Skein of Shadows (dungeons and dragons)

by Marsheila Rockwell

  “No. Stop.”

  Xujil looked over at the dwarf questioningly.

  “They will have more of the gas spores. The water is no barrier to them, unless we are farther out.”

  Greddark whirled, causing the boat to rock unsteadily. His brown eyes blazed with barely suppressed fury.

  “You are about two very short breaths from being thrown overboard, so my recommendation would be for you to stop speaking while you still can. Bad enough you lead us into a virtual ambush with those-what do you call them? Chitines? Then you bring us into a forest of living mushrooms and don’t bother to tell us that they might not take kindly to us chopping down one of their big brothers. And all the while, you manage to avoid getting a scratch on you while friend after friend of mine falls. So you’ll pardon me if I’ve decided I’m done taking orders from a coward.”

  Xujil blinked at him.

  “The warforged was correct; the chitine cavern was empty when I reconnoitered it. And the myconids are normally content to stay rooted in place. They did not attack Donathilde and her men; I had no reason to believe they would attack you. But if you are implying that I want you dead, I could have accomplished that feat at any time, while you slept,” the drow said bluntly. “What reason would I have had for bringing you all the way down to the Deeps, when I could easily have slit your throats in the Shallows, if that had been my intent?”

  “Well, considering you like to keep duergars as slaves and murder infants, who knows? Maybe it’s what passes for fun down here.”

  “Ah,” Xujil said, nodding. “So that is the crux of your dislike. The child.”

  “It’s definitely not a mark in your favor.”

  “We have been at war with the Spinner of Shadows since before you of the surface began manifesting the mark of the dragons. Before that, we were enslaved by the giants and suffered their enduring cruelties. Our enemies are implacable and unrelenting, and always have been. They would not hesitate to exterminate us, given the chance, so we cannot hesitate either. The child of my enemy is also my enemy, and deserves no more mercy.”

  “But the people of Trent’s Well weren’t your enemies,” Sabira said, disturbed to find herself unable to fault the drow’s cold logic.

  “A fact we did not discover until it was too late.” He looked at her, and shrugged helplessly. “Our magic may be different from yours, Marshal, but not even we can change the past.”

  Greddark scoffed.

  “I can’t believe you’re buying that,” he said to her in disgust. Looking at Xujil, he narrowed his eyes. “Just stay away from me, drow, or you’ll find out that no one does ‘implacable and unrelenting’ better than a dwarf. Now stop rowing.”

  Shrugging again, the guide obeyed. Greddark rummaged around in the packs at the bottom of the mushroom boat until he came up with a light crossbow and a clip that held five bolts. Setting them aside, he dug in his pouches until he came up with the vial of sulfur he’d scraped from the canyon walls at Zawabi’s Refuge, and another half-filled with a thick red liquid. He unstoppered both vials and carefully shook half of the yellow powder into the liquid, which Sabira guessed was some sort of oil. Then he replaced the corks in both, secreted the sulfur back in his pouch, and shook the remaining tube vigorously until the powder had completely dissolved, turning the liquid a rich carnelian color. Then he unstoppered it again, poured the concoction over the heads of the five quarrels, and loaded the clip into the crossbow.

  “What are you doing? What good are five crossbow bolts against a few hundred of those?” Sabira asked, jerking her head toward the shore.

  “Sulfur,” the artificer replied, picking up the crossbow and sighting it carefully, “mixed with certain types of oil, creates a potent fungicide.” Then before she could respond, he pulled the trigger, three times in quick succession. “For Skraad. And Rahm. And Zi.”

  The bolts flew across the water, thunking into the pseudoflesh of three of the largest myconids.

  “Sovereigns,” Xujil murmured, and by his tone of grudging admiration, Sabira knew he wasn’t calling out to the Host. “They lead the colony. If they fall, it falls with them.”

  “Good,” Greddark said, firing twice more, this time at two gas spores that hovered over the edge of the water. As the quarrels struck home, the spheres exploded, showering their fellow fungi with the dwarf’s creation. “Might take a few days, but by the time we get back here, we shouldn’t have to deal with them again.”

  “What have you done?” Jester asked in a shocked voice, the first time he’d spoken since they left land.

  “What I had to,” the dwarf replied shortly, attaching the crossbow to his belt, opposite his sheathed alchemy blade.

  “But… to destroy the whole colony…?”

  Greddark looked up.

  “They’re not people, they’re fungus. And even if they were, like your drow friend here said, ‘The child of my enemy is also my enemy, and deserves no more mercy,’ ” he said, and Sabira wondered if he realized that he hadn’t just repeated Xujil’s words, he’d mimicked both the guide’s tone and inflection perfectly.

