Skein of Shadows

by Rockwell, Marsheila

  “Bound by eight locks

  Her Heart breaks free

  And bathes both worlds

  In tyranny

  “ ‘Heart’ is often another word for treasure.…”

  Breven, pretending sympathy to get her to do what he wanted back in Vulyar:

  “… Tilde created a sort of reverse summoning spell to return her body to my study in Sentinel Tower in the event of her death.…”

  Sabira’s own heart pounded as she realized the truth. Whatever the artifact was that Tilde had originally been sent here to retrieve, she had found it—it was what had transformed her into a being half-spider, half-woman, and totally alien. It had merged with her, and she with it. The Khyber shard was now her heart, and she was the artifact, the power Breven wanted to make his House supreme. But instead of elevating Deneith, Tilde planned to use that power to level it, to pay the Baron back for his years of disregard. Even if it meant dying in the process.

  “No one turns their back on me. Not anymore.”

  As the sorceress raised her hand for another spell, Sabira held up her own. She didn’t think she could withstand another attack, healing potion or no. She needed to end this now.

  “Can you … can She … really bring him back?”

  Tilde paused, eyes narrowing.

  “What?”

  “Ned … you said She’d … bring him back … in exchange for me. For fulfilling the Prophecy … setting Her free.” Tilde hadn’t said that last, but it was the only thing that made any sense. Why else would a being powerful enough to corrupt a sorceress as strong as Tilde need her? Because She was trapped in a prison. One with eight locks, and just one key.

  Her.

  That was the real treasure here—freedom. To bathe both worlds—Khyber and Eberron—in tyranny.

  “Yes.”

  “Then … just do it,” she said, taking a step toward the dais. “I’m … tired. Tired of fighting … you, Breven.” She was, she realized, and the truth behind her words gave them a sudden strength. “Tired of the needs of the House … always outweighing my own. It’s not worth it any more. But Ned is. He’s the only one who ever really cared about me.” Elix’s face swam in front of her eyes and she thrust it regretfully away. “The only one who ever cared about either of us, Tilde.”

  “Ned …,” Tilde repeated, her eyes taking on a faraway look, her voice small, and lost, and sad. Confusion washed over her face, and her hand dropped.

  “Now!” Sabira shouted.

  Greddark pulled the trigger and his crossbow thrummed. A small thump sounded as the bolt struck home, catching Tilde in her left shoulder, just above her heart. As she turned, screaming in fury, to blast the dwarf, Sabira summoned the last of her strength and began to run.

  She sprinted down the aisle, leaped from the seat of the second pew to the back of the first, and launched herself at Tilde.

  The sorceress spun back, bringing up two of her segmented legs to stab at Sabira, but she twisted in midair and brought the spear tip of her urgrosh down, straight into the pulsing blue-black center of Tilde’s heart.

  As Siberys shard met Khyber, both crystals flared with unbearable light.

  And then the world exploded in a deafening flash of gold and darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Mol, Rhaan 2, 998 YK

  Tarath Marad, Xen’drik.

  Sabira picked herself up from atop a pile of broken bodies and twisted wood, shaking her head to make the roaring in her ears stop. Somehow, her shard axe was still in her hand, its dragonshard tip unharmed.

  Greddark limped over to her, one arm hanging torn and useless from its socket.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  The explosion had blown out one wall of the chapel and collapsed part of the roof, and chunks of wood and stone were raining down. The drow soldiers who hadn’t been killed in the blast were starting to climb to their feet. Through the gaping hole in the wall, Sabira could see drow streaming out of the larger temple, running for the ruined church.

  Of Tilde and her Khyber shard heart, there was no sign, though Sabira thought she saw a twinkle of blood-slicked gold and ivory beneath a nearby bit of fallen rock.

  “How do you propose we do that?” she asked. One of the drow a few pews back had caught sight of them and called to his fellows. They were beginning to advance, many drawing their swords. Some of them still had their crossbows and were scrabbling about for bolts.

  “Gimme mom’nt,” Greddark muttered, his words almost unintelligible as he struggled to pry one of the charms off his bracelet with his teeth.

