by James Wyatt
Vor stepped close to the warlock and stooped to look straight in his face. “You had better pray to whatever creatures you serve that we do not,” he said. “Or we’ll all be damned.”
Zandar backed down after that, and Sevren led them to a druid he said would help them stock up for their journey. But Kauth couldn’t get Vor’s words out of his mind.
Sevren proved to have useful contacts in Greenheart, and soon their packs were loaded with everything they would need for their journey—food, tents, rope, even extra clothes and weapons. Considering that none of the town’s buildings were crafted unless by druidic magic, the town was well supplied with the gear used by rangers and druids in the wild.
That evening, they set up their new tents near the edge of town, where the trees started coming closer together and the stone huts farther apart. They had agreed on two tents, each one large enough to hold two of them. Zandar and Sevren shared one, which left Kauth and Vor in the other. Kauth was relieved to see that Vor removed his plate armor to sleep—he had visions of the orc’s large shoulderplate jabbing into him as he tried to sleep. Even so, the tent was going to be crowded with the two larger members of the group together.
Kauth stayed awake outside the tent when the others retired for the night. For a while he sat and listened to the sounds of the forest—the chirping of frogs and crickets, the hoots of owls, and the soft, mournful songs of parents lulling their children to sleep. He could grow to like Greenheart, he decided—it had a peace and harmony about it that was sorely lacking in the other parts of his many lives.
With that thought, he began preparing his mind for the night ahead. He would be in close quarters with Vor, and he could not allow his identity to slip as it had on the airship with Gaven and Rienne. He began by reviewing the shape and features of his body, from his unruly hair and steel eyes down to his thick, crooked toes with their ugly nails. Cementing every detail in his mind as he had learned so many years ago.
She was jolted out of sleep by Kelas’s voice: “Who are you?”
She sat bolt upright and shouted her answer: “I am Faura Arann.”
“Stand for inspection.”
Kelas examined every detail of her face and body, measured the length of her hair, checked that her mole had not drifted while she slept. He stood behind her and weighed her breasts with his hands.
“Excellent. Go back to sleep.”
Kelas never paid enough attention to the eyes, she thought. It’s the eyes that will give you away.
Kauth shook the unwelcome memory from his mind, scowling at himself. He ran a hand over his face to make sure he hadn’t slipped.
“Focus,” he told himself. He repeated the exercise, from the top of his head to the leathery soles of his feet. Fixed each detail in his memory.
Who are you? he asked himself.
Kauth Dennar, he answered. A mercenary during the war, now a drifter, a thug, an adventurer. Born and raised in Storm-reach. I’m working for the Wardens of the Wood.
And leading my friends to their deaths.
“Listen well,” Kelas said, leaning over him. “You have no friends. You love nothing, care about nothing. Nothing is permanent—everything changes, everyone will die. If you love, if you care about anything, you will suffer. You will fail!” He punctuated his last words by striking Haunderk’s face with the back of his hand.
And what about hate, Kelas? Haunderk thought. Isn’t hate a form of caring? You can’t hate someone who’s irrelevant to you.
“Focus,” he whispered through clenched teeth. Once more, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. And again, reining in his wandering mind.
Nothing is permanent. Everyone will die. I will not fail.
CHAPTER
8
Gaven’s assessment of the dragon seemed correct. It circled above them—“like a vulture,” Jordhan observed—until they had cleared the sentinel pillars, then flew inland until they lost sight of it. Gaven cursed, but the crew was breathing easier.
Better to deal with the dragons when I’m risking only my own life, Gaven realized. And Rienne’s.
The wide channel’s waters were still and clear. Coral reefs teemed with life far below the surface, brightly colored fish darting in and out of their aquatic castles. They spotted some larger creatures as dark shadows in the distance—an enormous eel the size of the Sea Tiger, and what might have been a dragon turtle that dwarfed her—but those monsters kept clear of the ship.
