by James Wyatt
“What are you doing here?” the girl said, but her voice was more curious than frightened.
“I need to speak to the master of the house. But first let me help you clean up that mess.”
“No no, I’ll do it, Lady. After I take you inside.”
Rienne grimaced. Her accent betrayed her noble birth, despite the dirt and dust of travel matted in her hair and plastered to her skin, after months at sea and weeks spent slogging across a distant continent.
“Please,” she said, “it’s my fault. I’ll help you.”
She crouched down and started gathering the larger fragments, stacking them carefully and setting them aside. Hesitantly, the girl joined her, working from the other side.
“What’s your name?” Rienne asked.
“Ava.”
“I’m Rienne.” She smiled at the girl, and Ava finally seemed at ease. “Is the master of this house an artificer, Ava? Working with magic?”
“Not the master, Lady. But my mistress is very skilled.”
The mistress, of course. Why had Rienne assumed it was the man? A thought jolted her to her feet. A female artificer in Stormhome-“Is this Chanda’s house? Chanda ir’Selden?” Chanda and Rienne had been childhood friends and stayed close up until the time that Rienne fell in love with Gaven. Chanda disapproved of Gaven’s adventuring lifestyle, prospecting for dragonshards. Rienne had made a few efforts to get back in touch with her after Gaven’s imprisonment, but she had always been rebuffed.
Ava looked puzzled, but she nodded. “Shall I take you to her, Lady?”
Would Chanda help her now? Not if word had spread that Rienne had helped Gaven after he escaped from Dreadhold. For the sake of their old friendship, Chanda might refrain from summoning the Sentinel Marshals immediately, but she would not help.
“Actually, Ava, it’s probably best if I just get on my way.”
“Should I tell her you were here?”
“Will she punish you for the broken urn?”
Ava shrugged. “She’ll take it out of my wages.”
Rienne produced a silver coin and pressed it into Ava’s hand. “Best not to tell her I was here. Thank you.”
Ava stood gaping at the coin as Rienne slipped out the front door and into the quiet morning street.
As a girl, Rienne had practiced her sword play on a bluff just outside Stormhome, overlooking the crashing waves of the sea. Under the city’s perpetually crystal blue sky, she learned to still her mind and harness the energy flowing through her body. In her adolescence, she came to the same spot to find quiet and search for some sense of peace. She hadn’t been back there in years.
So she slipped out of the city before the streets grew crowded and noisy and retreated there, seeking the same stillness and solitude she had found there in her youth. As the sun cleared the horizon, she drew Maelstrom and moved through the forms of her fencing style, quieting her racing thoughts and focusing in on the still point at her core.
She froze, Maelstrom’s blade before her face, her sword hand pressed against her other palm. “We balance on the razor edge between past and future,” she had said to Gaven, “but that edge is what matters.” She saw Maelstrom’s sharp edge and it became clear.
On one side of the blade, eternity. The unchanging landscape of Argonnessen’s wilds, untouched by the passage of time except the cyclical turning of the seasons. On the other side, history, the constant churn of events, wars, nations, people, and relationships-motion with progress, destination. She felt she stood on the razor edge between, not past and future, but history and eternity. The edge was her destiny, the intrusion of history into the eternity of the world. It was not a foreordained destination, but the result of her action. Her destiny, she realized, was the ultimate consequence of her actions.
What did she want that consequence to be?
She swung Maelstrom in a circle around her. It caught the sun, surrounding her in a ring of blazing light. Sliding the blade back into its sheath, she walked back to the city, a plan forming in her mind.
Leaving the city was a challenge, but one she could overcome. She couldn’t buy passage on a ship to the mainland, so she’d have to stow away. She knew the routines of the harbor well enough to sneak aboard a galleon bound for Thaliost, and she knew the galleons well enough to find hiding places aboard. It was risky, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle, nothing she needed Gaven’s or anyone’s help to accomplish.
