Marked for Death: The Lost Mark, Book 1

by Forbeck, Matt

  When they reached the point where the ship met the stands, Te’oma stopped and surveyed the damage. She took two steps back and raced forward down through the wreckage of Bastard’s box to make a running leap across the splintered boards. Esprë screamed as they left the stands.

  Te’oma landed on the tilted deck of the airship and rolled forward on her shoulder with Esprë still in her arms. When they came to a halt, Esprë stopped screaming. The girl flushed, embarrassed with herself for showing fear. They began sliding toward the bow, and she started up again.

  The changeling wrapped one arm around the girl even tighter and reached out with her free hand, scrabbling at the deck’s surface, trying for a grip but finding nothing. Te’oma rolled over on top of the girl to protect her, and the two slid into the railing at the bow. The changeling shrugged off the impact but the flames licking through the railing’s wooden bars scorched her skin. As Te’oma shouted in pain, Esprë stopped screaming again.

  The changeling reached over to her left, and made her way along the railing until she could climb the bars like a ladder. She made good time this way, even with the girl in her arms, and the pair soon clambered onto the airship’s bridge. The smoke up there wasn’t as thick as Te’oma had feared.

  “Brendis?” Esprë said as she climbed over to the wheel, a tremor in her voice. Te’oma watched the girl to see what would happen. The young knight didn’t respond. The lower half of his face was covered with blood.

  Te’oma reached over to examine Brendis. “He’s alive,” she said. Esprë sighed with relief. “His nose is broken. They always bleed like that.”

  The changeling removed the leather belt that lashed Brendis to the wheel and lowered the knight’s limp form into the angle next to Esprë. She coughed on the smoke curling up into the bridge, and said, “We need to move this ship.”

  The changeling grabbed a hold of the wheel and tried to turn it, but it didn’t move. “How does it work?” she asked.

  The girl reached for the wheel and said, “Allow me.”

  Esprë closed her eyes for a moment, and the ship shuddered. The movement startled her, and her eyes flung open wide. Their rims reddened by the smoke, they looked bluer than ever to Te’oma.

  The rear of the airship pulled free of the arena floor, but the front remained lodged in the stands. The ship pitched forward, and Te’oma tumbled against the bridge’s console. Brendis’s limp form slid toward the edge, and the changeling reached out and grabbed him before he pitched over it.

  “Stop!” she shouted until the girl brought the ship’s stern back down again.

  “We have to pull back first,” Te’oma said.

  Esprë nodded as she strapped herself to the wheel. “What about Brendis?” she said.

  The changeling shoved the young man over and lodged him under the wheel. “Sit on him if you like.”

  The girl narrowed her eyes at Te’oma for a moment then grabbed the wheel and pushed her feet under the knight’s body to keep him tight against the console. When she was ready, the ship started to move again.

  Esprë coaxed the airship down and back. The craft slid back a few feet and then caught on something. The ship slid from side to side and then back and forth, trying to work around the catch, but it did no good.

  Te’oma watched the girl concentrate harder. She ignored the fire, the man at her feet, and her kidnapper and put her every thought into pulling the ship free. The airship slid back a few more feet and then caught again before starting to shudder like the branches of a tree in a stiff wind.

  A massive hammer-arm smashed up through the hatchway from the hold, sending splinters everywhere. Te’oma nearly jumped off the ship. Esprë screamed, and her hands came off the wheel. The ship crashed back to the arena floor, and the titan’s hand disappeared.

  Te’oma thought the girl would melt to the deck in an utter panic, but instead Esprë displayed a steely resolve. “Too much,” she heard the girl mutter to herself. “We’ve been through too much!”

  Esprë grabbed the wheel again, and the airship launched forward into the stands as if it might try to tunnel its way to freedom. A loud crash echoed from the front of the hold. Then the ship switched directions and pulled out of the stands just as hard. With a spectacular splintering of the broken boards surrounding the ship’s bow, the airship slid backward without a hitch.

