In the Claws of the Tiger (eberron)

by James Wyatt

  “Certainly,” Mathas said.

  “Dania, I’d like you to take care of securing letters of marque so we can loot Mel-Aqat with impunity.”

  “I’m happy to do that, Janik,” Dania said thoughtfully. “But maybe it would be better if you did. You discovered Mel-Aqat, and I’d think the Antiquities Bureau would like to see your name on the application.”

  “Feel free to throw my name around all you like,” Janik said. “But I know quite well that the old fools at the Antiquities Bureau like even more to see a pretty face holding the application.”

  Dania raised her eyebrows. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Once you’ve got the letter in hand,” Janik said, “I’d like you to go to the Wayfinder Foundation and find out if they’ve sent anyone to Mel-Aqat since we got back. I’ll double-check at Morgrave, but I think I would have heard if the university sent a team. I like to think the Wayfinders would have told me as well, but I want to be sure.”

  “Checking to see if any new information has come out of there?” Dania asked.

  “I’m pretty sure the answer will be no. I’m still working my way through inscriptions I copied there three years ago, and publishing bits and pieces as I get them translated. But there are some scholars who would like to add their voices to the ongoing conversation about Mel-Aqat and don’t want to wait for me to publish my findings. I’d also like to be warned if we’re likely to run into other explorers while we’re there.”

  “Got it.”

  “I think the rest can wait until we’re in Stormreach,” Janik said. “We’ll need more food there-though if you find something good you don’t think we’ll be able to get in Stormreach, Mathas, go ahead and buy that. We’ll need tents, boats … oh, you should get new boots in Sharn and break them in on the ship. You still have your packs?”

  “Of course,” Dania said, and Mathas nodded.

  “I have no intention of sleeping in a tent,” the old elf added, “as you are well aware.”

  “Just as I have no intention of walking into the wilds of Xen’drik without a tent on my back,” Janik replied, “whether I ever use it or not. Some day, somehow, your magic might fail. And my tent will be there, ready to serve.”

  They all laughed and settled into an easy banter as they finished their breakfast and walked up onto the deck. As they emerged, Janik gave a careful look at the sky, but soon forgot his worry.

  Two days later, the mile-high towers of Sharn came into view. Dania joined the crowd of people at the bow peering over each other’s shoulders to watch the city approach, but Mathas and Janik hung back, sitting on the ladder leading to the aft deck.

  “Are you excited to see Sharn again, Mathas?” Janik asked.

  “My favorite view of the City of Towers has always been from the quiet solitude of the Seventh Wind in Skyway,” the elf responded.

  “Out the inn window, eh?”

  “Exactly. I suppose this fascination with windows is not altogether new.” Mathas stroked his chin. “And you? It’s old and familiar to you now, is it?”

  “I’ve been gone only two weeks,” Janik responded. “It seems a lot longer. Much has changed.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “I left this place alone and wracked with worry about seeing you two again. Now I’ve brought you both back and we’re heading off on another expedition-just like the old days. And yet so different.”

  “It’s not the same without Maija,” Mathas said quietly.

  “Not at all.”

  From their seats on the ladder, the pair could see the spires of Sharn silhouetted against the vibrant reds and oranges of the sky as the sun began to sink behind the horizon. Janik watched Dania hold a small child up to get a better view above the crowd.

  “Janik,” Mathas said, “Dania didn’t get a chance to tell you-she saw Maija.”

  “What?” Janik nearly stood up in surprise, but he eased himself back down onto the ladder.

  “Yes, in Karrnath. With Krael. It was not an amicable meeting.”

  “I can imagine not! What was she doing there? What did she say?”

  “Dania did not report every word of their conversation, but she said that Krael was seeking an ancient tablet and Maija was working with him. She seemed to think that Maija was utterly lost to evil.”

  Janik scoffed. “She really is a paladin, then. All the world’s in black and white. If only it were so easy to tell good from evil, friend from foe.”

  “If only it were.”

  The towers of Sharn were all around them now, and the pair rose to their feet.

