by James Wyatt
“I have asked Lord General Haldren ir’Brassek to secure the construction site,” Kelas said. Cart saw Haldren’s shoulders tense. “He will lead a party including representatives of both House Cannith and Arcanix, along with sufficient force to take and hold the site in preparation for the construction work.”
Cart was baffled. Haldren had not mentioned this to him. Was this a surprise to Haldren? He couldn’t judge the Lord General’s reaction, especially without being able to see his face. But Haldren didn’t start or turn to look at Kelas as he spoke, so Cart figured he probably knew this was coming.
So had Haldren simply been too busy to mention it to Cart, assuming that his advisor would agree to the plan? That was certainly possible. Since their argument a few weeks ago, Haldren had been even less open with his plans. Or did Haldren perhaps not plan to bring him along? No, that was unthinkable.
Cart realized he didn’t know where the Dragon Forge would be built. He had assumed it would be in Fairhaven or nearby, but thinking about it, that didn’t make sense if dragons were involved. Kelas spoke of securing the site, so it must be a dangerous locale.
Good, Cart thought. An opportunity for action. I’ve had enough of diplomacy.
Cart’s concerns about Haldren leaving him behind proved to be unfounded. Haldren took Cart back to his office beneath the cathedral and informed him of their destination: a sun-blasted canyon at the edge of the Blackcap Mountains, near the Brelish border. The canyon, he explained, was the location of an imprisoned fiend-lord who would provide the knot of magic Ashara had mentioned. According to the scouts Kelas had sent, the presence of the fiend at the site had corrupted the plants and animals that lived nearby-particularly the animals. The reports described wolves that were warped and twisted into demonic forms.
“Our task,” Haldren said, “is to exterminate the wolves.”
At that, Cart understood why Haldren had not mentioned this task to him before. The bitterness in Haldren’s voice said everything he needed to know. The Lord General felt that his skills and abilities were wasted in this mission, which he viewed as a hunting party rather than a military exercise. In Haldren’s view, his fall from glory, which had begun at the Starcrag Plain, was complete. He had avoided telling Cart about it out of sheer embarrassment.
Cart could see his point of view easily enough, but he didn’t share his commander’s bitterness. Any action, even a hunting party, was preferable to the way he’d spent his last few months, sitting around Fairhaven waiting for Kelas and Haldren to finalize their plans and solidify their alliances. He was ready to draw his axe in battle again, to hew through flesh and bone. He was made for battle.
The plan was simple enough. They would assemble their party in Fairhaven. Haldren had already begun choosing soldiers, and Kelas would work with Jorlanna and Wheldren to select representatives from their organizations. Then Arcanist Wheldren would transport their party to Arcanix, using the same magical transportation he himself used in his ventures to Fairhaven. From Arcanix, it was a short march south across dry plains and a few scattered farms. The representative of Arcanix would lead them to the correct location, and they would secure the area. Put in those terms, rather than Haldren’s, it was a straightforward military operation. Except that the enemy forces were made up of demonic wolves rather than soldiers of a national army.
Cart couldn’t shake the feeling, though, that this plan-like all the plans he was involved in-would turn out to be far more complicated than it seemed.
CHAPTER 13
Rienne suggested that following the forest edge would make easy to retrace their course if they needed to, and though Gaven couldn’t imagine a reason they’d need to, he agreed. The land seemed to welcome them, offering an easy path through tall grass that seemed free of brambles and burrs. Far off to their left, the coast of the bay paralleled their course.
The forest at their right was unlike any other Gaven had seen, shrouded in shadow but alive with color, hung with moss, and steeped in the silence of ages. A hush lingered in the trees, muting the sound of the grass rustling with their footsteps, brooding like a physical presence constantly at their side. Here and there a dragonet perched on a branch at the forest’s edge and watched them pass, slowly fanning its wings as its tiny black eyes followed their movement. As colorful as any bird in the jungles of Q’barra or Aerenal, the dragonets seemed like something between a squirrel and a monkey-small foreclaws gripping branches or some morsel of food, needle-toothed mouths preening their scales, the serpentine undulation of their bodies as they scurried and glided among the leaves.
