by James Wyatt
He felt the spear break bone, and then heard it grate against stone below. He had missed the shard. The Soul Reaver heaved him away, its third tentacle tearing free from Gaven’s head, and rolled away from him onto its hands and knees. The Eye of Siberys protruded from its back, shedding pale golden light around the dark cavern. Gaven spotted the nightshard on the ground between him and the bloodied Soul Reaver. As the creature stood and turned to face him again, Gaven could tell that it saw the shard as well. They froze.
The idiot mammal is more clever than I imagined. It made a sound like a gurgling cough, and Gaven saw black blood spill down from its mouth. A fresh wave of pain washed through his head-he began to feel where the tentacles had been boring through his skin and scraping at his skull.
“I am the Storm Dragon,” Gaven said. He stretched his hands forward, and a blast of air like thunder shot through the Soul Reaver, sending it staggering backward a few steps. “And I will still be your doom!” He dove forward and clutched the Heart of Khyber in both hands, landing hard on his belly. He tried to roll back onto his feet as he caught his breath, but the Soul Reaver landed on top of him, two tentacles grasping at the nightshard while the other two slashed at his eyes.
Gaven swung his legs to one side and used their leverage to roll the Soul Reaver onto its back. Still clutching the Heart of Khyber in both hands, he put as much weight as he could above it, forcing it down toward the Soul Reaver’s chest. It put up both hands to push back, using all four tentacles to attack Gaven’s face. One forced its way into his mouth, tasting of blood and slime, working its way back toward his throat.
Grimacing with disgust, Gaven bit down on the tentacle in his mouth, adding a new taste of bilious ichor. He didn’t bite clean through, but it was enough: the Soul Reaver’s grip on the Heart of Khyber weakened, and Gaven managed to force the nightshard down to the stone floor. Spitting slime and bile, Gaven drove a knee as hard as he could into the creature’s midsection. Holding the nightshard against the floor with one hand, he grabbed again at the spear with the other, raising it and the Soul Reaver’s struggling body with it. Guiding the spear toward the hand that clutched the Heart of Khyber, he brought the spear’s point, still protruding from the creature’s back, down hard.
The spear pierced his hand, and he cried out in pain. But the Soul Reaver stopped struggling as the Eye of Siberys went on to pierce the nightshard, the Soul Reaver’s heart. Its withered body, a moment ago writhing with preternatural strength, dissolved into wisps of smoke, snakes of oily darkness slithering away and seeping into the ground. A foul-smelling cloud of gray-black mist arose from the body and then dissipated, leaving Gaven alone, holding the spear he had made from the Eye of Siberys, impaling his own hand against the ground.
A tremendous sob wracked his body, and he dropped his head to the floor. He started to scream even before he pulled the spear free, but then it was done, and the pain was not as bad. He thrust his injured hand under his other arm and squeezed it there as he tried to find his feet. Reeling, he leaned against the wall for support while he waited for his head to clear.
His mind swam with echoes of the Soul Reaver’s psychic assaults. The torrents of memory and feelings slowed, leaving him drained and trembling. It was done, or the worst of it was. Perhaps he had saved the world, or at least a corner of it. He wanted to take pride in that-he supposed he would when he was less exhausted.
As the storm of his thoughts stilled, he realized a strange emptiness in his mind. He cast his mind over his memories of the past months. The dragon of the nightshard, a presence in his thoughts for so long, was gone. He still remembered the dragon’s memories-but he remembered his memory of them, he remembered experiencing them as Gaven. They were still vivid in his mind, some of them all too vivid, but a little more distant, farther removed from his own experience.
The dragon had vanished, taking its memories with it, when the Heart of Khyber was destroyed.
His only light had also gone out, so he spoke a quick spell and cradled an orb of light in his palm.
“Look, father!” he cried.
Arnoth stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, smiling with pride. “Well done, Gaven,” he said.
Gaven flexed his hand, and the one orb split into three that danced into the air around him, lighting the tunnel walls.