  “We’ll be mooring soon,” Mathas said. “We should collect our belongings.”

  “Let Dania know, will you?” Janik replied, heading down the ladder to his cabin.

  CITY OF TOWERS

  CHAPTER 5

  It’s good to be home, Janik thought as a skycoach shuttled him among the towering buildings of the city toward his apartment near Morgrave University. Even if only for a few days.

  Janik had his own mental list of tasks to accomplish during their two days in Sharn, and he hadn’t shared every item on the list with Mathas and Dania. Foremost among them was digging through some historical texts and perhaps talking to a few colleagues to see if he could determine what the Church of the Silver Flame might want from Mel-Aqat. He was the acknowledged expert on that site, but his knowledge of the teachings and history of the Church of the Silver Flame was lacking, and he wanted to know what interest the Church might have in those ruins. Searching for a way to re-imprison some vaguely-defined evil spirit, he felt sure, was a cover for a more concrete goal.

  Recruiting a fourth member for their group was higher on his list of priorities than he had let on to the others. He could tell that Dania would rather have a cleric on the expedition-preferably a cleric of the Silver Flame. He fully expected her to return with a cleric sent by the Church. The last thing he wanted was to be forced to bring some Silver Flame crusader along because he didn’t have a stronger candidate to offer.

  As he jumped off the skycoach onto a balcony near his apartment, he made a mental list of the most important books and scrolls that mentioned Mel-Aqat, planning his research. In contrast to his exhaustion upon arriving in Fairhaven and Flamekeep, he found himself energized and excited to be back in Sharn. He paused a moment on the balcony, looking at the towers stretching as far as he could see. Above him, it was nearly impossible to distinguish the lights of high windows in Morgrave University from any stars that might have been in the sky. He breathed deeply, savoring the air and its myriad odors, glad to be back in familiar surroundings.

  Turning the key in his apartment door, he suddenly remembered that Adolvo Darriens had been an outspoken follower of the Silver Flame. His commentary on the ancient elven text known as the Darriens Codex, named in his honor, might shed some light on the Church’s interest in Mel-Aqat. He pushed his door open, and the key fell from his hand and clattered on the bare stone floor.

  The place was a shambles. The outer room-his study and sitting room-was littered with books that had been torn from the shelves and tossed carelessly aside. His two cushioned chairs were overturned and a glass case in which he stored his private collection of antiquities had been smashed. At a glance, Janik judged that only one or two items were missing, though several others were damaged. Through the open doors in the hallway, he could see that the kitchen and his bedroom had been similarly ransacked.

  “Damn you, Krael,” he swore under his breath. He drew his sword, stepped into the outer room, and pushed the door closed behind him. He made his way on silent feet around the small apartment, making sure that no agent of Krael’s remained. When he was satisfied that the place was empty, he sheathed his sword, barred the door, retrieved his dropped key, and started putting books back on their shelves.

  An hour later, Janik righted one of the overturned chairs and collapsed into it, feeling the weight of his exhaustion settling on him. With one hand on his forehead, he looked up at the bare spaces on h
is shelves.

  “The Darriens Codex,” he said, pointing at the empty shelf. “Edgeler. The Scorpion Hymns. Gautier. Zhavaan. And the Serpentes Fragments. Well done, Kavarat. You got everything important. Well damn done.”

  He sat there staring at the empty places until sleep seized him.

  Sometime during the night, Janik must have shuffled from the chair to his bed. He woke up lying on top of the covers, still wearing his clothes, blinking as the dawn light poured through the uncurtained window. He got up, washed, and changed his clothes. With a last rueful glance at the empty spaces on his bookshelves, he made his way out the door.

  He walked a long route he had walked hundreds of times before, from his apartment to the university and its teeming Commons, his favorite place to eat breakfast. He noticed for the first time how many dark alleys opened along his path, how many places an attacker could hide. Every time he saw a warforged, his hand reached almost involuntarily for his sword, though he recognized none of them as Krael’s assassin.

  This is ridiculous, he thought. I’m jumping at shadows. Fifteen years of all kinds of adventure, digging through ruins, spying for Breland, hiking across Xen’drik, and I’ve never been like this.