She made her way to the harbor, her bedraggled appearance drawing some stares. Among the sailors and merchants at the wharves, she blended in to the crowds. A few inquiries revealed that a galleon would be sailing for Thaliost in a week’s time. She would have liked to leave sooner, but in the meantime she could enjoy a taste of life in the city again. She sold one of the small gemstones she used as a portable form of wealth, since she could no longer access her Kundarak accounts, and spent freely. She savored the taste of anything that wasn’t journeybread. She slept in a bed, on a filthy mattress under scratchy blankets, grateful to be out of her bedroll and off the floor. She bathed and bought new clothes, with the unfortunate consequence that she drew more attention as she walked in the streets. But the sword at her belt frightened off the lonely sailors and drunken revelers who might otherwise have accosted her.
Finally, the night before the Windborn was to sail, she slipped down to the galleon’s berth, dodged the guards, slunk past the sailors on deck, and disappeared into the hold. There among the barrels and crates, she made herself as comfortable as she could and settled in for the journey, clutching Maelstrom to her chest.
Getting off the ship would be more difficult, she knew. They’d dock in Thaliost sometime on the third day of their journey, probably early in the morning. Passengers would disembark, then the sailors would unload the cargo and there would be no place left to hide. Rienne’s best hope was to sneak back up to the deck amid the bustle of their arrival and mingle among the passengers. It would be easier to mingle, she thought ruefully, if she looked like she could afford the hundred and fifty galifar fare. The clothes she’d bought in Stormhome were those of a street vendor or laborer, not a noblewoman.
Still, she knew from experience that adventurers who made their fortune by pillaging ancient ruins and selling dragonshards sometimes bought extravagant fares on Lyrandar vessels, so that was the role she adopted. When the morning of the third day broke, she stole out of the cargo hold and up on deck, and scanned the other passengers. One human woman wore a necklace that looked like a relic of the Dhakaani empire, so Rienne approached her and struck up a conversation about the jewelry.
The woman was an instructor at Morgrave University in Sharn, Rienne learned, and had retrieved the necklace herself from a goblin ruin near Tranthus, in Zil’argo. Goblin history was not one of Rienne’s strengths, but she kept asking questions, drawing long responses from the instructor. When the ship docked at the cliffs below Thaliost, they strolled together off the ship, lost amid the other passengers, to all appearances a pair of friends traveling together.
The docks of Thaliost were down at sea level, over the waters of Scions Sound. Overhead, the crumbled remains of White Arch Bridge jutted out from the cliff where the city perched, stretching out across the sound toward Rekkenmark in Karrnath. The bridge had been a sign of the united Galifar before the war, joining two of the Five Nations, but it quickly became one of the casualties of the Last War. One by one the passengers grew silent as they crossed the docks, looking up at the shattered bridge and remembering what it meant.
Before they could board the magical lifts that would carry them from the docks to the city itself, the passengers had to file through a checkpoint where Thrane soldiers checked their identification and traveling papers. Rienne had no traveling papers, but she was not concerned-the identification papers that showed her to be a member of the nobility, combined with a “processing fee,” would certainly be enough to get her where she wanted to go.
“Papers, please.” The soldier stuck out his
hand without looking at her, listening to the soldier on his right tell a story about his mother-in-law. Rienne put her identification papers in his hand, and he glanced down at them momentarily. “And your traveling papers?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have traveling papers.”
That got the full attention of the soldier and the man with the mother-in-law. “You don’t have traveling papers? What do you think you’re doing?”
“I was called away from my family estate in rather a hurry,” Rienne said, adopting the tone of a noblewoman faced with impertinence from the lower classes. It had the desired effect-the soldier examined her identification, raised his eyebrows at her family name, and compared the portrait on the papers to Rienne’s own face. As he did that, Rienne placed three galifars on the table in front of him. “This will cover the cost of processing the papers,” she added.
“I’m very sorry, Lady Alastra,” the soldier said, and as his eyes fell on the gold coins his face showed deep sorrow indeed, “but there’s no way I can let you into Thrane without traveling papers. Not these days.”
