The Road to Death: The Lost Mark, Book 2

by Forbeck, Matt

  “When the skeletons figure out what’s really happening, Xalt may not be able to get away. I can keep them away,” she said, fingering the silver, eight-pointed symbol of the Sovereign Host that peeked out from behind the top of her tunic, where it hung around her neck on a colorful strand of woven fibers.

  Kandler started to protest, but Brendis cut him off. “I’ll stay with Esprë,” the still-pale knight said. “I’m still not …” he swallowed, and Kandler wondered if he might vomit. “I’d be better in a protective role, I think.”

  “That leaves me to tackle the gates alone,” Kandler said with grim resolve. “If that’s how it has to be—”

  “I’ll go with you,” Sallah said.

  “No,” Kandler tried again.

  “She’s right, boss,” Burch said. “You might need help at the gate. I can wrangle the horses on my own.”

  Kandler began to say something, then stopped and shut his mouth. “Did I have a say in any of this?”

  Esprë reached out and put a hand on his arm. “I know just how you feel.”

  The crackling fire roared past the window of the room in which Kandler slept, and he awoke. He pried open his eyes to see Xalt’s shape silhouetted in the window, a warm, flickering light setting off the edges of his form from the night beyond.

  “What is it?” Kandler asked, sure he wouldn’t like the answer.

  “Sounds like an airship,” said Burch.

  “Ours?”

  Xalt shook his head. “The skeletons are still working on an old ship in the yard. This craft must be the military one Berre referred to.”

  “It’s early,” Kandler said. “Damn Karrnathi efficiency.”

  “Does this change things?” Brendis asked.

  The young knight looked as if he’d been sitting on the edge of his bed watching the others the entire time. There were only three beds in the room, and Burch and Kandler had taken the others, as Xalt had insisted that since he didn’t need to sleep, the beds were useless to him.

  Kandler nodded. “I’m just not sure how.” He paused to think for a moment. “We should let them unlimber the new ship, tie it down. The crew will be tired and want to sleep. Once they’re settled, we can move. We need to be out of here long before dawn.”

  A knock at the door made Xalt jump. Kandler and Burch fastened on their weapons as Brendis crept toward the door, his hand on the hilt of his sword. Before he could put his hand on the door, it burst open, and Esprë, Sallah, and Monja spilled into the room.

  “Did you see the airship?” Esprë asked.

  Kandler nodded as he stood to gather the young elf in his arms for a quick embrace. Then he turned to the others.

  “The plan’s the same,” he said. “We just need to sit tight here for a bit. Then we move.”

  “Are you sure this is still a good idea?” Xalt said.

  Monja looked up at him as the two strolled across the fort’s open yard toward the battered airship. “It’s a little late for second thoughts,” she said. “They’ve already spotted us.”

  Xalt stared up at the ship with the black, unblinking stones that served as his eyes. Skeletons still swarmed over the thing like ants across an anthill, building, building, building. The banging of hammers and the high-pitched rhythmic zipping of saws didn’t skip a beat as they neared, but an overseer in full Karrnathi armor—black, solid, and covered with burled spikes—standing on the bridge pointed down at them as they approached.

  Xalt marveled at how well the repairs had gone so far. He hadn’t thought animated skeletons capable of such craftsmanship, and the thought shamed him. Many breathers underestimated warforged in the same way, considering them nothing more than heartless killing machines. He’d spent his entire life—most of it, anyway—proving that notion wrong.

  To Xalt’s eye, the airship looked almost ready to go. The skeletons had even painted a name across the ship’s stern: Phoenix. Somehow, the gesture made the ship seem much more than just a mode of transportation, and Xalt realized that he would miss it.

  He wondered for a moment if they could somehow manage to steal the airship and escape on that instead. He had no idea how to defeat all the skeletons, sever the mooring lines, and then take off into the night, but he thought perhaps Kandler would. Then he remembered that the airship’s ring of fire would be like a beacon in the darkness. The other airship would race after them and bring them down long before they could make it to the cover of the Mournland.

