by James Wyatt
Idiot mammal. The Soul Reaver’s thoughts scraped across Gaven’s mind. You have fulfilled your purpose. Now die.
Another psychic blast ripped through Gaven’s mind, sending his sword clattering to the ground as he brought his fists to his temples and howled. But it passed, and Gaven still stood. He stooped to retrieve his sword as the Soul Reaver stepped closer.
Do you know why I am called the Soul Reaver, mammal?
“The greatest of the daelkyr’s brood,” Gaven whispered, “the Soul Reaver feasts on the minds and flesh of a thousand lives before his prison breaks.”
And you shall be a thousand and one. Another blast tore at Gaven’s mind, and the Soul Reaver drew closer still, extending all four tentacles toward Gaven’s pain-wracked skull.
“The Bronze Serpent calls him forth,” Gaven screamed, pouring his agony into his voice, “but the Storm Dragon is his doom!” He slashed his sword at the tentacles, but the blade clanged against them as if they were solid stone rather than writhing flesh.
So you thought. And you thought to drive your spear into my heart. But your Prophecy didn’t help you, did it? Perhaps you are not the Storm Dragon after all.
One tentacle made contact with Gaven’s scalp and attached itself like a leech, and he felt his will begin to ebb. Of course he was not the Storm Dragon, he realized. How could he stand against this monster? In trying to destroy the Soul Reaver, he had only made the abomination more powerful. He tried to bat the tentacle away with one hand, but it held fast. The Soul Reaver was close, so close that its constant psychic grumbling had grown to a roar in Gaven’s mind. He could see the ash haft of the spear he’d made dangling from the creature’s chest. It smelled faintly of ozone and charred flesh, which made him smile weakly.
A second tentacle touched his head. The pain was fading, along with Gaven’s desire to resist. Why should he not feed the Soul Reaver? He should be glad to nourish his master in the last moments before his ascension—
The thought filled Gaven with alarm. Where had that idea come from? The Soul Reaver planned to seize godhood from the Crystal Spire? Gaven tried to make sense of that notion, and he felt the creature’s tentacles recoil slightly at that surge of mental activity.
A third tentacle touched, but Gaven swept a hand up to knock it away before it could affix itself. He tried to throw his body backward, away from the creature that fed on his thoughts, but two clawlike hands embraced him and pulled him back. He tried to lift his sword, but he could no longer bring it between the Soul Reaver’s body and his own. Gaven could see the palest glimmer of golden light within the churning darkness in the Soul Reaver’s chest.
The Eye of Siberys pulsed there like the Soul Reaver’s heart, throbbing in a steady rhythm that beat in Gaven’s head as well. Shadows twisted around it, like veins carrying its power throughout the creature’s body. “The Soul Reaver’s heart …” he murmured, and then he knew.
His spear had not touched the Soul Reaver’s heart. The monster had goaded him into using his spear against its fleshly body, rather than striking its real heart—the Heart of Khyber. Gaven let his sword fall to the ground, and with his last ounce of will, he wrapped both hands around the haft of the ash spear. He gave it one mighty tug, but it would not come free.
Where had the nightshard fallen? Gaven wrenched his head around to scan the ground, even as the Soul Reaver’s third tentacle attached itself to his scalp. His thoughts were a jumble of memories and nightmares brought up at the Soul Reaver’s call, but he clung to an image of the Heart of Khyber. At last he saw it on the ground behind the creature, where he had staggered backward before.
He had no will left. He feebly tried to pull his head away from the grasping tentacles while keeping his grip on the spear, but he could not move his head beyond their reach. He tried to speak, but the words came out slurred beyond recognition. Still, they formed themselves in his mind. “There the Storm Dragon drives a spear through the bones of Khyber through the Soul Reaver’s heart.”
Layers of meaning. He stood, barely, among the bones of Khyber, deep beneath the earth. But if the Heart of Khyber was the Soul Reaver’s heart, then the Soul Reaver’s bones were Khyber’s bones. He could drive the spear through the Soul Reaver’s bones and into the Soul Reaver’s heart, if he could just—
“I am player and playwright!” he cried, and he heaved himself forward into the Soul Reaver’s chest. The spear sank deeper into the creature’s flesh, and waves of pain rippled through Gaven’s mind. He forced his foe backward one step, two, then with one great push knocked it to the ground. Two tentacles tore free of his head, trailing blood from their sickly white tips. Gaven clutched the spear, pulling it downward with all his strength, praying to the Sovereign Host that its tip would find the nightshard.
