The Killing Song: The Dragon Below Book III

by Don Bassingthwaite

  CHAPTER

  8

  Geth was dreaming. He dreamed that he was on a battlefield, faceless enemies coming at him in unending waves. He felt no fear, though. He howled his courage and strength at his enemies, and met them with his great gauntlet on his right arm and Wrath gripped in his left hand. He tore through them in a whirling, unstoppable dance. Dark blood flowed, flesh and bones split, and his enemies fell before him. Sometimes the shadows parted to reveal the faces of dolgrims or chuul, Bonetree hunters or Aundairian raiders, the soldiers of Breland or Thrane. They all died. His goal lay ahead, clearly visible across the battlefield: the mound of the Bonetree clan. He would reach it soon. He was unstoppable, invulnerable, his body and his spirit in perfect harmony. He threw back his head and roared to a sky lit bright by the Ring of Siberys and all twelve moons.

  He didn’t want the dream to end—not just because of the clean exhilaration of the fight, but because his friends and allies fought alongside him. Orshok, Krepis, and Kobus fought with him. Ashi, Natrac, and Ekhaas. Singe and Dandra guarded his back with magical flame and psionic whitefire. Adolan fought beside him, his heavy spear thrusting and spinning.

  On his other side, another younger Singe in the blue jacket of the Blademarks emblazoned with the silver crest of the Frostbrand company. Other friends from the lost company were there too. Treykin, Coron, Dew, Leed, Jahanah, Falko, Bikk … Somewhere, even Robrand d’Deneith rode, calling orders to the men and women in his command.

  And Geth felt nothing but joy at seeing them again. There was no grief at seeing Adolan. There was no anger at confronting Robrand and no shame at seeing the Frostbrand—even though Geth knew he should have felt it.

  In the way of dreams, that moment of doubt started everything unraveling. Geth’s arms felt heavy suddenly, gauntlet and sword dragging on them. Enemies stopped falling so easily. The faces of allies faded, becoming as shadowy as those of the figures they fought. Above the sounds of battle, Robrand’s clear calls became bitter, directed at him rather than the company. “Fight, you coward! Fight! The city depends on you—fall and you kill Narath and the Frostbrand!”

  “Frostbrand!”

  The cry brought him around. One of the Frostbrand had left his position. Black curls shone as the man bounded forward to meet a charging band of enemy fighters.

  “Coron!” Geth shouted after him

  The first of the enemy fighters sidestepped the mercenary’s attack, dropped to his knees and swung a knife in a tight arc. Coron’s right leg collapsed under him. Even as he fell, though, he thrust with his own blade, and one of the enemy jerked back. Clear as sun on a bright day, Geth saw red blood burst from an ear cut away by a chance blow.

  The sound that reached him would have been terrible coming from the throat of any living creature. Geth’s gut collapsed into a knot as the injured man kicked the sword out of Coron’s hand, grabbed a handful of black curls, and raised a knife so heavy it looked like a butcher’s tool. Coron’s eyes rolled back as he saw his death ready to fall.

  “No!” Geth roared. He leaped forward. “No!—”

  “—No!” He sat up with the cry on his lips, his heart thundering in his chest. He might have jumped up and drawn Wrath if there hadn’t been an orc lying across his legs. The warrior grunted and opened eyes bleary with sleep and drink to glare at him.

  “Hacha, shekot, hacha!” he groaned and rolled off Geth’s legs to fall back into slumber.

  Geth sat still, letting the world come back to him as the dream faded. He was in a tent, the air close and heavy with the mingled smell of bodies and ale. It wasn’t the tent Batul had assigned to them. Orcs lay around him. Some were twitching slightly, some were snoring. All were asleep. Kobus sat propped up against a pile of gear, his head lolling on his massive chest, a mug still in one hand, a huge chunk of gristly meat in the other. Sunlight pierced the gap of the tent flap in a hot, yellow bar. When Geth felt capable of movement again, he rose, pulled his shirt and vest from under the head of an orc who had been using them as a pillow, and stepped carefully to the flap.