“Ever since Aundair attacked up north,” the other soldier added, “we have to be a lot more careful.” He, too, eyed the gold coins with regret and longing. “On the lookout for spies and such.”
Rienne drew herself up in outrage. “Are you suggesting that I am a spy?” This was a disaster. She was already drawing some stares. Her erstwhile companion, already past the soldiers, lingered to see what the problem was, and other soldiers were looking up from their own tables to find the source of the disturbance. She had left Khorvaire almost immediately after the battle at Starcrag Plain-she’d had no idea of the political repercussions of Haldren’s aborted attack.
“Of course not, Lady,” the soldier with the mother-in-law said, holding his hands up to shield himself from her wrath. “It’s just that the rules are so much stricter now-”
“The rules do not apply to me, soldier.” That was an attitude Rienne encountered all too often among the nobility-one she despised. If she could have followed the rules, if there had been any way she could get traveling papers, she would have.
The first soldier seemed to take offense at that. “The rules apply to everyone, Lady.” He sneered. “We’re all equal before the Flame.”
The other soldier shuffled out from behind the table as Rienne’s mind raced through her options. Arguing with the soldiers was getting her nowhere, and she suspected that her appeal to her birth had hurt her cause more than helped it. With the magical lifts between her and the city, breaking past the soldiers and fleeing into the streets and alleys wasn’t an option. She couldn’t return to the ship without showing her papers there, where the Lyrandars who crewed it would know who she was.
Two other soldiers stood at her shoulders, and the one with the mother-in-law stood in front of her, looking down severely. “I’m sorry, Lady, but we’re going to have to take you into custody until we can sort through this matter.”
That was the fourth option, and it was the only one that seemed viable. She gave herself up to the soldiers, who escorted her into the city, into a guard tower, and into a bare stone cell with iron bars.
CHAPTER 38
Despairing of finding Frostburn Cut or any other pass through the Shadowcrags, Aunn staggered through the foothills, trying always to make his way to higher ground. The mountains rebuffed him, spilling him back out onto the plateau above the Labyrinth, and leading him much farther south than he would have liked. From time to time he saw shadows in the clefts of the hills-stalking creatures watching him, waiting for him to tire and falter. Sevren’s words echoed in his thoughts, warning of predators making their way out of the mountains-bears, panthers, and girallons. And flying predators as well, griffons and wyverns.
Flying predators… Aunn looked up at the sky, glowing red with sunset. At first he saw nothing, but then a dark shape rose just above the line of the mountains before swooping back down. The shape was miles away to the south, but a flying predator needed prey. And the most likely place to find prey in the mountains was in a pass. He scanned the mountains as the sky darkened, hoping to see something closer, but all he saw was another flap of mighty wings in the same general area. That had to be his destination, his gateway back to the Eldeen Reaches and the civilized world beyond.
He walked in that direction until his legs threatened to give out beneath him, then he staggered into a crevice and dozed, clutching his mace and jolting awake at every sound. A tingle on his neck made him leap out of the crevice, swatting at what proved to be a scorpion the size of his fist. After smashing it with his weapon, he tried to sleep with his back against the cliff wall, but sleep evaded him.
When morning’s fire lit the sky, Aunn heaved himself to his feet and continued on to where he’d seen the hint of wings. Shadows kept stalking him, but as he climbed higher into the hills, farther from the Labyrinth, they resolved into less sinister threats-a red panther that watched as he passed beneath its clifftop perch, a silver bear that shambled away, more interested in the sparse growth of bushes on the higher ground ahead than in him.
This time he climbed and kept climbing, continuing higher and higher until the Demon Wastes lay spread out behind him like the slowly fading memory of a nightmare. The rising ground led him at last into a narrow cut through the mountains, chilly rather than cold, only a faint dusting of snow on the rock above him. The bushes grew thicker and greener, and he could see trees ahead and above him. The air tasted sweet after the acrid fumes of the Demon Wastes, and he drank it in like water.
