The Killing Song: The Dragon Below Book III

by Don Bassingthwaite

  CHAPTER

  15

  The passage was straight, broad, its walls broken only by a few closed doors and decorated with more of Bava’s murals—further confirmation of Dandra’s guess that the terrace had been for the arena’s better clients. It had the same air of abandonment as the exterior of the arena, but there were also signs of activity. A couple of cheap cold fire torches had been jammed into ill-fitting brackets. A thin path of footprints was worn into the dust and debris of the floor. One of the doors off the passage was partly ajar, and more cold fire lit the room beyond. There was no sound within. Dandra peered inside without touching the door. She could see the corner of sleeping pallet, as well as a heap of scattered clothing. Swirling marks had been drawn on the walls as if by a bored child, but these scrawls resembled the patterns of a dragonmark. They surrounded other rough drawings—clouds and lightning and ships of strange design—and Dandra clenched her teeth as she eased away from the door.

  “Dah’mir hasn’t abandoned Vennet yet,” she said.

  Singe lifted his rapier. “Good.”

  As they moved closer to the far end of the passage, Dandra became aware of a smell in the air. At first it was merely stale, but it quickly grew stronger and more pungent. By the time they stood at the base of a short flight of stairs leading up into the open space of the arena, it was a sickening stench. The air was thick with it. Dandra pressed a hand over her nose and mouth and fought back a rising nausea.

  “Bird droppings,” said Singe in answer to her unasked question. “Bird droppings and rotting bodies.” He eased one of the cold fire torches from its bracket, damping the glow of the heatless magical flames in his free hand, and mounted the stairs. Dandra followed him.

  They stood at the rear of what must once have been the best seats in the arena, close enough to the oval ring for a good view, far enough back to be out of danger if combat went awry. The light that leaked through Singe’s fingers fell on one large chair that remained in place, a cushion moldering on the seat. Others lay scattered in pieces.

  Firelight shone up from the arena floor, flickering in long shadows across the steep tiers of benches that circled the arena, their empty ranks broken by other private boxes higher up. Just as Moon—or Virikhad—had said, the arena had no roof and was open in the center to what passed for sky in Malleon’s Gate. The light from below made the opening seem even darker and turned the sagging poles and tattered remains of canvas that had once been awnings over the upper ranks of benches into great ribs trailing scraps of flesh. Both the broken awnings and the benches beneath them were marked with long white streaks of bird droppings. Dandra guessed that the droppings had come from Dah’mir’s herons, though none of the black birds were visible. Maybe they were all up in Overlook, watching Fan Adar.

  Singe breathed in her ear. “Do you feel Dah’mir’s presence?”

  In their other encounters with the dragon, Dandra had felt his dominating presence tugging at the edge of her consciousness before she’d actually seen him. This time, though, she felt nothing. “No,” she answered, “but that could be because Ashi’s dragonmark protects me.”

  She stepped off the air and, staying low, moved cautiously forward until she could look over the low rail that surrounded the box and see down into the ring below. Her breath caught in her teeth.

  That light that danced around the arena came from cold fire that burned on several stout posts set into the floor of the arena. The stench of decay that filled the air came from five bodies that lay within the circle. Dandra looked away, forced air into her lungs, and made herself look back again.

  The arena floor was covered in sand. At one end, in the twilight beyond the torches’ glow, the sand lay in rolls and billows as if it had been scraped up and pushed around to make a bed for some huge creature—almost certainly Dah’mir in his dragon form. At the other end, lay the bodies, and the sand around them had been washed as smooth as a beach at water’s edge—except instead of water, it had been blood and other fluids that had smoothed the sand. Three of the bodies lay together, and two of those showed the most advanced decay. Both had bloated, and one had burst, then liquefied so that its blackened tissues spread out as if running off its bones. By contrast, the third body in the cluster was emaciated, pale, and stiff. From above, Dandra couldn’t tell how he had died.

  She knew the body had been a man because of his clothes. From the clothes, embroidered in distinctive patterns of metallic thread, she also knew he had been a kalashtar. The filth-crusted clothes that pinched the more decayed bodies were likewise kalashtar in design.