He felt the spear break bone, and then heard it grate against stone below. He had missed the shard. The Soul Reaver heaved him away, its third tentacle tearing free from Gaven’s head, and rolled away from him onto its hands and knees. The Eye of Siberys protruded from its back, shedding pale golden light around the dark cavern. Gaven spotted the nightshard on the ground between him and the bloodied Soul Reaver. As the creature stood and turned to face him again, Gaven could tell that it saw the shard as well. They froze.
The idiot mammal is more clever than I imagined. It made a sound like a gurgling cough, and Gaven saw black blood spill down from its mouth. A fresh wave of pain washed through his head—he began to feel where the tentacles had been boring through his skin and scraping at his skull.
“I am the Storm Dragon,” Gaven said. He stretched his hands forward, and a blast of air like thunder shot through the Soul Reaver, sending it staggering backward a few steps. “And I will still be your doom!” He dove forward and clutched the Heart of Khyber in both hands, landing hard on his belly. He tried to roll back onto his feet as he caught his breath, but the Soul Reaver landed on top of him, two tentacles grasping at the nightshard while the other two slashed at his eyes.
Gaven swung his legs to one side and used their leverage to roll the Soul Reaver onto its back. Still clutching the Heart of Khyber in both hands, he put as much weight as he could above it, forcing it down toward the Soul Reaver’s chest. It put up both hands to push back, using all four tentacles to attack Gaven’s face. One forced its way into his mouth, tasting of blood and slime, working its way back toward his throat.
Grimacing with disgust, Gaven bit down on the tentacle in his mouth, adding a new taste of bilious ichor. He didn’t bite clean through, but it was enough: the Soul Reaver’s grip on the Heart of Khyber weakened, and Gaven managed to force the nightshard down to the stone floor. Spitting slime and bile, Gaven drove a knee as hard as he could into the creature’s midsection. Holding the nightshard against the floor with one hand, he grabbed again at the spear with the other, raising it and the Soul Reaver’s struggling body with it. Guiding the spear toward the hand that clutched the Heart of Khyber, he brought the spear’s point, still protruding from the creature’s back, down hard.
The spear pierced his hand, and he cried out in pain. But the Soul Reaver stopped struggling as the Eye of Siberys went on to pierce the nightshard, the Soul Reaver’s heart. Its withered body, a moment ago writhing with preternatural strength, dissolved into wisps of smoke, snakes of oily darkness slithering away and seeping into the ground. A foul-smelling cloud of gray-black mist arose from the body and then dissipated, leaving Gaven alone, holding the spear he had made from the Eye of Siberys, impaling his own hand against the ground.
A tremendous sob wracked his body, and he dropped his head to the floor. He started to scream even before he pulled the spear free, but then it was done, and the pain was not as bad. He thrust his injured hand under his other arm and squeezed it there as he tried to find his feet. Reeling, he leaned against the wall for support while he waited for his head to clear.
His mind swam with echoes of the Soul Reaver’s psychic assaults. The torrents of memory and feelings slowed, leaving him drain
ed and trembling. It was done, or the worst of it was. Perhaps he had saved the world, or at least a corner of it. He wanted to take pride in that—he supposed he would when he was less exhausted.
As the storm of his thoughts stilled, he realized a strange emptiness in his mind. He cast his mind over his memories of the past months. The dragon of the nightshard, a presence in his thoughts for so long, was gone. He still remembered the dragon’s memories—but he remembered his memory of them, he remembered experiencing them as Gaven. They were still vivid in his mind, some of them all too vivid, but a little more distant, farther removed from his own experience.
The dragon had vanished, taking its memories with it, when the Heart of Khyber was destroyed.
His only light had also gone out, so he spoke a quick spell and cradled an orb of light in his palm.
“Look, father!” he cried.
Arnoth stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, smiling with pride. “Well done, Gaven,” he said.
