by James Wyatt
The stone of the pillars was striated in varying shades of gray, brown, and red. The sides facing the inlet had strangely smooth walls-but they were carved with the enormous faces of dragons. They were clustered near the tops of the pillars, far above the reach of any human hands. Dozens of them, and no two the same. Long horns and short ones curled and coiled, or jutted straight back or to the sides. Scaly ridges jutted at every angle from cheeks, jaws, chins, and ears. Each one had its own attitude, its own personality. Gaven pointed them out to Jordhan and Rienne.
“Just like the ones on the beach,” Jordhan said.
Rienne shook her head. “But these aren’t totems for the Serens.”
“It makes me think,” Gaven said. “Perhaps these and the ones on the beach were made for the same purpose.”
“To warn intruders away,” Rienne said.
“Exactly. They say quite clearly that this land belongs to the dragons.”
As if in response to Gaven’s words, a dark shape rose up from the top of the eastern pillar. It was long and serpentine, and its wings were like fans extending along its sides, tapering down to the end of its tail. It snaked through the sky high above them, weaving great circles in the air.
Gaven clenched the bulwark. “It’s just taking our measure.”
“I hope you’re right,” Jordhan muttered.
“I hope I’m wrong. I’m here to learn from the dragons. I’d rather talk to one now, or fight it if I have to, than fight three dragons later when they decide to attack us.”
Jordhan shrugged. “All I know is I’d rather live a little longer, even if it’s only a few hours. I mean to squeeze every last drop out of life before I’m dragon food.”
“No one on this ship will be dragon food,” Gaven said, louder than he meant to. “Just keep sailing, Jordhan.”
The captain’s face darkened, and he stalked back to the helm without another word.
“Damn,” Gaven muttered. “I didn’t mean to-”
“It’s been a long journey, Gaven,” Rienne said. “We’re all getting a little testy.”
“At this rate, we’ll kill each other before the dragons have a chance.”
CHAPTER 5
Kauth stared out the window of another Orien coach as it rolled past an apparently endless series of trees. This time, though, Vor sat stiffly beside him, and Sevren and Zandar joked in the seat behind. Perhaps a dozen other passengers half-filled the enormous coach, watching the countryside drift slowly by or talking quietly with each other. Even a team of magebred horses pulled the coach at what felt to Kauth like a snail’s pace. The first five days outside of Varna, the view had been monotonous-farm after farm on the starboard side, and the broad expanse of Lake Galifar to port. The other side of the lake was too far away to see, except for the peaks of the Blackcaps jutting up in the middle. Leaving the unremarkable village of Niern that morning, though, the coach had finally turned away from the coast toward Greenheart, and fields soon gave way to the dense forest that made up the heart of the Eldeen Reaches.
The trees crowded close in to the road, as if they resented the civilizing influence that had cleared away their brothers and sisters. Their leaves blocked the sun, shrouding the forest in a perpetual twilight. At times, branches scraped against the roof of the coach or broke against its sides. Wild animals watched the coach without fear-at one point, passengers on the port side had screamed in terror as an enormous Eldeen bear shambled up beside the coach, staring at them eye to eye. Other, stranger things flitted through the forest at a safer distance, some wearing more or less humanoid shapes, others more like beasts. Sometimes the trees themselves walked, shadowing the coach on its course.
Around midday, the coach lurched to a stop. A nervous hum of whispered conversation rose immediately in the coach, and Kauth shot a glance at Vor. The ore looked at him, nodded, and heaved himself to his feet-plate armor and all. He strode to the front of the coach, and Kauth grabbed his crossbow as he got up to follow. “Wait.” Zandar grabbed his arm.
“There might be trouble,” Kauth said, whirling to face the warlock. “I’m not going to let Vor face it alone.”
“Neither are we,” Sevren said. He bent his bow and looped the string around the free end. “But Vor prefers to face trouble head-on.”
“While we sneak around behind,” Zandar said, jerking his head toward the back of the coach. “This way.”
