Skein of Shadows (dungeons and dragons)

by Marsheila Rockwell

  Tellingly, the crest portrayed one house larger than the other two. Sabira was sure that must be Cannith South, headed by Merrix d’Cannith and controlling the family’s holdings in Breland, Zilargo, Darguun and now, apparently, Xen’drik.

  As they entered through the gates, Greddark paused.

  “It’s very… blue.”

  Sabira snorted. It was that. Everbright lanterns in the shape of dragonshards adorned virtually every curved cornice, rounded windows blazed with light, and the undercarriages of magically-powered lifts similar to those in the City of Towers glowed even in the noontide sun. And they were all a bright, blinding blue.

  “Maybe it’s Merrix’s favorite color?”

  The Burnished Bull was on the left, but Sabira’s attention was caught by a House Cannith monitor challenging a group of three warforged just to the right of the enclave gate. Though she couldn’t hear everything, it seemed clear that the warforged were unhappy at being treated as mere laborers-or worse, virtual slaves-and were taking out their frustrations verbally on the hapless human. Sabira decided she didn’t particularly want to be around when the argument moved from heated words to unsheathed blades.

  “This way.”

  She led Greddark over to the tavern, passing beneath the sign that spun between two dragonshard-tipped horns. The motif was carried throughout the entire establishment-and indeed, the whole district-with the ends of steam pipes fashioned to look like snorting bulls and posts and poles on every edifice echoing the curvature of a gorgon’s horns.

  The Canniths liked to style the Burnished Bull as an open-air establishment in the same vein as the Bogwater over in the Phiarlan enclave. But where the Bogwater was spacious and open to the sky, the Bull was dark and cramped, huddled under a wooden building supported by heavy vertical timbers, with some tables situated in the resulting shade and others open to the elements on a small patio. Posters were tacked up on some of the posts and on the patio walls, advertising everything from repair services for warforged to custom goggles for artificers. One small sheet showed a picture of an iron defender and offered grooming services, but Sabira was fairly certain it was meant as a joke.

  The still was actually the most remarkable thing about the tavern. Like everything else in the ward, it glowed blue. Pumping pistons and shifting gears moved around its central vat, but Sabira was fairly sure they were only there for show, to make the tavern’s tinkering patrons feel as if they’d never left their cluttered workshops.

  Despite Loghan’s assertion, there were only two warforged in the tavern, one of whom was the barkeep. The only other patrons were a halfling woman in a teal dress, a female elf with dark hair lounging against a post and reading a book, and another elf-blond and male-sitting on the patio admiring the view. None of them looked like artificers to her, a fact which the second warforged was loudly lamenting. She was beginning to wonder if Loghan might have misled her.

  Greddark, who’d been content to follow her lead since they’d met in Sharn, stepped around her and walked up to the bar, taking the seat beside the complaining warforged.

  “I understand you’re in need of an artificer? You’re in luck, friend. Darkgred d’Kundarak, Artificer and Other Things, at your service.” He stuck out a hand to the warforged. “What seems to be the problem?”

  The warforged turned to him, the violet crystals of his eyes glowing. Though the metal construct’s face wasn’t capable of expression, he appeared to be sizing Greddark up. Seemingly satisfied with what he saw, he took the dwarf’s hand and answered.

  “Dark Red? But your hair is white.”

  Greddark blinked and Sabira had to stifle a laugh. His hair did look white in the glow from the still.

  “ ‘Dark’ is fine. And you are?”

  “Kupper-Nickel. And as a matter of fact, I do need an artificer’s service-either that, or a carpenter’s.” He lifted up a metal plate on his left arm to reveal sinuous muscles formed of wood. There were several discolored patches where the brown fibers were cracked and flaking.

  Greddark clicked his tongue.

  “Dry rot. Made a trip to the islands recently?”

  “How did you know that?” If the warforged had eyebrows, Sabira was sure they would have shot up in time with the Wayfinder’s surprised tone.