  “Not sure we have one.”

  Sabira hefted her shard axe in front of her defensively, scanning what was left of the chapel nave. More drow were recovering and moving toward them, on every side, surrounding them. There was no way out but to fight.

  “ ’Rab sis,” Greddark mumbled around a wand he had clenched in his teeth. Sabira grabbed it, pulling it out of the dwarf’s mouth. Thirteen crystals ran the length of the slender rod, all dull and lifeless.

  “We can’t teleport,” she reminded him as she handed it over.

  “We’re not. Plane-shifting. It’s all the rage.”

  There was a commotion at the back of the church.

  Something was coming through the doors.

  “What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”

  “Gotta calibrate—”

  “No time!” Sabira shouted. The drow in the back were beginning to scream as the something reared up and tossed two halves of a mangled body into the air. Sabira caught a glimpse of black scales and multiple legs. It was one of the lizardlike spiders she thought she’d imagined back in the tunnels. And it had brought friends.

  A lot of them.

  And they were heading straight for her and Greddark.

  “… the right one … sensitive trigger …,” the dwarf continued, fiddling with some settings on the wand. Sabira grabbed his broken arm and he winced.

  “Just pick!” she yelled, then jabbed at the wand herself as the lead reptile cleared the crowd of screaming drow and launched itself at them.

  There was a flash of colorless light and Sabira felt that strange stretching sensation again. And then they were floating in a mass of roiling orange and purple clouds as green lightning crackled around them.

  “What the …?” she began, looking around in stunned amazement. As she watched, the clouds hardened into crystal and they were standing on a vast pearlescent plain. It began to rain blood.

  “Kythri, the Churning Chaos. You didn’t let me finish the calibrations, so it sent us to the closest plane. Kythri is coterminous right now, but that could change at any moment. Sort of the nature of chaos.”

  “Now what?” she asked as the plain dissolved beneath them and they fell into a sea of gritty golden ooze, which evaporated and hardened again below them into black rock scored with innumerable fissures. Fire shot up from the cracks, showering them with stinging sparks.

  He thumbed a switch on the wand.

  “Now we go home.”

  Mol, Rhaan 2, 998 YK

  Trent’s Well, Xen’drik.

  They landed in the desert outside of Trent’s Well, not far from the Shimmying Shifter. At Sabira’s look, the dwarf shrugged.

  “I needed a focus.”

  “And it just happened to be the only place where you can get a decent drink. Why am I not surprised?” She shook her head. “Come on. Let’s go find Brannan, get you patched up, and get out of here.”

  They made their way slowly back up the steep path and into the cavern that housed the rest of the settlement. As they entered, Sabira shivered. After Korran’s Maw, the caverns below Frostmantle, and now Tarath Marad, she didn’t think she ever wanted to be out of sight of the sun again.

  There was no line outside the mayor’s house and she pushed the door open, not bothering to knock. She was beyond niceties at this point.

  She walked through the foyer and into the sitting room. Brannan sat i
n a high-backed seat, sipping from a glass and talking to someone in a chair across from him. He stopped mid-sentence when he saw her, nearly dropping his drink.

  “Sabira!” he exclaimed, standing quickly. The man in the other chair followed suit. As he rose and turned, she could finally see who it was.

  Elix.

  The dark-haired Marshal rushed across the room and gathered her into a tight embrace. For a too-brief moment, the horrors of the past weeks drained away like ice in the new spring sun. Then he sighed and stepped back from her, searching her face.

  “Tilde?” he asked.

  She could only shake her head sorrowfully.

  “What happened?”

  She related the story of Tilde’s last moments as succinctly as possible, leaving out the awful things she and the sorceress had said to each other at the end. As she talked about the aftermath of the explosion and the attack of the spider-lizards, Greddark interrupted her.

  “Those weren’t spiders. They were dragonspawn. Gloomwebs, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Sabira looked at him.

  “Dragonspawn?” She thought back to the sand dragon that had attacked them outside of Zawabi’s Refuge. Of all the wagons in the caravan, it had just missed theirs.