As Gaven and Rienne walked, they sometimes played the games that had occupied them on many treks in the past, jousting with words or exchanging riddles-but they knew each other’s riddles, and Gaven was prone to slip into brooding over some riddle of the Prophecy. They walked often in silence, hushed by the stillness of the forest, absorbed in the strange landscape, stumbling occasionally over a tangle in the grass or a root striking past the forest border to invade the plain.
When they made camp under the eaves of the forest, Rienne sang, and the silence fell away.
Clinging to his scraps of sanity in Dreadhold’s mighty walls, Gaven had often tried to remember the sound of her voice, but it had eluded him. Her voice was like the perfect steel of her sword, clear and sharp and resonant like ringing crystal, and it cut to his heart. Her tunes were at once peaceful and deeply melancholic, making his chest ache with their beauty. Sometimes she sang old epics or hymns or laments, but often her songs had no words.
When he closed his eyes, he could see the shape of the melodies, tracing bold arcs or curling on themselves. They reminded him of the words of the Prophecy traced on the walls of the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor, the words of creation hidden in the earth itself, but these were characters he couldn’t read, secrets of the universe he couldn’t decipher. They hinted at the eternity beyond the tumult of history and Prophecy, in much the same way that the anthems and marches of Khorvaire’s nations and armies shouted their fleeting, furious existence in the thick of that storm.
Rienne walked and laughed and sang with him like an old friend, but when the embers of their fire died down and they spread their bedrolls on the ground, she did not lie in his arms. So he lay watching the stars and listening to her breathe as she drifted into sleep, and grief weighed on him until he thought he would drown in it.
A few days in, the forest bent their course back toward the beach, and the bay reached for the trees, cutting another cove into the line of the shore. The sound of the tide as Gaven drew nearer to the water put him on edge-the urgency of the waves made his trek without a destination feel like a waste of precious time. For the better part of a day they wore at his mind until he was nearly ready to abandon his quest and teleport back to Khorvaire where he felt he could at least do something-he didn’t know what, but any activity had to be better than what might turn out to be a walk through an unchanging eternity.
Then they rounded the last hand of the forest, grasping at the beach, and the landscape of Argonnessen came to an abrupt end. The forest fell back from the intrusion of a vast blanket of cultivated fields. Dragon heads carved from great boulders formed a rough ring around the fields as far as their eyes could see, tiny compared with the monuments of Totem Beach but similar in style-except that these all depicted what might have been the same creature, with the pronounced crest of a silver-scaled dragon. Far in the distance, beyond the fields, the bright afternoon light shone along the southern horizon in the shimmering line of a river, and lit the western walls of a city.
Rienne sank to her knees in her amazement. “The Serens?” she said.
“Jordhan seemed to think that they see Argonnessen as sacred ground and won’t venture inland any farther than Totem Beach.”
“Jordhan could be wrong,” Rienne said.
“Besides, the Serens are barbarians. They’re sea raiders. Their settlements on the islands are scattered villages, nothing like a walled city.�
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“Maybe the Serens and these people are two branches of the same family. Maybe one branch settled inland, developed agriculture, and built cities, while the other settled the islands and kept to their raiding. Like the Lhazaar Principalities compared to the Five Nations.”
The mention of the Lhazaar islands sent a shudder down Gaven’s spine-the prison-fortress of Dreadhold towered over one of those islands. Many nights he had lain in his cot, straining to hear the faint whisper of the waves crashing against the rocks far below his tower cell, struggling to stay awake.
“But even the Lhazaarites have Regalport, Port Verge, and Tantamar,” Rienne continued, oblivious to his discomfort. “They’re not much, but they’re more than the Serens seem to have.”
