Esprë screamed as a rough, scaly hand landed on her shoulder. She spun about, terrified, to find Ibrido staring down at her with his unblinking eyes. He bared his teeth at her, and she cringed.
“It is beautiful, is it not?” he said to her. “The ballet of battle, the dance of death. It is poetry at its most savage and desperate, each stanza featuring a victor and a vanquished.”
“It’s horrible,” Esprë said. “Disgusting.”
Ibrido nodded. “It is all that and more, but somehow you can’t bring yourself to stop watching it, can you?”
The dragon-elf’s words rang true, but Esprë refused to admit it, even to herself. The sight of the battle had frozen her with fear, she told herself. She wasn’t some kind of voyeur of death. Right?
Esprë curled up on the deck, hugging her knees to her chest and closing her eyes. The dragonmark between her shoulder blades began to burn. She wondered if it had some kind of a mind of its own. Would it start talking to her someday, if it grew large or powerful enough? Or would that just be her mind cracking if that happened?
With all that pounded at her these days, she sometimes feared for her sanity. She didn’t think she could be blamed if it somehow gave way. She was far too young to be expected to carry such a burden as her dragonmark, and the series of kidnappings, and the fact that a continent—or perhaps two—full of the most dangerous creatures in the world wanted her, and everyone who could possibly be related to her dead.
Esprë threw back her head and screamed. The ear-piercing blast forced Ibrido to step back and cover his ears. The sound hurt Esprë’s head, which made her scream even louder and longer, as she channeled every bit of her frustration and fear into it.
At that moment, Esprë was sure that Kandler, Te’oma, Burch, Xalt, and Sallah would never catch up with her. She was on her own, and she was doomed to be torn to pieces—physically, mentally, and spiritually—by the most ancient and evil inhabitants of Eberron.
The dark powers of the Mark of Death surged into Esprë’s hands, freezing them into the shapes of claws. They glowed black with her unimpeded wrath, and the color—or absence of it—snaked up around her arms and danced across her shoulders.
Ibrido stepped back at the sight of the vengeful young elf, and for the first time she saw fear in his reptilian eyes. A laugh leaped to her lips and burst from her mouth in savage delight as she jumped to her feet and reached for the dragon-elf.
“You do not know the powers you toy with,” she told Ibrido as she stretched toward him, determined to put an end to him, no matter what the skeletons might do to her afterward. They would be too late to save him, and at the moment that seemed it would be enough.
Ibrido’s fist flashed out and caught Esprë squarely on the chin. She went sprawling back onto the bridge’s railing, blood spiraling out from her face. Before she could recover, the dragon-elf waded in under her defenses and beat her senseless.
Esprë felt her power fading, waning from her under Ibrido’s relentless battery. She tried to grab at him again, but he knocked her to the ground with a blow to her temple, and all the fight ran out of her.
“Neither,” Ibrido said, as she collapsed to the deck, “do you.”
Chains rattled in Esprë’s ears as she regained her senses. They hung from manacles on her wrists, and a set of walking bones dressed in battered Karrnathi armor held their other ends.
“No more time for sleeping,” she heard Ibrido’s voice say. “We have an engagement to keep.”
She shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun, which stabbed lances of pain into her brain, and stared up at the dragon-elf, who towered nearby but out of reach. She cursed herself for her foolishness. She should have known better than to attack a trained warrior barehanded, even with hands flowing with the deadly energy of her dragonmark. If she was going to kill him, she should have bided her time, waited for the right moment, and struck. Only when his guard was down would he be vulnerable, and now she had guaranteed that he would not be so incautious around her perhaps ever.
A pair of skeletons escorted her to the starboard gunwale. She couldn’t say if they were the same two that had watched over her in the captain’s cabin, but she supposed it didn’t matter. One dead body was the same as another.
The skeletons made the perfect soldiers. They obeyed their orders without question. Being already dead, they had no fear of death. Since they all seemed equal in skill and talent, they could be swapped in and out of positions at will.
