The Road to Death: The Lost Mark, Book 2

by Forbeck, Matt

  Kandler nodded. “They had a lot more meat on them than the creatures you have around here.”

  “Perhaps they came from Fort Zombie to the west then. If so, it must have been a rogue operation. I know the Captain of Corpses well. He is a good man, and I cannot imagine him perpetrating such an act.”

  “They wore the symbols of the Blood of Vol,” Sallah said.

  Berre nodded. “As I suspected. While the Blooded are outlawed in Karrnath, they are still a powerful force. Many Karrn subscribe to their sanguine beliefs, holding their blood-drenched services in secret. The zombies of which you speak could have come from anywhere in the nation.”

  “Maybe even from Korth,” Kandler said. He did not want to anger his host, nor did he share her apparent trust in her fellow citizens of Karrn.

  “I’ll grant that,” she said, “but I would not tar all of the people of Karrn with the same brush.”

  “Different brushes it is,” Burch said.

  “Where is Te’oma?” Esprë asked, cutting off any reply.

  Kandler stiffened, his arms still wound around the young elf.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “She was here when I fell asleep this morning.” She blushed. “I’m still a little worn out from all this, but she wasn’t here when you came in.”

  Kandler turned on Berre. “You left her alone with her kidnapper?”

  “With a guard outside and one in here.”

  “Where’s that guard?” Sallah asked.

  Burch kicked a bleached femur from under a nearby bed, rattling what sounded like a pile of them as he did. “I wondered who handled your housekeeping around here.”

  Berre cursed. “This is the problem with having to rely on the unliving for everything.” She stuck her head out through the curtained doorway of the room and bellowed, “Lieutenant!”

  A moment later, a handsome, dark-haired man charged through the door. “Yes, my captain!” “Where is the changeling?”

  The officer glanced at the empty bed across the room from Esprë’s. His rock-steady eyes did not blink. Kandler wondered if they ever did.

  “Gone,” the lieutenant said, no expression marring his face. “I will gather a crew to scour the entire fort for her. If she is still here, I will find her.” With that, he turned on his heel and left.

  Berre held up her hands in frustration. “Who did I anger to get stationed here among these idiots?” She snarled. “It’s an important post, but it’s on the backend of nowhere. Do you know why the place is staffed with undead? They can’t find anyone else willing to sit here, at least since the war ended. It’s too damned dull.”

  The dwarf glanced at Monja. “It’s not that the halflings aren’t worthy adversaries, but we haven’t seen as much as a hunting party within a league of this place in over a year. The biggest excitement we’ve had involved a visit from your lathon, and that was eighteen months ago.”

  Berre stormed over to the bed covering the pile of bones and sat down hard on it. “My apologies,” she said. “These are my troubles, not yours. I’ve added enough to yours as it is.”

  Monja walked over and put an arm around the dour dwarf’s shoulders. “None of that matters. If we never see this changeling again, we would all be happy. Let’s hope she took the opportunity to escape and never looks back.”

  Kandler wanted to believe that too, but his gut told him different. He held Esprë even tighter.

  “She likely killed the guard and flew out the window by means of that fantastic cloak of hers,” Xalt said. As the words left him, he stopped and cocked his head. “Can you ‘kill’ something that’s already dead?”

  “Her cloak?” Berre asked.

  “A symbiont,” Sallah said. “A living creature attached to her like some unholy parasite.”

  Berre put her head in her hands and groaned.

  “It’s not important,” Kandler said, trying to believe the words as he said them, finding they offered him little solace. “We have Esprë now. She’s safe.”

  “I’m just so happy to see you!” Esprë said.

  “As am I, despite all my errors,” said Berre, sighing as she stood up. “I request that you all join me for dinner tonight. We dine at sunset, which should fall in but a few hours. In the meantime, I asked for quarters to be arranged for you. I’ll have one of my soldiers bring up your things.”

  “I can take care of that,” said Xalt.