  Te’oma smiled as the airship rose into the air. Her good mood was smashed flat as a bug under her boot when the weight in the ship shifted again, and the bow flipped up into the air. Before Esprë could scream this time, the hammer-fist stabbed through the hatchway again.

  The hatch was too narrow for the titan to fit more than its arm though. The massive hammer-hand flailed about at random for a moment, hunting blindly for a foe, then it disappeared back through the hatch again.

  Te’oma peered over the bridge’s console to look down the hatch. As she did, one of the titan’s turquoise eyes slammed against the inside of the portal. It withdrew just as quickly.

  Te’oma glanced back at Esprë, who had turned white, despite her newfound resolve. Before the changeling could say a word, the hammer-hand stabbed up through the hatchway again. This time, it was aimed toward the bridge. It slammed into the outside of the console, and Te’oma dove aside as Esprë let out a little squeak.

  When the changeling looked back, the girl’s color had returned. She watched as the girl stuck out her jaw, turned to her, and said, “Hold on.”

  Te’oma slipped her hands through a set of straps on the bridge’s rear railing just in time. Esprë didn’t wait for her as she drove the airship forward again at a startling speed, heading straight for the arena’s stands again.

  At the last moment, Esprë brought the airship to a wrenching halt. The change in momentum nearly pulled Te’oma from her straps. As she prayed to Vol that the battered leather would hold, she heard the titan in the hold let loose a final screech of fury and frustration and felt it slide helplessly toward the hole in the bow through which it had entered the hold. The ship tilted forward steeply as the massive creature slipped out through the holed hull and tumbled through the open air, crashing into the stands below, then the ship snapped back, and Brendis slipped loose from his spot under Esprë and went sliding toward the ship’s back rail.

  As consciousness slowly returned, so did the pain. The wound in Xalt’s back hurt worse than anything in his life. Still, he had patched together enough other warforged in his time to know that the wound would not be fatal, and this helped him to avoid panicking.

  Xalt calmly pushed himself up and sat on the platform on which he had been stabbed. He put his hands against his chest opposite of where the knife had entered his back. Recalling his training, he repeated the magical words and rubbed his hands across his skin in the proper pattern. This never worked as well inside the Mournland as it did without, but still, Xalt could feel his fibers knitting back together. They weren’t as good as new, but they would do for now.

  When Xalt was done, he stood and looked up at the arena. The changeling who had stabbed him and taken Esprë had gone off in that direction. It was time for Xalt to enter the place as well. With no elf-girl in tow, he’d be much less conspicuous.

  As he walked toward the nearest tunnel, he saw the airship come screaming in over the arena. The craft stopped in what Xalt could only think was a disastrously fast manner. At first the crowd went wild, but then the assembled warforged fell quiet.

  It sounded to Xalt like Bastard was saying something through that horn he liked to wave about so much, but the artificer couldn’t make out the words. It felt as if everyone inside the arena was holding their collective breath.

  Then Xalt heard the crash. The city’s platforms shook with the violence done to the arena, and the voices of hundreds of warforged roared in panic and pain.

  Xalt tried to race up the tunnel, but before he got halfway, a flood of warforged came rushing at him, fleeing from whatever disaster had taken place inside. The artificer had to turn
back and wait for the great rush of creatures to ebb before he could brave the tunnel once again.

  “What happened?” Xalt asked one of the stragglers as the outflow slowed.

  “Breather attack!” the warforged said as it kept running. “The stands are on fire!”

  Xalt looked down the tunnel through which the straggler had come, then started the long walk into what he thought must be almost certain doom.

  When Xalt emerged from the tunnel, he saw an incredible tableau laid out before him. To his left, Kandler, Burch, and Sallah battled a warforged titan bent on tearing them to pieces. In front of him, the airship’s stern jutted straight out of Bastard’s reserved section of the arena’s stands. The floor around the airship burned. To Xalt’s right, he spotted Te’oma leading Esprë out of the stands and toward the burning airship.

