Word of Traitors: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 2

by Don Bassingthwaite

  The movement was enough to draw the eye of one of the hobgoblin guards. He swung around.

  Ekhaas, Ashi, and Aruget-Geth were caught in the open. “Toh!” cried the guard. Daavn, Makka, the hobgoblins and bugbears all swung to look as well.

  Their friends froze for an instant, then dashed for the cover of the ridge. Geth saw Daavn’s eyes go wide—and Makka’s narrow with bloodlust. He grabbed Wrath so he could understand the words that were shouted.

  “Get them!” Daavn ordered. “Kill them!”

  The guards were in motion as soon as the command was ordered.

  “They’re mine!” roared Makka. He charged, swinging his fists and bashing hobgoblin guards aside, with Pradoor clinging to his shoulder and cackling like a mad thing. The other bugbears, picks and hammers still in their hands, stood still, obviously uncertain whom to obey. Daavn drew his sword and screamed at them to follow as he took off after Makka. The bugbears roared as Makka had and leaped to the pursuit. They didn’t bother descending the steep stairs cut up to the tomb but jumped from rock to rock across the face of the ridge.

  The distraction had worked, although not just for them. Midian was up and running, stealth abandoned for speed. He looked to be heading for a particularly rough section of the ridge about two long arrowflights away from the gate. Geth waited a heartbeat longer, until Daavn and his men were well away from the tomb, then pushed himself to his feet. “Go!” he said. “Tenquis, can you run?”

  “You should have asked that before,” the tiefling snapped, but he was up already up and running nearly as quickly as Geth himself, if a little more unsteadily. Geth stayed close to him. Chetiin, faster than either of them, paused at the bottom of the stairs, then darted up ahead.

  Tenquis was grimacing in pain by the time he reached the top, but he lurched over to the tomb door and ran his hands over the scarred surface. Geth felt a fresh burst of anger for Daavn and Tariic. The fine carving of Haruuc was nearly destroyed. Only his fierce, watchful face remained. Tenquis caught his look. “It can be repaired,” he said. “A good artificer or even a magewright with a little time can fix anything.”

  The bugbears had taken their tools with them, but Tenquis reached into one of the pockets of his vest and pulled out the heavy steel pry bar Geth had watched him slide into it. He threw it to Geth. “When I tell you, work that in about there”—he pointed to the seam between the door and the frame where a bugbear’s pick had already broken a hole—“and get ready to heave.”

  “That’s not going to work. I told you, the pivots are broken.”

  “And I told you an artificer can fix anything.” He pulled more objects out of his pockets: a couple of tiny flasks, a stick of bright red chalk, and several roughly polished stones. The flasks and the stones he set to the side. Taking the chalk in one hand, he spread the fingers of the other wide and touched them lightly to the door on the side where the pivots had been. His face took on a distant expression and, after a moment, he started to trace out stange lines on the door with the chalk.

  Geth looked to Chetiin. The goblin crouched on the edge of the space before the tomb, watching the ridge where Ekhaas and the others—and their pursuers—had disappeared among the age-carved rocks. Shouts and cries, the scrape and clatter of metal against rock came back over the ridge. Their friends were doing their job, keeping Daavn and his men busy. Geth still felt fear for them in his gut.

  “Have you seen them?” he asked.

  “Glimpses,” said Chetiin just as Ekhaas’s voice rose in a song that ended in a crash and a short, swiftly silenced scream. Geth’s hands tightened on the shaft of the pry bar.

  “Geth, I’m ready,” Tenquis said.

  Both Geth and Chetiin turned around. Tenquis was dusting shimmering powders from the tiny flasks over the chalk-marked door and onto his hands. He nodded at the broken spot he had pointed out before and Geth quickly set the end of the pry bar into it. When he was ready, he nodded back to Tenquis. The tiefling took a deep breath. “As soon as you feel the door shift, work the bar with everything you’ve got,” he said. “We only have one chance at this.”

  He picked up two of the stones, a near match in color and grain for the stone of the door, and held them against his palms with two fingers of each hand. He spread his other fingers and, stretching his arms, pressed them against the door at the top and bottom of his chalked lines. His eyes closed and his face tightened in concentration. His lips moved in a rapid, nearly inaudible whisper.

