The Road to Death: The Lost Mark, Book 2

by Forbeck, Matt

  Esprë steeled herself as she felt her confidence waning. “They found me before. They’ll never give up.”

  Ibrido bared his teeth. “If they somehow do manage to catch us, I will knock them from the sky. This is a warship on which we travel, not some enchanted pleasure boat.”

  Esprë stood up, and the dragon-elf took one step back. The skeletons closed ranks in front of him, keeping him far from the young elf’s reach.

  “Perhaps I’ll kill you myself,” she said, trying to inject some menace into her voice. The dragonmark on her back began to itch, and the tips of her fingers began to numb with cold.

  “Take her,” Ibrido said.

  For an instant, Esprë wondered whom he spoke to. Then the twin skeletons darted forward and grabbed her by her elbows. They shoved her back into the overstuffed couch and pinned her there.

  Esprë struggled against the skeletons’ grasp, but they held her fast as steel. She kicked out at them, but they just draped their leg bones over her and pressed her feet to the floor too. She grabbed at them with her grave-chilled fingers, wishing them to die, to fall over at her feet into a pile of shuffled bones, but they ignored her.

  “Your dragonmark has no power over those already dead,” Ibrido said. “Of all the creatures on this ship, only you, I, and the terrified bosun flying this ship still draw breath. They exist to help maintain this ship and to protect me. If I die, they have their orders.”

  “Which are?” A ball of ice formed in Esprë’s gut.

  “To kill you. To rend your corpse to pieces. To scatter it across open leagues of land.”

  One thought speared through Esprë’s mind, and she gave voice to it. “What happened to Te’oma?”

  The dragon-elf let loose a low, rumbling sound that Esprë guessed was meant to be a laugh.

  “We had a parting of the ways,” Ibrido said. “She became a loose end, and I tied her off.”

  “Where is she?” Esprë whispered, barely audible over the whistling wind.

  Ibrido pointed a taloned finger over the young elf’s shoulder. She turned to gaze out the window and saw that something had been thrown through it from this side: something—or someone—who had probably fallen to her death.

  Esprë bowed her head, her shoulders shaking. After a moment, she realized she was crying. How could she mourn for this twisted creature who had brought so much misery into her life? She didn’t know. She couldn’t explain her sadness to anyone, not even herself. All she could do was give herself over to it or fight it away.

  She wept openly and unashamed.

  “How ironic,” Ibrido said. “If she were here still, you’d be threatening her life as well. Now that she’s gone, though, you mourn her passing.”

  The dragon-elf shook his head. “I do not understand the cruel tricks that fate plays on us all. That one such as you should have a gift like the Mark of Death bestowed upon you is beyond my ability to fathom. Is this a random world in which little makes sense, or is there some higher purpose to this choice that only the gods could possibly understand?”

  Anger flared in Esprë’s heart. It was one thing for Ibrido to threaten her, but she could not abide being mocked. She kicked and struggled with the skeletons pinning her in place, but she made no headway against them.

  As she tired, she glared up at the dragon-elf and said, “Why don’t you come a little closer and find out?”

  Ibrido snorted at the young elf. Then he spoke to the skeletons. “Release her.”

  The two creatures let Esprë go and stood up flanking her, ready to move against her again at Ibrido’s word. She rubbed the spots on her arms where they had pressed their thin, hard finger bones into her flesh, leaving livid marks. She wondered what the dragon-elf’s game might be, but she was willing to let him keep talking while she tried to figure a way out of this trouble.

  Ibrido stepped forward until he was only a few feet from Esprë. She gauged the distance, wondering if she could reach out and touch him with her deadly power before he could dodge out of the way. It would be close, she was sure, and she was not ready to take that chance yet.

  Then Ibrido leaned down until his snoutlike nose rested only inches from Esprë’s face. “Go ahead and give it a try,” he hissed through his long, sharp teeth. “You can kill me right here, right now. You can put an end to all of this. It will only cost you your life.”

