by Matt Forbeck
That girl was long dead now, and Vol—who had promised to bring her back—had destroyed her body and any chance for her to return.
At first, Te’oma had wanted to avenge herself on the Lich Queen, who’d used her so callously as little more than a weapon to be aimed at her foes. Later, she realized that Vol might never have been able to revive Te’oma’s daughter. Even if the changeling had brought Espre back to Illmarrow, there would be no way that Te’oma could have forced the ancient, long-dead elf to live up to her part of the deal. Vol may have stuck to the bargain, but she just as likely might have not.
Te’oma had let her emotions control her, and Vol had played her for the fool. The Lich Queen had told Te’oma
of the destruction of her daughter’s body in a fit of pique. There was no way of knowing if that was true either. Vol could easily try to contact her again soon and offer her another chance at saving her little girl.
Perhaps she’d even been trying. In her grief, Te’oma had severed her telepathic link with the Lich Queen, determined that she would never have use for it again. If Vol had only meant to scare her by lying about the fate of the girl’s body, then her plans had backfired on her—at least as far as Te’oma was concerned.
With that act, Vol had murdered the changeling’s daughter, as surely had the angry mob that had stoned the girl to death. This time, though, she’d killed off Te’oma’s last hope for the girl as well. There would be no bringing that back.
If Te’oma couldn’t do anything to save her own daughter, at least she could help save someone else’s. Despite herself, the changeling had come to care about Espre. She was aware that the young elf hated her, and she didn’t blame her for it. She only knew that she had to do whatever she could to make right all the wrong she’d done to the girl, even if that meant following her into the jaws of certain death.
If that meant following Espre and her friends to the ends of Eberron, then so be it.
Te’oma couldn’t stomach the idea of returning to Khorvaire anyhow. If she flew off now, where would she go? What would she do?
She desperately needed some kind of purpose to fill the void her daughter’s death had left in her. This one seemed as good as any.
With that thought burning in her brain, Te’oma folded her wings against her body and let gravity pull her into an accelerating dive toward one of the soarwings sliding through the air below her.
The soarwing appeared off to the port again, closer this time. Espre could see the green-scaled rider now, his long, thin tongue slipping out of his mouth and flapping in the wind. He pulled back his lips to bare his rows of sharp, white teeth as he glared at her with his baleful, yellow eyes.
Espre froze. The rider’s reptilian form reminded her so much of the half-dragon Ibrido that she feared that the villain had somehow come back to life and chased them across the desert, the mountains, and the plains to finally finish them off here, before they could even leave Khorvaire behind in their quest to confront his distant masters. She watched as he brought back his arm to hurl a feathered spear at her, and she had no doubt that it was destined to pierce her heart.
Then the lizardman squealed in surprise as the soarwing under him swerved toward the airship. A crossbow bolt sailed through the air, just missing the creature and causing it to duck in the direction of the Phoenix.
The movement shocked Espre into action. She roared at the fire elemental in her mind, and the ship lurched toward the soarwing.
The ring of fire caught one of the thunder lizard’s wings and crisped it in an instant. The beast screeched in mortal pain as it tried to flap away from the airship on its single remaining wing.
Thrown from his mount, the lizardman spun off into the sky and disappeared beyond the port rail. The soarwing, though, flopped toward the deck and landed hard on its wooden surface to the sound of breaking bones. It did not move again.
"Where’s the other one?” Espre yelled. "Where is it?”
Xalt scanned the sky but saw just as little as Espre. Then he flung his head over the bow. A moment later, he sprang back up. "Down there!” he said. "Down and to port!”
Grateful to have some direction to head in—any direction at all—Espre pushed the airship in that direction. As she did, Monja let loose of her leather strap and flung herself to the bridge’s rear gunwale.
"He’s going after the wagon,” Monja said, straining to be heard over the roar of the ring of fire. "He looks like he’s going to— Spirits! He killed one of their horses. I think they’re going to crash!”