Sevren followed, and Kauth trailed behind to the door at the back of the coach and out into the shadow-cloaked woods. The air was warm and heavy, quiet with the expectation of a summer thunderstorm. Vor’s voice, coming from in front of the coach, was muffled but clear.
“This coach is under my protection,” he called out. “You will face me before you harm a single person aboard.”
The only sound Kauth could hear in response was a harsh hiss that pulsed with anger.
“It’s the Children of Winter,” Sevren whispered, and Zandar nodded.
“What does that mean?” Kauth asked. The name sounded familiar to him-he thought perhaps it referred to one of the druidic sects of the Eldeen Reaches.
“It means bugs,” Zandar said with a grin. “Lots of big bugs.”
“Let’s move,” Sevren said.
He and Zandar moved to opposite sides of the coach and skulked into the shadows of the trees. Kauth decided to stick with Sevren, trailing several yards behind. The shifter held an arrow nocked in his bow, and made only the slightest rustle as he moved. Kauth felt clumsy by comparison.
Another rattling hiss made him start, then Sevren cried out. An arrow flew wild, and something yanked the shifter off his feet and into the air. The forest blocked Kauth’s view, so he broke into a run.
He cleared an ancient oak and stopped short. An enormous green mantis, taller than an ogre, held Sevren in two scythelike claws. Four other legs held the insect’s slender body off the ground, and its long abdomen jutted out and up behind it. Sevren had managed to pull out two long knives, but it was all he could do to keep the mandibles at the bottom of the creature’s triangular head from tearing open his belly.
Kauth lifted his crossbow to his eye and sighted along the shaft of the quarrel, aiming for one of the insect’s enormous eyes. Just as he tightened his grip to loose the bolt, a centipede the size of his finger dropped onto his hand from a branch above. He jerked, and his quarrel soared over the mantis’s head.
“Bugs, indeed,” he muttered, shaking his hand to throw the centipede off. In the same moment, something landed on the back of his neck and bit, sending a jolt of pain down his spine.
Swatting at whatever had landed on him, he stumbled away from the oak where he’d stopped. Glancing back at it, he realized that the tree was alive with centipedes, writhing and crawling over every inch of bark. He shuddered, brushing at his arms and chest, then he remembered Sevren.
Just as he turned, Sevren fell from the mantis’s claws, the creature’s head falling with him. The creature jerked spasmodically, lashing out with its claws as it staggered forward. One claw raked across the shifter’s chest, but Sevren lashed out with a knife and cut it cleanly off. With a final shudder, the mantis fell to the ground, its legs twitching in the air.
Kauth ran to the shifter. “Let me look at you,” he said. “How bad are your wounds?”
“Don’t worry about me!” Sevren snarled. “We need to get to Vor!” He sheathed his knives, retrieved his bow from where it had fallen, and set off, nocking another arrow as he ran.
The shifter leaped over ferns and roots without breaking stride, and Kauth found himself lagging again. When he lost sight of Sevren, he felt the forest close in around him. Everywhere his eyes fell, he saw some kind of crawling thing-spiders the size of his fist skittering along branches, thick millipedes snaking amid the fallen leaves, beetles whirring their wings in the air, a scorpion the size of a dog creeping slowly alongside his path.
He felt them all watching him-thousands of eyes following his every movement, sizing up their prey. His ski
n crawled, and every few steps he swatted at some real or imagined vermin pricking his exposed skin.
He broke, panting, out of the forest and onto the road in front of the Orien coach. Vor stood directly in front of the coach, the ground around him littered with the shattered carapaces of enormous spiders and insects of every description-as well as one crumpled gray-cloaked human form. Two more of the hooded figures dodged the sweeping strikes of his greataxe, trying to slash through his armor with their curved blades. A wasp the size of a horse darted around him, lunging at him and then flying back out of his axe’s reach, the droning of its wings drowning out the sounds of the battle.