  The dragonmark started to burn on Esprë’s back. She wondered how it could get so hot and not scorch her shirt. She brought up her right hand, which felt as if she’d plunged it into a snow bank. She raised it toward Ibrido’s scaly face but stopped just before touching it.

  The dragon-elf bared his teeth again. Esprë could smell old meat and fresh wine on his breath. “You may have something of the killer in you after all,” he said. “The changeling doubted it, but I can see it in your eyes. Still, you value life too much to risk tossing away your own, don’t you?”

  Esprë growled in frustration as she threw herself back against the couch again. The icy sensation in her hand and the fiery one between her shoulder blades ebbed, each seeming to wash away the other.

  Ibrido snorted as he stretched to his full height and glared down at Esprë with his unblinking, reptilian eyes. “I want you to remember this moment,” he said. “Etch it in your mind. Think back to it when you are brave enough to consider raising your hand against me again.

  “I gave you your chance. I put myself almost literally in your hands. My life could have been yours to devour like an overripe fruit, but you were too cowardly to pluck it.”

  With that, he spun on his heel and strode out the door. The two skeletons stayed there, standing at either end of the couch, undead escorts who gazed past her with nonexistent eyes.

  Who is your master?” Kandler asked.

  Te’oma sat up in the bloodstained bed, the chains hanging from her collar and manacles rattling as she did. “You don’t want to know,” she said. “It’s not important any more.”

  “Whoever you serve sent you along with a pack of bloodthirsty vampires and Karrnathi skeletons to destroy my town and kidnap my daughter from her own bed. It’s important to me.”

  Kandler had chased this changeling across the whole of the Mournland and through the Talenta Plains into Karrnath. As long as he had her, he was determined to pump as much information out of her as he could.

  Te’oma considered his words for a moment, staring up at the justicar with her blank, white eyes. Then she nodded. “I work for the Lich Queen.”

  She paused for a moment, as if waiting for a bolt of lightning to come crashing out of the clear night sky and strike her down. When it failed to happen, she continued. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “She’s a powerful, undead wizard who lives among the pirate nations in the islands to the northeast of here.”

  Te’oma shook her head. “That’s accurate but insufficient. It’s like calling a dragon a large lizard. It sells the creature short and illustrates your own ignorance.”

  In the corner, Burch—who still sat perched in the room’s lone window, as he had for hours—lifted his crossbow off his lap and sighted down the length of its loaded bolt. The changeling eyed the tip of that bolt for a moment before turning her attention back to Kandler.

  The justicar leaned forward. “Enlighten me,” he said.

  “The Lich Queen lives in Illmarrow Castle, high in the Fingerbone Mountains, which rise out of the Bitter Sea as the island called Farlnen.”

  “That’s on the northwest side of the Lhazaar Principalities?”

  “You’re not as ignorant as you seem.”

  Kandler gave her a mirthless smile. Let her underestimate him. Let her tell him things he already knew. He wasn’t here to impress her.

  “What does the Lich Queen want with Esprë?” Kandler asked. “Mardakine is a long way from the Bitter Sea.”

  “The lich queen wasn’t always a lich. In her breathing days, she was a powerful wizard by the name of Vol. This was back in the
years of the Elf-Dragon War, which pitted the continents of Aerenal and Argonnessen against each other in a bitter conflict.

  “Vol’s parents were the daughter of the leader of the House of Vol and the most powerful of the green dragons in all of Argonnessen. Their own parents arranged the marriage in an effort to bring the two factions together and perhaps put an end to the war. It did unify the elves and dragons, but not in the way the House of Vol had hoped.

  “If love between a dragon and an elf was forbidden in both societies, then an offspring from such a match was an abomination. When news of Vol’s birth spread, the leaders of the other elf houses met with the dragon kings and agreed that they must put aside their differences to destroy this abomination and all who had spawned it.