  A dragon—and then dragonspawn—attacking out of nowhere, bent on stopping a mission triggered by the Draconic Prophecy. Sabira couldn’t deny the truth of it any longer. The Prophecy was real. And she was a part of it, however unwilling.

  Had been. Hopefully it was over, now that Tilde was dead.

  Greddark gave her a rueful smile.

  “So which Conqueror piece did you want to be? I’m thinking paladin.”

  “Queen,” Elix said decisively, touching her cheek. She reached up to press his palm even closer, drawing strength from the simple gesture.

  Greddark chuckled, then moaned, grabbing his arm.

  Brannan bustled over to him.

  “There are healing potions in the back. Let me get them.”

  Greddark arched a brow at her and she gave a barely perceptible nod. She wasn’t sure what role the Wayfinder was really playing in all this, but she didn’t trust him. If he was leaving her sight, she wanted someone else’s eyes on him.

  “I’ll come too,” the dwarf said. Brannan shrugged and led him out of the room.

  After they had left, Elix removed his hand, went over to a small, flask-laden table, and poured her a drink. As he brought the glass over to her, she detected the distinctive tang of ironspice.

  “Frostmantle Fire,” he replied to her unspoken question. “I brought it with me.”

  Which reminded her.

  “What are you doing here? Did Breven get impatient waiting on his prize?”

  Elix shook his head.

  “You first. You said Tilde’s death stopped the Prophecies—plural. What did you mean?”

  She took a quick sip before answering, feeling the warmth of the potent liquor flowing through her, bolstering her. It was a poor substitute for Elix’s embrace, but it would do for now.

  “There were three different bits of Prophecy in play, not just the one Breven told us about,” she said, then recited them all for his benefit. “Greddark figured out that the first one had been mistranslated—it wasn’t referring to all three moons being dark, just Rhaan. When that moon was dark and an unmarked member of House Kundarak—the dreaming Warder—arrived with the ‘Daughter of Stone and Sentinel’ on the day of Onatar’s Rest, then the eight locks could be opened.”

  “You and Greddark? And Onatar’s Rest—that’s today, right?”

  She nodded.

  “So were the locks opened, then?” he asked, looking confused. She didn’t blame him. She wasn’t completely sure she had it all right herself. Even if she had to believe the Prophecy was real, the interpretations were still all too suspect. “And if so, what was behind them?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied. “I think Tilde was the Heart in the second Prophecy. She was certainly intending to bathe this world in tyranny, anyway, and by the looks of it, she’d already done a pretty good job of it down there. And that ties into the third Prophecy, too, the one about her people being doomed from her birth—I think that means her transformation into … whatever she was—and the world being ‘her killing field.’ But I kept her from ‘breaking free’—to the surface, I guess. Which she would have done if she’d been able to sacrifice me to the Spinner, like she’d planned. And since she didn’t break free—or sacrifice me, thankfully—then the locks stay closed and the She stays put.”

  She paused.

  “I think.”

  A sudden widening of Elix’s hazel eyes was all the warning she had.

  She spun, the blade in Brannan’s hand skimming along her battered armor instead of plunging through it and into her back. His eyes blazed red.

  “But you did free her, you smug little fool—when you killed her. And now all that remains to secure my Queen’s release and regain Her favor is your death!”

  He lunged at her again and she sidestepped, pulling her urgrosh from its harness as she did. He recovered and came at her again. She swung at him, going for his skull. He moved at the last second, and the axe-blade of her urgrosh caught his Khyber shard-studded ear, sheering it cleanly from his head and taking off most of the left side of his face with it, exposing glistening muscle and bone.

  As the chunk of bloody flesh fell to the floor with a wet plop, the black Khyber shard still twinkling in its midst, Brannan stepped back with a growl and his humanity fell away, revealing the feline features of a tiger standing on two feet, dagger held in a clawed hand whose palm faced outward instead of in.

  Brannan ir’Kethras was a rakshasa, an ancient servitor of the demons bound below Khyber long ago by the dragons of Prophecy.