Espre’s heart sank, but she pushed out with her mind harder, striving to shove the performance of the airship’s elemental to new heights. Just as the wagon hove into view beneath the twisting and turning Phoenix, something dropped past the airship’s deck at top speed, heading right for the wagon below.
Then Espre realized that the falling object wasn’t something but someone. "Te’oma!” she shouted, fearful of what the treacherous changeling might do. "Te’oma!”
Chapter
34
The horses screamed as their companion lost his footing and sagged in the harness. They fought hard to remain on their hooves, but gravity and momentum worked against them.
Kandler cursed and hauled back on the reins as hard as he could. "Hold on!” he shouted.
The wagon went up on two wheels and threatened to tip right over, but Kandler pulled on the reins and wrestled the surviving horses away from the direction in which their dead fellow had fallen. The beasts bellowed in protest at the way he forced them to twist and turn, but he ignored the noise and forced them to come to a thundering halt and pull the wagon back onto all four wheels.
It was everything Kandler could do to keep his seat. Behind him, he heard Burch growling as the barrels and casks in the back of the wagon threatened to crush him under their rolling bulk. Sallah grunted as she held on to the wagon with her free hand, refusing to drop her sacred blade.
Then the wagon hit a bump, probably just the roots to some long decaying tree, the trunk of which had long rotted away into the swamp. The wheels came to such an abrupt halt that Sallah lost her grip and catapulted forward, past the horses and onto the marshy ground beyond.
"No! ” Kandler shouted. He flung out an arm to grab her as she went by, but his fingers failed to find purchase on her armor. She hit the ground hard and did not get up.
Kandler dropped the reins and leaped from the wagon. As his feet hit the ground, he heard a horrifying screech from above. He flung his head back and saw a soarwing coming straight down at him as he raced for Sallah. The lizardman rider on its back hissed triumphantly and brought back its arm to hurl its last spear through the justicar's heart.
As Kandler reached Sallah, he saw that she still lived. The fall had knocked the air from her lungs, though, and she had yet to catch her breath. He fell to his knees next to her and drew his sword, unwilling to let the long-beaked soarwing have either of them without a fight.
The justicar glanced at the vfagon, but he could not see Burch under the pile of supplies that had crushed forward against the front of the wagon’s bed. The two horses stood there, terrified, and probably would have stampeded off again if they hadn’t had their companion’s corpse weighing down their harnesses.
The soarwing screeched again, closer now, and Kandler’s heart started to pound. Should he cower over Sallah, protecting her with his body, or should he stand and fight?
He leaped to his feet and held his sword over his head, directly between himself and the soarwing. He stood straight over Sallah, ready to hurl himself between her and danger of any sort.
Then he spotted something coming straight at the soarwing, right out of the sky. At first he wondered if it could be the second soarwing, which he’d somehow lost track of. It
moved too fast, though, and it was too small.
Perhaps it was the rider from the other soarwing. It could have tumbled from the back of the creature, just like the one Burch had shot before. Had the shi
fter taken out another rider with a last, desperate shot before he’d disappeared under a pile of supplies? Kandler couldn’t be sure.
Then something struck the ground behind Kandler with a hard, wet sound. He snapped his neck around to see a green-scaled body bounce up from the road beyond him, spraying bits of mud and blood as it arced into the air and came down again.
The soarwing screeched a third time, and when Kandler looked back at it, the creature was reaching for him with its claws. He readied his sword for a desperate swing, hoping to at least be able to take the monstrous lizard with him. If he could manage that, then maybe Sallah and Burch would survive, especially if they could find Espre, Monja, and Xalt, wherever they were now.
He spotted the telltale ring of fire from the airship just then, but the soarwing’s ivory-colored shape eclipsed it before he could do more than focus on the orange blaze. He grasped the hilt of the fangblade in both hands and prepared to swing at the onrushing talons slicing through the air at him.