  “If you can spare the time,” Berre said, “I’d rather chat with you before dinner. It’s not often that I get to interview a resident of the Mournland. Living so near to it as we do, I find it fascinating.”

  Xalt cleared his throat at the request.

  “It’s fine,” Kandler said. “If you don’t mind, it’s the least we can do to repay her.”

  “I’ll gather our things,” Brendis said.

  “That’s not necessary,” Berre said, “I’m sure my …” She grimaced at the young knight. “Yes, that might be best.”

  Kandler nodded his thanks at Brendis, then turned back to talk with Esprë about everything they’d both seen since Construct.

  Brendis walked past a dozen skeletons in Karrnathi armor as he found his way to the stables where he and the others had stashed the packs they’d carried with them all the way from the Wandering Inn. The creatures set him on edge. Although they seemed to ignore him, he couldn’t read a thing in their empty eye sockets to put his mind at ease.

  As a Knight of the Silver Flame, Brendis believed that all undead creatures, be they vampires, skeletons, zombies, ghouls, wraiths, ghosts, or things even worse—were inherently evil. Each of them should be resting peacefully in the ground, their spirits wandering off to their respective rewards. Instead, they were animated by a necromantic power that could only be classified as evil. By the gifts granted him by the Silver Flame, he could feel their evil radiating from them like the dark glow of a lantern that shed naught but chilly death.

  By extension, that meant the people who controlled such creatures should be evil too, but Berre seemed as solid and good a dwarf as Brendis had ever met. He fought to reconcile these two ideas in his brain, but it only frustrated him. He ached to call down the power of the Silver Flame to eradicate the skeletons around him or at least to force them to flee from his sight forever, but here they seemed to serve a greater good. He determined to leave them alone for as long as they returned the favor—at least for now.

  What, he wondered, would Sir Deothen have done?

  He had missed the elder knight’s leadership since they had lost him in Construct, crushed to death beneath the mobile city on the orders of the warforged lieutenant Bastard. He knew that Sallah, Deothen’s daughter, likely missed him even more. She’d done her best to stand in her father’s stead, but with only the shaken Brendis left to lead, the effort sometimes rang hollow. She needed a chance to grieve for her fallen father, and he hoped now that they had finally found Esprë, this time would come to her soon.

  As he made his way to the central yard, he spied the battered airship floating there in the middle of the place. When he and the others had entered the fort, he’d stopped in his tracks and stared at the thing. It had been through so much he found it hard to believe it hadn’t been destroyed.

  The restraining arcs that held the ring of fire in place around the craft bore countless small cracks and a few larger ones. He knew that if the mystically charged arcs ever gave out entirely, the creature of elemental fire trapped in the ring would lash out with explosive, destructive force, possibly consuming every shred of wood in the entire ship, as well as anyone unfortunate enough to be on it at the time.

  Brendis had borne all that in mind as he’d rammed the airship straight into the stands of the arena in Construct on Deothen’s orders. It had been the bravest thing he’d done in his life, the kind of thing he’d trained for, ever since being accepted as a prospective Knight of the Silver Flame. He’d followed his commander’s directions without hesitation or concern for his personal safe
ty, and for that he felt no little pride. That the battle had ended badly reflected more on the unfathomable will of the Silver Flame rather than his own dedication to it.

  Now, though, hope leaped in his heart that their whirlwind journey had finally come to an end. With luck, Sallah would be able to convince Kandler that the safest place for Esprë was in Flamekeep, the Thranite capital. There the full force of the worshipers of the Silver Flame could be deployed to keep the girl from the hands of others until they could determine what ultimate fate must befall one who bore the Mark of Death.

  Brendis marveled that such a sweet young creature could be burdened with such a dragonmark. As far as he knew, no one else had received such a mixed blessing in well over three millennia, during the closing days of the legendary Dragon-Elf War. That it had reappeared now, after so many centuries, could only mean trouble.