Battles raged in the memory of the land, the clash of armies, the blood of soldiers soaking into the soil. The earth had whispered to Gaven of Argonnessen’s native people, and proof of them was spread before his eyes. His earlier shudder lingered in his spine as a chill tingle-an excitement and wonder and dread he couldn’t quite pin down.
“The only way to figure out who lives there,” he said, “is to go there.”
Hugging the edge of the forest, Gaven and Rienne made their way around the fields. Most of the crops growing there were familiar-wheat and barley, grapes and olives. Whoever lived in this city, Gaven surmised, baked bread and drank beer and wine. A few plants he couldn’t identify. Moving farther along, they came upon fields of livestock-hulking beasts the size of cattle, but definitely not cattle. Their horns were curved and sharp, their hides covered with brown-black scales, and their shoulders were ringed with a frill of spines. Still farther, they found some fields that were freshly plowed. And there they saw a long line of people stretched across the far side of one field, stooping or crawling along the ground, planting.
It struck Gaven as absurd, somehow, the mundaneness of it. They were in a distant continent, one that no other native of Khorvaire had ever seen, as far as he knew, and his first sight of the people of this land was a row of farm laborers, planting the next season’s crops. All their talk of Prophecy and eternity, of exploring new lands and walking into unknown danger, and then they stumbled upon a farm. He laughed.
“What are they?” Rienne breathed. The absurdity had escaped her, clearly-she was intent on the distant figures, shielding her eyes from the setting sun.
“What are they?” Gaven echoed. “They’re farmers, laborers. Where’s the mystery in that?”
“No, I mean what race are they? They’re not human.”
The smile dropped from Gaven’s face, and he squinted at the laborers he’d dismissed. Rienne was right-at first they looked human, tall and as broad as you’d expect from people who made their living by heavy labor. They were too far away to make out more detail than that. The discrepancy was in their heads, when from time to time he’d see them in profile. Rather than the gentle contours of a human face, they had long, rounded snouts.
“Gnolls?” he said. Those barbarians, plentiful in the monster nation of Droaam, had heads resembling dogs or hyenas.
“I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of a gnoll city before.”
“They could be slaves of whoever built the city.”
“It’s not the right shape.”
Rienne was right. Gnolls had flat, sloping foreheads, a sharp brow ridge, and a pointed muzzle. These had a single curve from crown to snout, unbroken by a brow. With the addition of a horned frill, they would look just like Vaskar.
“Lizardfolk?” Rienne wondered. Reptilian races were fairly common in the jungles of Q’barra, south of the Lhazaar islands on Khorvaire’s east coast.
“No. They look like dragons.”
Rienne blinked. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised. We just discovered a city in Argonnessen, why shouldn’t it be inhabited by walking dragons?”
Gaven was certain now that he harbored no long-lost memories of Argonnessen in the depths of his mind. If he had ever known that Argonnessen was inhabited by dragon-people, he was certain he would remember it now. He watched one of the creatures stand from its labor, stretch long, strong arms, and then freeze. It lowered its arms slowly.
“They’ve seen us,” Gaven said.
“I wonder if we’re as strange to them as they are to us.”
The one that had seen them was rousing the others, and the dragon-people sprang into action. One took off at a run in the direction of the city, and the rest hustled to a corner of the field.
“I’m not sure I want to find out,” Gaven said. “Let’s get some cover.”
Rienne led the way into the shelter of the forest. Only when the last trace of sunlight was draped in the shadow of the canopy and the stillness of the ancient trees had closed around them did she pause. Gaven turned then and peered back through the brush. The laborers were spreading across the field again, but in a line parallel to the forest edge. They carried spears and halberds with huge, jagged blades.
“They’re prepared for intruders,” Rienne said. “They think we’re scouts from their enemies, perhaps.”
“What will they do when they see we’re not?”
“I doubt we’ll be any less threatening to them.”