Gaven flexed his hand, and the one orb split into three that danced into the air around him, lighting the tunnel walls.
“Thunder and lightning,” he muttered, reading the Draconic character inscribed on the wall beside him. He started, and looked around. “Cart?” he called weakly. “Where did you get off to?”
CHAPTER
52
Trailing one hand along the wall, Gaven retraced his path, back to the base of the Crystal Spire. As he walked, his mind filled with the words traced on and by the twisting tunnel, words that spoke of the Storm Dragon, the gates of Khyber, and the bridge to the sky. The verbs, though—those most flexible of words, allowing so many nuances of action and meaning. The nouns were facts, the bare facts of the situation as it stood. The verbs were possibility.
The ululation of the Soul Reaver’s hordes had diminished slightly, and the voices no longer rose in unison. The cries all seemed to be coming from somewhere far above, as though new waves of monsters were pouring out through the chasm from the upper reaches of Khyber and swarming anew over the battlefield.
He rounded one last bend and threw a hand up to shield his eyes from the brightness of the Crystal Spire, which had grown more intense since he left it. Light leaked out to cast deep shadows on the tracings of the cavern wall, and shone on Cart’s impassive face. The warforged stood on the dragon’s lower jaw, poised at the very edge of the Crystal Spire.
“Planning your ascension, Cart?” Gaven could barely find his voice—his throat was raw from yelling, and the lingering taste of the Soul Reaver’s slime made his tongue feel thick.
“Have you come to stop me, Storm Dragon?”
“I don’t care, one way or another. I don’t plan on passing through that gate.”
“What about the Prophecy?”
“There are many ways to bring the Prophecy to pass.”
“I try not to think about it.”
“Uncommonly wise.”
“What god watches over my people, Gaven?” Cart’s voice was strangely melancholy, and he rocked ever so slightly on his heels as he stared down into the dragon’s gaping maw. “Which Sovereign has our interests at heart?”
“Are there gods for each race and people?” Gaven asked. “Doesn’t the whole Host keep watch over us all?”
“Perhaps. But the gods made all the other races. We were made by artificers and magewrights. Does Onatar then care for us, the god of the forge? Or perhaps the warlord Dol Dorn, since we were made for war? Or do they see us as many mortals do—simply as tools for war? There is no god of swords or siege engines. Perhaps there is no god for us.”
“You want to be one, then? God of the warforged?”
Cart shrugged. “I am torn. I am not accustomed to feeling so divided.”
“I’ve never heard you speak of warforged as your people before.”
“I have always felt that the best way to serve warforged everywhere was to fulfill my own duty, to live out the purpose for which I was made.”
“And you were made for war.”
“I was. That’s why I followed Haldren. He was my commanding officer, and I honored and respected him for that. But he also promised a return to war. I wanted that—I wanted to see the world plunged into violence again, just so I could find purpose again. What is a warforged to do in a world no longer at war?”
“What would you do, then, as god of the warforged? Would you urge them into war?”
Cart stroked his chin. “Power is quite a temptation, isn’t it? It’s one thing to think of all the good one might do. But I can so easily imagine abusing that power. To become a dark god of war, the destructive mirror of Dol Dorn, calling for war for its own sake. I think the Dark Six would become the Dark Seven.”
Gaven nodded. “Exactly.”
Cart stepped back from the Crystal Spire, and shadows fell over his face. “Well, Storm Dragon? How will the Prophecy come to pass?”
“The Storm Dragon bursts through the gates of Khyber and blocks the bridge to the sky.”
He came and stood across from Cart, on the face of the snarling dragon, and looked up. The Crystal Spire rose forever above him, its light showing hints of movement along the edges of the chasm far above but blocking any detail from his view.
“That’s not what you said in the City of the Dead,” Cart said.
“No, it’s not. But there are many ways to translate Draconic verbs, many layers of meaning that are expressed better in context than in isolation. And if I am to be the Storm Dragon, then I am the context for those words. They can’t be interpreted apart from me.”
“So you will choose your own destiny after all.”
Gaven smiled. With one more glance skyward, he stepped forward into the Crystal Spire.