  He almost laughed at the notion that the Mournland represented safety, but he didn’t think Monja would share his feelings. Still, he’d spent almost two years living in the blasted land, sharing space with others of his own kind. For someone who could go without food, drink, and sun, it represented a haven. Most breathers feared to enter the place, which made it safe—at least from them.

  Then Xalt noticed that the ship’s rudder lay on the earth beneath it. The skeletons had taken it down for repairs. The changeling had nearly torn it to pieces that night she’d plucked Esprë right from the ship’s deck. Despite that and all the action it had seen since then, it looked in fine shape now, needing only to be hoisted back into place.

  “What’s that?” Monja called to the Karrnathi overseer. Her too-innocent tone rang false in Xalt’s ears.

  “I said,” the Karrn called down, “what are you doing out here? You need to return to your quarters. Now!”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” the halfling shaman said. “I decided to go for a stroll. My friend here doesn’t need rest, so he agreed to escort me.”

  “You can’t be out here. I have my orders.”

  “I just wanted to see the airship,” Xalt said. “It has many memories for me.”

  A rope ladder dropped over the side of the ship, and the overseer slid down it to the ground. “You spent some time on this beauty?”

  The overseer didn’t seem like a monster, as Xalt might have guessed from the way the others spoke of the Karrn. He was a tall, lanky young man with an easy smile set in a tanned face still battling acne. His dark hair looked as if he’d let one of the less competent skeletons cut it with a rusty knife.

  “How many knots do you think she can make?” the Karrn said. “I’ve never piloted one of these, and I’m looking forward to taking her out for a test soon.”

  The gates of Fort Bones stood far enough from the airship to be shrouded in darkness but for a pair of large, everburning torches ablaze at the top corners of the gates. There, standing atop two open platforms, they served as signal lights for travelers in the dark as well as light for the pair of living sentries passing the long night hours by playing dice behind the crenellated walls.

  Kandler and Sallah crept along the inside of the fort’s outer wall until they reached the gates. As they did, they heard the steady trod of iron-shod bones tromping along the walkways overhead, Karrnathi skeletons on their ceaseless patrols.

  “What’s the plan from here?” Sallah whispered as they stopped for a moment, leaning against a darkened patch of wall.

  Her armor made it hard for her to move quietly, but the crackling of the airship’s ring of fire, along with the sounds of the repair crew on the other side of the yard, had covered the occasional jangling of the chains in her mail.

  “I got us this far,” said Kandler as he peered at the gates, only yards away.

  A large, heavy bar—a banded log, really—lay across both sides of the gate, resting in a set of iron braces. Moving it would not be easy, but he guessed that the two of them, one on each end, could handle it together. As soon as they did, though, the guards would sound the alarm, and the entire fort would descend on their position.

  Kandler pointed to the ladder at the west side of the gate. “We need to get up there,” he said.

  Sallah glared him. “No,” she hissed. “Those men up there are innocents. They’ve done us no harm. I won’t take part in killing them.”

  Kandler gaped. “You picked a damn poor time to develop a conscience,” he said. “You’ve killed
plenty since I met you.”

  Sallah grimaced. “I fought to defend myself and those around me. Those were just and honorable battles. This,” she spat, “this is assassination.”

  Kandler held his head in his hands. “I knew I should have brought Burch.”

  The shifter cursed softly as he slipped in a pile of horse apples. He caught himself with an outstretched hand before landing in the mess, but that did little to improve his mood. He scraped the dung from his bare sole as best he could against the inside of the stable’s wall and wiped off the rest on some fresh hay.

  Burch finished saddling up the black horses they’d need: seven by his count. Then he removed the ropes from across the faces of each of the stalls. There were a dozen horses all told, and he wanted to be able to get them all racing out of the place at the same time. A loud noise from the rear of the last stall should be enough to drive them all out, he hoped. The thought of loosing a howl at the docile creatures made him smile.