  The other two bodies, though, were not kalashtar. One was a human, the other a dwarf, and most of the blood that soaked the sand spread out around them. Deep, dark-edged gashes crossed their throats. Their gaunt faces were waxy and sunken, but they hadn’t bloated yet—they hadn’t been dead as long as the kalashtar. Flies flew around all of the bodies and across the blood-stained sand in clouds thick as smoke. Dandra could hear the hum of them from where she stood.

  The flies also circled a long work table that had been set on the sand just behind where the human and the dwarf lay, but they found far less of interest there and didn’t linger. Dandra’s gaze darted over the myriad things that littered the table: tools, clamps, smooth pieces of wood that might have been models or forms of some kind, partly used spools of bright gold wire, a vessel containing thin plates a handspan long of the same metal, another vessel of clear crystal baubles. A heavy brazier, as cold and lifeless as the corpses, stood nearby. Along the sides of the table and from the table to the brazier, the sand had been trodden into a hard-packed path. The feet of the dwarf and the human still lay on it.

  Singe had joined her at the rail. Dandra felt him tense. “Twelve moons,” he said. “Look—on the end of the table. Do you see that?”

  She saw. It was a box of dull gray metal, unadorned and unassuming, but she knew that box. It was the box that had been hidden for thousands of years inside the Grieving Tree of Taruuzh Kraat. It was the box with which Dah’mir and Vennet had fled the ancient Dhakaani stronghold.

  It was the box that contained—or at least had contained—the black binding stones that Dah’mir would turn against the kalashtar.

  “Light of il-Yannah,” Dandra swore softly. “He wouldn’t have just left the stones out in the open, would he?”

  “Most people don’t just leave bodies rotting in the open either.”

  Dandra looked around the arena again. Except for the flies, there was no sign of movement or life. There was no sign of Dah’mir in any of his forms. Her eyes went back to the box, then to the bodies on the sand. “We need to have a closer look,” she said.

  Singe nodded agreement and jammed the torch he carried into a crevice in the rail around the box, a marker in the darkness. There were shadowed gates below—most closed, at least one ajar—opening onto the floor of the arena, but to reach whatever passages led to them, they would have had to find their way through the arena’s innards. At the end of the box seats, however, the rail was low and easily crossed, giving them access to the regular seats and to stairs among the benches that led toward the arena floor. The stairs ended at a wall around the ring that left a fair drop to the sand below. Dandra paused at the wall, took another careful look around, then swung herself over and dropped to the floor. Her feet touched the sand for only a moment before she pushed off to remain floating above it, her spear at the ready. When Singe was down as well, they moved forward together. Up close, the humming of the flies was a loud drone.

  The bodies of the human and the dwarf were closest, and they paused by them first. In spite of the decay that had set in, the hands of both were clearly bruised, nicked, and burned as if from many hours of careful labor. Many, many hours to judge by the path worn into the sand. Even in death, their fingers were gnarled, marked for eternity with dents the exact size of the wire on the table. Their legs had been shackled with a length of chain, enough to have permitted them to walk awkwardly, but
not to run. “They were prisoners,” Dandra guessed. “Dah’mir had them working on something.”

  “Their clothes are good,” Singe said. “Too good for Malleon’s Gate.” He looked at the tools and materials on the table and the muscles of his jaw tightened. “I think they were goldsmiths, probably from the upper city.”

  “What do you think they were doing?”

  Singe stepped in silence over to the metal box, examined it for a moment, and opened the lid.

  When Vennet had seized the box in Taruuzh Kraat and opened it, only Geth had been in a position to get a good look inside. Dandra had touched his mind with kesh, though, and he’d shared what he’d seen. As if she’d seen it herself, the memory of twenty blue-black dragonshards, each no bigger than a finger and wrapped in a filigree of gold, shining against ancient, crumbling red fabric, had been burned into her mind.