  Opening it let more light into the tent, bringing a new moan of protest from the orc Geth had woken. The shifter ducked out into the open air quickly and let the flap fall behind him. The camp of the Angry Eyes horde lay quiet except for a few warriors making a valiant attempt to carry on their celebrations with quiet singing and music, the same strange combination of drums and bone rattles that had filled Geth’s skull through the night. A good number of warriors hadn’t even made it into tents or huts and lay asleep on the bare ground. The sun had climbed just high enough above the horizon that the softness of dawn had given way to the harsher heat and light of morning. At the center of the camp, a strong fire still burned, heating rocks for the Gatekeepers’ sweat lodge and sending a thick column of smoke into the air, but everywhere else fading embers gave up only thin threads of smoke that clung to the ground in a foul mist.

  All told, the camp looked exactly how Geth felt. Vague memories of drinking, singing, and dancing with the warriors of the horde came back to his throbbing head. Something else came back to him and he reached up to touch his face above and below his eyes. Thick smears of red paint crumbled under his fingers. The other warriors of the horde, he corrected himself. He remembered taking the horde marks from Kobus’s hands.

  He groaned and stumbled for the nearest campfire with orcs still around it. The lingering warriors gave him a hero’s cheer. Geth answered with a vague wave that seemed to satisfy them. A mug had been abandoned beside a big skin bag that could have held water or ale. He threw away what liquid remained in the mug and refilled it from the bag. Water. He grunted in disappointment and looked at one of the orcs.

  The dream clung to him like a curse. He needed to talk to someone about it. “Gede Orshok?” he asked thickly. He’d tried to master a few simple questions in Orc on the journey from Tzaryan Keep—Wrath let him understand the language but didn’t help him speak it. The warrior, however, just shrugged. Geth tried again. “Gede Ekhaas? Gede Dhakaani?”

  The orc broke out in laughter and started babbling to one of the other warriors, who also laughed. Geth considered using Wrath to find out what was so amusing, but couldn’t quite summon up the energy. Taking his mug of water, he found the shady side of a tent and squatted down on the ground.

  For all that the majority of the dream had been pleasant, there had been something distinctly unnatural about it. He hadn’t dreamed about the Frostbrand in years, and he’d never dreamed about them in such a happy way. He had happy memories of the company, of course, but in his experience, those weren’t the memories that came back to him in dreams.

  Coron’s death, that was more typical, though even it was something he hadn’t seen in his nightmares for a long, long time. The thought brought visions of the man’s murder rising up within him. Geth squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth, choking the memory back. The effort left his stomach aching.

  Why had the dream come to him at all? If he was going to dream about fighting, a battle wouldn’t have been his first choice. A good brawl would have been better. His fight with Kobus. Any number of scuffles in camps and taverns with the Frostbrand to back him up. Good-natured fights with members of the Frostbrand. People didn’t die so often in brawls as they did in battles.

  Maybe, he thought, it was because of the night spent with the warriors of the horde. That would explain the strange presence of the Bonetree mound in his dream. Even so, how could the spirit of the horde—the wild unity that gave it strength—have affected him so quickly and so deeply …

  Something stirred at the back of his mind, a half-buried memory. He frowned and tried to recall it, but it kept slipping away as if it didn’t want to be remembered. Geth concentrated hard, pulling back the wisps of his dream and the haze of the night. Something Batul had said. Something about the warriors of the horde sharing fires …

  The old druid’s words crept into his mind like scared dogs. “Warriors arrive in the camp and
fall into the horde as if they’ve been sharing a fire for days,” Batul had said. “The council is nearly ready to make a decision and getting a dozen Gatekeepers to agree on dinner usually takes weeks of debate.”

  Geth’s eyes narrowed and he drew a long breath. What was going on? He raised his mug and sipped at his water.

  When he lowered the mug, he saw Ekhaas coming toward him. In contrast to Geth, she didn’t look like she was suffering after the night—she might have been turned out for a Blademarks inspection. There were no horde marks on her face. Geth tried to remember if he’d seen her at all through the night. If he had, it was only in passing, a face in the shadows observing the celebrations as he took part in them.

  As she passed the campfire, the orcs called out something to her. She stopped and gave them a glare of such loathing that they shrank back in silence. The hobgoblin continued on and stood over Geth.