  As he reached the stall farthest from the door, he smelled something under the standard stable stench. For a moment, he chalked it off to the fact the stalls hadn’t been mucked out in far too long, but then he recognized the scent: death.

  Burch cursed again. On a tight schedule like this, he couldn’t afford to have anything get in the way. Maybe the smell came from a body the Captain of Bones—or some seconded necromancer from the Karrnathi army, more likely—hoped to turn into another of the fleshless soldiers that gave Fort Bones its name, or maybe the cook had just tossed the remains of the freshly butchered pig they’d had for dinner out here.

  The shifter wanted nothing more than to just ignore the smell and leave. If any of the others had taken up this assignment instead, they would never have noticed it, he knew.

  Instead, Burch reached into one of the packs he’d hung across the saddle horn of a nearby horse. After rummaging around for a moment, he withdrew an everburning torch and uncapped it, exposing its cold, magical flame.

  The sudden light stabbed into the shifter’s eyes as he tried to stand between it and the stable’s outer wall, hoping that he could keep anyone outside from seeing the glare through the unsealed gaps through which the wind sometimes whistled. Burch blinked until his yellow, slit eyes readjusted. Then he followed his nose into the back of the rear stall.

  The horse standing there spooked a bit at the proximity of the torch, but Burch calmed it with a quick word and a stroke along its smooth, black neck. It moved aside for him as he pressed further into the back of the stall, seeking the source of the stench.

  There, in the far corner, he saw a bare elbow peeking out from under a pile of fresh hay. Perhaps it had once been covered and the horse had brushed the hay over it aside. Either way, there it was.

  Burch probed into the hay with the flickering torch, its flames leaving the hay untouched but setting them aglow where its stalks touched the light. He swept the golden stuff aside, exposing the naked body underneath.

  The corpse lay face down in the muck, but as soon as Burch saw its short, black hair, he knew who it was. He reached down to drawback the head by that hair, pulling Brendis’s face into view. The young knight’s neck bore vicious red marks from some kind of rope or strap. His eyes were open, although the pupils had rolled back into his head.

  He was as dead as he could be.

  Burch closed Brendis’s eyes and lowered the young knight’s head back into the hay. Then he cursed, cursed, and cursed again.

  Where are we going?” Esprë said as Brendis led her by the hand from the bedchamber in which they had sat waiting for the others. Kandler had instructed them to wait there for fifteen minutes before making their way toward the gate as fast as they could. If they heard any uproar outside, they were to charge toward freedom straight away.

  Only ten minutes had passed, and Brendis had taken Esprë by the hand and said, “It’s time to go.”

  At first, the young elf had thought perhaps her nervousness about the escape had made the time they’d spent alone, in wordless contemplation of the chaos to come, seem shorter than it had been. Maybe the time had passed, and she just hadn’t noticed it. There hadn’t been a clock in the room, not like the ones perched atop some of the shining towers of far-off Sharn. She just couldn’t tell.

  Then, when they left the room, Brendis took her to the right instead of to the left, which would have brought them closer to the gate.

  “This isn’t the way,” she said to him. “The gate is back in that direction.”

  Brendis’s grip tightened on Esprë’s hand. “That way isn’t safe,” he said.

  “But that’s the way everyone else went.” Esprë felt her heart freeze in her chest.

  “I know.”

  The young elf yanked her hand from the knight’s grasp. “I’m not going a step further until … Oh, my holy ancestors.”

  The knight stopped and turned to stare at Esprë, a secret little smirk on his face. “You didn’t think I’d leave you behind just like that,” he said, “did you?”

  Esprë drew back a breath to scream, and a firm hand clamped down across her lips. She tried to spin away from it, but another strong arm wrapped around her, pinning her arms to her sides.

  “You are my captive,” a low voice said in her ear. “I’d like you alive, but you will do dead. Be silent.”

  Esprë nodded against the hand across her face, but it stayed in place. She recognized Ibrido’s voice and manner, and she knew that he would not hesitate to break her neck given half a reason.