  The red fabric was gone from the box now and the individual binding stones replaced with neatly stacked creations of twisted gold. Singe drew one out and held it up. Plates and wires of gold, interspersed with clear crystals, had been fashioned into a sort of bracer, a long cuff to fit around the forearm. In a way, it was beautiful—and also sinister. Mounted on the bracer, fastened within a cage of gold, was one of the binding stones. Just as she had when Vennet had first held up one of the ancient stones, Dandra felt a chill pass through her at the sight of it. She could feel the stone like a void on the edge of her awareness. She took a step back, but couldn’t take her eyes off the golden bracer.

  The swirls of metal and crystal reminded her of something else, of the great device Dah’mir had used beneath the Bonetree mound to exchange the minds of Tetkashtai, Medalashana, and Virikhad with those of their psicrystals, the first step in recreating them as servants of the Master of Silence. The bracers were so much smaller than that device, though—but then the binding stone that Dah’mir had used in the device had been a larger, weaker imitation of Taruuzh’s stones. Dandra swallowed as an idea came to her.

  “Singe, is there a place where a second stone could be set?” she asked.

  The wizard inspected the bracer and nodded, then looked into the box and frowned. “There are no more binding stones, though,” he said. “They’re all set in bracers already.”

  Her heart felt as hard and heavy as a rock in her chest. “The second setting isn’t for a binding stone. How many bracers are there?”

  Singe’s lips moved as he counted quickly. “Only seventeen.”

  Dandra glided past him toward the bodies of the kalashtar. Flies buzzed around her, settling on her skin and tangling in her hair. She brushed them away but they just came back. Holding her breath against the stench, she looked down at the three dead kalashtar. Unlike the human and the dwarf, they wore no chains. Dah’mir’s power would have held them captive.

  Just as she had expected, all three wore one of Dah’mir’s bracers—and the second setting on each had been filled with a psicrystal. Each of the three bracers was different, however. The one fastened around the arm of the most decayed body was the crudest, the one worn by the slightly-less decayed corpse a little more refined. The bracer worn by the body that was only emaciated was identical to the bracer that Singe held. Hanamelk had said that three kalashtar were missing from Fan Adar, unaccounted for among the victims of the killing song but presumed dead under its influence.

  These three deaths couldn’t be blamed on Virikhad, though. Just as he had when he’d lured Tetkashtai and the others to the Shadow Marches, Dah’mir had needed subjects for his experiments.

  Dandra looked back to Singe. “The bracers must do what Dah’mir’s device did—they change the power of the binding stone so that instead of trapping the mind of a psionic creature, the stone exchanges its mind with the mind of its psicrystal.”

  “So Dah’mir failed twice, succeeded on the third try, and had his captive goldsmiths create bracers for the remaining stones, then had them killed when they were done the job.” Singe’s face twisted and he thrust the bracer he held back into the metal box. “Dandra, this means he could start changing kalashtar any time!”

  On some level, she heard his dire warning. On some level, it filled her with fear, though also with hope: the stones and the bracers were in their possession now. But at the same time, it didn’t echo within her the way his first words had. If Dah’mir had failed twice, then succeeded on the third try …

  She spun back to stare at the third body, the emaciated man wearing a bracer identical to those in the box. Flies swarmed around him just as they swarmed around the decaying bodies, crawling across his eyes and into his nose and in and out of his mouth.

  As she watched, his staring eyes slowly blinked. Flies flew up and settled back.

  The bracer had worked. He was still alive, kalashtar mind going mad in a psicrystal prison, psicrystal mind helpless in an unfamiliar body. Except for the defiant nature that had enabled her to seize control of Tetkashtai’s body and save herself, that would have been Dandra’s fate beneath the Bonetree mound. The psicrystal in the man before her didn’t have that strength of will. The kalashtar would die, wasting away, mind still trapped—or else go mad and become a servant of the daelkyr.