Jordhan hugged the western edge of the channel as close as he dared, keeping an eye on the coral so it didn’t tear a hole in the hull. He stopped the ship when the daylight became too weak for him to see into the depths, but no one aboard slept except in fits, jerking awake at every strange sound or surge of the waves.
At daybreak, Gaven looked around and saw a crew on the brink of mutiny. Lack of sleep and abject terror had begun to overcome even this crew’s fierce loyalty to Jordhan. They wanted to sail back to familiar waters—it was written plainly on their haggard faces. He pulled Jordhan into the captain’s quarters.
“We have to find a place to disembark as soon as possible,” he said as the hatch closed behind him.
“What’s the matter?” Jordhan asked.
“Your crew. I don’t think you can rely on them much longer.”
“You finally noticed? You think I don’t know my crew?”
Gaven grimaced. He hadn’t intended to start another quarrel with the captain. “What are we going to do about it?”
“They’re my crew, aren’t they?” Jordhan seemed determined to fight.
Gaven looked more closely at his old friend, and suddenly noticed what he had managed to ignore for so long—the same haggard expression, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, he’d seen on the Sea Tiger’s crew.
Thunder and lightning, he thought. What have I done?
“They are your crew, and this is your ship. I’m sorry I put you through this.”
Jordhan’s shoulders slumped. “I insisted. You’re my friend.”
“That means the world to me.” He clapped Jordhan on the shoulder. “We’ll get through this.”
Jordhan straightened, managed a weak smile, and followed Gaven back onto the deck.
That afternoon, one of the sailors charged with watching for dangers to the hull spotted the wreck of another ship, encrusted with barnacles and coral. Her mast rose dangerously close to the surface, so Jordhan steered clear. But as they sailed past, a number of sailors clumped at the bulwark, watching the wreck as they passed, muttering darkly to each other.
Gaven shook his head. He couldn’t blame them for their mood. It had been a long journey, they had already spotted one dragon as well as other dangers lurking in the water, and the shipwreck seemed like a premonition of their own future. Standing beside Rienne, he stared blankly at the wall of mountains rising up to starboard, wondering whether he had made a terrible mistake in bringing them into this danger.
After a moment, his eyes took in the landscape before him. His mind seemed to shift into a different way of thinking and perceiving, and the mountains were no longer just mountains.
“What is it, love?” Rienne was looking up at him, concern etched on her brow.
“Eternity,” he whispered.
She tried to follow his gaze, searching the mountains to see whatever it was that he saw.
“The words of creation, Ree. They’re written on the land here—the Prophecy is inscribed in the shape of the mountains and the path of the coast.” Before the battle at Starcrag Plain, the rolling hills and fields of Aundair had spoken to him of their past and future, of centuries of turmoil and bloodshed. This land was different, powerfully different.
“Tell me what you see.”
“Eternity,” he repeated. “The land of the dragons has been since the beginning, and it will be at the end of the world. Change is alien to this land. The Prophecy unfolds around it, not within it.”
It was not quite unchanging, he realized. But the pace
of its history was slower than in Khorvaire. The echoes of incredibly ancient events still resounded dimly within the mountains. He saw a trace of the battle that had wrecked the ship, a fleeting blur of movement where the destiny and activity of Khorvaire intruded upon the stately majesty of eternal Argonnessen.
“What about us?” Rienne asked. “Surely our arrival here speaks of change, however small.”
“A tiny quaver in the voice of the Prophecy. We will leave no lasting mark on this land.”
“Which is greater? To leave a great mark on the volatile history of Khorvaire, or to add your voice to the symphony of eternity?”
Gaven furrowed his brow and looked down at Rienne. She tore her eyes from the horizon and met his gaze. He took in her whole face, ran his fingers through her hair. He had always had a vague sense that her destiny was significant, momentous, but it had never been clear to him—or to her. He saw her, for a moment, as a part of this land. She had mastered the discipline of focusing her soul’s energy, uniting thought with action. There was a stillness even in her movement, a purity of intention. A thread of eternity woven into her mortality.
