Unbroken Chain: The Darker Road (single books)

by Jaleigh Johnson

  Ashok pulled his chain in and came up over a weapons bench toward the left head. The other blacksmith had picked up a second dagger off the table and prepared to hurl it. Ashok snatched it out of his hand as he ran past across the table.

  “Get outside,” he told the man and threw the dagger.

  The blade sank to the hilt in the snake’s flesh. Hissing, the snake released the woman’s arm. Dazed and poisoned by the snake’s fangs, the woman staggered back and slid to a sitting position against the wall.

  Ashok brought his chain up. He didn’t want the snake to have time to decide to go after the blacksmith again. He struck the thick meat where the two heads became one, then whipped the chain back for another strike. Between his chain and Olra’s whip, they harried the beast so hard that it couldn’t decide which threat to defend against first. The heads jerked, twitched, and even snapped at each other in their frenzy.

  Yet every time Ashok shifted position in an attempt to corral the snake and move it away from the injured blacksmith, the beast struck out viciously and forced Ashok to defend himself.

  “The thing’s mad,” Olra said. She danced aside as the thick tail whipped at her flank. “Trying to kill itself.”

  “Just like the panthers,” Ashok said. They would never be able to contain the snake. “We’ll have to kill it.”

  “Finish it, then,” Olra said. Her scarred face soaked in sweat, mouth set in a grim line, she moved in for the kill.

  It wasn’t the first time they’d had to put a beast down, but something about Olra’s manner was different. Aside from Uwan, she was the most restrained shadar-kai Ashok had ever known, but instead of her usual measured efficiency, she moved forward eagerly and attacked the snake with obvious pleasure.

  The Camborr struck the snake again with her whip, and Ashok struck it with his chain, but this time the barbs were slow to come free, and Ashok’s chain didn’t distract the left head. It turned from him and surged at Olra over the top of the right head. Olra didn’t see it coming.

  “Watch out!” Ashok screamed. He dropped his chain and dived onto the snake, but its reach was too great. The left head struck before Olra could get her whip up as a screen. It sank its fangs into Olra’s neck and drove the Camborr back against the forge hearth. She dropped the whip and flung her left hand back into the burning coals.

  Olra screamed, but the snake choked off the sound, biting and pumping venom into her blood as fast as it could in quivering, jerking motions. At the same time, the reek of burned flesh filled Ashok’s nostrils. Olra’s arm spasmed. She couldn’t pull it out of the fire.

  Ashok snarled in fury and wrestled with the snake, dragging it back several feet by sheer desperation. Abruptly he saw the dagger still sticking out of its flesh. He let go with one hand and pulled the weapon out. He stabbed down, repeatedly driving the weapon to the hilt. Finally, he hit something vital. The snake’s heads reared up in unison and fell away from the forge.

  Released from the snake’s fangs, Olra pushed off the forge with her back and fell forward onto her stomach. She pulled her burned hand in close to her chest and lay still, panting.

  The snake’s heads made one last feeble attempt to strike at Ashok, but he wrenched the knife out and stabbed again to widen the wound. The heads dropped, the left on top of the right, across one of the workbenches.

  Ashok rolled away from the corpse. The heat and smoke made him light-headed. He put a hand against the floor to lever himself up and felt his fingers slip in warm wetness-Olra’s blood.

  “Ashok, are you in there?” Skagi’s panicked voice called from outside.

  “We’re alive,” Ashok called to him. “Olra needs healing!”

  He didn’t know if Skagi heard him. He crawled to where Olra lay. She tried to roll over onto her back but was too weak. Ashok took her shoulders and gently turned her.

  The snake had savaged her neck. It hadn’t merely poisoned her but had tried to eat her alive in its frenzy.

  “Quick strikes, shallow wounds,” Olra said. Her jaw muscles were rigid, making it hard for Ashok to understand her. “Doesn’t fit … their nature. Should have been trying to … hide from us.”

  “Don’t try to talk,” Ashok said. “Lie still here while I go to Makthar and get a healer. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  He started to rise, but Olra grabbed his arm. “Poison is the same,” she said.