  There was a clash of blades from the ridge and another sharp scream. Chetiin turned to look. Geth kept his eyes on Tenquis and his grip steady on the pry bar. He could feel sweat forming on his palms.

  Tenquis’s teeth clenched. His whispers slid between them.

  Stone creaked.

  Through the steel bar, Geth felt a distinct vibration as the door shivered and rose by the tiniest fraction. He threw his weight against the bar, hauling at it. For an instant, steel grated against stone, then the tip of the bar caught again and held. Geth strained, his muscles cracking and popping.

  The door moved.

  Geth groaned at the weight of it. He ground his teeth together until they hurt and heaved harder on the bar. The thickness of stone that stood out from the frame grew slowly. A finger’s width. A finger’s length. Two fingers’ lengths. A dagger’s length.

  Darkness appeared. Chetiin seized a loose rock and shoved it into the gap. Geth drew back the pry bar and thrust it into the darkness before the stone could crack. The heavy steel squealed as it took the weight of the door. Geth drew a breath and shifted, letting the ancient heritage of his blood give new energy to his muscles before he stepped around, worked his fingers into the thin gap and pulled. Tenquis moved with him, hands resting steady on the stone, whispers rising.

  The gap grew. Geth could have slipped through sideways. “Enough!” he gasped at Tenquis.

  “All the way or it will swing closed on us,” said the artificer, and even those few words interrupting his whispers brought new creaking from the unseen pivots. Geth groaned again and kept pulling. Step by step, back until the mouth of the tomb gaped wide. He waited for a shout from Daavn or one of his men as they caught a glimpse of what was happening and realized they’d been tricked. None came.

  “Almost there!” said Tenquis—and pulled his hands away from the door, getting out from behind it. There was a crunch and a grinding sound as the magic that had held the shattered pivots together faltered. For an instant, Geth felt the unbearable weight of the door against his arms. He pulled with all his strength, trying to hold in the straining cry that threatened to escape him.

  The door shifted one last time, then ground to a stop, striking the side of the tomb with a gentle tap. Geth’s arms and shoulders felt heavy and numb. His legs trembled, but he limped around to the front of the tomb and the doorway.

  Chetiin was already standing in the shadows, poised at the top of a dark staircase. Tenquis pulled a stone that glimmered pale as moonlight from his pocket. Geth drew Wrath. He could feel the presence of the Rod of Kings pulsing in the sword.

  They stepped down into Haruuc’s tomb together, moving away from sun and into shadow. The cold stench of cave damp and slow decay rose to meet them. Tenquis’s moonstone—shedding just enough light for shifter or dar or tiefling eyes to see—revealed walls that changed from worked stone to rough, natural rock as they descended. The stairs became rougher, too, hacked out of the floor of a steep passage wide enough for two broad-shouldered men to walk side by side. The words that the hobgoblin priests had spoken at Haruuc’s funeral came back to Geth.

  Traditions tell that the People were born in caverns and lived there before we emerged to fight beneath the sun and the sky. When we pass through the gates of death, we return to caverns, the womb and the grave.

  The steep passage grew taller. Glints of light shone ahead, reflections of the moonstone, and they emerged into a cave perhaps twice as big as Geth’s quarters in Khaar Mbar’ost and far taller, heaped with
gold and treasures.

  Lhesh Haruuc Shaarat’kor sat on his throne in the midst of this tribute, both eye sockets empty now as they stared at the stone sky.

  Geth stopped at the bottom of the passage and looked on the remains of the father of Darguun, haste brushed aside by a curious sense of awe. He’d watched the corpse being carried down into the tomb, had walked with it through Rhukaan Draal. Haruuc was as dead now as he’d been then, yet somehow there was a particular solemn majesty about him. It wasn’t so much the wealth that surrounded him as it was the unnatural stillness of something dead, alone in the unchanging solitude of one of Eberron’s small secret places. Geth felt like an intruder. He lowered Wrath and bent his head in a nod of respect.

