.

  “You really don’t like being told what to do, do you?”

  Sabira couldn’t help but grin back.

  “I guess it’s the dwarf in me.”

  Then the smile faltered and she became serious again.

  “We’ll wait till morning. Or what passes for morning in this pit, anyway. If Jester hasn’t made his way back to us by then, we’re moving on.”

  “I do not understand your reluctance,” Xujil said. Sabira was ready to punch him after all, but when she turned to him, his face was creased with perplexity rather than challenge. “You must know the warforged has perished.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know. Of all the people under my command, Jester was the only one who wanted to turn back, and I convinced him to stay. Wherever he is right now, he wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for me. So we’re staying put, to give him as much of a chance to find us as we possibly can. I owe him that much.”

  Xujil started to blink and stopped himself. Instead, he inclined his head to her.

  “As you will, Marshal.”

  He walked off, and Sabira returned to the shoreline, to watch, to wait, and above all, to hope.

  Sul, Rhaan 1, 998 YK

  Tarath Marad, Xen’drik.

  Sabira awoke from a vision of Elix drowning in the darkness of the sunless sea, Jester holding one ankle and Guisarme holding the other as he struggled to make it back up to the surface. To her.

  Greddark’s hand was on her shoulder, and he looked wary, like she might have tried to hit him in her sleep. Given the nature of her dreams, she probably had.

  “It’s morning, Saba, and there’s still no sign. What do you want to do?”

  It was the same question she’d asked the warforged bard, and her answer was the same as his had been.

  “We move on,” she decided, climbing to her feet. Though, in truth, it wasn’t much of a choice. They couldn’t go back. The leviathan had eaten their boat, and there were no mushrooms on this side of the lake with which to replace it.

  They pulled on their cloaks and gathered what few things they had left, doing their best to erase all sign of their passing. It wasn’t hard; the land here was rocky and barren, resisting tracks, and they’d done without a fire for the past two nights.

  Xujil led them through the twisted landscape, staying closer than was his wont as he guided them over the broken ground. To Sabira, it looked as if some petulant giant had lifted the cavern floor here and thrown it back down again in a fit of temper, then stomped off without bothering to clean it up.

  “I thought you said the molten rivers hadn’t flowed here since the giants first clapped your people in chains,” Greddark commented as they climbed over a jutting rock and then had to leap across a narrow but deep fissure. Sabira was pretty sure that’s not actually what the drow had said, but she was interested in his answer. The terrain was starting to remind her of the area beneath Frostmantle, which was most definitely still active—or had been, until the rising magma had been funneled off through a planar gateway into Risia, the Plain of Ice, thanks to Aggar and a persistent scholar named Goldglove.

  “They have not,” the guide replied. “There are greater and more dangerous forces in Tarath Marad than mere elements.”

  Greater forces than those that caused mountains to rise and laid entire cities to waste in a single night? Sabira would lay odds that they were unfriendly, and probably xenophobic too. Lovely.

  “And how likely are we to encounter these … forces?”

  Xujil blinked at her. He seemed unable to help himself.

  “You plan to steal an item of power from the Spinner, Marshal,” he said at last, as if a more direct answer to her question would be too obvious to voice.

  “You know, sometimes being direct really is best. ‘Very.’ That’s all you had to say. ‘Very.’ ”

  The drow apparently took her literally, for he did not speak again for some time. Though that could have been because clambering up and down the jagged chunks of stone took all the breath out of him. It certainly did her.

  What seemed like an eternity later—but probably was really only the entire day, and maybe part of the night—they finally reached the far wall of the huge cavern. Sabira was sure they’d traveled so far they must be halfway back to Zawabi’s Refuge by now, or else out underneath the Thunder Sea. She was completely turned around and had no sense of what direction they were traveling in. She considered asking Greddark, then decided against it. The idea of millions of gallons of water or even tons of sand sitting somewhere above her head, with nothing separating them but the cavern ceiling, which might or might not be all that thick, made the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention.

  Some things it was better not to know.

  Several tunnels opened up before them like choices in a rigged shell game. Except in this case, Sabira figured the loser was the one who picked the right shell. Lucky for her.