  He rested his left hand on the hilt of his short sword and strode more deliberately along the streets and bridges of the City of Towers, forcing himself not to peer around every corner.

  Janik reached the Commons and bought a piece of fried dough sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. Food in hand, he looked around at the students and faculty clustered at tables throughout the plaza, hoping to spot a colleague he could talk to about Mel-Aqat. Seeing no familiar faces, he made his way to his office, eating as he went.

  He paused outside his office door, licking the last sugar crystals from his fingers. He fully expected to find his office ransacked, even though nothing there was as precious or important as the books that had been stolen from his home. He turned the key in the lock, dropped his right hand to his sword hilt, and pushed the door open with his left.

  Nothing seemed out of place, to Janik’s surprise. Everything was as he had left it two weeks earlier. Which meant that either Krael’s agents hadn’t managed to gain access to his office since it was in a public area, or they had known that what they really needed was in his apartment. Maybe it had been a lucky guess-they tried his apartment first and found everything they were looking for. It was hard to imagine that anyone working for Krael knew that much about his books.

  Except Maija. That thought stung like a Xen’drik scorpion. Dania had seen Maija and Krael together in Karrnath. Was Maija still working with Krael, telling him where to find Janik’s books? Was she Krael’s lover now?

  He pushed those thoughts aside. He dropped his pack on the desk, pulled a journal and writing set out of it, and left the office again, locking the door behind him. The university library couldn’t afford a copy of the Serpentes Fragments, but it did have copies of all Janik’s published papers, including the article in which he first spelled out everything the Fragments said about Mel-Aqat. As he walked to the library, he formulated a plan. All thoughts of Krael and his warforged assassin fled from his mind.

  Janik did not emerge from the library until it was time to meet Dania and Mathas for dinner. He hurried to the edge of campus to catch a skycoach that would take him to Mathas’s favorite restaurant, the Azure Gateway, in the floating district of Skyway. Once aboard the rowboatlike craft, he pulled out his notebook and looked over his writings.

  The Serpentes Fragments was a loose, disjointed collection of short verses and fragmentary prose from Xen’drik. The exact provenance of the texts was the subject of much scholarly debate. Janik had made what many scholars considered convincing arguments that some of the lore contained in the Fragments dated to roughly the time of the quori invasion and the fall of the giant kingdoms of Xen’drik, some forty thousand years ago. Other fragments were much later, and the first attempt to bring any semblance of order to the fragments seemed to have been about three thousand years ago, when a tiny city or temple-state of drow undertook the task of collecting and editing the jumbled pieces of a tradition they inherited.

  The most ancient fragments were the ones that concerned Janik, for they spoke of a Place of Imprisonment that lay at the feet of the Pillars of the Sky. They described it as being surrounded by lush jungle-“trees that bear fruit and vines that climb, all manner of creeping thing and everything that grows,” in the quaint words of the first modern translation. One of the important realizations that had finally led Janik to the site of Mel-Aqat was that this jungle was gone, replaced by the great golden desert Menechtarun.

  The Place of Imprisonment described in the earliest fragments was vastly different from the crumbling ruins Janik and his friends had found when they finally reached Mel-Aqat. Only the great ziggurat at the heart of the ruins remained relatively intact, and Janik had not located an entry to the structure on his last visit. Gone were the great columned halls, the towering statues of tiger-headed men and women, the sprawling relief carvings of dragons making war on demons.

  In reviewing his own writings about the Serpentes Fragments, Janik had been drawn to two things: the description of the ziggurat and the mention of the carvings. In some places, the ziggurat itself was described as the Place of Imprisonment, while in other passages, the term clearly applied to the whole site. Zhavaan’s hypothesis, expounded in one of the books Krael had stolen, theorized that the more specific references were more ancient and thus more accurate. That theory would confirm that Janik’s earlier expedition could not have released whatever was imprisoned there-he never got close enough to the ziggurat to release any ancient binding.