  “It’s caused by a fungus-not something you’d be likely to get doing airship runs to and from the desert. And it requires more moisture to take hold than you’d get here in the city, even with the constant drizzle.” Sabira was so used to the periodic warm rain that she hadn’t paid any attention when it had started again, but this was the dwarf’s first time in Stormreach, so of course he’d noticed. “Could have gotten it spelunking, I suppose, except it looks like the light in your right eye is a little dim, so I’m guessing you haven’t been seeing as well in the dark as you normally do. You’d have noticed the difference if you’d been underground recently.”

  Sabira was impressed. She knew the dwarf was good at what he did-Aggar wouldn’t have sent him along otherwise-but she hadn’t expected him to be quite so observant. She resolved to be a little more careful what she revealed around him from now on.

  The bartender spoke up.

  “So he will lose the arm, then?”

  “ What?” Kupper-Nickel exclaimed, his voice somehow managing to convey a higher octave than his vocal chords were actually capable of making.

  “No, no,” Greddark hastened to assure him. “It’s true, when found in a building or a ship, a carpenter’s first reaction is usually to hack out the affected wood and graft in new timber, but you’re neither of those things-and I am not a carpenter. I’m an artificer, and we do things the right way.”

  He pulled one of the silver charms off his gold armband. It grew in his hand until he held a short length of carved ivory that bore a large sapphire on one end and a diamond on the other. He grinned at Sabira.

  “Whipped this up when Aggar told me we were going into the desert. Didn’t think I’d get a chance to try it out before then.”

  “Try-?” Kupper-Nickel repeated, but Greddark grabbed the warforged’s wrist and jabbed the blue tip of the wand into the diseased wood.

  “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt. Much.” He thumbed a silver switch on the side of the wand and said, “Desiccate!”

  Nothing seemed to happen for a moment, but then she saw the warforged stiffen. She watched as the blue color bled from the sapphire and into the diamond on the other end, like water flowing from one vessel to another. When the once-blue sapphire was as white as the diamond had been, Greddark thumbed the switch again and removed the wand from Kupper-Nickel’s arm. It shrank back down to the size of the other charms, and he replaced it on his bracelet.

  “How’s that feel?”

  The dark spots on the warforged’s arm had lightened to match the color of the rest of the wood. The Wayfinder used his other hand to peel off chunks of dried-out wood like scabs, revealing normal-looking “muscle” below. He opened and closed his empty hand a few times, and Sabira watched as the wooden sinews flexed in response.

  “Good as new,” the warforged replied, a smile that would never grace his face still infusing his words with pleasure. “But what did you do?”

  “Trick I learned from a ranger I knew once, actually. ‘If it’s dry rot, then dry it’s not.’ It’s simple: Fungi need moisture to survive. Get rid of the water and the fungus dies. I actually figured we’d find the hydration properties of the wand more useful, but even when an artificer gets it wrong, he gets it right.”

  Sabira rolled her eyes. Greddark was a little too self-satisfied for his own good, but before she could find just the right quip to bring him down a notch, Kupper-Nickel laughed, a strange tinny sound made even more bizarre by the fact that the warforged’s mouth didn’t move.

  “He does indeed! What do I owe you, Dark, Artificer and Other Things?”

  “How about passage to Trent’s Well?” Sabira answered quickly before the dwarf could respond. While Boroman ir’D
ayne had written them a letter of introduction to Brannan ir’Kethras, he hadn’t given them any means of actually finding the head of the Tarath Marad excavation. And while she could have bought passage easily enough with Breven’s letter of credit, she wanted to save the bulk of that money for supplies and something resembling decent mercenaries.

  “Fair enough,” the Wayfinder replied, holding out his hand. Greddark shook it somewhat sullenly before shooting a glare at Sabira.

  The warforged turned to the barkeep, Glaive, to settle up his bill. Sabira took the opportunity to move closer to the dwarf, lowering her voice.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Greddark harrumphed.

  “I was going to tell him he could buy me a cup of tea.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Wir, Barrakas 4, 998 YK

  Stormreach, Xen’drik.