  “Why did they just call me your ‘honeycomb-dancer’?” she said in a voice that made Geth flinch.

  “No idea,” he said and gulped more water.

  Ekhaas’s ears tipped forward in suspicion, and her lip curled in an expression that managed to encompass both disdain and disbelief, but she crouched beside him.

  “We need to talk,” she said. “Something is wrong in this camp.”

  He looked at her carefully. Her eyes seemed hard, but there was something haunted in their amber depths, as if Ekhaas had seen something that unsettled her. Geth thought he could guess what that something was. “Did you have a strange dream last night?” he asked. “A dream of fighting with all your friends beside you?”

  Her ears stood up sharply. “I was in a battle out of legend, wielding sword and song alongside the heroes of my people. We were fighting to reach a hill.”

  “Not a hill. The Bonetree mound.” A chill passed across Geth. “Ekhaas, we had the same dream. And last night, I think Batul tried to warn me about something—”

  “That the camp is on the edge of frenzy?”

  “That warriors are joining the horde too easily.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “The same thing. Among my people, orcs are infamous for going into battle with more enthusiasm than sense, but the mood in this camp is like a herd of tribex protecting a gravid female. Last night you and Orshok were practically painting horde marks on your faces the moment we arrived.”

  Geth flushed. “You weren’t?”

  “I’m a duur’kala.” A hint of Ekhaas’s normal arrogance crept into her voice. “I’m trained to inspire and manipulate people. You can’t do that effectively without learning to recognize the signs of manipulation in yourself.”

  “Wait,” said Geth. “You think we’re actually being manipulated?”

  “I’m certain of it.” Her ears twitched forward and her voice dropped. “It’s a subtle thing, a touch so light that it’s hard to feel it, but last night after you were swept off, I scouted the camp, watching and listening. When I found myself wanting to join in an orc campfire song, I knew something wasn’t right.” She rubbed at her temples as if the thought pained her. “Whatever is happening, it encourages those in the camp to follow their natural tendencies. In a duur’kala, the urge to sing. In orc warriors, the urge to join with the horde.” She glanced at him. “In a shifter, perhaps the urge to join the horde as well, to fight and demonstrate strength.”

  He wanted to protest, but the argument made too much sense. It touched on his own suspicions and on Batul’s warning.

  But there had been two parts to that warning, hadn’t there? He sat up straight, water slopping out of his mug. “Grandfather Rat! The Gatekeepers—Batul said they’re coming to a decision more quickly than normal too.”

  Ekhaas bared her teeth. “I wondered that the druids could allow this to happen. They’re caught in it too. Khaavolaar.”

  “How is that possible?” Geth asked. “Batul seemed to know what was happening. Why isn’t he doing something about it?”

  “The manipulation may be light, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful. And Batul did do something—he warned you.”

  “But why not do more?”

  She rapped her knuckles together in a rapid rhythm, and her eyes narrowed again in thought. “Whatever’s happening, it is working in accordance with the goals of the Gatekeepers,” she pointed out. “Duur’kala have used magic to inspire strength on the battlefield since the time of the Dhakaani Empire. Perhaps the druids are doing the same.”

  Geth shook his head. “Batul sounded surprised at what was happening.”

  “Then consider the opposite: perhaps the druids can’t do anything to prevent what’s happening …” Her voice stopped and the rhythm of her knuckles paused. Her ears stood up straight.

  Geth’s gut tightened at what she had suggested. “That’s not possible!” he blurted.

  “It is possible,” Ekhaas said tightly. “Did your collar protect you?”

  Geth’s hand went to the collar of black stones around his throat. “Just before we met Krepis yesterday, the stones felt cold, but only for a moment. Maybe it was a warning?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe whatever is causing this is something the magic of the Gatekeepers can’t block.”

  “But what could—” The answer came to him before he’d finished asking the question. What power could resist the magic of the Gatekeepers to manipulate their minds? The power that the Master of Silence had tried to control in his new servants. Geth felt a chill. “Medala,” he said.