He dropped down into the dragon’s maw, but then wind whipped up from nowhere, whirling furiously around him and holding him aloft. The earth rumbled as lightning probed the chasm, and a shower of rocks tumbled down from above, catching in the whirlwind and circling him. He lifted his hands to the sky high above, where the Crystal Spire broke through the swirling storm clouds, and a great bolt of lightning flashed down through the chasm, striking the stone dragon’s mouth and adding to the swirling hail of stone around him. Then he surged up on the wind, sloughing the rock behind him.
He burst up through Khyber’s gate in an explosive shower of rock splinters. The cavern went dark as the dragon’s mouth collapsed in on itself, great slabs of stone falling in on the gate and dousing the light of the Crystal Spire. Reaching a hand toward Cart, Gaven lifted the warforged into the whirlwind behind him and hurtled up through the chasm.
Flashes of lightning illuminated the darkness around them as they rose, revealing tunnel mouths crawling with gibbering monsters clambering toward the surface. Gaven shot past them, rising faster than he had fallen, emerging into open air in the space of a few gasping breaths. Lightning crackled in the air around him, and great thundering bolts struck the ground below. The whirlwind below him hurled monsters off the brink and into the yawning depth of the chasm, and more lightning blasts sent enormous slabs of earth plummeting down after them. The Storm Dragon stretched out his arms, and sheets of lightning struck along the length of the chasm, shattering rock to fill it in. Thunder rolled continuously like the rumbling of a mighty earthquake, and when it was done, the chasm had become just another scar on the face of the Starcrag Plain.
* * * * *
Haldren’s stallion galloped across the plain. Rienne stroked his neck as she rode, encouraging him to greater speed. He was no magebred horse or Valenar steed, but he was amazingly sure-footed on the rocky ground, which more than made up for a lack of raw speed. The earth thundered with the pounding of his hooves—no, she realized, the earth shook from tremors far below the battlefield, which seemed to bode ill for Gaven’s well-being.
The battle was over, as far as Rienne could see. Haldren’s soldiers had fallen or been routed from the field entirely, and until she drew near the chasm she saw only a few clumps of monsters
scattering away from the field—heading for new haunts in the Starpeaks or the Silver Woods. She could see no dragons still aloft, whether they were all dead or driven away or just brought to ground. She spurred the stallion toward the towering shaft of light, a beacon in the midst of the furious storm.
She was halfway across the plain when the beacon flickered and went out. Her mind raced through a handful of possibilities as she spurred the stallion on: Had Gaven crossed the bridge to the sky, collapsing it behind him? Had he failed, proving that he was not the Storm Dragon after all? Had Gaven perhaps been wrong about the whole Prophecy and the Crystal Spire? Perhaps it was not any kind of bridge to the sky, but some kind of beacon or signal, and Gaven had destroyed it.
She drew a slow breath, calming her pounding heart, and tried to lose herself in the rhythm of the stallion’s gait.
She lost track of the distance to the chasm where the Crystal Spire had been, and the storm grew even fiercer ahead. Wind whipped her hair and small hailstones stung her skin, and she soon rode into a wall of rain. She guided the horse toward the heart of the storm, where lightning danced around a swirling whirlwind. The heart of the storm must be Gaven, she thought.
A new tide of monsters poured out of the storm toward her, a tumultuous mass of pallid flesh and flailing appendages, sharp claws and writhing tentacles, screaming mouths and staring eyes. They seemed to surge forward, clawing over each other in their haste to reach fresh prey. Each time she fixed her gaze on one creature, it disappeared under or behind the next wave of horrors. Terror and revulsion wrenched her gut, but she quelled them with another slow breath. If these monsters stood between her and Gaven, then she would have to fight her way through the monsters. She pulled the stallion to a halt and slid Maelstrom from its sheath.
There was no discipline to their advance. When they drew close, a monster with a single staring eye and a much smaller fanged mouth leaped ahead of the others and bounded up at her. The gaze of its lidless eye raked across her, blistering her skin as its claws reached for her throat. She drove her blade into its eye and deflected its momentum, sending its lifeless body spilling to the ground behind her. Her arms trembled—that would not do. Combat required discipline, focus, concentration, a perfect unity of thought and action.