“Thunder and lightning,” he muttered, reading the Draconic character inscribed on the wall beside him. He started, and looked around. “Cart?” he called weakly. “Where did you get off to?”
CHAPTER 52
Trailing one hand along the wall, Gaven retraced his path, back to the base of the Crystal Spire. As he walked, his mind filled with the words traced on and by the twisting tunnel, words that spoke of the Storm Dragon, the gates of Khyber, and the bridge to the sky. The verbs, though-those most flexible of words, allowing so many nuances of action and meaning. The nouns were facts, the bare facts of the situation as it stood. The verbs were possibility.
The ululation of the Soul Reaver’s hordes had diminished slightly, and the voices no longer rose in unison. The cries all seemed to be coming from somewhere far above, as though new waves of monsters were pouring out through the chasm from the upper reaches of Khyber and swarming anew over the battlefield.
He rounded one last bend and threw a hand up to shield his eyes from the brightness of the Crystal Spire, which had grown more intense since he left it. Light leaked out to cast deep shadows on the tracings of the cavern wall, and shone on Cart’s impassive face. The warforged stood on the dragon’s lower jaw, poised at the very edge of the Crystal Spire.
“Planning your ascension, Cart?” Gaven could barely find his voice-his throat was raw from yelling, and the lingering taste of the Soul Reaver’s slime made his tongue feel thick.
“Have you come to stop me, Storm Dragon?”
“I don’t care, one way or another. I don’t plan on passing through that gate.”
“What about the Prophecy?”
“There are many ways to bring the Prophecy to pass.”
“I try not to think about it.”
“Uncommonly wise.”
“What god watches over my people, Gaven?” Cart’s voice was strangely melancholy, and he rocked ever so slightly on his heels as he stared down into the dragon’s gaping maw. “Which Sovereign has our interests at heart?”
“Are there gods for each race and people?” Gaven asked. “Doesn’t the whole Host keep watch over us all?”
“Perhaps. But the gods made all the other races. We were made by artificers and magewrights. Does Onatar then care for us, the god of the forge? Or perhaps the warlord Dol Dorn, since we were made for war? Or do they see us as many mortals do-simply as tools for war? There is no god of swords or siege engines. Perhaps there is no god for us.”
“You want to be one, then? God of the warforged?”
Cart shrugged. “I am torn. I am not accustomed to feeling so divided.”
“I’ve never heard you speak of warforged as your people before.”
“I have always felt that the best way to serve warforged everywhere was to fulfill my own duty, to live out the purpose for which I was made.”
“And you were made for war.”
“I was. That’s why I followed Haldren. He was my commanding officer, and I honored and respected him for that. But he also promised a return to war. I wanted that-I wanted to see the world plunged into violence again, just so I could find purpose again. What is a warforged to do in a world no longer at war?”
“What would you do, then, as god of the warforged? Would you urge them into war?”
Cart stroked his chin. “Power is quite a temptation, isn’t it? It’s one thing to think of all the good one might do. But I can so easily imagine abusing that power. To become a dark god of war, the destructive mirror of Dol Dorn, calling for war for its own sake. I think the Dark Six would become the Dark Seven.”
Gaven nodded. “Exactly.”
Cart stepped back from the C
rystal Spire, and shadows fell over his face. “Well, Storm Dragon? How will the Prophecy come to pass?”
“The Storm Dragon bursts through the gates of Khyber and blocks the bridge to the sky.”
He came and stood across from Cart, on the face of the snarling dragon, and looked up. The Crystal Spire rose forever above him, its light showing hints of movement along the edges of the chasm far above but blocking any detail from his view.
“That’s not what you said in the City of the Dead,” Cart said.
“No, it’s not. But there are many ways to translate Draconic verbs, many layers of meaning that are expressed better in context than in isolation. And if I am to be the Storm Dragon, then I am the context for those words. They can’t be interpreted apart from me.”
“So you will choose your own destiny after all.”
Gaven smiled. With one more glance skyward, he stepped forward into the Crystal Spire.
