Skein of Shadows (dungeons and dragons)

by Marsheila Rockwell

  “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 head 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 in
to 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.”

  “No. Your lovely namesake will be returning to Stormreach just as soon as her crew can push us off the gangplank, I imagine,” Sabira replied.

  “We will do no such thing!” the Wayfinder protested.

  “Aye,” the Lyrandar woman said with a wink and a grin. “We’ll make you jump.”

  The half-elf hadn’t been joking. Zawabi’s Refuge had no docking tower; it had few actual buildings to speak of. Instead of a traditional berth, the Lyrandar navigated through a series of narrow canyons until she came to an outcropping on the gorge’s eastern rim, framed by curved pillars of stone reaching up into the sky like grasping fingers. A sizeable house surrounded by several improbably green trees sat back from the edge of the canyon beside the makeshift dock, and massive purple crystals grew out of the ground in the distance, blindingly bright in the morning sun.

  But while the airship slowed, it didn’t stop at the house. Instead, the Lyrandar piloted the ship a bit farther down the canyon and then lowered the gangplank off the port side of the deck, away from the tree-framed house.

  Sabira looked over the railing. Below them on the canyon floor, a field of sharp red rocks thrust out from the parched ground, each as big as a man.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  One of the crew, a sailor named Quilli, joined her at the railing. The halfling woman was a constant fixture on the airship’s deck, the youthful innocence of her face and voice belied by her sharp tongue and salty wit. Sabira had thought the dwarves undisputed masters of the curse until meeting the vulgar sailor. But given that the halfling had been able to make both Greddark and Skraad blush in the same breath, Sabira was no longer quite so sure.

  “Not there, Marshal,” Quilli said, managing to pack a world of scorn into the title. “There.”

  The halfling was pointing to a narrow ledge at the base of a tall rock pillar jutting up from the gorge’s western face. It was a good ten feet away from the end of the plank, and every now and then, a gust of wind blew through the canyon, making the wooden board quiver.

  “Not to pry, but why exactly are we disembarking on a practically non-existent ledge on this side of the canyon when all the buildings-and, I’m assuming, the oasis-are on that side?” Greddark asked, gauging the distance to the ledge with a skeptical expression on his face.

  “Zawabi refuses to allow Brannan’s caravans to stay within the refuge. They are camped on the top of the canyon wall, above us,” Kupper-Nickel responded, coming over to stand by the gangplank.

  “So… why are we down here and not up there?” Greddark asked, his annoyed tone making it clear he didn’t think he should even have to be posing such a ridiculous question.

  Just then, another strong gust of wind shrieked down the canyon, buffeting the airship and slamming the elemental ring into the rock wall. The dwarf, who’d had his feet planted firmly on the deck, swayed, but didn’t fall, the legendary immovability of his people serving him well. Sabira and the airship crew, including Kupper-Nickel, likewise stayed upright, though Sabira had to reach back a quick hand for her shard axe, drawing stability from the urgrosh’s enchanted haft.

  The two other warforged were not so fortunate. Guisarme went down on one knee and the smaller, lighter Jester, who’d been standing beside Quilli looking at the rocks below, pitched forward over the railing with a decidedly human-sounding yelp. Quilli reached for him, but he wore no clothing for her to grab, and her hand slid ineffectually off metal and smooth wood.

  Sabira reacted without thinking. Her urgrosh was out of its harness in an instant, and she was swinging the shard axe down toward the bard’s spine to a chorus of the crew’s shocked gasps. As the bard began to tumble headfirst into the gorge, Sabira snaked her weapon in, gouging his backplates and snagging his lyre strap behind the axe-head of the urgrosh. In the same motion, she twisted the haft in a two-handed grip while throwing her weight backward. The shard axe’s magical stability kept her from being yanked off the deck of the airship along with the falling bard, but it couldn’t keep her from sliding across the wooden surface on her backside. As she reached the railing, she braced her feet on adjoining balusters and bent her knees so she could bear more weight. Even so, the leather-wrapped haft was almost ripped from her grasp, and she knew she had mere moments before the lyre strap snapped.

  “Little help here?” she grunted, even as Greddark and Kupper-Nickel reached over the side of the railing to grab Jester by the ankles and haul him back up onto the deck. Another spiteful gust shook the airship as they worked, threatening to send all four of them pitching over the railing. But the Ly
randar righted the ship in time, though the elemental ring took a chunk of rock the size of Sabira’s head out of the canyon wall in the process, and she barely avoided having it replace her flesh and bone one as it shot out across the deck, propelled by the unhappy union of air and earth. As it was, everyone on deck was showered with stone shrapnel, and a sliver the length of Sabira’s forearm embedded itself into the deck mere inches from her thigh.

  She was surprised when a red-gold hand reached down to help her to her feet, and even more surprised when the arm attached to that hand gathered her into a rib-crushing hug.

  “Thank you, my lady! Your quick thinking-and quicker action-kept me from ending up a pile of scrap metal and kindling at the bottom of this accursed gorge. I shall write an epic in your honor that will put those unimaginative dwarf bards to shame!” Sensing that Sabira was having trouble breathing-or perhaps tipped off by the blue tinge in her lips-the warforged released her from his embrace. As Sabira drew in great gulps of the dry desert air, Jester continued, the frown his face couldn’t show still evident in his voice. “But how did you know I’d had my lyre strap reinforced?”

  She hadn’t, actually, but it had been an easy bet to take. Most bards spent more money on their instruments than their weapons, and held their music closer than their purse strings.

  “Easy,” Greddark supplied with a nonchalant shrug, saving her from having to admit that, educated as it was, it had still been nothing more than a guess. “The strap doesn’t hang as loosely as it would if it were mere leather, and you can see metal showing through in places.”

  Before either she or the warforged could answer the inquisitive, the Lyrandar pilot rounded on him in belated response to his earlier question.

  “ That’s why we’re not up there,” the half-elf snarled, her face contorting with effort as she fought to calm the affronted air elemental and return the ship safely to the center of the gorge. “You think the wind’s bad down here, wait till you get up top. I’m not risking my ship-or my life-just to spare you lot some climbing.”