  “The resulting battles nearly tore Aerenal apart. The House of Vol had long been one of the most respected and powerful of the elf lines. This was, after all, the house that carried the Mark of Death, the thirteenth and most dangerous of all the dragonmarks. Vol herself bore this mark, which gave the elves and dragons yet another reason to fear her and her power.

  “Within a matter of months, the House of Vol was destroyed. According to recorded histories from the time, no one survived. The name of Vol was stripped from the elf libraries and expunged from their conversations. It was as if no one from the house had ever lived.”

  Kandler had heard some of this before, in bits and pieces, in his travels. His wife Esprina had mentioned the House of Vol, but only as an example of how pride went before the fall. Like most elves, she had a long memory, and she had family members who’d been alive at the time of the crusade against House Vol. According to her, the members of the House of Vol had been involved in some kind of horrible breeding program designed to drive up the numbers of the rare dragonmarks that showed up among elves.

  “But the Lich Queen survived,” he prompted.

  Te’oma nodded, warming to her tale. “Exactly. While the rest of the House of Vol fought for their lives, Vol’s parents had her smuggled away to Khorvaire where she could live in safe obscurity. The other houses searched in vain for the young elf for years. Eventually they gave up, declaring that she must have died in one of their many offenses and been lost.

  “Vol dedicated herself to revenge. She took to the study of magic, becoming one of the most powerful wizards on the planet. When her life neared its end, she took the next step, something no smaller-minded elf would have ever considered, with their worship of their ascendant councilors. She didn’t wait for their Priests of Transition to grant her immortality. The Undying Court would never have allowed it. She took it for herself.

  “She transformed herself into a lich.”

  Kandler watched the changeling as she spoke. She betrayed a range of emotions about this Vol, which he found curious.

  “You admire her,” he said.

  “Why not?” The thought seemed to surprise Te’oma even as she agreed with it. “Despite the persecution of two of the most powerful groups in the entire world, she not only survives but thrives. She lives on her own terms and has everything she could ever want—but for one thing.”

  “A digestive system?” Burch said.

  Te’oma ignored the shifter. Kandler thought perhaps she rolled her eyes at him, but since they were white throughout he couldn’t be sure.

  “The Mark of Death.”

  Kandler shook his head. “You said she bore the mark.”

  “She did. She does, but there’s one problem with dragonmarks, at least from a lich’s perspective: You have to be alive to use them.

  “To survive forever, Vol had to give up her most personal and incredible powers.”

  “She literally traded death for immortality.”

  Te’oma smiled. “Exactly.”

  “Why does she want Esprë? It’s not like she can just steal the dragonmark from her.” Kandler paused, a sick feeling in his stomach. “Can she?”

  Te’oma frowned and shook her head. “No, but you won’t believe the real reason.”

  “Try me.”

  Te’oma gazed up at Kandler from her bed and said, “She wants to protect her.”

  Burch burst into howling laughter from the windowsill. Kandler snapped his head around to glare at the shifter, and he clammed up.

  “Tell me how that makes sense,” Kandler said to Te’oma. He didn’t know what to believe, but his instincts told him that this was too outlandish to be a lie.

  “The Lich Queen knew that if she had escaped the purge of the House of Vol, others may have too. The bloodlines in elf society are long and tangled. It was one thing to murder every named member of the House of Vol. It would be another to kill everyone related to them as well. It would have torn Aerenal in half.

  “If some of her distant cousins had survived, then the Mark of Death might someday resurface. If it did, it would cause an uproar within Aereni society again, perhaps resulting in another purge, and the bearer would be murdered for sure.

  “Vol devoted a portion of her time and magic to searching for any sign of the return of the Mark of Death. Over the centuries, she found a few false clues, but she always remained wary of these lulling her into a false sense of hopelessness. She tracked down every lead, sure that one of them would finally prove true.”

  “That’s how you and those vampires came to Mardakine.”

  Te’oma nodded. “We lurked around the edges of the town for a few days, until we were sure we’d located the right person. Then the knights showed up, forcing our hand. We struck.”