Two men and a woman, all wearing the unicorn symbol of House Orien on their shoulders, stood behind Vor with lightweight blades in their hands. They jabbed at the hooded Children of Winter and the pack of scorpions and spiders at their feet, but it was clear that if the defense of the coach had rested in the hands of these warriors alone, it would already be overrun. The horrorstruck faces of the other passengers peered out the windows at chittering swarms and gigantic vermin crawling over the carriage’s sides and windows.
Sevren and Zandar ranged back and forth at the edge of the forest to line up clear shots against the Children of Winter and their many-legged minions. Sevren kept his bow in his left hand, but he alternated between pulling it back to loose an arrow and yanking out his knife to cut down a foe that came too close. His arrows feathered several corpses littered over the road, and a few more lay along his path at the side of the road.
Zandar held no weapon, but he fired blasts of shadow from his hands, like the one he’d used to shatter Vor’s mug back in Varna. When an enemy got too close, he lashed out with a hand curled into a claw, drawing streaks of shadow and blood across the chest or face of his foe. He had evidently reached the scene before Sevren-without the distraction of the giant mantis, it was easy to imagine how-and his body count was higher.
A clump of four gray-robed women kept their distance from the melee, standing back to back in the midst of a swarm of red-hued wasps that buzzed constantly around them but evidently caused them no discomfort. They had thrown back their hoods to reveal long, wild hair. Two were withered crones, but one looked more like a plump baker or farmer than a sinister priestess, and the fourth was no more than twenty. The women chanted a constant stream of ritual prayers, pointing here and there around the field of battle. Wherever one pointed, vines and roots sprang out of the forest to grab at one of Kauth’s allies, a blast of wind made someone stagger backward, or another giant vermin skittered out of the forest. Kauth had found his place in the battle. Dropping his crossbow and sliding his mace out of its loop at his belt, he ran at the knot of women.
As soon as he reached them, he wished he hadn’t. The swarm of wasps descended on him, stinging every bit of skin they could find. Their stings burned like fire, and they buzzed in his ears, crawled to his eyes and mouth, and began working their way under his armor. He managed a swing of his mace at one of the crones, knocking her back against her comrades, then he staggered out of the swirling, droning cloud.
The crone he had hit spoke a word, and a ball of flame appeared in her outstretched palm. Snarling at Kauth, she hurled the fire at him. He sprang out of its path, but another dancing flame appeared in the druid’s hand.
“Sea of Fire,” Kauth muttered. “That’s not a bad idea.”
He backed away, stopping short at a chittering sound behind him. He swung his mace as he turned and was rewarded by a crunching sound of chitin and the squelch of a spider’s soft body beneath. Jumping across the wolf-sized spider’s corpse, he ran another ten yards or so, fumbling around in the quiver at his belt to find the right wand.
He drew out a slender length of cherry wood topped with a fire opal, turning it over in his hands to feel the magic inside it. A weaving pattern of fiery lines took shape in his mind. Pointing the red gemstone at the cluster of druids and their living shield, he loosed the knot of magic in the wand, letting the fire burst forth.
It shot like a glowing ember toward the druids, then blossomed into an enormous sphere of roaring flame. The women shrieked in pain as the fire seared their flesh. The magical flames dissolved into the air, leaving the druids scorched but standing-but the swarming cloud of wasps was gone. The cinders of a hundred thousand tiny wasp bodies littered the ground.
“Well done!” Zandar called to him, loosing a blast of shadow at the nearest druid. She fell on the ground and lay still. Kauth jammed the wand back into his pouch, shifted his mace back into his right hand, and charged at the remaining three.
Just as he reached them, an arrow thudded into the one on his left, then two more in rapid succession, and she followed her sister to the ground. He shot a glance at Sevren and realized that the battle was winding down. No more vermin harried the shifter or Zandar, and Vor was charging at the remaining women from the opposite side. Kauth sighed his relief, and at that moment a blast of lightning shot out of the sky, knocking him off his feet.
“Gaven?” he murmured, then the world went black.