  Now that Xalt got a closer look, he saw that the airship wasn’t burning, although everything around it was—including the lower half of a second titan, whose upper half still jutted through a hole in the airship’s hull.

  Xalt circled around the airship to the right, hoping to get a better look at just what the changeling was doing with Esprë. When he caught sight of them again, Te’oma had gathered up the girl in her arms and was leaping from the splintered stands onto the airship’s tilted deck. The pair climbed up the railing toward the bridge. Xalt wondered if he could find a way onto the deck and take Esprë back.

  Xalt gauged the distance of the leap he would have to make. The length paralyzed him for a moment, then the decision was torn from him, as the ship started to move. The artificer guessed what the changeling was doing. If she could extract the ship from the stands, she’d be gone before anyone could stop her. Xalt had to move now.

  He surveyed the airship, looking for some means of getting aboard other than leaping from the unstable footing of the stands. There was the hole in the bottom of the hull, but the mad, half-dead titan in there closed off that route. The rope ladder was now too high from the ground for Xalt to reach. That left the mooring lines.

  The two fore mooring lines lay draped over the shattered remains of Bastard’s box. One of the aft lines had been chopped in half, but the other hung down straight from the airship’s stern. Xalt decided this was the only option. He stomped toward the line. He could hear the cries of a few injured warforged in the stands, and part of him wanted to stop and help them. It was in its nature to do so, but he did not have time now.

  When Xalt reached the mooring line, he grasped it and began the long, arduous climb to the ship’s deck. The absence of one of his fingers slowed him, but he was determined and tireless in his task. As he ascended, the ship jerked about like an animal caught in a foot-trap. For a moment, it was all he could do to hang on. When the shaking stopped, he began hauling himself upward again.

  Xalt neared the ship’s aft rail, and the airship broke free from the stands and started for the sky. But something shook the ship violently, and the craft dove toward the ground. Xalt glanced down at the hold that was now in front of him rather than above. Through the hole, he could see the remains of the half-titan fighting on, and the warforged couldn’t help but feel the stirrings of a touch of pride that a creature forged like himself could be so powerful and tenacious.

  The ship zoomed forward at top speed, and the titan tumbled into the aft of the hold. A moment later, the ship ground to a halt, and the titan burst out of the front of the ship’s hull and fell out. As the titan’s bulk left the airship, the craft lurched into the air, and Xalt went with it. For a moment, the artificer feared he would be flung from the rope, but he managed to hang on. Determined to get off the rope and on the ship as quickly as possible, he hauled himself up the line.

  Just before Xalt reached the ship’s deck, an armored figure slid into the battered rear railing, which gave way. The artificer instinctively reached out to grab the knight who slammed into him.

  The warforged’s left hand gripped the edge of the damaged decking even as his body went swinging out into space. The remaining finger and thumb of Xalt’s right hand ensnared the steel collar of the knight’s breastplate. Still unconscious, Brendis dangled limply as the weight dragging on his limbs caused the warforged to howl in pain.

  When Deothen plunged through the decking, he had thought he’d be able to make quick work of the coward who had run from him at the first opportunity. Now, he wondered who was the hunter and who was the prey.

  The space beneath Bastard’s box opened straight down to the ground below. No floorboard separated the platform from the land it moved over at a walking pace. When Deothen dropped to the earth, he found himself standing on crushed gray grass that dozens of the city’s walkers had trampled and dozens more would grind underfoot as the city moved along its chosen course.

  The platforms here were high enough that Deothen could walk upright, but he could not raise his sword over his head. Compared to the stands above, it was dark and quiet, but the noise level grew as the warforged above stampeded toward safety, trying to escape the blaze started by the airship’s ring of fire.

  Deothen’s silver-flamed sword glared through the gloom beneath the city. He held it up before him and peered into the darkness, looking for some sign of the warforged leader.