He dropped down into the dragon’s maw, but then wind whipped up from nowhere, whirling furiously around him and holding him aloft. The earth rumbled as lightning probed the chasm, and a shower of rocks tumbled down from above, catching in the whirlwind and circling him. He lifted his hands to the sky high above, where the Crystal Spire broke through the swirling storm clouds, and a great bolt of lightning flashed down through the chasm, striking the stone dragon’s mouth and adding to the swirling hail of stone around him. Then he surged up on the wind, sloughing the rock behind him.
He burst up through Khyber’s gate in an explosive shower of rock splinters. The cavern went dark as the dragon’s mouth collapsed in on itself, great slabs of stone falling in on the gate and dousing the light of the Crystal Spire. Reaching a hand toward Cart, Gaven lifted the warforged into the whirlwind behind him and hurtled up through the chasm.
Flashes of lightning illuminated the darkness around them as they rose, revealing tunnel mouths crawling with gibbering monsters clambering toward the surface. Gaven shot past them, rising faster than he had fallen, emerging into open air in the space of a few gasping breaths. Lightning crackled in the air around him, and great thundering bolts struck the ground below. The whirlwind below him hurled monsters off the brink and into the yawning depth of the chasm, and more lightning blasts sent enormous slabs of earth plummeting down after them. The Storm Dragon stretched out his arms, and sheets of lightning struck along the length of the chasm, shattering rock to fill it in. Thunder rolled continuously like the rumbling of a mighty earthquake, and when it was done, the chasm had become just another scar on the face of the Starcrag Plain.
Haldren’s stallion galloped across the plain. Rienne stroked his neck as she rode, encouraging him to greater speed. He was no magebred horse or Valenar steed, but he was amazingly sure-footed on the rocky ground, which more than made up for a lack of raw speed. The earth thundered with the pounding of his hooves-no, she realized, the earth shook from tremors far below the battlefield, which seemed to bode ill for Gaven’s well-being.
The battle was over, as far as Rienne could see. Haldren’s soldiers had fallen or been routed from the field entirely, and until she drew near the chasm she saw only a few clumps of monsters scattering away from the field-heading for new haunts in the Starpeaks or the Silver Woods. She could see no dragons still aloft, whether they were all dead or driven away or just brought to ground. She spurred the stallion toward the towering shaft of light, a beacon in the midst of the furious storm.
She was halfway across the plain when the beacon flickered and went out. Her mind raced through a handful of possibilities as she spurred the stallion on: Had Gaven crossed the bridge to the sky, collapsing it behind him? Had he failed, proving that he was not the Storm Dragon after all? Had Gaven perhaps been wrong about the whole Prophecy and the Crystal Spire? Perhaps it was not any kind of bridge to the sky, but some kind of beacon or signal, and Gaven had destroyed it.
She drew a slow breath, calming her pounding heart, and tried to lose herself in the rhythm of the stallion’s gait.
She lost track of the distance to the chasm where the Crystal Spire had been, and the storm grew even fiercer ahead. Wind whipped her hair and small hailstones stung her skin, and she soon rode into a wall of rain. She guided the horse toward the heart of the storm, where lightning danced around a swirling whirlwind. The heart of the storm must be Gaven, she thought.
A new tide of monsters poured out of the storm toward her, a tumultuous mass of pallid flesh and flailing appendages, sharp claws and writhing tentacles, screaming mouths and staring eyes. They seemed to surge forward, clawing over each other in their haste to reach fresh prey. Each time she fixed her gaze on one creature, it disappeared under or behind the next wave of horrors. Terror and revulsion wrenched her gut, but she quelled them with another slow breath. If these monsters stood between her and Gaven, then she would have to fight her way through the monsters. She pulled the stallion to a halt and slid Maelstrom from its sheath.
There was no discipline to their advance. When they drew close, a monster with a single staring eye and a much smaller fanged mouth leaped ahead of the others and bounded up at her. The gaze of its lidless eye raked across her, blistering her skin as its claws reached for her throat. She drove her blade into its eye and deflected its momentum, sending its lifeless body spilling to the ground behind her. Her arms trembled-that would not do. Combat required discipline, focus, concentration, a perfect unity of thought and action.