  Ekhaas nodded in agreement. “We have only her word that she’s weak, and if she can overcome Gatekeeper magic, the wards that the druids have placed around her are little more than paint.”

  “And she wants revenge on the Master of Silence.” Geth sat back, and it seemed to him that the stones of the collar grew a little bit colder, as if in confirmation of his idea. Encouraging the growth of the horde and pushing the Gatekeepers to make their decision to march would get the kalashtar closer to her goal—and if Medala was manipulating the horde, it would explain the appearance of the Bonetree mound in both his dream and Ekhaas’s. Still, it hardly seemed possible. “She can’t be this powerful, can she? She couldn’t really control the minds of a horde of orc warriors and a council of senior Gatekeepers all at the same time, could she?”

  “It takes very little to encourage a mule to go where it wants to go,” said Ekhaas. “If this is Medala, she’s not controlling minds, only intensifying emotions that are already present. I doubt that one orc in a hundred would have any idea they were being manipulated. Medala herself might not even be specifically aware of the individual minds she’s influencing.” Her ears flicked. “I wonder if she thinks she’s helping.”

  “Helping?” Geth’s voice felt strangled in his throat. “Grandfather Rat, what do we do now? Where’s Orshok? Maybe he—”

  “I looked for him,” Ekhaas said. “It seems he joined the other Gatekeepers in the sweat lodge last night.” There was a note of finality in Ekhaas’s voice, as if the young druid had been irrevocably separated from them.

  Geth looked up and across the still peaceful camp toward the bulk of the Gatekeepers’ sweat lodge. “We need to talk to Batul.”

  “I’ve been to the lodge. No one enters except at the word of a druid. The vaults of Volaar Draal aren’t sealed so tight. While the horde simmers, the Gatekeepers stew in their own juices.”

  “Wolf and Rat, we have to do something!”

  “Do we?” Ekhaas looked at him. “What danger is there? It seems that Medala—and again, we don’t know for certain that it is her—is working toward the same goals as the Gatekeepers.”

  “Maybe I just don’t like idea of her messing with my mind!” Geth snapped. The hair on his arms and on the back of his neck was rising.

  “I’ll agree to that, whether it’s Medala or not—”

  Geth snarled at the hobgoblin. “Stop saying that! It has to be her. Who else could it be?”

  She gave him a cool stare. “There are many things beneath the moons of Eberro
n that are capable of twisting the thoughts in your head, Geth. A duur’kala of no great power could make you grovel.” He bared his teeth at her, but she only smiled, showing her own teeth. “A duur’kala would have better sense than to try—control often leaves anger behind.” She looked thoughtfully across the camp. “I will admit, though, that I can’t think of any better explanation for what’s happening here than Medala’s influence. Maybe there is something we can do.”

  Geth followed her gaze. The night’s celebrations had left his sense of the camp’s layout confused, but he couldn’t forget what lay in the direction Ekhaas stared: Medala’s tent. His rising hair bristled. “Tiger’s blood! I hope you’re going to say we can kill her.”

  “She’s allied herself with the Gatekeepers. We can’t kill her.” Ekhaas stood. “But we can talk to her, perhaps confirm our suspicions.”

  “I don’t need them confirmed. Ekhaas, did you listen to the stories we told you about her? If she does still have her powers, she’s dangerous—and capable of cutting right through Gatekeeper magic.”

  “Then it’s fortunate I’m not a Gatekeeper. A duur’kala can protect herself. If you want to count a tiger’s teeth, you have to put your head in its mouth.” Ekhaas’s grin turned mocking. “If you want to come with me, my magic can protect you too.”

  He growled at her again, guzzled his water, then flung the mug away and climbed to his feet. “I’m coming,” he said. The idea made his stomach twist, though not so much as the thought of doing nothing.

  The way to Medala’s tent also led past the tent Batul had assigned to them. Geth ducked inside while Ekhaas waited, dug a shirt that didn’t reek of orcish ale out of his pack and pulled it on, then opened the bundle that contained his great gauntlet. It was the work of only moments to pull on the armored sleeve and adjust the straps that held it in place. He clenched his right fist as he stepped out of the tent, savoring the clash of metal on metal. Ekhaas raised an eyebrow.