PROTECT AND DEFEND THE HEIR OF FROSTMANTLE ONCE MORE …
Aggar was on the far side of the cell, his back to her. He was naked from the waist up and rust-colored hair clung in sweaty strands to the nape of his neck. Muscles rippled along his back and gold rings sparkled on his fingers as he went through the motions of swinging an imaginary axe against an equally insubstantial foe. The many beads and trinkets in his beard clattered and chimed with each practiced movement.
“Finally,” the Tordannon heir said without turning to look at her, not missing a step in a complicated pattern of slices and thrusts. “I’ve been asking for water since midnight.”
“I’m not here to bring you water. I’m here to haul your carcass out of the fire—again.”
At the sound of her voice, Aggar stopped so fast he almost stumbled and whipped about as though yanked by an invisible cord. The color fled from his normally rubicund face, and his green eyes stood out like crown gems.
“Saba? What in the name of Onatar’s huge hairy backside are you doing here?”
ALSO BY
MARSHEILA ROCKWELL
Legacy of the Wolves
Inquisitives Book 3
THE SHARD AXE
©2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
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Cover art by: Michael Komarck
eISBN: 978-0-7869-5933-4
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v3.1
For generations, all the world of Eberron knew was war. The five nations—Aundair, Cyre, Breland, Karrnath, and Thrane—clashed long after the warring heirs of Galifar had died, allying and attacking as the tides of battle shifted. Then the Mourning—an atrocity no nation claimed—wiped Cyre from the face of Eberron.
THE TREATY OF GALIFAR
ENDED THE LAST WAR.
Though the war is over, the world abounds with reminders of a magical arms race, the spectacular technology born of magic and ambition. The influential dragonmarked houses ply their magical skills in trade instead of weapons. The warforged, a race of living constructs, strive to find a place in a world that resents them. The lightning rail and the elemental airships that once sped weapons across Khorvaire now haul goods and travelers.
THE TREATY OF GALIFAR REDREW BORDERS
Where once a sprawling empire claimed the continent, disparate nations now clutter the landscape. Only four of the Five Nations still stand. Warrior elves defend their ancestral lands in Valenar. Goblins and monsters have established kingdoms of their own and demand recognition. Rebels take old grievances to the streets, and the dragonmarked houses gather power in secret. And no one has forgotten the old hatreds.
THE TREATY OF GALIFAR SPURRED DIPLOMACY
In the shadows of the cities and on the frontiers of the fledgling nations, a new kind of hero arises. They are veterans of the Last War, looking for closure. They are spies tasked with protecting their realm from new threats and old. They are inquisitives investigating crimes, trying to make a living while avoiding the state’s attention. They all want to forget the Last War …
BUT THE LAST WAR
WON’T FORGET THEM.
THE NEXT WAR IS BREWING.
For my three wonderful sons, who put up with a lot of pizza, pleas for “Quiet!” and postponed Mommy time so that this book could be written: you guys make it all worthwhile.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel almost died more than once. The fact that it survived to sit on a bookshelf instead of languishing on my hard drive is due in no small part to the heroic efforts, staunch support, and spot-on advice of my wonderful editors, Erin Evans and Nina Hess. Thank you. The fact that it is so much better now than when I first typed the words “Chapter One” so long ago is due largely to the keen eyes, constructive criticism, and encouragement of a number of people, most notably Rebecca S. DeMoss, Erin M. Hartshorn, Stuart Etter, Steven Wilber, Jeff LaSala, Samantha Henderson, Joe Rixman, and Jaime Lee Moyer. Thank you. The fact that it even remotely resembles the world of Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited is due both to the helpful folks at Turbine and the devoted players who posted detailed walkthroughs on YouTube for newbs like me, especially James Gessner. Thank you. And the fact that I survived to write it at all is due almost entirely to the love and long-suffering of my husband and children (and, of course, Catherine). Thank you, most of all.
I swear to uphold and defend the Code of Galifar, with heart, mind, soul, and steel, until Galifar is once more reunited and at peace. I swear to follow the Code and to administer it justly and impartially, without respect to wealth or position, throughout the Five Nations and beyond.
—Opening lines of the Sentinel
Marshal Oath
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
CHAPTER ONE
Zor, Dravago 26, 998 YK
Korthos, Xen’drik.
Sabira Lyet d’Deneith toyed with the glass in her hand as she watched her quarry from the far end of the Wavecrest Tavern’s semicircular bar. The warm tang of ironspice drifted up to tickle her nose and she grimaced, wishing again that she were not here on business. She’d been nursing this same tumbler of Frostmantle Fire for almost an hour now, and she wanted nothing more than to toss it back and signal for the tavernkeep to bring her another, and leave the bottle this time. But even as diluted as it was—and watered down was the only way to get it this far from Khorvaire and the Mror Holds—the potent dwarven spirit still had a dangerous bite that she remembered well from her days on the Karrnathi border. She couldn’t afford to indulge now, but maybe later, after she’d arrested this latest piece of offal.