CHAPTER 6
During the Last War, while he served in Aundair’s army, Cart had often marveled at the muscles of the human face. So many small bits of flesh moved the skin, the eyebrows, and the eyes-all combining to form such a bewildering variety of expressions. Humans and the other races like them wore their emotions on their faces, though the dwarves were better at steeling their faces than the others. But to him it was as though they spoke a foreign language he understood imperfectly. When they died, their faces all seemed to freeze in a mask of their horror. Sometimes they looked down at the wound where his axe had slashed them open. Other times they looked at his face.
A mask-that was his face. A smooth plate of metal, incapable of any expression except opening and closing his mouth. A single rune on his forehead marked the place of his forging and an identifying number. His face was quite effective at striking fear into an enemy’s heart. It also made it surprisingly easy for him pass lies as truth. But at times, Cart wished for the simplicity of a scowl or a frown to express his displeasure.
Haldren was trying to explain Kelas’s plans, the complex machinations the spy had set in motion. Kelas’s goal was the same as Haldren’s had been, when he first escaped from Dreadhold: seizing the throne of Aundair. But Haldren had relied solely on military power to achieve what he wanted, making no more than a half-hearted attempt to secure allies beyond his contacts in the army. Kelas, on the other hand, not only relied on Haldren’s military contacts-those that had survived the last ill-fated excursion, anyway-but also spent most of his effort negotiating, wheedling, manipulating the wizards of Arcanix, the artificers of House Cannith, and his own allies and underlings among the Royal Eyes of Aundair. It was a world of diplomacy and compromise that was completely alien to Cart’s way of thinking.
“Try to understand it as a military campaign,” Haldren tried to explain. “Each of these potential allies is like a key strategic objective. Kelas marshals his forces to take each one, mindful of how he distributes them, sometimes giving way at one battlefield in order to win another.”
Cart shrugged-one means he did have to express emotion, and one that he found effective. “That’s your expertise, Lord General, not mine. I’m a soldier, not a general, not a diplomat. And not an assassin.”
Haldren threw up his hands. “Forget it, then. I’ll work with Kelas. You just do what you’re told.”
“I always do,” Cart said. It was true-he was made to follow orders, and he took that duty seriously. “You are my commanding officer. But I am your staff-your entire staff-and I cannot advise you in matters I do not understand.”
“Clearly, in this realm I do not need your advice.”
“Clearly.” Cart’s jaw tightened. A human like Haldren would not detect the flex of fibers at the joint.
“Dismissed.” Haldren spat. He turned his attention to the papers on his desk.
Cart had to give credit where it was
due. Haldren had learned to rein in his temper. Of course, that meant he was little more than Kelas’s lackey. He did not like to see the Lord General so beaten. Though he had to admit that his confidence in Haldren’s judgment had diminished since the debacle at the Starcrag Plain.
He put his hands on Haldren’s desk and rose slowly to his feet. Haldren did not glance up. A quick salute, then Cart turned crisply and strode out of the room. He turned just as decisively to the left and made it down past four other doors before he realized he’d gone the wrong way. He stopped abruptly, then pivoted where he stood and walked back the way he’d come. He fought the impulse to slam a fist into Haldren’s door as he walked past it.
The halls and offices beneath the abandoned cathedral of the Silver Flame formed a labyrinth appropriate to their new use as Kelas’s base of operations. Cart found himself just as lost among the vaulted passages as he was in the political scheming, and just as frustrated.
He rounded a corner and something slammed into his chest. Not something, he realized-someone. His arms folded reflexively around her as she yelped in surprise, then he gently took hold of her shoulders and steadied her on her feet. Only then did he recognize her as Ashara d’Cannith, Kelas’s liaison to the northern branch of House Cannith.
“I’m sorry-” she began.
Cart cut her off as he fell to one knee. “Lady Cannith, the fault is mine.”
House Cannith had built him and given him life. Their creation forges had birthed his race. Any dragonmarked heir of the House was his rightful master. The question had never come up, but if he were forced to choose between obeying the Lord General and obeying the most insignificant heir of the House, it would be a difficult decision.
“No, no,” she protested. She reached down to his elbow and gently guided him to his feet. “I wasn’t watching where I was going. You’re Cart, aren’t you? Haldren’s…”