Best of all—from Ibrido’s point of view, at least—Esprë’s powers were useless against them. You couldn’t make the dead any deader.
The young elf followed along after the skeleton that held her chains and peered over the edge of the ship. A rope ladder hung there, leading down to a level spot on the mountain’s slope. She rubbed her aching temple and turned to glare at Ibrido.
“I don’t think I can climb down there with these chains on,” she said.
The dragon-elf bared his teeth, though whether in amusement or frustration, Esprë could not tell. “I suggest you hold onto them tightly,” he said.
Then he pointed to the skeleton paired with the one holding her chains. “Put her on the ground,” he said.
The skeleton reached out with its bony hands and grabbed Esprë under the arms. She shrieked and kicked at the creature with all her terrified might, but her blows glanced off its armor. She grabbed on to her chains above her manacles, just before the skeleton heaved her over the side of the ship.
Esprë screamed as she tumbled toward the rocks below and then again as the chains caught short, the other ends held firm in the grasp of the skeleton above. The manacles scraped against her wrists, biting into the skin there and drawing blood. Her arms felt like they might pull from their sockets, but they held. She looked down to see her feet swinging a mere yard from the hard, unforgiving ground.
The skeleton above played out the chains, lowering Esprë to the ground. When her feet rested on the rocks, she sighed in relief and rubbed the blood from her injured arms. After her last outburst, she wondered if Ibrido hoped to anger her again or put her in her place. Either way, she refused to give him the satisfaction. She mastered her temper, and she stuck out her chin, determined to see this through with the grace her mother had always shown.
Esprë’s outburst had frightened her as much as anyone, probably more than Ibrido. She had never felt the power of her dragonmark course through her like that. She had been sure that nothing could stand against her—right up until the dragon-elf smacked her to the deck. The humiliation of her miscalculation burned in her more than the scrapes along her wrists.
A pair of skeletons escorted her away from the rope ladder, and Ibrido crept down in their wake. He shouldered past her and followed a path in the stone that she hadn’t seen until he started down it. The skeletons grabbed her by the elbows and pulled her along after him.
The path narrowed, and one skeleton walked in front of Esprë while the other followed close behind. The slope dropped away dozens of feet onto stunted trees and sharp rocks to her right, and to her left the cliff face became so steep as to be unscalable. She held her breath and focused on looking straight ahead of her as she walked, concentrating on the solid breastplate of the skeleton in front of her, grateful that it wore some kind of armor so she couldn’t just see straight through it. The path continued up for awhile before it turned into a small hole secreted behind a thick clump of gnarled bushes rooted in the side of the cliff.
Esprë balked outside the hole, but the skeleton in front of her gave a firm tug on her chains, and she followed it into the darkness beyond. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that she was inside a small, dry cave no larger than the main room in the house she’d shared with Kandler in Mardakine.
Ibrido uncapped an everburning torch and handed it to the skeleton standing between him and Esprë. The creature passed it back to the young elf, who held it up before her.
“The rest of us do not need the light,�
� Ibrido explained, “but I’d prefer that you didn’t slip into a bottomless shaft by some sick twist of fate.”
As an elf, Esprë’s eyes were better than Kandler’s in the dark, but the pitch black of an unlit cave would have blinded her as well. She nodded at the dragon-elf, not in thanks but for him to proceed.
They crept through the caves for some time, always working their way lower and lower. Most of the passages were natural, but some had been carved by skilled hands and reinforced to keep them from collapsing. Esprë had never been in such a place, but she recognized the handiwork of dwarves. Temmah, one of Kandler’s deputies back in Mardakine, had often spun tales of such glories for her, locked deep away in his ancestral home in the Mror Holds. These were no crude tunnels but clean passageways cut from the living rock by skilled hands.