  Kupper-Nickel told them they were in luck. He had a desert run planned for today, but he had to leave right at the fourth bell. Gratitude notwithstanding, he had a schedule to keep. If they weren’t at Falconer’s Spire and aboard his red-winged airship by then, he’d have to go on without them and they’d either have to wait another two weeks for him to return or find someone else to take them. But considering the majority of the trips to Xen’drik’s interior were funded one way or another by the Aurum-which meant Arach-that wasn’t really an option. So Sabira’s next order of business was getting a group of men together to accompany her and Greddark across the desert and into the darkness below it. Quickly.

  “Why not just go to the captain of the Sentinel Marshal outpost here?” the inquisitive asked as they sat at a table at the Burnished Bull. “Once he knows Breven sent you, surely he’ll give you his best and brightest for the task.”

  Sabira laughed at that.

  “First, Greigur wouldn’t give me charge of his best men if Dol Dorn himself appeared and commanded it to be so.” The Sovereign God of Strength and Steel, most Marshals revered either him or his sister, Dol Arrah, the Sovereign Goddess of Sun and Sacrifice. Though if Sabira had been pressed to choose, she would have eschewed them both for Olladra. At least the goddess of luck didn’t pretend she was anything other than fickle.

  “Second, Breven doesn’t want him to know anything about it. Greigur would be far more likely to send his own men after the artifact than he would be to help the Baron retrieve it, so we’ve got to make sure he doesn’t know anything about it. Which is going to make hiring a handful of Deneith soldiers under his nose a very tricky proposition.”

  “Why do they have to be Deneith?”

  That gave Sabira pause. Breven hadn’t told her she needed to hire men from the House; in fact, he hadn’t specifically told her she needed to take anyone with her at all, though he must have meant for her to do so when he gave her access to his bank account.

  But thirty Blademarks and a powerful sorceress had gone down into Tarath Marad, and the only one who returned was their guide. If Sabira was going to follow in their footsteps, she wanted the best warriors she could find at her back. She’d just assumed they’d be wearing the Deneith chimera on their armor, but Greddark was right. There were other mercenaries in Stormreach, ones whose services could be bought without Greigur’s knowledge, and their steel was just as sharp as that of anyone who wore the green and yellow.

  Sabira chuckled self-deprecatingly. As often as she ridiculed others for their blind obedience to the House, her assumption that Deneith warriors were superior to any others simply by virtue of their name was just another side of the same coin. She was suddenly glad she wasn’t traveling with either Aggar or Elix-both of them would have seen her hypocrisy in an instant, and only one of them might have kept quiet about it.

  “They don’t, necessarily. But I don’t know who else we can find, hire, and supply before the fourth bell.”

  Greddark shrugged. “How about some warforged? A lot of them don’t seem too happy working for Cannith right now; I’d bet they’d jump at the chance to prove they’re more than just two-legged toolboxes.” He looked over at Glaive, who was bringing them two mugs of cider, since the tavern sadly carried neither tea nor dwarven whiskey.

  “No offense meant,” he said to the warforged.

  “The mere fact that you are concerned I might be offended proves that,” the barkeep replied as he set down their drinks. “How many warriors do you need?”

  Sabira chewed her lip thoughtfully. Tilde had gone in with thirty men, but the very size of her party could have led to its demise-the larger the group, the harder it was to pass unnoticed by the things that lurked in the shadows, or to maneuver in tight places when such notice could not be escaped.

  She looked over at Greddark inquiringly, but the dwarf shrugged, as if to say, “It’s your show.”

  “It’s not a question of how many,” she said after a moment. “It’s a question of how good they are.”

  Glaive nodded his approval.

  “In that case, you will want to speak to Bardiche. He is a warforged in search of a purpose-better you give it to him than the Lord of Blades.”

  “The Lord of Blades?” Sabira repeated in surprise. “I didn’t know his cult extended this far outside the Mournland.”