  He knew that some in Flamekeep would advocate killing the girl as the only means of being sure of eradicating this dangerous mark once more, but he didn’t see how they could prevail. The Church of the Silver Flame respected the fire of life above all else, and to extinguish it as it burned in the soul of an innocent young elf flew in the face of that. Still, people who knew anything of the Mark of Death feared it, and those ruled by fear often made choices they might normally abhor.

  Brendis’s duty was clear, though: to bring the girl back to Flamekeep to meet Jaela Daran, the Keeper of the Silver Flame. As the voice of the Silver Flame, the youthful Daran would certainly see the proper path for Esprë’s life, and Brendis had no doubt it would be good and just.

  The young knight walked around the ship one last time, gazing up at it before ducking into the stables nearby. Dozens of skeletons swarmed over the thing, making repairs as they went, shoring up cracks, patching holes, and replacing the large sections of the airship’s hull that a pair of twenty-foot-tall warforged titans had ripped away during the battle in Construct.

  Brendis breathed a prayer of thanks to the Silver Flame. It had been a miracle that any of them had survived.

  The ship looked better already, having been in the care of the Karrn for only a matter of days. The skeletal soldiers worked over it without flagging, despite the fact, Brendis suspected, they’d been at it for days without rest. What was rest to an animated set of remains? In this, at least, Brendis saw how evil could be set to a good purpose.

  It had all seemed much simpler when he’d been a child himself during the Last War. The people of Thrane—the followers of the Silver Flame—were good, as were their allies. Those who stood against them were evil. Now, in these strange days of so-called peace, the rules had changed. Alliances forged and shattered overnight. Friendships often only lasted until the job was done, and evil could serve good.

  Not for the first time, Brendis wondered if good could not also serve evil.

  The horses in the stables whickered as Brendis entered the tall wooden building that served as a home for the dozen or so beasts housed there. He murmured to soothe them, and they calmed down. He suspected the creatures did not leave the gates of the fort too often. Perhaps the skeletons made them nervous, as they did most animals. He would not have been surprised to learn the horses were used to living with such creatures by now, though.

  No lights burned in the stable, and the far end of it stood shrouded in shadow, illuminated only by the few lances of light that made their way through random gaps in the walls’ wooden boards. Brendis looked around for the gear but didn’t spot it anywhere near the doorway. He waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness after walking outside, unsheltered from the sun.

  Brendis had never cared much for direct sunlight. It tended to scorch his fair skin. In the Mournland, though, he had despaired of ever enjoying such bright light again. The thought that Gweir, Levritt, and Deothen—his fellow knights who had perished there—would never have the chance to do so made it somehow seem that much more precious. While riding that glidewing on their insane trip here through the sky, he’d basked in the sun’s blazing rays, letting their warmth penetrate him all the way through. He could still feel the burn on the back of his neck as he peered into the shadows here, and the sensation made him smile.

  The young knight felt something tickling at the back of his brain. It reminded him of when he’d been in training to become a knight. He always felt that way if he’d forgotten something but couldn’t remember what. He’d learned to trust that feeling over the years, his hidden mind trying to tell him something that he couldn’t yet put into words. Still, he couldn’t understand what nagged at him like that. Perhaps he was confusing it with guilt over surviving when his friends had died.

  Gweir had been Brendis’s best friend since they’d been squires together, serving the Knights of the Silver Flame in the desperate hope they would someday be called to join their illustrious ranks. To see him die on that corpse-strewn field, a hidden warforged driving a length of steel straight through him, blood coughing up red and warm from his mouth, then his eyes glazing over as the burning flame of his soul left him—something had died in Brendis that day too.

  Perhaps staying to give him a proper burial had been a waste of time, especially when Esprë was still in mortal peril, but he couldn’t find it in him to leave his friend to lie there under the dead-gray Mournland sky. The traditions of his order forbade it.

  A pain stuck in Brendis’s heart as he thought of poor Levritt, who’d not been so fortunate. They’d been forced to leave his headless body behind in that warforged camp. Brendis shivered as he remembered the sick, wet sound of the rookie knight’s head leaving his neck by means of another warforged’s sword.