“Let’s get out of here.” Gaven strode into the shadows of the trees.
“What?” Rienne said, hurrying after him. “Don’t you want to learn more about these people?”
“Not if that means witnessing their combat techniques, or learning how they treat prisoners of war. Hurry!” Gaven cast one last look over his shoulder to make sure the well-armed farmers had not caught up to them. Still a few steps behind him, Rienne glided across the forest floor, her eyes darting to catch every movement in the forest around them. Satisfied that they had a significant lead on their pursuers-if indeed the dragon-headed people were still pursuing them-he charged onward.
“Gaven.”
Rienne’s voice had the quiet urgency she reserved for truly dire circumstances, and Gaven halted his headlong rush, scanning the trees. He heard the quiet song of Maelstrom sliding from its scabbard, so he pulled the greatsword from his back, though he still couldn’t see what had alarmed Rienne.
The first things he saw emerging from the undergrowth and around the thick trunks of trees were arrowheads-obsidian, he guessed, rough-hewn but viciously sharp. Then strong hands clutching the horn handles of curved bows drawn back. Then the dragon-folk stepped into view.
I’d be dead where I stand, Gaven thought, if Rienne hadn’t seen them. She is watching my back.
“Easy, Gaven,” Rienne said, and Maelstrom slid into its sheath again with a whisper. “If they’d wanted to, they would have loosed their arrows already. See if they speak Draconic.”
Gaven dropped his greatsword to the ground and spread his empty arms wide, palms out. “We mean no harm,” he said in Draconic.
He saw their eyes widen, and he was suddenly struck by how human they seemed. Their faces were wide, and accentuated by small frills extending back from their mouths. Despite his earlier impression, they did have distinct brows-ridges of scales arching up from their snouts over their eyes and meeting those cheek frills. Behind their brows, they had crests resembling thick, ropy hair, formed of horn or scales. Some of them also had protruding scales that extended down from their chins, and Gaven realized suddenly that those were the males-the bodies of the men and the women were quite different in familiar and quite un-reptilian ways. There could be no question about it in Gaven’s mind. The strange creatures that surrounded him in this alien forest were people.
People he shared a common language with.
“What kind of creature are you?” one of the women said in Draconic. Her voice was low but melodious. She wore metal armor, unlike most of the others whose garb was stitched of scaly hide. She held no bow, but carried a shield in her right hand and an axe in the other. Armor, shield, and weapon shared a similar style unlike anything he’d ever seen-graceful curves meeting in points, suggesting tongues of flame. Lik
e the breath of a red or gold dragon.
Gaven opened his mouth to explain what he and Rienne were but found himself at a loss for words. The first word that came to his mind to describe them was “meat”-not how he wanted to identify himself to these people. He turned to Rienne.
“What are we?” he asked. “How do I explain Khoravar to these people?”
“The dragons of Argonnessen certainly know of the elves of Aerenal,” Rienne said. “Try it.”
“We are travelers-on-the-sea,” Gaven said in Draconic. “We have journeyed a great distance to arrive at this land. Some of our ancestors were Aereni.” He paused to judge their reaction to this news.
Their wide mouths curved in unmistakable smiles. At the tips of their snouts, the scales formed a beaklike protrusion, but leathery skin behind it parted to reveal knife-blade teeth. Some of them laughed out loud, deep and throaty. Gaven cast his mind back over what he’d said-had he made some gaffe of manners or grammar?
“You talk like a dragon,” the armored woman said through her smile.
“Or a character in a bad romance,” another one added, letting his bow straighten slightly as he laughed.
Gaven was relieved but confused. He did speak like a dragon-probably because he learned to speak Draconic by holding the memories of an ancient dragon in his mind for twenty-seven years.
He didn’t know any other way to speak Draconic, though he had already puzzled out some idioms and colloquialisms he’d never heard before. “Bad romance” was his best guess, and he could only assume that the dragon-man had meant a play or a work of fiction.