“I don’t know,” he admitted at last.
Early the next morning, Jordhan called Gaven and Rienne to the poop deck and pointed to the coast ahead of the Sea Tiger. Gaven scanned the coast, but he found that his eyes were still on the Prophecy, and he had a hard time discerning what Jordhan was pointing at.
“The cove?” Rienne asked.
“I think we’ve found our harbor,” Jordhan answered.
Finally Gaven saw the cove cut into the coast ahead of them. The mountains rose up on the near side of the cove, but on the far side, a beach sloped gently up to level ground.
“The gates to Argonnessen stand open,” he said.
The words stirred something in his memory—the gates of Khyber? The Soul Reaver’s gates? That portal had figured prominently in the Prophecy surrounding the battle at Starcrag Plain and his fight against the Soul Reaver. But he felt there was something else….
He smiled at himself. A few months ago, the Prophecy had been so vivid in his mind that it leaped to mind unbidden, overwhelming him with visions and dire warnings. Now he searched his memory and caught only the hem of a fleeting thought—the gates to the land of dragons … or something like that. He didn’t miss the nightmares, the visions that seized him even when he was awake, the constant sense that he remembered events an instant before they occurred. But as he had said to Rienne, he did miss the sense of purpose.
“The gates to Argonnessen,” Rienne echoed.
While Gaven was lost in thought, Jordhan returned to the helm to steer the Sea Tiger into the cove. Rienne leaned over the bulwark, staring at the distant beach.
She glanced over her shoulder at him with a grin. “You have a way of making everything sound so momentous.”
“Don’t you think it is? How many people have even seen this land, let alone walked into its heart?”
“Perhaps I’ve grown jaded. You and I spent years venturing into caverns far below the earth where no one had ventured before. Somehow that never seemed so … weighty.”
“It turned out to be, though, didn’t it? That’s where I found that nightshard, the Heart of Khyber.”
Rienne’s face clouded. That single moment had set world-shaking events in motion—from speeding along the schism of House Thuranni, to Gaven’s sentence in Dreadhold, and ultimately his confrontation with the Soul Reaver. It had caused them both a great deal of pain.
“We were so young,” Gaven added. “Too young to appreciate the significance of what we were doing.”
“Or perhaps now we’re inclined to exaggerate the importance of our tiny quavers in the voice of the Prophecy.”
A surge of anger rose in his chest. “You think I’m being arrogant? Is that what you think this is about?”
Rienne turned and leaned back against the bulwark. Gaven expected her face to mirror his own anger. Instead he saw sadness. “I still don’t know what this is about,” she said.
Her calm demeanor did nothing to soothe his anger. “How many times do I have to explain it to you?”
“Just until you find an explanation that makes sense.”
“Saving the world doesn’t make sense to you?”
“Saving the world, Gaven? Listen to yourself.”
Gaven was completely dumbfounded. “You think that’s pride.”
“I think the world doesn’t need saving. You said it earlier—this place is eternal, and the world with it. Nations and empires will come and go, we mortals will live our lives struggling like mad to leave any kind of lasting mark on it, but the voice of the Prophecy continues. Like the drums and the drone, unchanging beneath the melody.”
“Eternity doesn’t make that struggle less important. Maybe this isn’t about saving the world. But it might very well be about saving everything we know as the world—all of Khorvaire, for example. I think that’s important enough.”
“And you think you can do that.”
“I think I have to.”
Rienne turned back and looked out over the glassy water. “I’m sorry, Gaven. It seems my heart’s just not in this yet. I don’t know what I’m doing here, what my part in all this is.”
He put a hand on her back. “I’m glad you’re with me, anyway.”
She gave a slow nod. Then something caught her eye, and she pointed. “What’s that?”
Gaven’s gaze followed her pointing finger off to port and upward. Two dark shapes wheeled in the air—dragons. There could be no doubt.
“The dragons are back,” Rienne breathed. “Sovereigns help us.”
“We’d better tell Jor—”
The voice of the lookout cut him off. “Dragons!”