  “Not Brannan. Shakvar,” the fiend snarled, lunging again.

  Sabira twisted out of the way, forgoing a riposte as she moved into position on one side of the rakshasa, allowing Elix to step up on the other, broadsword in his hand.

  Shakvar laughed, and suddenly Elix stiffened, a look of grief and terror on his handsome face.

  “The richest wine cannot compare to the taste of a mortal’s fear,” the rakshasa purred, his feline mouth splitting into an evil grin made even more demonic by the ruined half of his face. “And the best part is, when he recovers from the illusion of watching you die, he’ll get to experience the real thing.”

  Sabira stabbed at him with the spear end of her urgrosh, hoping the dragonshard would have the same effect on the fiend as it had had on Tilde. His backward hand closed around the sharpened crystal and pulled her close as he stabbed out at her with the dagger in his other claw. As he did, she noticed the color of the fur on his wrist didn’t quite match that on his hand and she suddenly knew why he’d been so interested in the gnoll’s paw back at Zawabi’s Refuge. Then his blade caught her in the shoulder and bit deep. Shakvar twisted it back and forth, laughing.

  His laughter was cut short as a thrum sounded behind him and the head of a crossbow bolt protruded suddenly from the arm that held the shard axe. He dropped his hold and yanked the dagger from Sabira’s shoulder, turning. As she stumbled backward, she saw Greddark leaning against the door jamb, crossbow hanging down from his good hand and blood seeping from a knife wound in his chest. He took a step forward, trying to raise the crossbow again, but it slipped from his weakened grasp to clatter across the floor. Then Greddark followed, falling to his knees and then forward onto his face, his hand outstretched, reaching for Sabira. Then he shuddered once and lay still.

  Shakvar snorted and tore the quarrel from his arm, tossing it aside. He turned back to face her and Sabira could only watch in horror as the wound sealed, striped fur closing over it as if it had never been. A quick glance at his face showed that even the wound from her own enchanted urgrosh was beginning to heal over, though much more slowly.

  Shakvar saw the look on her face and sneered.

  “Your petty weapons can’t hur
t me,” he crowed. “You might as well—”

  The rakshasa’s gloating cut off abruptly as Elix appeared, Greddark’s blow having disrupted the fiend’s illusions long enough for the dark-haired Marshal to break free of them. He lunged forward and suddenly there were three rakshasas facing him, all laughing scornfully.

  Elix didn’t waver, thrusting the length of his cold steel into the Shakvar in the center, the one who’d first taken the dwarf’s quarrel in his shoulder, though none of the three showed any trace of that wound now.

  It was a mistake. Though Sabira would have made the same choice, from where she stood, she could see what Elix couldn’t—dust motes dancing in the wan light of the everbright lanterns, disturbed by the movement of the rakshasa on the right and not by the other two.

  Not by Elix’s target.

  She didn’t stop to think. As Elix’s blade slid ineffectually through nothing, Sabira darted forward, not even having enough time to raise her urgrosh in defense, intent only on coming between him and the claws heading for his unprotected throat.

  Shakvar’s razorlike talons caught her in the same shoulder he’d skewered, gouging out chunks of flesh as she tried belatedly to bring her shard axe up to block.

  Sabira cried out in agony, and in relief. She knew that the blow that had all but left her arm useless would have torn Elix’s head from his body, and that realization nearly buckled her knees beneath her.

  She’d almost lost him, like Ned and Orin and all the others. Almost had her worst nightmare made real, and all without telling him how she really felt.

  As a regret deeper than grief and more painful than any physical torment she’d ever experienced coursed through her, she cried out again, this time in fear. Fear that she’d never get to tell him what he most needed to know. What she most needed to say—out loud—to him, to herself, and to the world.

  “Elix! Ye—”

  She was interrupted by a bark of laughter.

  “Oh, now that is delicious,” Shakvar crooned, his feline grin marred by the exposed jawbone, which even now was regaining flesh, muscle, and fur. “Your fear is even sweeter than his. As your despair will be also.” His smile widened. “He can’t hear you. He’ll never know. I’ll make sure of that.”