  She didn’t know much about the shadowy figure, and everything she had heard was full of exaggeration and contradiction. By all accounts a powerful and charismatic warforged, the Lord of Blades was rumored to be building an empire for the living constructs out of the bones and ashes of the nation that had once been Cyre-though for what purpose, no one could truly say. She’d heard him variously described as a teacher and a prophet, a warlord and a madman. The truth, of course, was probably somewhere in between those extremes.

  What she hadn’t heard was that he had any interest-or sway-in Stormreach. That would certainly explain the unrest among the Cannith warforged. Though the Treaty of Thronehold had given the warforged their freedom at the end of the Last War, there were many people who still regarded the metal men as little more than slaves. Even the most enlightened tended to see the warforged, who had originally been created as weapons of war, as painful reminders of that century-long struggle. Few accepted them as actual people, let alone individuals with abilities and desires that might well have nothing to do with warfare.

  If asked, she would have said Stormreach, home of misfits and outcasts, was a perfect haven for warforged-or anyone, really-struggling to find acceptance in the wider world of Eberron. Apparently, she would have been wrong.

  “There are many Bladesworn among my brethren now,” Glaive replied. “Some say the Lord of Blades himself has come to Xen’drik, seeking an ancient device that will give him ultimate power.”

  “Lot of that going around,” Greddark said, and Sabira kicked him beneath the table.

  “So where can I find this Bardiche?” she asked a little too loudly, giving the dwarf a dirty look.

  Glaive seemed oblivious to the exchange. More likely, he just didn’t know what to make of the silly fleshlings.

  “When last I saw him, he was near the Maker’s Gate with two others, arguing with one of the monitors. If he has not yet been taken into custody for his impertinence, you may still find him there. You will know him by the dramatic flourishes he uses when he speaks. I believe his makers may originally have intended for him to serve House Phiarlan.”

  “Wait. They arrest people for impertinence here? You might as well turn yourself in now, Sabira,” Greddark quipped, pushing the bench back to avoid another blow to his shin as he made to rise.

  Before Sabira could think of a properly scathing rejoinder, Glaive put a hand on the dwarf’s shoulder to stop him.

  “Your pardon, Dark Artificer, but having seen your skill in aiding Kupper-Nickel, I am hopeful you might be able to assist another of my brethren who has all but lost the use of his right arm. The Cannith artificers want to remove it and replace it with a blade or a hammer, or some other implement of war. Perhaps even something similar to a rune arm-”

  “Rune arm
!” Greddark interrupted with a disdainful snort. “Don’t know what the Canniths see in them. Bulky things. Make it impossible to drink your tea. Give me blade or a wand any day.”

  Glaive paused for a moment, nonplussed. When he was sure the dwarf’s outburst was over, he continued.

  “But Jester has worked diligently to master the lyre and fears that he will no longer be able to play once they are finished with him. If you could perhaps offer him another alternative, I know he would be very grateful. He might even be willing to join you on your quest. While he longs to play at the Livewood, he is quite agile and his services might be of use to you.”

  Greddark looked over at her, and Sabira shrugged.

  “Go. I can talk to Bardiche myself. Though I’m not really sure we need two jesters on this trip. Maybe if the warforged turns out to be funnier, I’ll take him with me instead and you can stay here and keep pretending you’re a Cannith instead of a Kundarak.”

  She gave him an acid smile and stood up.

  “Better than pretending I’m a Deneith,” the dwarf muttered under his breath as she walked away, but she acted like she hadn’t heard him.

  “… can’t loiter around here all day. Move along.”

  The Cannith monitor-a different one from when they’d first come into the enclave-was waving his crossbow around as the lead warforged responded theatrically, wringing his hands. The gesture was both amusing and somewhat pathetic, given his face’s total lack of ability to convey the accompanying anguish.

  “All we want are jobs. A mission, a reason to exist. If we cannot find that here, where we were made, then where can we?”

  Glaive was right. Bardiche would have fit right in with the players of House Phiarlan. He’d have made an excellent actor if he’d been anything other than a warforged.

  “That’s not my problem,” the monitor replied impatiently as Sabira approached. “You need to move along. Word is the warforged are becoming a danger to the peace-loving residents of this ward.”