  “I know, that’s why I have to hurry-”

  She ignored him. “Shouldn’t have … pumped all of it … into me, but it did. Nothing left to milk … for the merchants.”

  Her words penetrated at the same time Ashok saw the milky venom overflowing from her wound. There was almost as much venom as blood.

  “No,” he said softly, then louder, “No! Tell me what to do. How do I stop it?”

  Glassy-eyed, she pushed his hand away when he touched her wound. “You know enough … to know when there’s no more to be done. When you’re ready, you should lead the Camborrs … You have the skill … My wishes … my orders, tell Uwan. My life for the Watching Blade.”

  She relaxed. Contentment spread over her features, and she closed her eyes.

  “Ashok!” Skagi burst into the room. Blood and sweat streamed from his upper body, turning his spike tattoos a glistening red. “You’re needed.”

  “I told you to get a healer,” Ashok snarled. “Where were you?”

  “I’ve been with-” Skagi came around the workbench and saw Olra. “Tempus have mercy-”

  “Godsdamned oaths won’t help us!” Ashok cried.

  He expected Skagi to be angry at his blasphemy, but then he noticed the warrior’s pallor and the strain in his muscles where he gripped his falchion hilt.

  Cree wasn’t with him.

  “Skagi,” Ashok said, in a dead monotone, “what happened?”

  “Cree. You’d better come,” Skagi said.

  Ashok started to get up, but he stopped when he noticed the shallow rise and fall of Olra’s chest. “She’s not dead yet,” he said. “We can’t leave her to die alone.”

  “I’ll stay with her,” said a faint voice near the hearth.

  The injured blacksmith was trying to stand. She clutched the bite wound in her arm, but the fang marks were not as savage as those inflicted on Olra, and no venom dripped from her wound. Ashok and Skagi went to help her. Together they sat her down next to Olra’s still form. She cradled the Camborr’s head in her lap and nodded to the two men.

  “Go,” she said calmly. “We’re fine.”

  “The clerics are chanting over him,” was all Skagi said as he led Ashok to the hut at the edge of the training grounds. Inside, two healers, including the one Ashok had seen tending to Tuva, kneeled on either side of Cree, obscuring him from view.

  Ashok didn’t speak. As he stood watching the clerics work, he could not hold a thought in his head that didn’t involve killing. A red rage settled over his mind, a haze he did not attempt to quell. The last time he’d felt this way was when he’d confronted and killed Reltnar, a shadar-kai of his own enclave who had tortured Ilvani. Back then the rage had made him cold, methodical, able to deal with each threat as it came. Now he was helpless, as impotent as he had been kneeling at Olra’s side.

  Finally, one of the clerics stood up and walked stiffly over to them. “By Tempus’s will, he lives,” the cleric said. He directed the words at Skagi. The big man nodded, betraying no emotion beyond the oath to Tempus he uttered under his breath.

  The other cleric left to fetch litters to carry away the dead and wounded, and for the first time Ashok could take in the details of the hut. The room was similar to the other forge, with as much disarray and as many signs of fighting. Ashok looked for the body of the second snake, but it was not in the hut.

  Skagi saw him looking and explained. “Cree blocked its escape.” He pointed to a gap between the ceiling and wall stones that admitted patchy light from the torches outside. “This one was smaller than the other, but it still laid into him like a d
emon. I thought it would take his head off.” He swallowed. “Once he went down, the thing got out, but we’d hurt it enough, it flopped around, didn’t know which way to go. More Guardians came and finished it off.”

  Ashok wasn’t really listening. He kneeled in the cleric’s place beside the unconscious Cree. They’d cleaned the blood off his face, and Ashok saw that the fang marks spread diagonally across Cree’s face. One had punctured his cheek, the other his eyebrow. Between them, Cree’s left eye was missing, torn from its socket.

  “They couldn’t save it,” Skagi said, and for the first time Ashok heard a catch in his voice. Still Ashok said nothing, and eventually he heard Skagi’s footsteps as the warrior left the hut.