  Xujil turned to them, his face grave.

  “We are entering territory patrolled by the Spinner’s followers. You must be quiet as the tomb, and if I gesture to you to move or to stay put, you must do as I say quickly and without question. Otherwise, I cannot guarantee your safety.”

  Like he’d guaranteed Tilde’s, Sabira wondered? But there was no point in baiting the drow. He was the only one who could get them where they needed to go.

  “You will also need to extinguish the lights on your helmets and use only your goggles from this point on. Unless one of you has other magic that enables you to see in the dark? Donathilde cast a spell on herself and her companion.”

  Companion. Singular. One of Deneith’s most powerful sorceresses and thirty of its best Blades, and by the time they’d made it this far, there were only two of them left. She felt a flash of anger at her House’s patriarch. What artifact could possibly be worth so many lives? But she knew the answer, as sure as if Baron Breven himself were here to whisper it in her ear.

  One that could save—or end—many, many more.

  She and Greddark thumbed their lamps off and pulled their low-light goggles up. They were instantly engulfed in darkness, for this part of the cave had none of the luminescent fungus that had lit their way previously. Sabira couldn’t see the dwarf next to her, or even the hand in front of her face. She hadn’t realized how dependent on the blue glow of the everbright lanterns she’d become down here, and she felt a moment of stark, primal fear before she was able to detect the faintest light emanating from the mouths of some of the tunnels.

  As her eyes adjusted, she was able to make out Xujil’s silhouette against the nearest of these, and Greddark’s at her side. The drow motioned for them to follow and led the way into the third tunnel from the left, which seemed to Sabira to be no different from any of the others. More and more patches of glowing green fungus appeared as they went on, and soon she could see as well as if she’d had been using the everbright lantern; maybe better.

  In addition to the mosslike fungus, they began to encounter spider nests and webbing with increasing frequency. There’d been spiders during most of the trip, of course, but they’d generally been small and of no great concern. Sabira was not one of those people who had an unnatural loathing for the e
ight-legged creatures, and she was willing to leave them be if they did the same for her. But these egg sacs were bigger and promised less aloof inhabitants. When one began to tremble as she passed, she didn’t hesitate, stomping on the sac before its inhabitants could burst out and make their acquaintance.

  Xujil looked back at her, his usually placid face tight with anger.

  “Quiet as the tomb, Saba?” Greddark whispered as she scraped the pulpy mess off her boot and onto a nearby rock.

  “Sorry. I thought he meant a Karrnathi one.”

  Karrnath had turned to the dead to bolster their forces during the Last War. Even now, most of her citizens considered it a great honor to have one of their fallen relatives restored to unlife to continue to serve their country. There was a saying in Karrnath: A quiet grave is a disgraced one. Which was part of the reason she wanted her body burned when she died. She loved her country, and her House, but she’d already made far more than her share of sacrifices for both of them. She had to draw the line somewhere, and if duty dictated that line could not be drawn in life, she was going to make damned sure it was in death.

  Of course, she supposed if she died down here, she wouldn’t have to worry about it. There was always a bright side.

  When her boot was clean enough that she wouldn’t leave a trail for any vengeful spider lovers to follow, she waved for Xujil to continue.

  The relative sparsity of cobwebs and the occasional boot print in patches of strange, spongy rock attested to the fact that they weren’t the only ones to use these passageways, but aside from more egg sacs that wisely stayed still in Sabira’s presence, they saw nothing else in the tunnels for hours. Xujil did have them hide in crevices and side passages a time or two, but she neither saw nor heard what prompted the drow to take cover. Given that at one point she had to squeeze into a crack coated with bat guano—which Greddark promptly collected off her clothes afterward—Sabira had a sneaking suspicion the guide might just be doing it out of spite.

  They came to another fork in the tunnel, and Xujil led them down the smaller of the two passages. The luminescent fungus was meager here, and the webs thicker, though there were no spider nests that Sabira could see. At one point, the tunnel narrowed so that they had to crawl for about ten feet, and Sabira had a sudden flashback of that other crawlway, and the voice that she’d heard. She braced herself for a repeat performance, but whatever had called her name before remained blessedly silent.