  Kandler put a fist up to his mouth for a moment. He put it back down when he noticed the knuckles were white. “Tell me again how this is supposed to be for Esprë’s protection.”

  “Vol wants to bring Esprë to live with her in Illmarrow Castle. There she can train her in the use of the Mark of Death in a way that no one else possibly could. Every other bearer of the mark is long since dead.”

  “Including Vol.”

  “She can also hide her there from others who would seek her out, either to kill her or to use her for their own ends.” Te’oma spread her arms wide, her chains rattling with the gesture. “Think about it. If the Silver Flame could detect the appearance of the Mark of Death—the first in over three millennia—do you think others don’t know about it as well? The Undying Court in Aerenal? The dragon kings of Argonnessen? The Finders Guild? The Lords of Dust? The Deathguard? The Dreaming Dark?”

  Kandler nodded.

  “Can you protect her from all of them?” Te’oma said in a whisper. “You couldn’t even keep her safe from me.”

  Kandler fought the urge to reach out and strangle the changeling, to twist her neck back into the shape in which Ibrido had left it. Instead, he stood up and walked toward the doorway. Before he left, he shot back over his shoulder.

  “Tomorrow’s another day.”

  It’s time,” Kandler said as he entered the infirmary. Three human guards stood watching over the changeling, one at the window, one at the door, and a third standing a sword’s length away from Te’oma’s bed. Berre had sent them in shortly after Kandler left the room last night, with orders to make Burch leave and get some sleep.

  Kandler had bumped into the Captain of Bones this morning already, and she’d told him about the switch. He’d thanked her for it. He needed Burch fresh and ready for their trip, no matter where it took him. Berre looked like she’d been on her feet for the entire night, but that was fine. Once Phoenix took off, her part in all this would be done.

  The changeling sat bolt upright in bed at the sound of Kandler’s voice. He wondered if she’d slept at all herself. She looked horrible. Since she was a changeling, the justicar knew that either she’d made herself look like that on purpose or she was too distracted to bother with her appearance at the moment. Her red eyes and puffy face told him she’d been crying.

  “All right,” she said in a defeated voice, rubbing her eyes.

  “Try to contact Esprë,” Kandler said.

  The changeling c
losed her eyes and concentrated. She remained silent for a long moment, until Kandler cleared his throat.

  “I have her,” Te’oma said. “She’s unharmed. She’s in the captain’s cabin on Keeper’s Claw.”

  “Where are they headed?”

  “She can’t tell. From the direction of the sun, they’re heading east by northeast, but that’s all she knows right now.”

  “Tell her to stay safe and keep her head down.”

  Te’oma looked up at the justicar and nodded.

  “And tell her I love her. We’ll contact her again once we’re in the air.”

  Te’oma smiled. “She knows.”

  Kandler waited for a moment until he thought the changeling had broken her psionic connection with his daughter. “How is she?” he said. “Is she frightened?”

  “No more than you’d expect. That’s one tough elf you’ve raised.”

  “Living with him will do that to you,” Burch said as he walked in through the curtained doorway. “I used to be a gnome.”

  Kandler ignored the shifter. A thought about the changeling had struck him, and he needed to know the answer now.

  “Do you have a mindlink set up with anyone else?” he asked Te’oma.

  The changeling froze, then lay back down in the bed. She closed her eyes and nodded without a word.

  “With whom?” Kandler asked. “The Lich Queen?”

  Te’oma nodded again.

  “Have you contacted her recently?”

  The changeling didn’t move. A growing dread filled Kandler’s heart.

  “Is that why you’ve been crying?”

  Te’oma’s body shook so hard it rattled her chains. She rolled forward into a ball, unable to hold back her tears any longer.

  “It looks like I’m not the only one who’s failed at his job around here,” Kandler said.

  “She’s dead,” Te’oma said softly.

  “For centuries,” Burch said.