Before she could steady herself, the waves broke around her. Action first-thought would follow. Maelstrom went into a dance of constant motion, spinning like a deadly shield surrounding her, blocking the creatures’ attacks and biting into their flesh. Many of the monsters reached up to grab her-and a few reached down from a greater height-and those were the first to die. Haldren’s horse proved himself one last time, rearing up to strike with its hooves and felling many of the smaller creatures. But before long the horse was pulled screaming under the surging tide, throwing Rienne through the air as he fell.
With a mighty shout, Rienne brought her energy back into focus. Like Darraun piloting the airship alone, action alone would not suffice against these hordes. Rienne came down on the chitinous back of a hulking monstrosity, then bounded off it to a relatively clear patch of ground. As she landed, she kicked a skittering buglike thing out of the way and slashed two other nameless things back, carving herself a place to stand. She banished her fear and lost herself in whirling motion, feeling Maelstrom surge to life in her grip. This was the style of fighting that had given the sword its name: a constant spinning, cutting everything within reach, wheeling the blade through an unending, intricate series of swirling arcs punctuated by sharp thrusts-what she thought of as lightning strikes within the whirlwind.
As she danced, the storm answered her strikes with lightning that shook the earth, and she had the sudden thought of fighting alongside Gaven on one of their subterranean expeditions. She smiled as gore flew from the tip of her blade. No claw could touch her, no tentacle stayed coiled around her wrist or leg for more than an instant before she sliced it through. Wide eyes tried to catch her gaze and assault her mind, sharp teeth tried to close around her but met the constant motion of her blade. Her feet moved with her blade, an intricate dance of steps and lunges that guided her away from dangerous blows and brought her near the weakest foes. She was utterly lost in the dance-no memory or anxiety about Gaven remained in the diamond stillness of her mind, perfectly focused on the battle at hand. A perfect unity of will and action.
The sea parted around her, and Rienne stumbled. A greenish ray of light shot through where she would have been if she had stepped where she planned. She stopped her whirling in order to keep her full attention on the monster before her. Its body was a gigantic orb hovering a few feet off the ground, a magical buoyancy holding it aloft. One great eye stared at her from above a mouth filled with needle-like teeth, and ten more eyes writhed at the ends of long stalks on its upper surface. Years of exploring the subterranean reaches
had taught her to fear the beholder above almost all other threats of Khyber. One of those smaller eyes had projected the green light, and Rienne knew the touch of that light could mean her death.
Something lunged at her from the right and lost its head to a reflexive slash of her blade. The monsters seemed hesitant to attack prey the eye tyrant had chosen for itself, but they were also driven by some madness or rage or instinct that wouldn’t let them leave her alone.
Slowly Rienne started into a new dance, ready to slash at anything that came at her from the sides or behind, but focused on dodging the beams of light that came from the many eyes of the beholder.
Displaying more coordination than she had yet seen among the Soul Reaver’s hordes, two creatures came at her from both sides. The easy response to such an attack broke her rhythm: she ducked toward one and threw it at the other. Before she could return to her rhythmic pattern, though, two rays of light made contact with her body. One seared her flesh, opening a horrible wound in her arm, black around the edges, sending horrible pain jolting through her body. At the same moment, she felt an absurd urge to flee, to turn and run from the horrifying apparition before her, even though it meant plunging headlong into a sea of smaller horrors.
She swallowed her fear, telling herself that it came from the beholder’s magic and not herself, and found her stride again in time to dodge two more beams of light. The monster might have been laughing at her, opening and closing its mouth so that its teeth rubbed together. A ridiculous image of the beholder as a butcher sharpening a knife appeared in her mind, and the smile returned to her face. It was time to charge.
With three quick steps she built up enough speed for a great leap at the beholder. She landed just close enough, swinging Maelstrom down with the full force of her jump and cutting a shallow gash in its plated hide. As she brought her blade around for another strike, a bolt of lightning struck the creature, knocking Rienne backward a few steps with the thundering force of its blast.