  Tenquis must have felt it too. He bowed low, a flourishing gesture that was distinctly tiefling. Chetiin, however, didn’t move at all for a long, long moment and it took all that time for Geth to realize that this would be the first chance he’d had to see Haruuc up close since Midian had attacked him.

  When the goblin finally moved, he walked directly up to Haruuc’s seated corpse, knelt down, and opened a small chest that rested by Haruuc’s feet. From inside it, he took the ugly, crystal-set dagger named Witness—the dagger that had been stolen from him, the dagger that had killed Haruuc. He pressed the flat of the blade to his heart as he looked up at the lhesh and Geth heard him murmur, “You will be avenged, my friend.” He slid the dagger into an empty sheath on his right forearm, then turned back to Geth and Tenquis. “Find the rod,” he said.

  Geth raised Wrath again and swung it around the cave. Awareness of the Rod of Kings prickled across his senses. To the left and across the cavern—the sword pointed directly at a pile of rolled carpets. Geth had to admit that it was a good hiding place. If by chance the tomb was pilfered while the rod was within, the fine but bulky carpets would almost certainly be ignored in favor of gold and gems. “There!” said Geth. He stepped toward the carpets.

  Something flickered in the very corner of his vision, high up among the shadows of one wall of the cavern. Something pale, quickly obscured by the movement of something dark that gave a soft snap.

  He threw himself back with a curse at the same moment a crossbow bolt hissed through the space where he’d been. It sank deep into the wood of a treasure chest. Shadows leaped across the cavern wall as Tenquis raised the moonstone. Its pale light revealed Midian, perched in the mouth of narrow crack, already sighting along the stock of a small hand crossbow once more. The gnome gave a crooked grin and winked at Geth before he squeezed the trigger.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  3 Aryth

  The rocks of the ridge made a challenging hunting ground. Makka’s initial charge carried him to the arm of the ridge behind which Ekhaas, Ashi, and Geth had sought shelter, but his quarry had already vanished into the rough gray folds. At the point where a shallow gully broke the slope he paused and tested the air with flaring nostrils. They hadn’t lingered—they were moving higher. He crouched. “Get off, Pradoor,” he said. “Wait here.”

  “And do what?” The old goblin woman clung tight to his shoulder. “Admire the sounds of battle? My place is with you. The age turns.”

  Makka bared his teeth for all the good that it did. Her blind eyes didn’t see him. “I can’t fight with you on my back.”

  “The age turns around both of us.” Pradoor’s fingers dug into him. “We serve—”

  “—the Six,” Makka said through his teeth. “But the Fury puts my revenge before me.”

  “Then why do you hesitate to follow her path?” asked Pradoor. “The Six reward those who serve.”

  Makka snarled and rose to his feet just as rocks clattered along the arm of the ridge behind him. He whirled to find two of Daavn’s bugbear workers clambering over the crest of the slope. The other bugbears, iron hammer and pry bar in hand, paused at the sight of him. Makka tensed his ears, thrust out his chest, and growled.

  The other bugbears hunched back. Their ears flattened and they ducked their heads, offering submission in the ancient manner. When Makka turned again and continued on up the ridge, they fell into line behind him. On his shoulder, Pradoor chuckled.

  He felt like the leader of a tribe again. But better. Stronger. The favor of the Fury was on him.

  The age turned around him.

  Somewhere behind him, Daavn was shouting his name. He ignored it.

  The peak of the ridge broke into a jumble of pits and crevices and more gullies, some shallow, some twice his height in depth, all of them offering hiding places. A scattering of stunted trees and bushes on the backside gave even more cover. The only figures visible were Daavn’s other workers. They saw him and the pair of bugbears that followed him and, one by one, they offered their silent submission. Makka gestured to them all with crisp movements, ordering them to spread out among the broken places of the ridge. His gut told him that his enemies wouldn’t have gone far—they would stay near the tomb.

  Daavn and his hobgoblins came trotting up behind him with a clatter of armor. The warlord’s ears were back and his sword was out. “Maabet, I knew we should have killed them in the dungeon.”

  Makka swung around to glare at him. “Their deaths are mine,” he said. “The Fury gives them to me.”