  All around Deothen, silent sets of legs marched on, each holding a section of a platform perched atop it. He stood still and let the city move around him for a moment, then he felt something hot and bright behind him. He turned to see the flames from the airship’s ring of fire coming down through the floor. As he strode to the side to avoid the oncoming conflagration, he wondered if the warforged leader could have climbed up through the flames to return to the arena above. He decided it didn’t matter. If Bastard had gone that way, there was no way he could follow.

  Deothen stood to the side and watched the flames as they passed by. As he did, he saw something moving behind them. Bastard. The warforged leader turned to Deothen, and the senior knight saw the light of the fire flickering in the creature’s sapphire eyes.

  “Without your titans around you, you slither away,” Deothen said as he walked toward the warforged. “Like a snake to its hole.”

  He brought his sword arm back, but before he could swing, Bastard stepped behind a nearby walker. Deothen slashed at the intervening golem, cutting its thin legs in half. The walker fell to the ground, and the platform sagged down where the creature had once held it up.

  “You hide behind your tools like a child behind its mother’s skirts,” Deothen said. “Come out and fight me, coward!”

  Bastard laughed as he stepped behind another walker that blindly ignored both its master and the intruder with the blazing blade. “What you call cowardly, I call cunning,” the warforged leader said. “I didn’t become a lieutenant of the Lord of Blades by charging into battle against every sword-waving idiot who challenged my bravery.”

  Deothen cut down the walker standing between him and Bastard, but the warforged leader was no longer behind it.

  “Face me!” said Deothen, waving his sword about to punctuate his words.

  The knight heard something charging up behind him fast, and he turned. He was too late to bring his sword to bear, and the warforged leader slammed into him. He went sprawling across the dirt until he smacked another walker in the back of its legs. It fell away, and the platform sagged down over Deothen’s head.

  Bastard leaned forward and kicked the downed knight. The spikes on his foot punched through Deothen’s armor and punctured his side. The knight cried out in pain, but he slashed up at Bastard at the same time.

  The knight’s sacred sword bit into Bastard’s thigh, cutting deep into the fibers beneath its shining, spiked plates. The warforged leader grunted and leaped back before Deothen could strike again.

  The knight struggled to his feet, clutching his chest. Blood seeped through the holes Bastard had kicked there.

  “So, this snake can bite,” Deothen said through gritted teeth.

  He spun about, looking for som
e hint of Bastard’s location. The arena floor above him shuddered as the airship fought to free herself from the stands.

  “I answered your taunts once,” Bastard called. “I’ll not be so foolish again.”

  Deothen glared into the gloom in the direction of the voice, then he turned to look back the way he’d come. There, in the wan light streaming through the hole the airship had torn in the arena floor, he saw Bastard. The creature’s spiked armor seemed to glow in the pool of daylight.

  Bastard raised his golden horn and said, “Halt.”

  The walkers carrying the massive city’s platforms on their shoulders slowed their pace to a crawl and then stopped.

  “Fire and ashes!” Deothen said. He launched himself at Bastard, but the creature was too far away.

  “Down.” Bastard’s order echoed in Deothen’s head. He ignored it and kept racing forward. Nothing was going to stop him from hacking the warforged leader to pieces with his blade.

  Deothen grazed his head on the platform over him as he ran. At first, he thought he must have run up a slight rise in the ground. Then he realized that the walkers all around him were crouching down, each working its way to its knees.

  “Down!” Bastard said again.

  Deothen bent over and hustled along as fast as he could. Even though the city had stopped moving, Bastard and the hole above him seemed no closer. Soon Deothen could no longer stand at all. He threw himself down and scrambled forward on his hands and knees, his flaming sword still clutched in his fist. Bastard wasn’t so far away now—perhaps a score of yards—but it seemed like miles of dark and broken road.

  Deothen’s hand slipped, and he found himself on his belly. He tried to rise to his knees again, but there wasn’t enough room.

  All around the knight, the walkers who had been carrying the city above them folded themselves down on the ground. Unlike him, they didn’t need to breathe. They had no lungs from which the air would be crushed by the horrible weight above them. They could just lie there in the suffocating dirt for hours, even days, and then rise once again at their master’s call.