  Janik, however, suspected that the more general description of the site actually predated the construction of the ziggurat-that the ziggurat was built much later in Mel-Aqat’s history as a way to mark the Place of Imprisonment. That was the argument Janik had propounded in one of his published papers. Even in that case, it was likely that the ziggurat was the location of the actual binding. Janik was quite sure he had not released whatever was imprisoned at Mel-Aqat.

  But what was imprisoned there? The Fragments related a myth introduced by the phrase, “As recorded in stone at the Place of Imprisonment.” It went on to describe a great war between dragons and demons-a common theme in the mythology of Xen’drik’s ancient civilizations. This war was supposed to have ushered in the golden age of the giants. Before the birth of the giant civilizations, the legends said, demons ruled the world, which was a place of fire and unbridled torment. The great dragons, united in a coalition if not in a single species (the legends disagreed), waged a great war on the demons that lasted over a million years. In the end, angelic spirits who had allied themselves with the dragons-the winged rainbow serpents called couatls-had bound the demons inside the earth, sacrificing themselves to form the spiritual prisons that held them fast. From the ashes of this epic war, the giant civilizations were born.

  A war that lasted a million years, Janik found himself thinking as the skycoach neared the floating towers of Skyway. And from its devastation a great new civilization was born. What will be born from the ashes of the Last War? he wondered. Such a pretty myth-that new birth might come from so much ruin.

  The myth of the couatls’ sacrifice was undeniably important in the history of Xen’drik-and even the recent history of Khorvaire. Serpent cults appeared among the native races of Xen’drik with surprising frequency through the ages, right down to the present day. Giant cults, ancient elf cults, even modern drow cults revered the winged serpents, just as there were other cults that worshiped the imprisoned demons. Many of the texts in the Serpentes Fragments-perhaps most of them-could be traced to cults such as these, giving the collection its name.

  Of greatest immediate interest to Janik, was a theory that identified the Church of the Silver Flame as a modern version of a Xen’drik serpent cult, transplanted to Khorvaire. He wondered what connections might exist between the Church t
hat now ruled Thrane and the primeval cults that revered the couatls and used Mel-Aqat as a place of worship. Might the Keeper of the Flame be sending him-and Dania-to Mel-Aqat in hopes of finding some artifact that would establish the connection between the Church and the ancient ruins? Did the Church hope to establish its antiquity, give itself an added degree of respectability by proving its ancient ties? Or was it seeking to prevent Krael and the Order of the Emerald Claw from learning the same thing?

  Janik returned his notebook to his backpack and before long was walking the peaceful streets of Skyway toward the Azure Gateway. The floating city district boasted three prominent restaurants with panoramic views of the city, extensive menus of fine cuisine, and exorbitant prices. Mathas preferred the Azure Gateway for its food and its friendly half-elf headwaiter, a wizard with whom Mathas had struck up a casual friendship in years past. Janik preferred it because it was generally less crowded than the others.

  When Janik entered the restaurant, Mathas was talking with the headwaiter in the foyer, apparently catching up after his two-year absence from the city. Dania stood nearby, politely attentive without participating in the conversation. She smiled at Janik as he walked in, then Mathas and the headwaiter turned to welcome him.

  “Ah!” the headwaiter said. “Janik Martell, welcome! But where is the lovely Maija?”

  I guess Mathas didn’t tell him very much, Janik thought. Mathas and Dania looked at him uncomfortably, unsure how he would react.

  “She will not be joining us this evening, Ravvan,” Janik said quickly.

  “Very good, master,” the half-elf replied graciously. “Your party is complete, then? I will show you to a table.”

  Having spent the day poring over manuscripts in ancient elven tongues, Janik suddenly saw Mathas and the two half-elves walking before him in a strange new light. He thought about their ancestors, living in Xen’drik and slaving under the giants. Were Dania’s elf ancestors part of a serpent cult? Was there some predisposition in her blood that had led her to worship the Silver Flame? Dania and Mathas were as familiar to him as the short sword at his side, but for just a moment, they seemed as alien as the distant elves of Aerenal or the cyclopean ruins of Xen’drik.