Kandler knew that the trick to such a defense was to wait until the last possible instant to strike. Swing the sword too soon and you wasted your chance, leaving yourself even more vulnerable to the raptor. Swing too late, and you might never get your chance at all.
The fact that the soarwing was the largest flying predator Kandler had ever seen—outside of a dragon—meant the beast had eaten a lot of other creatures before this. Many of them had probably been snatched up in an attack just like this. Kandler promised himself not to be taken the same way.
Even if the soarwing grabbed him, Kandler hoped to slash the thing to ribbons. Its long, white neck practically begged for the fangblade’s edge, and he meant to make the two meet, whether he survived the encounter or not.
Then the thing zooming up behind the soarwing slammed into its back. Kandler heard a loud crack, as of bone on bone. The lizardman riding the beast was knocked from his perch on the soarwing’s back, and the creature spun forward, head over tail, stunned.
The ground shook when the soarwing smacked into it, just beyond Sallah. It tumbled along from the point of impact like a monstrous ball of sinew and scales until it crashed to a halt in a boggy patch of ground so wet and treacherous that it seemed to start pulling the beast down as soon as it fell in.
Kandler spun about as he watched the soarwing smash into the earth, watching its demise in stunned silence. The fangblade hung loose in his hands as he gaped at the thing. Its wings had to have been forty feet across. He’d probably have swung too early at it just because his brain wouldn’t have been able to believe it had been that large.
For a moment, Kandler wondered if the soarwing represented some ancient, distant relative of the dragons like Nithkorrh. Although the dragons had far greater smarts on their side, when it came to sheer, brute force in the sky the fruit didn’t seem to have fallen far from that fearsome tree.
Kandler heard a horrible, gurgling noise behind him. He turned to see Te’oma standing over the fallen lizardman, whose legs had been shattered in the fall. Before he could say a word to stop her, she took her obsidian dagger and slit open the cold-blooded creature’s throat. His struggles ceased.
Kandler gave the changeling a grim nod. He never liked to see someone killed like that, but he bore no doubts that the lizardman would have done the same to each and every one of them given half the chance.
"Thanks,” he said. He surprised himself by how much he meant it.
The changeling shrugged as if she’d done nothing more than slap down a stinging insect. She bent down and wiped her blade on the lizardman’s sash then sheathed it.
Kandler reached down and helped Sallah to her feet. The lady knight flushed with shame at not having been able to defend herself at the end.
"I should have been the one over you,” she said.
"Play your cards right, and maybe you’ll get a chance later,” Kandler said with a grin.
"I’m not hurt,” Burch said as he extricated himself from the mess of supplies strewn about the back of the wagon. "If anyone cares, that is.”
A bit of blood trickled down from the shifter’s scalp, but he didn’t appear to notice it. He grinned at the others as he wiped the red from his face. "Looks like I missed a good scrap. Everyone still breathing?”
As if in answer, the roar of the airship grew louder. Kandler craned back his neck to look up at the Phoenix and had to step back out of the way as a rope ladder fell down where he had been.
Xalt’s head poked out over the gunwale. "Are you hurt?”
"No,” Kandler shouted as he reached for the ladder and started climbing toward the airship’s deck. Sallah followed close behind him. "How about up there? Where’s Espre?”
"She has the wheel,” the warforged said.
"And Monja?” Burch asked, shading his eyes as he peered up at the Phoenix.
"She’s fine.”
"What happened to the third flyer?”
"The soarwing you forced toward the ring of fire? It’s here on the deck behind me, half-cooked.” The warforged glanced back over his shoulder. "I believe Monja is already cleaning the corpse. She said something about not wanting lo waste a single bit of food before a long ocean voyage.” "Fantastic,” Burch said, flashing a toothy grin. "I hear those things taste like stirges.”