“Do you have a plan?” Rienne asked.
In answer, Gaven stretched out his fingers, feeling the wind that drove their ship toward the cove. His dragonmark itched again, and the wind gusted briefly, then grew steadily. He felt the wind move through him, felt the storm gathering in his mind. The brilliant blue drained out of the sky, and a veil of gray draped the sun.
“What are you doing?” Rienne said. “They’ll think we’re attacking!”
Dark clouds gathered above them, responding to the surge of anger he felt. “I’m trying,” he said, “to get the ship into the cove.” Speaking was difficult. Every word sparked a gust of wind.
Rienne looked toward the cove, then back at the panicked crew. “I’ll get the crew below.”
The dragons were coming in fast, adjusting their course to account for the Sea Tiger’s burst of speed. They would be upon her before she reached the cove. Gaven couldn’t read their intent—they might have been coming to parley, or purely out of curiosity. But the sunken ship they’d passed in the channel suggested otherwise. Gaven growled in frustration, and thunder rumbled in the clouds overhead. The winds grew stronger, and the clouds roiled in a great maelstrom.
They were close enough to identify now. One was the same dragon that he’d seen before, at the sentinel pillars. Its wings didn’t so much flap as undulate along the length of its serpentine body, and it managed to ride the wind better than the other. Sunlight shone gold on its scales. The new dragon was a bit smaller, but its white body was thicker. It flapped its wings furiously in the wind.
They weren’t too large, by dragon standards—both were smaller than Vaskar had been, but Gaven would barely reach the shoulder of either one. The gold dragon had two sharp horns sweeping back from its brow, and a number of small tendrils extending like a beard from its cheeks and chin. A thin crest started just behind its horns and ran the length of its neck, matching the twin membranes of its fanlike wings. Where the gold gave an air of wisdom and subtlety, the white dragon was all predatory hunger. A short, thick crest topped its wolflike head, and thick plating started at its neck and its heavy tail.
The gold circled above the ship, and a moment later the white landed heavily on the deck, right in front of Gaven.
The deck creaked as the galleon keeled forward, and Gaven stumbled backward to avoid sliding right into the dragon’s claws. The dragon growled deep in its throat, and it took a moment for Gaven to realize that it was forming words in Draconic.
“You should not be here, meat,” the dragon said, prowling a few steps closer to Gaven. It ran a blue-white tongue over the teeth on one side of its mouth.
Meat—dragons sometimes used the same word for humanoids as they did for food. A vivid memory sprang to Gaven’s mind: Vaskar’s bronze-scaled mouth closing around the neck of a wyvern. He shook the memory from his head. He would not be meat, and neither would any other person on the Sea Tiger.
“I’ve come to learn the wisdom of the dragons,” Gaven said in Draconic.
The dragon pulled its head back, evidently surprised to be answered in its own language. Then it snarled and snaked forward again. “Then you’ve made a fatal mistake, meat.” It bared its daggerlike teeth and started padding toward Gaven.
“You’re the one who has erred,” Gaven said.
Thunder rumbled overhead as if to underscore his words, and Gaven thrust his arms forward. A ball of lightning formed around him then hurtled at the dragon as a mighty bolt and a resounding clap of thunder. The force of it knocked the dragon back and over the bulwark. It thrashed about for a moment before catching air under its wings again.
Gaven watched as the dragon flapped up and away from the ship, clearly both hurt and daunted by the blast of thunder and lightning.
“Gaven!” Rienne’s voice behind him jolted him around just as a great gout of flame washed over the deck.
The gold dragon flew above the highest mast, blowing a stream of fire from its mouth to cover the whole deck with a blanket of fire. To his surprise, Gaven didn’t see any of the crew—just Rienne, standing near the main hatch, surrounded by leaping flames. She cried out.
Drawing a quick, deep breath of the searing hot air, Gaven thrust his arms out to the front and back, and a great blast of wind swept the fire from the deck. Rienne fell to her knees.