  She had to defend herself. She felt the dragonmark on the back of her neck start to burn, and the sensation sluiced down the backs of her arms to pool in her hands. Even here in the darkness, they seemed to glow black, their unnatural absence of color standing out against even the night.

  Now, if she could just raise her hands enough to touch him—or the changeling. She lunged forward at the false Brendis, but Ibrido’s embrace held her fast.

  “Stop her,” the Karrn said. “Or I’ll kill her now.”

  A bolt of pain stabbed into Esprë’s mind. It felt as if her brain had shrunk to the size of an apple and now rattled around in a skull that was far too large.

  Then the hand around her mouth slipped down to her neck and squeezed. The arteries there closed off, and the world went black before the young elf could shout a word of protest.

  “That was close,” Te’oma said in her own voice, although she maintained Brendis’s form. “Did you see her hands?”

  “What of it?” Ibrido asked as he slung the unconscious Esprë over his shoulder. “She is but a child—a valuable child, but too young to hurt one such as me.”

  “Think what you like,” Te’oma said as she shifted into a new shape. “She almost killed me with but a touch.” She glanced down at herself, trying out a new voice. “How do I look?”

  Ibrido parted his lips and exposed his teeth in what Te’oma could only guess was meant to be a smile. “Just like our esteemed Captain of Bones,” he said, scanning her from head to toe, “if you can ignore the fact you’re dressed as a Knight of the Silver Flame and stand at least foot taller still. Wear this, and slouch over.” He tossed her a black cloak, which she flung over her shoulders and draped over Brendis’s armor.

  “Much better,” he said. “In the darkness, the guards should not be able to ascertain any differences. Assuming we don’t stumble across Berre herself, your disguise should be impenetrable.”

  Ibrido turned and stalked down the hallway until he reached a ladder that led to a hatchway in the ceiling. Toting the young elf along as if she weighed as much as a feather pillow, he shoved the hatch back and launched himself up through it into the well-lit night beyond.

  Te’oma followed close on his heels, struggling just a little with mimicking Berre’s shorter gait. The changeling preferred her own long legs, and those of a dwarf seemed cramped and bothersome.

  When she popped her head up through the hatch, Te’oma saw the Karrnathi airship hovering above her. It str
etched longer and wider than the one the justicar and his friends had stolen from Majeeda, the mad elf trapped in her own tower in the Mournland, and the ring of fire that encircled it like a ring around a finger crackled even louder.

  The Karrnathi airship hung moored over the northwest corner of the fort, as far away from the fort’s front gate as possible. Several ropes held it in place, and a wooden gangplank led from the crenellated rear wall up and over to the ship’s main deck. The name of the ship—Keeper’s Claw, named for the icy grasp of the god of the dead—sprawled across the bow in blood-red letters, just beneath the masthead hanging under the bowsprit. The massive wooden carving depicted a monstrous skeleton with a demon’s horns and a werewolf’s teeth flying along as if it held the entire rest of the ship on its tremendous back. Painted a gleaming white, it looked like it might somehow detach itself from the rest of the ship and go on a deadly rampage at the slightest provocation.

  Ibrido stopped halfway up the gangplank and beckoned for Te’oma to hurry up. She doubled her pace and reached his side in seconds. As she approached, she gazed at the unconscious Esprë on his back. For someone in such mortal peril, she slept blissfully unaware, and Te’oma smiled at that.

  “You are in charge of this fort,” Ibrido said. “Remember that.”

  Te’oma nodded, irritated that the Karrn felt he had to tell her about her business. She’d been impersonating people her entire life, so often that she sometimes wondered who she was. She recalled a moment as a teenager when she’d been unable to tell if she’d returned to her own form or just something that looked a great deal like it. She’d cried herself to sleep that night, only confident about her own self when she awoke the next morning, comfortable in her own skin.

  She suspected that was why the natural form of a changeling was so plain, almost blank. It was too much effort to try to know every inch of a complex physique—far simpler to be a simple person in the first place.