  At that point, Brendis thought he could have been forgiven for thinking of all warforged as soulless beasts, evil creatures no better than the skeletons wandering around the fort. Perhaps they were even worse, for they knew what they were doing. These walking sets of bones only followed orders—and none too well, it seemed.

  Xalt put the lie to all that. It would have been all too easy to hate all the warforged, but the artificer had shown them more than kindness. He’d risked his own life to save them from his fellows and had lost one of the three fingers on his hand for his troubles. Brendis flexed his fist at the thought of it.

  Then there was Deothen, his leader, his mentor, his friend. Brendis had looked up to the elder knight since his days as a squire. He’d never seen anyone else so—so knightly. He was everything that Brendis aspired to be. When he’d been assigned to Deothen’s squad, he’d been thrilled. His parents and sisters had been so proud.

  He hadn’t seen Deothen die. He thought maybe he’d heard the man’s last roars as Bastard ordered the city of Construct to lower itself on him, crushing him to death under only the Flame knew how much wood and steel, but that had probably been his imagination. He’d been only half-conscious, if that, after ramming the airship into the arena’s stands. If it hadn’t been for Esprë and Xalt, the changeling would have killed him for sure.

  Brendis couldn’t wait for all this to be over so that he could get back to Flamekeep. Of the five knights who’d left on this mission at the behest of the child-aged Keeper of the Flame, only two of them were left: Sallah and him.

  Had it all been worth it? Three good men dead to rescue a dragonmarked elf? He had only his faith to help him answer that question. It said an emphatic “Yes,” but the word echoed hollow in his ears.

  That shook the young knight more than he cared to admit. He’d grown up in the Church of the Silver Flame. His mother had been a knight too, his father a priest in the church’s hierarchy. He had never questioned the wisdom of the Silver Flame, and he wasn’t going to start now.

  Still, as his father used to tell him, “There are times, my son, that test anyone’s faith. If your convictions can weather these moments, then you can take comfort in the strength of your faith and know that it will sustain you throughout your days.”

  As Brendis made his way to the back of the stable, he spotted the packs he was looking for
. While he stooped to shoulder them, he affirmed his faith with a silent prayer to the Silver Flame, petitioning it to help him stay strong.

  He felt the leather reins fall around his neck and draw tight as a sharp knee shoved him in the back and knocked him to the ground. The weight of his attacker and his packs kept him down. His tried to bring his arms up to pull the reins away, but they caught in the straps of the packs instead.

  Brendis tried to draw in a breath to scream for help, but with the reins twisted tight around his neck he could only cough out a meek protest. His attacker ignored the noise and pulled the reins tighter.

  The young knight’s eyes locked on a shaft of light filtering into the stables through a thin hole between two boards. In his mind, the soft glow transformed into a silvery flame that beckoned him forward. He struggled to creep toward it as his vision darkened, closing into a tunnel focused on that burning light.

  Silver Flame, he prayed with his final thought, may you consume my soul with your light.

  Then all went black.

  So Brendis isn’t joining us for dinner?” Esprë said as Kandler emerged into the hallway from the men’s quarters.

  Kandler shook his head at the young elf, who didn’t do much of a job of hiding her disappointment. He was still so happy to see her that he didn’t mind a bit. He just put his hand on her back and guided her across the fort’s open yard toward the private dining room of the Captain of Bones.

  “The trip here was hard,” he said. “Not everyone’s suited for riding a glidewing. Monja thinks he’s a bit sunsick too.”

  “There’s also that knock he took when he banged his head in the stables,” said Sallah.

  With the dust of the flight and the Mournland washed away, she looked more amazing than ever, Kandler noticed. Her skin had a fresh glow to it that he had never seen on her before. It seemed more than just being clean. She looked younger too. Perhaps the relief of catching up with Esprë had erased some of the worry from her face.