  Anger and loathing burst inside Dandra. She raised her spear to kill the man Dah’mir had left alive—

  —and froze as a shout of alarm and running footsteps echoed from above. She whirled to see Ashi, bright sword in hand, scarf torn from her face, burst into the light of the torch Singe had left in the private box above—closely followed by Vennet and the big-toothed hobgoblin she had seen on the lift. As the hobgoblin pressed the hunter, Vennet sprang up onto the rail and screamed, “Master! I bring your enemies to you!”

  “Actually, Vennet, I believe the ones that matter brought themselves.” Dah’mir’s oil-smooth voice drifted through the cavern of the arena. Dandra and Singe both spun again. Feathered wings rustled and a solitary heron came swooping out of one of the shadowed access tunnels. Acid green eyes flashed as it settled to perch on the edge of the wall around the ring. “You were right, Dandra. I wouldn’t just leave the binding stones out in the open.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  Natrac squeezed his hand and wrist between the bars of the window on his cell door, and fished for the heavy bolt that held the door closed. The bars were too close together for him to get more than halfway to his elbow through—he’d had them designed that way, of course—but with the right tools, he thought that he might just be able to catch the bolt and maybe tug it open.

  Except that he didn’t have the right tools. He had a strip of ripped cloth that had been his sleeve and a makeshift hook that had been part of the mechanism holding his hidden spy hole closed. Tearing the secret compartment apart had been painful, an act of desperation. Getting out of the cell was more important than keeping secrets though.

  How long had he wasted trying to scheme a way out? How much time was left before night fell and Biish moved against the kalashtar in Fan Adar? He wasn’t sure. The hobgoblin’s headquarters—his old headquarters—had gotten very quiet after Biish and Vennet had left.

  Holding one end of his rag strip tight between thumb and forefinger, Natrac opened his other fingers and released the hook. It dropped, bounced as the unfurling cloth reached its end, then hit metal. Natrac let out his breath. He’d remembered where the bolt was. He eased the hook up, and it caught on the handle of the bolt on the first try. Natrac pulled slowly. The handle turned with the rising hook until it stood upright, and the hook slipped free. A little more jiggling with the hook got it around the side of the handle. A careful tug rewarded him with the sound of sliding metal as the bolt eased out of its socket.

  It moved only a painfully short distance before his hand hit a bar and could move no further. Natrac had known that would happen, though. “Olladra guide my fingers,” he whispered. He twisted his hand to bring the rag to the gap between the next pair of bars—then bent his head and groped for the cloth with tongue and teeth. Lords of
the Host, he thought, this would be easier with two hands.

  He was standing with the rag in his teeth and his hand pulled part way back into the cell when the door of the outer room opened. He jerked reflexively, wrenching his hand through the bars and leaping back to try and draw the rag and hook out of sight. The hook, however, caught on one of the bars. The rag snapped out of his mouth, his teeth clashed together, and a tusk jabbed up into his lip. Natrac stifled a grunt of agony and groped for the rag, but it was too late. On the other side of his cell door, Benti had the hook between her slim fingers. A thin smile curved her lips.

  A flick of her wrist could have pulled the rag away and ended his attempt at escape, but she didn’t move. Natrac glared at her. “If you’re waiting for me to reach for it before you pull it away, you’ll be disappointed.” he said. “I’m not going to play that game.”

  “You want out badly, don’t you, Natrac?” the half-elf asked. “I suppose I would too. Biish will be back to see you sooner or later.” Her eyes fell on the broken cover of the spy hole, and her lips twitched a little more. “Finding out that he missed that little secret isn’t going to improve his mood.”

  Natrac took a step to the side, blocking the compartment from her view. A desperate hope made his heart beat a little faster. Benti wouldn’t have come back if she didn’t want something—and he didn’t think she would be bringing up the possibility of escape if it weren’t a prize she’d at least consider offering.

  Maybe she was just dangling hope of freedom in front of him, the way she dangled the rag, but he had to take that chance. He had to get back to the upper city and warn Dandra about what was coming. He looked up, met Benti’s gaze, and thrust his tusks forward defiantly. “Dagga, I want out,” he said. “Not just because of Biish though. If you’re still interested in ‘Lord Storm,’ I’ll tell you what I know—for a price.”