  Alone, Ashok continued to stare down at Cree. The hot rage finally passed, and he thought he felt nothing, not relief or sadness. He simply stared at the place where Cree’s left eye had been and tried to conjure an emotion.

  This is what you’ve wrought, he told himself. Two battles-you may as well have fought in neither of them. Why had he sent the other blacksmith outside? To protect him? He could have helped them, provided another distraction at least. If Ashok had fought with a sword instead of a chain, he could have lopped the thing’s heads off one by one. There’d been a table full of weapons, and he hadn’t thought to grab anything but a paltry dagger.

  Ashok’s thoughts continued to ramble. He searched for a reason, he had to find an explanation for how it all went wrong. Why had he tried to grab the snake with his bare hands? Was there something wrong with his chain that had made him discard it? He reached for the weapon to see, but it wasn’t there. He realized he’d left it in the hut with Olra.

  Olra would be dead by now-Olra, who had been his teacher. She was dead, and he had no weapon. No matter. His chain hadn’t been able to aid either her or Cree. If only he’d fought with a sword. He’d killed the she-panther, but he may as well have let it devour him. He waited for Cree to wake and tell him that, that he wished the panther had killed Ashok.

  “Wake up,” he said, and then, savagely, “Wake up and say it.”

  He waited, staring at that empty socket, but Cree slept on, unheeding.

  When the clerics returned, Ashok left the hut and went to find Skagi. He found the big man and a pair of Guardians examining the body of the second snake, which was lying a short distance from the hut. It was smaller than the other serpent and had only one head.

  Ashok’s Camborr training took over, supplanting his grief for the moment. He reached down and turned the snake’s open mouth toward him to examine its fangs. “Almost no venom in this one,” he said. “It wasn’t nearly as worked up as the other.”

  “Not from where I stood,” Skagi said harshly.

  Ashok nodded. “But it was trying to escape, which is what both snakes should have done when they got out of their cages. Something drove them crazy, made them seek out prey when they should have hidden from us.”

  There was no dust storm to blame this time. Some other force was at work here. He needed to find out what.

  “I’m going to the training grounds,” Ashok told Skagi. “I need to see how the snakes got out of their cages. Uwan will demand answers once he hears of this.”

  Skagi nodded. He took the snake’s head from Ashok and peeled back its mouth to touch its fangs. Ashok thought he was looking for venom, but then Skagi clenched the snake’s head in his fist. Fangs punctured his flesh. Streams of blood sluiced between his fingers and ran down Skagi’s arm. The snake’s eyes burst. Its skull crumpled into an unrecognizable lump in Skagi’s grip.

  Tossing the savaged corpse aside, Skagi said calmly, “I’ll come with you.”

  He didn’t wipe the blood from his hands.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Deep within the caves, most of the shadow beast cages sat empty. Olra had expected to fill them with the spoils from the caravan run-they were clean and ready with strong locks and new enchantments. One of the Camborrs-Ashok recognized him as Olra’s assistant-hurried up from the back of the cave to meet them.

  “I heard,” he said tersely before Ashok could speak. “Ikemmu lost a fierce warrior today.”

  Ashok nodded brusquely. “Take us to the snake cages,” he said, “now.”

  The assistant led them over to the south corner, where a set of smaller cages had been crammed in one on top of another at waist height. The bars were evenly spaced, no more than three inches apart. “We had them both in the lower cage,” he said.

  Skagi flicked the cage door with the back of his hand. Metal clanged, and the door swung back on its hinges. “Cage’s unlocked,” he said disgustedly. “Who opened it?”

  The assistant faced them squarely, his head up. “I opened the door,” he said.

  Skagi took a step forward, but Ashok put his body between the two of them. “Why?” he asked calmly.

  “The snakes attacked each other,” the assistant said. “We thought at first they were fighting for territory in the small space. When they wouldn’t stop, Olra ordered me to put them in separate cages.”

  “And that’s when they escaped,” Ashok finished for him. “They’d already gone mad. You couldn’t have stopped them.”

  “I could have died trying,” the man said.

  Skagi grunted. “So could the rest of us.”