Her gray eyes narrowed as she studied him over the rim of her glass. Riv Caldamus—probably a spy, definitely a murderer, and also, apparently, a card shark. The changeling—who today was masquerading as a fair-haired human “artifact collector” from Sharn—sat at a table near the bar,
dealing out another hand of Jarot’s Bluff. He’d already knocked two players out of the game, and he had a respectable pile of coins in front of him. The pile was half again the size of that of his nearest competitor—a florid, flour-coated man who could only be the village baker—one of the Storrs, judging from the bald pate and paunch. The other remaining player, whose stack was smaller still, was an elf she didn’t know—a ranger by the looks of him, and a frustrated one at that. From the way he chewed on the inside of his cheek, he obviously didn’t care any more for this hand than he had for the last half dozen Caldamus had dealt him. Whether the elf suspected he was being swindled or merely thought he was having a run of bad luck, Sabira couldn’t say, but she was convinced the changeling was cheating. She just couldn’t figure out how.
He wasn’t dealing from the bottom of the deck or using any holdout device she could detect, either hidden up one of his long sleeves or under the table. And other than the players, herself, and Prynn, her partner for this job, no one in the common room had been there throughout the entire game. So the changeling couldn’t be working with an associate. She didn’t bother counting the serving girls or the tavernkeep—there was no chance Sigmund Bauerson or his daughters would collude with an outsider to cheat the locals who were their main source of income. If anything, it would be the other way around. This also precluded the changeling using marked cards, since the deck belonged to the tavern.
Magic was always a possibility, but the reports she’d gotten from Stormreach’s Sentinels Tower hadn’t indicated Caldamus was a practitioner of anything more arcane than subterfuge and disguise. Of course, if the changeling were a spy, he’d have access to all sorts of artificer-wrought toys, any number of which could give him a definite edge in a card game.
Not that it mattered. Whatever clever gadgets Caldamus might be carrying, they’d be no match for a pair of determined Marshals.
Sabira’s latest partner had slipped in unnoticed a few moments ago and was waiting in the shadows by the tavern door, crossbow in hand. Without glancing over at him, Sabira laid a silver sovereign on the bar, their agreed-upon sign. Pushing her stool back, she reached down for the shard axe propped against the bar, her hand curving reflexively around the familiar leather-wrapped haft. The weapon—an adamantine urgrosh, part axe and part spear, with a sharpened Siberys dragonshard forming its spear tip—had been a gift from her days back in the Holds, the only thing she’d taken with her when she’d left that Hostforsaken place. With it in her grasp, she was blessed with the strength, stability, and endurance of the urgrosh’s dwarven makers, and the weapon had served her in good stead over the years.
As it would again today.
She hefted the shard axe onto her shoulder like a jovial woodcutter and then moved casually toward Caldamus’s table. She paused as the baker laid his cards on the table—three queens and two heirs, a configuration commonly known as the Hags. A good hand, but not an unbeatable one.
Caldamus winced. “Oh, tough luck,” he said sympathetically as he spread his own cards out in a fan before him. A United Galifar, five dragons. Now that was an unbeatable hand.
“Damn it!” the baker cried, slamming a meaty fist down on the table and making his single remaining stack of sovereigns jump. He looked like he might lose his breakfast all over the last of his coins. Sabira sympathized; she knew that gut-wrenching feeling all too well.
“Bad beat,” the elf murmured, even as Caldamus began raking in his winnings.
Sabira laughed softly as she shook her head, drawing the players’ attention.
“Something funny?” the baker asked angrily, glaring.
Sabira ignored him, directing her comments at the changeling whose hands had stilled on the coins.
“You know, if you’re going to cheat, you might not want to be so obvious about it. Even hacks like these will catch on eventually.”
The baker spluttered indignantly at that, while the ranger’s almond eyes became slits as Sabira confirmed his suspicions. The elf’s hand began inching toward his belt and the dagger he no doubt kept sheathed there.
“Lucky for you,” Sabira continued, keeping her eyes on Caldamus as she pulled her brooch out from beneath her shirt, where she wore it pinned to a leather cord, “the Sentinel Marshals aren’t interested in copper-ante gamblers.”
“Marshals?” the baker repeated, dumbfounded. He ogled the three enameled heads—lion, dragon, and goat—that made up the chimera of House Deneith and served as the Marshals’ badge of office. The elf wisely pushed back from the table; he wanted no part of what was about to happen. Caldamus’s placid expression remained unchanged as he regarded her and her makeshift pendant with cool blue eyes.