Chapter
35
Kandler breathed in deep the scent of the open sea. From here, the sun still set over Khorvaire, but he knew that this would be the last such dusk he’d enjoy with that piece of land framed in it for some time. The sun’s dying rays lit up the sky like glowing lava, liming the clouds in pinks, purples, and reds. In the distance, he spied a flock of what looked like seagulls working their way along the shore, and he wondered for a moment if they were soarwings instead.
It had been years since Kandler had seen the ocean, and he found that he had missed it more than he’d known. He couldn’t hear the vacillating roar of the pounding surf over the crackling of the Phoenix's ring of fire, but he watched a pod of dolphins playing in the waves and let his mind carry him back to more peaceful times when he could have enjoyed a simple day on a beach.
Growing up in Sharn, the largest city in Breland, he'd spent many a day on the shores of the Dagger River or wandering along the edge of the Hilt. On more than one occasion, his parents had brought the whole family out to Zilspar to visit family. From there they’d made ventures to the ocean proper, and Kandler had fallen in love with it. The smells always conjured thoughts of travel and adventure in his mind, and he credited those trips with inspiring the wanderlust that had caused him to join up with the Citadel as a young man.
As a Brelish agent, he’d traveled throughout much of Khorvaire. He’d seen the Lake of Fire in the Demon Wastes. He’d visited with the Old Woman of the Swamp who stared into the Pond of Shadows in the distant Shadow Marches. He’d walked through the Court of KingKaius in Karrnath, and met more diplomats and mercenaries than he could count.
Since marrying Esprina, though, he’d given up much of that. They’d only been together for a short time before the Day of Mourning—far too short—and after that he’d dedicated himself to taking care of Espre. Bereft of her mother, she’d required much of his attention, and their bond had grown to the point that he considered her to be far more than merely a daughter by marriage.
After'the end of the Last War, he’d helped found Mardakine as a means of plumbing the depths of the Mournland. He’d hoped to discover what had killed his beloved wife along with so many other souls. For whatever reason—responsibilities to Espre, to everyone else in Mardakine—he’d never made much progress.
While he understood that he couldn’t have expected to unlock the secrets of the Mournland, his failure to do so still disappointed him. His head knew that even if he’d spent every waking moment scouring that horrible, wasted place, he probably wouldn’t have had any better luck. His heart, though, bore the guilt of not having given every moment of his life to solving that particular riddle.
He he
ard the footsteps behind him, soft and familiar, and he waited for her to speak. She opened her mouth and began to say something, then flung her arms around his
waist instead. He turned around and embraced her as well. "What’s that for?” he said to Espre.
The young elf smiled up at him. "I just wanted to say thanks.”
"No need,” he said, tousling her hair.
"You don’t even know what I’m thanking you for.” She grinned up at him, and his heart melted. When happy, she reminded him so much of her mother.
"It doesn’t matter,” he said. "You don’t need to say a thing. I already know.”
"I still want to say it,” she said. "For my sake, not yours.”
"In that case, don’t let me get in your way.”
He laughed, and it came light and easy. Now that they were finally on their way across the ocean, he felt as if a millstone had been lifted from his neck. The decision had been made, and there would be no turning back. They would face their fate together.
No danger lurking behind them could do more than pale before the danger they had chosen to confront. "Thank you,” Espre said, "for saving my life.”
"Back there?” Kandler gave her a confused look. "I didn’t do anything more than keep a wagon from crashing. You should be thanking Burch—and Te’oma, I suppose.”
"I already did.” Espre frowned. "Thanking Te’oma wasn’t easy.”
"I don’t suspect it was. One good deed doesn’t make up for everything else.”
"She did help Burch kill Nithkorrh too.” Espre shrugged as if to say how sad it was that there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
"I thought you came here to thank me,” said Kandler. "Sounds like I’ve been pretty useless.”
Espre smiled and gave him another hug. "I think you’ve
done a few amazing things since we left Mardakine too.” "Thanks,” he said, letting gentle sarcasm drip from his tongue.