Even so, the passages seemed long unused. Dust kicked up around Esprë’s feet as she walked, and a stale smell permeated the place. Underneath it lay a subtle stench of rot that grew as they worked their way deeper into the mountain.
At one point, the passage emerged into a large chamber, so expansive that the light from Esprë’s torch could not reach the ceiling or the opposite wall. Tall pillars of stone stabbed high into the vaulted darkness, each carved with intricate statuary that depicted ancient tales of the dwarf clans that Esprë hadn’t the time to study or comprehend. Graffiti marred some of these, scrawled in some sub-literate hand, pictograms that seemed to speak of violence, blood, and death. In other places, rubble from the carvings littered the floor where they’d been torn down or broken to pieces with hammers and axes.
Esprë gawked as she moved through the chamber, and several times the skeleton leading her had to yank on her chains to bring her along. As an elf, Esprë knew that she would—could, at least—live for many centuries. If the Undying Court somehow allowed her to ascend into its ranks, she might walk this world for millennia untold. As young as she was now, though, she had only the barest idea of what this entailed, and the thought of things as old and full of history as this chamber standing abandoned and unused filled her with sadness.
“This was once the Great Hall of Clan Drakyager,” Ibrido said. His voice echoed in the empty darkness, bouncing from distant walls at which Esprë could only guess. “They were a wealthy and powerful line in those bygone days, but they fell into decadence and could not stand against the Jhorash’tar orcs who overran this part of the mountains a hundred years ago.”
Esprë stopped and gaped at what little of the hall she could see at once. To her delight, Ibrido halted as well, and the skeleton leading her by her chains stopped next to him. The other skeletons that walked with them clustered about them for a moment, an earless audience of the dead.
“Who were those dwarves who attacked us as we approached then?” she asked.
The dragon-elf snorted. “The remnants of that once-proud clan. The Iron Council in Krona Peak granted them the right to attempt to return here in exchange for accepting a solemn duty, a responsibility with which none of the other clans cared to be charged.”
“What was that?” Esprë brought her torch closer to one of the pillars and saw a carving of a great dwarf king sitting atop a mound of gold and jewels. Its head was missing, and several empty spots stared back at her from the carving, possibly where real jewels had once rested before being pried out by trespassers and thieves.
“Guarding the home of my superior, of course.” Esprë could see Ibrido’s bared teeth glowing softly in the torchlight. “Come now,” he said. “Our host will be waiting.”
From the Great Hall, the procession turned left and down, even deeper into the mountain’s roots. The passages became rougher and rougher as they went, until the smoothness of the floor was the only sign that anyone had ever been here before.
The walls turned blacker here too. Esprë reached out with her hand and felt the wetness on them, as if they were soaked through with untold millennia of water that had run through them since shortly after the world had been born. The air became humid, nothing like the clean, dry stuff from the caverns’ upper reaches, and the stench of rot grew stronger, filling her nostrils until her lungs ached for a taste of the untainted sky.
After what seemed like an endless series of twists and turns, the procession came to a halt. Esprë followed her skeletal keeper into a large room filled with other skeletons. Some of these were of the Karrnathi variety, standing tall and dressed in various pieces of armor, waving about the swords that seemed to be forever grasped in their bony hands. Others lay scattered on the floor in pieces, bare of flesh but held together by rotted bits of clothing and the occasional mail shirt. Most of these were short—no taller than Esprë, she guessed—but broad. Others stood taller but even wider and had long, savage tusks spearing out of aggressive underbites.
The room bore carvings like those in the Grand Hall, but they seemed fresher and less polished, the fruit of less-skilled hands. Whereas the others had depicted legends of all sorts, these showed only images of war, pitched battles between the dwarves of Clan Drakyager—their shields bore an icon of a sparkling diamond, just as Esprë had seen on the statuary above—and their orc foes.