  The guards with Daavn had the sense to flinch back, but Daavn just leaned into Makka’s anger. “If I find them first, I will kill them, gift of the Fury or not. They’re not going to stop Tariic from taking what’s—”

  A weird, fluting battlecry and the sudden clash of weapons interrupted him. Makka knew the cry—it belonged to Ashi of Deneith. Shouts in Goblin answered it as bugbears converged on the crevice where the dust of battle rose. Makka put his back to Daavn and raced with them, leaping across the tops of mounds and spires. One bugbear reached the crevice before the others and dropped down into it with a roar, but his cry turned to a gurgle. The swirl of dust faded even as Makka reached the crevice. Two bugbears lay dead within, one stabbed through the heart, one with his belly ripped open.

  Their assailants were gone, vanished into the maze of broken rock. “They’re close!” Makka shouted. “Look for them from above. They can’t hide from you.”

  Even as the words left his mouth, one of the other bugbears yelped and fell hard on his face, his feet pulled out from under him by a loop of rope. Makka saw shock in the bugbear’s eyes as he was dragged back. Big hands clutched at the rock, but as half his body disappeared down into a pit, he thrashed abruptly and went still.

  The lithe form of a shifter, spattered with blood, vaulted up out of the pit. Geth flashed a grin at Makka, thumped his chest in salute, then dived into another crevice.

  Makka howled in rage. Daavn appeared, his guards in close formation behind him. Makka thrust a finger at the crevice. “Geth’s in there! You go after him and we’ll take the top!” He grabbed a bugbear with his other hand and dragged him forward.

  Daavn glanced into the crevice—and jerked back as a stone whistled past his head. The warlord’s face twisted in anger. He whirled his sword around his head in command, then he and his soldiers plunged after Geth. Makka raced to the edge of the crevice, shouting for the other bugbears to converge on him.

  One of them didn’t make it. A duur’kala’s keening song rose on the air. Stone cracked and the worker who had been the first to submit to Makka vanished as the rock wall on which he stood collapsed. His cry rose above the rumble of sliding rock, ending abruptly.

  At the same time, a hobgoblin gasped in pain. A blur of hair and blood, Geth popped up out of the crevice and dodged into another. Makka howled again. “It’s like fighting spirits, Pradoor! They strike and run!”

  “Make them stand!” the goblin said, slapping his head. “The Fury favors you”—her voice rose—“as the Six favor all those who fight for Darguun!”

  The words were met with a roar from dar throats, but they were more than just an inspiration. Makka felt the blessing wrap around him like the embrace of victory. Stre
ngth and confidence flowed into him. He ripped the bright sword of Deneith from its scabbard and turned, looking for a target. Any target.

  Across the ridge, Ashi, a stolen hobgoblin sword poised to strike, rose up silently behind one of the two remaining bugbears. Makka pointed his sword—her sword—at her. “Fight me, Ashi of Deneith!” he bellowed. “Fight me!”

  She jerked at the challenge, startled to be caught. Her intended target turned. Sword met steel bar with the ring of metal on metal. Weapons drew back for another exchange of blows.

  Makka charged along the ridge. “By the Fury, fight me!”

  He felt the power of the Fury move through him, binding him to Ashi. She felt it, too. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t let down her guard. The bugbear she fought swung his pry bar. Ashi turned it easily, then whipped her sword at his chest.

  The bond between Makka and her tightened like a noose. Sudden pain wracked Ashi’s face—Makka felt an echo of it like the sweetest of stings. Her swing faltered and the killing blow became a flesh wound. Her opponent stumbled back.

  Ashi tried to strike him again, but once more Makka felt the Fury’s power pull tight. Ashi’s face grew pale, the swirling lines of her dragonmark leaping out in sharp contrast.

  Then he was on her. Human sword in dar hands clashed against dar sword in human hands.

  Through their bond, Makka felt Ashi’s pain ease now that she submitted to the power of his challenge, but it had hurt her. He could see it in her face and feel it in her blows. She was slower than the last time they had fought—even if he was now fighting with Pradoor perched on his shoulder like a cackling bird. The old goblin laughed with glee. “For the Six!” she cried. “For the Six!”

  “Close your mouth!” Ashi thrust at Pradoor.