  They rowed in silence after that, paddling far out onto the lake until they could no longer see Gharad’zul behind them and there was nothing but cold, black water around them on every side. Sabira lost her bearings quickly, but neither Xujil nor Greddark seemed concerned. She decided it must be living underground that gave the two races their innate sense of direction. Apparently, it wasn’t just a dwarf thing. It was also a drow thing. Or at least an Umbragen one.

  She almost chuckled at that, but quickly recognized the humor for what it was-an inappropriate but understandable reaction to the sudden deaths of so many of her companions.

  She’d lost comrades-at-arms before; you couldn’t have lived through the end of the Last War without seeing someone you cared about die. She’d even lost more than three on one mission-or even six, if you counted Laven, Glynn, and Guisarme. But the difference was that then, she’d at least been able to strike a blow against the ones who’d killed her friends. This time, she hadn’t even had a chance to fight back. And, of course, before, those men hadn’t been under her command.

  These had.

  She had to remind herself, again, that she’d forced no one to join her on this mission. They’d come of their own accord, judging the rewards to be worth the risks. And if they’d gotten far more of the latter than the former, that was not her doing.

  None of which, however true, gave her even the slightest bit of comfort.

  She found herself wishing suddenly that Elix were here. As a captain of the Sentinel Marshals, he’d had to deal with losing men, even with ordering them to their deaths. It was something every Deneith soldier trained for, but that few ever had to actually face. She knew Elix wouldn’t be able to make the pain or the guilt go away-that was her burden, the price of command. But he’d at least be able to show her how not to hate herself for it.

  And as she thought it, she wondered if that’s why she’d balked at the idea of marrying him. Not because she wasn’t good enough for him-no one was, and besides, who in love ever truly thought they were worthy of that love being returned by the object of their affection? No one who actually was, surely.

  No, that beautiful betrothal bracelet and everything it represented terrified her because it was a partnership of the most intimate kind, and one thing you learned early in her House-and especially as a Marshal-was that no partnership lasted forever.

  Partners got reassigned, or quit. Or died, usually in horribly painful and gruesome ways. Or maybe that was just her partners, but then, that was sort of the point, wasn’t it?

  It had happened to every partner she’d ever cared for-Ned, even Orin. She didn’t want it happening to Elix. Especially not because of her.

  As if summoned by her thoughts, a vision of the dark-haired captain sinking below the surface of that magma pool swam before her eyes, quickly morphing into one of him aflame and being buried under a rising tide of fungus. She b
linked the sight away and stared out over the black water, straining to see something, anything other than the man she loved dying over and over again in increasingly awful ways.

  The light from her helmet did little to pierce the darkness. When she looked down into the water directly, the blue beam broke into a thousand reflections in the black water, giving her the illusion that the boat was gliding across the surface of a vast Khyber shard, its binding magic calling out to them, hungry and eager. She looked up again quickly, shaking the thought away.

  As she did, she thought she saw a dark smudge in the distance. Moving forward carefully, she pointed it out to the drow, who nodded.

  “We are nearing the opposite shore. Once we set foot on land again, we will be in the domain of the Spinner of Shadows.”

  “Who-or what- is the Spinner?” Sabira asked. Boroman ir’Dayne had said that the Spinner, or She, of Shadows was a deity peculiar to the Umbragen, but the drow spoke of her as though she were an actual, physical being, something akin to a queen.

  Xujil looked at her, uncomprehending.

  “She is… the She,” he said at last, “is the Spinner of Fate, the Queen of Shadow, the Well of the Umbra, the Womb and the Pit. She is Tarath Marad. She is… all.”

  “Yeah, okay. Sorry I asked.”

  She moved back to her position near Greddark at the stern of the boat, staring out over the water at the approaching shore. They were getting closer. She could feel it.

  Something moved below the surface of the lake a few feet off the starboard side of the vessel, humping up above the waterline and then back down again before she could point it out to the others. She’d never bothered to replace her shard axe in its harness, and now she put her makeshift oar down and grabbed the weapon, leaning over the edge of their floating mushroom cap.

  “What is it?” Greddark asked, instantly alert.

  “I thought I saw something,” she said, scanning the opaque water.

  “A leviathan,” Xujil said from the front of the boat, paddling faster.

  “ What?” she and Greddark exclaimed in unison.

  “We happened upon one on our last crossing, but the sorceress defeated it. They are normally solitary. I did not expect to encounter another.” Xujil had told them that Tilde’s party had fought something in the water. He had failed to adequately communicate what that something was. “I would suggest we increase our pace.”

  Sabira grabbed her oar again and the four of them rowed in urgent unison, racing toward the ever-expanding shoreline. She actually thought, for a moment, that they might make it.

  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.”