Before the sun even reached the horizon-still too far to his right, not at his back-he decided to stop, desperate for rest and certain he’d sleep better on higher ground. He spread out the bedroll Farren had given him, wrapped himself in the warm wool, and stared up at a sky that was beginning to clear of clouds. Three of the smaller moons were rising nearly full in the east, and two bright crescents shone high overhead. As the sky darkened, the gleaming Ring of Siberys took shape, a golden band linking the moons. When the sky reached its perfect blue, within a hair’s breadth of black, Aunn smiled and closed his eyes.
A high, distant shriek jolted him awake. He sat up, looking around for the source of the sound. A hint of shadow on the ground made him look up-just in time to roll away from the talons of a griffon as they raked across his back. He fumbled with his bedroll and onto his feet, scooping his mace into his hand on the way up. Another beast swooped at him, its vicious beak open wide and its front talons stretched forward as its leonine rear legs kicked at the empty air.
Aunn threw himself aside as it reached him, swinging his mace into its ribs. He could only see two griffons-a dangerous threat, but manageable, as long as there weren’t more he hadn’t seen yet. It would help, he thought, if they were the sort of predator that fled from prey that could defend itself.
The griffon he’d hit, knocked off balance by the blow, made a clumsy landing and emitted a sound that combined a high screech and a rumbling growl as it turned back to face him. So they were not that kind of predator.
A strange calm settled over him, even as he hit the other griffon in the wing, knocking it out of its dive. He still didn’t fully understand what had happened when he wrestled the fiend in the Labyrinth, but whatever it was, it was staying with him-the supporting presence of Kalok Shash, perhaps, the spirits of the dead Ghaash’kala warriors fighting beside him.
The grounded griffons circled warily, on opposite sides of him, watching for an opening. He turned with them, keeping them at either edge of his vision, ready for them to pounce. But then the one on his left slowed its pace slightly, dropping out of his field of vision.
Damn, he thought, these things are smart.
He ran forward and whirled to face them as they sprang in unison toward him. He used the momentum of his turn to swing his mace in a wide arc across his body, knocking one griffon into the other and keeping both their claws away from his body. A feathered shoulder slammed into his exposed
chest, knocking him to the ground. The griffon landed on him, squeezing the breath out of him.
Its rear claws scratched at his legs as it scrambled to its feet, and its mate lunged in to bite at his weapon arm. Its beak tore flesh, and his mace tumbled out of his hand. Shouting in pain, he kicked the griffon off him and rolled to grab his weapon with his other hand. Talons bit into his back.
A manageable threat? he thought. What was I thinking? And why aren’t the dead warriors of the Ghaash’kala covering my back?
He heard Zandar’s voice in his thoughts, the warlock’s cynical wit, and it shamed him. As much as he had liked the warlock, it was Vor’s faith he wanted to emulate, Vor’s confidence and strength.
Aric, today you die. As a ghost, you will fight… You will fight until at last you have proved yourself worthy of joining Kalok Shash. Are you ready?
His initiation into the Ghaash’kala had not been complete-until he faced the fiend in the Labyrinth, he realized. In that battle, he had died. He was already a ghost, fighting to prove himself worthy.
“Make me worthy,” he breathed.
Biting back the pain, he found his feet again. A beak already washed with his blood lunged at him again, but his weapon came down on the griffon’s skull and crushed it. The other beast shrieked in fury and jumped forward. One swing knocked its head to one side, and a second smashed it the other way, breaking the creature’s neck.
Silence, except his own breathing and the pulse of blood in his ears. A gentle chill seized him and he closed his eyes to savor it-a presence that defied all names, holding him up and soothing him. His breath stopped and his pulse no longer pounded, all sound was shut out in that moment. When the moment began to fade, he clutched at it, tried to hold the presence near, but then it was gone, and he heard the movement of breath and blood, the stirring of a gentle wind coming down from the mountains.
The corpses would attract scavengers. He slung his pack, threw his bedroll over his shoulder, and made his way farther up the pass to find a new resting place.