  “I’m sure Uwan will want to speak to you,” Ashok said. “As Olra’s assistant, you’re the best choice to replace her.” He said nothing about Olra’s final wishes. He would never be able to take the Camborr’s place, no matter how long he trained.

  Skagi paused by the row of cages. “Footprints here, small ones,” he said. “Olra’s?”

  The assistant shook his head. “The Lady Ilvani’s,” he said. “She came earlier, before the snakes escaped.”

  “Ilvani was here?” A strange feeling crept over Ashok, a dread awareness. He remembered how Ilvani looked after the caravan attack, the terror in her face. The dust on her clothes.

  She’d been out on the plain when the panthers went mad.

  “Did she say anything?” Ashok asked.

  “Nothing,” the assistant said. “She just walked among the cages.”

  “And right after that the snakes went crazy,” Skagi said. He looked at Ashok, and Ashok knew they were thinking the same thing.

  “We have to find her,” Ashok said, “before something else happens.”

  They hurried out of the caves and returned to the huts, where a group of Guardians lingered to help put the forges back in order. Skagi asked them if they’d seen Ilvani, but none of them had.

  “I’ll check her chamber,” Ashok said. “You go to the wall-tell Neimal to spread the word among the Guardians to be on the lookout for Ilvani, and tell her to seal off the caves. No one goes near the beasts until we find out what’s going on.”

  “You really think she’s the cause of all this?” Skagi said grimly.

  “I don’t know,” Ashok said. “As long as we keep her away from the beasts, we should be safe.”

  “I’ll tell Neimal,” Skagi said.

  Ashok ran to Tower Athanon. He found Ilvani’s chamber empty. A search of the tower turned up nothing, and none of the shadar-kai he encountered had seen the witch. Ashok checked the training yard and even ventured into the trade district where the markets were busiest.

  He ran up and down the streets, dodging vendors hawking goods from all across the mirror world of Faerun. The scents of the market-exotic spices, meats, and thick perfumes-mingled with his blood and sweat. The humans, halflings, and dwarves shot him curious or alarmed glances as he ran past and were quick to clear out of his way. He stopped several of them to ask about Ilvani, but none of them had seen a shadar-kai that looked like her anywhere in the market.

  As a rule, the other races in Ikemmu showed deference to the shadar-kai as the defenders of the city that sheltered them and made them wealthy, so the people answered Ashok’s questions swiftly and with apologies for not being able to aid him.

  Defeated, Ashok heade
d back to the wall. He had to hope the guards found some trace of her, but he also knew that if Ilvani didn’t want to be found, she would not be, and there was nothing he could do to root her out.

  When he got to the wall, one of the Guardians signaled him. At once he teleported to the top of the wall. Neimal waited for him.

  “What news?” he demanded.

  In response, the witch drew her sword and faced the portal. Flames shot up the blade with a sudden brilliance that dazzled Ashok’s eyes, and the portal activated.

  “Ilvani is out on the plain,” Neimal said.

  “On the Shadowfell? You let her go out there alone?” Ashok said sharply.

  Neimal’s expression turned black. “Your message to detain her came too late. She asked to leave, and I have no authority to prevent her from coming and going as she wills. But you, Guardian, you I can detain forever.”

  Ashok forced his temper in check. “I think Ilvani is in danger.”

  “So Skagi informed me. I sent him to find you. Ilvani won’t answer the guards’ entreaties that she come back through the portal. They don’t want to have to force her, and neither do I,” Neimal said. She pointed with her sword at the active portal. “Go to her. She might listen to you, but you should know she’s not alone out there.”

  “What?” Ashok cried. “Who’s out there?”

  “The guards spotted the nightmare out on the plain within sight of the portal,” Neimal said. “It’s not the first time, either. They’ve heard its screams many times.”

  If Ilvani and the nightmare came together, there was a good chance the beast would be affected by whatever caused the other creatures to go mad. Ashok’s insides twisted at the consequences of such a meeting. Ilvani’s magic was strong, stronger than that of any wizard he’d seen in Ikemmu, but the nightmare was a force of nature, the embodiment of the harsh, unpredictable Shadowfell landscape.