“We are, on the other hand, very interested in murderers, especially those who choose veteran members of the Defender’s Guild for their victims.” She hefted the shard axe off her shoulder, leveling its dragonshard tip at the changeling. “Riv Caldamus, by order of House Deneith, you are under arrest for the murder of Goren ir’Kados of Fairhaven. Stand up—slowly—and place your hands—”
Sabira didn’t get to finish the command. Caldamus moved faster than she’d anticipated, leaping up and sending his chair flying even as he heaved the table at her. Sabira dodged the cascade of cards and coins and sidestepped around the changeling’s impromptu shield just in time to see a crossbow bolt slam into the underside of the table, grazing his neck and nearly pinning his collar to the wood.
As Caldamus dove for cover behind another table, Sabira shouted at her partner.
“Damn it, Prynn, I want him alive! Aim for his hands, not his head!” As much as she’d like to see the changeling dead, he was worth more alive. And a bolt through the hand would make him less of a threat with those damnable daggers of his—
Sabira didn’t have time to complete the thought before one of those very blades came whizzing toward her face. With an oath, she flipped the urgrosh and brought the head of its axe up, knocking the dagger out of the air with a satisfying clang of metal.
“Oh no, you don’t,” she muttered. If that idiot she’d been assigned to work with got her injured—or worse, cost them their quarry—well, she might not kill him, but she’d make sure he was busted back down to a private riding patrol outside Fort Bones. Worse even than sewer patrol here in Stormreach, it was quite possibly the most miserable, degrading assignment a member of House Deneith could get. As she had good cause to know.
Another crossbow bolt slammed into the tavern floor between tables, flushing Caldamus out. Head down, he ran for the cover of the long wooden bar. Bauerson was there waiting for him with a spiked club, protecting the still and the myriad bottles of spirits lined up against the wall behind it.
Blocked by the tavernkeep, Caldamus balked for a moment, eyeing the distance to the kitchen door. Sabira, on the other hand, didn’t waver.
She ran forward, leaping from the seat of a long bench to the top of the table nearest Caldamus. Without breaking stride, she launched herself off the wooden platform at the changeling. Caldamus turned just in time to get his hands up before she hit him and bore him bodily to the floor, her shard axe caught ineffectually between them.
The changeling closed his hands over the haft on either side of her own, and their tumbling roll abruptly slowed as the urgrosh’s enchantment flowed through him, granting him the same rock-like stability she possessed. They fetched up hard against another long bench, Caldamus on top.
Sabira was momentarily nonplussed to find herself staring up at her own face; the changeling had assumed her features during their roll across the tavern floor. Prynn now had a tangle of limbs with two coppery-haired heads as a target, a tactic Caldamus obviously thought would take the other Marshal out of the picture.
Sabira almost laughed aloud at the thought. Prynn wouldn’t hesitate to put a bolt between her ribs if he thought he could take the changeling out as well. As far as the uncompromising lawman was concerned, she had just as much Defender blood on her hands as Caldamus did and des
erved no better fate. An opinion the other Marshal would probably be surprised to learn Sabira shared.
But Prynn would have to wait to see her punished another day. Right now, she had a job to do.
Caldamus pushed the shard axe’s haft upward toward Sabira’s throat. She knew she was stronger than him, but she was also far shorter, a bare handful of inches taller than the average dwarf. Any advantage her wiry strength yielded would be negated once he was bestride her, and her options for extricating herself would diminish considerably. She had to act fast.
While her hands were effectively pinned, her legs were still free. Guessing that the changeling’s transformation had gone no further than his neckline, she brought one knee up between his thighs as hard as she could, simultaneously digging her fingernails deep into the tops of his hands.
Caldamus let out a yelp, releasing his hold on the shard axe as his body instinctively curled inward around the pain.
It was all the opening Sabira needed.
She rolled to the left, using the urgrosh as a lever to thrust the changeling off of her while drawing both knees up to her chest and kicking out at him forcefully. The blow sent him crashing into a nearby table. He bounced off its edge and fell, face-forward, onto the sticky tavern floor.
Sabira was on him in an instant, her knee in his spine to keep him down. She set the shard axe aside—well out of his reach—and yanked his arms behind his back. She then pulled a set of steel manacles out of her pouch and shackled his wrists. The magewrought metal would contract or expand with the size of its wearer, ensuring that the changeling would not be able to wriggle out of his bonds, no matter what form he took. Even so, she placed a set of matching manacles around his ankles; the Defender’s Guild was paying a handsome sum for the changeling’s apprehension, and she didn’t want to take any chances with that sort of money. Once he was trussed to her satisfaction, she climbed off and pulled him roughly to his feet.
The Shard Axe: An Eberron Novel (Dungeons & Dragons) Page 1