A slab of cast iron comprised the wall opposite of where Esprë and the others had come in. It had once been smooth and polished, the young elf guessed, but the constant exposure to the damp had rusted the surface a cracked and burnt red. Some of the pictographs she’d seen above appeared here too, splashed across the iron wall in some crude attempt at a mural that only served to horrify with both its subjects and its style.
Ibrido stood before the rusted iron wall. His boots disappeared into inches of black, unwholesome water that covered the floor. His hands rubbed at the center of the wall, removing flakes of rust as large as the leaves of the maples that Esprë had climbed in during her early childhood in Cyre.
The skeleton holding Esprë’s chains gave them a tug, and she followed him into the frigid water, which swallowed her shoes and soaked her up past her ankles. She splashed after him as close as she could, not wanting to stumble into the water and be dragged through it to where Ibrido waited.
The dragon-elf nodded at her as she came up. Then he took a hammer from one of the nearby skeletons—a dwarf that had probably died defending this chamber many years ago—and smashed it into the iron wall in the center of the spot at which he’d been peeling the rust away.
A dent appeared where the hammer struck. Ibrido grunted and swung the weapon again and again. After three blows, an outline appeared around the dents, a series of cracks that defined a square about a foot wide.
Ibrido set to the square with a flurry of blows that echoed throughout the skeleton-packed chamber like rolling thunder. The sounds from beyond the iron slab came back a spilt-second later but no less loud.
The dragon-elf puffed with the effort, and the blows came less frequently and powerfully than before. Soon he gave up, his arms hanging like the branches of a willow at his sides, limp and useless. He cursed between panting breaths and dropped the hammer. It disappeared into the black waters around his feet.
The skeletons stood like statues throughout this, never twitching a single knucklebone. It seemed that they were part of the decorations here and that only Esprë bore witness to Ibrido’s efforts and his failure.
The young elf laughed. The first giggle escaped from her throat before she could stop it. When Ibrido’s yellow reptilian eyes narrowed at her, the giggle grew to a guffaw, and she soon found herself howling uncontrollably, tears flowing down her reddened face.
“Do not mock me!” Ibrido said, showing the first emotion Esprë had ever seen in the creature. He reached out with his taloned hand and wrapped it around her throat. With it, he lifted her inches off the ground and snarled in his face.
“Never mock me,” he hissed into her face.
For a moment, Esprë feared the dragon-elf would sink his vicious teeth into her face. She felt the dragonmark itching, begging for her to scratch it by letting it loose. Befo
re she could act on that impulse, though, something on the inside of the iron slab banged back.
Ibrido hurled the young elf into the arms of the skeleton that held her chains and spun to glare at the door. The furious look of defeat on his face turned to one of triumph.
The banging sounded again and again, and Esprë noticed that a new set of cracks had formed in the rusted wall. These were set in a square at least twice as tall as her and just as wide, right in the middle of the slab.
“Back,” Ibrido ordered her and the skeletons. The creatures pressed against the walls to either side of the iron slab. The skeleton holding Esprë dragged her into the corner to the right of the slab and kept itself between her and the noise.
A horrifying roar sounded on the other side of the slab. Esprë had never heard anything like it, but it chilled her to the bone. Had she not been chained to the skeleton shoving her into the corner, she would have broken and run straight back up the twisting hallways that had led them here, until she reached the sun and fresh air again.
Then the cracked section of the iron slab smashed inward, blasting past Esprë, Ibrido, and the Karrnathi skeletons. Some of the other remains, the ones that were lying against the slab, shattered from the impact, smashing to tiny pieces. The sound of the section of the iron wall clanging against the opposite wall deafened the young elf for a moment, and she closed her eyes and ears, pleading for it to stop.
When she opened her eyes again, Esprë saw Ibrido beckoning her skeletal escort to bring her along after him through the new-made hole in the slab, which now seemed like a perfectly cut doorway. As the skeleton tugged at her chains, she pulled back against it and screamed.
The Road to Death: The Lost Mark, Book 2 Page 23
