The Killing Song

CHAPTER 6

Deathsgate district was on the opposite side of Sharn from Overlook, and in the City of Towers-and of stairs, ramps, bridges, blind streets, and precipices-making the journey on foot would have taken a few hours under the best of circumstances. Singe briefly considered it anyway. A long walk in Sharn could be very pleasant.

When Ashi paused twice before they even made it out of Overlook to marvel at some view or gape at one of Sharn’s more exotic citizens, he decided that a walk would be better left for another time. He drew Ashi to a wide marked balcony that protruded out into space high above a large courtyard and hired a skycoach. The look of amazement in the hunter’s eyes as the coach, resembling nothing so much as a large rowboat decorated with the figurehead of a swan and with wings carved into the wood of its hull, rose into the air brought a laugh up from deep in Singe’s belly.

“Her first time in Sharn,” he said to the coach driver, a woman with short, silvery hair, large eyes, and the kind of eternally youthful face that hinted at elf blood. He would have been hard-pressed to put an age to her.

The driver smiled. “I’ll give her the tour.”

And so the City of Towers skimmed past below, around, and above them. The passing of the rain had left the air cool and the sky clear. High up, the smells of the city streets mingled with the night breeze off the sea. Every shift in the wind that beat at Singe’s hair brought hints-and sometimes bursts-of odor. Smoke. Saltwater. Rotting vegetables. Baking bread. It all blended into a unique perfume. Singe could have closed his eyes and still known he was flying above Sharn.

None of the visible moons were full, but their crescents, fat and thin, made a pleasing sight, a scattered counterpoint to the thick gossamer band of the Ring of Siberys in the southern sky. Sharn was itself a reflection of the sky above as the lights of homes and streets shone against the darkness of the towers. All around their skycoach, other coaches flew, lit fore and aft by shimmering white lights. Here and there, tiny soarsleds crackled with energy as their lone riders piloted them through the night. Higher up, the open air was the domain of airships, some only a little larger than their skycoach, others massive, each supported and propelled by a wind or fire elemental bound into a ring around the ship’s belly. Those ships powered by a fire elemental shone like shooting stars; those powered by an air elemental had a paler glow, like errant moonbeams.

Far, far below the skycoach, night fell into the deep chasms that separated the plateaus on which the wards of the city had been built. The way was most clear over those dark voids and their driver could easily have followed that route. She didn’t. Instead, she plunged in among the towers themselves, dipping under bridges and darting around other traffic, all the while shouting out the sights. “The Korranath, the great temple of Kol Korran,” she called above the rush of the wind, and Ashi stared at an enormous dome of gold that flashed with the light as if a thousand gems were embedded in its surface. “Kundarak Tower!” and the peak of a tower topped with four life-size statues of dragons flicked past. “Skysedge Park!” and Ashi leaned out over the edge of the coach to stare in amazement at the meadows and ponds that rolled across the tops of three great towers.

The hunter sat back with her eyes wide above her scarf. “Ha’azit teith,” she said in awe. “How is all this possible, Singe? Even magic has limits, doesn’t it?”

Singe smiled. “You know about other planes of existence like Xoriat and Dal Quor,” he said, trying to keep concepts simple for her. “Xoriat is the Realm of Madness and Dal Quor is the Region of Dreams. There are other planes as well, worlds that are the pure expression of an element or concept. Sometimes they’re far away from Eberron, other times they’re closer. Sometimes the reality of one of those other planes bleeds through into Eberron, making a permanent connection. Wizards call those places manifest zones, and things are possible in them that wouldn’t be possible anywhere else. The Shadow Marches has many small manifest zones of Xoriat. It’s one reason the daelkyr and the cults of the Dragon Below are so powerful there.” He gestured around them. “Sharn is built within a manifest zone of Syrania, the Azure Sky. Magic related to flight works better here, sometimes with hardly any effort at all. That’s how towers can be built so tall and why lifts and skycoaches-” He rapped his knuckles against the hull of the coach. “-work at all.”

Ashi still looked as if she was struggling to understand his explanation. Singe tried to think of an even simpler way to describe the nature of Sharn to her, but the coach driver beat him to it. “Things don’t want to fall down here,” she said, and Ashi’s face cleared in comprehension.

They curved in a wide arc, passed over another dark chasm, and entered another ward. Their driver began naming sights again, and Ashi once more became entranced. “The Old Spire of Deniyas. Kavarrah Concert Hall. Looks like there’s a performance tonight-I think it might be Egen Marktaros, the Thrane exile. Dalannan Tower and Morgrave University.” The coach dipped sharply, diving between towers so closely packed it might as well have been flying through tunnels. They emerged into a district that smelled of alchemical experiments and shone with magical light in myriad hues.

“Everbright, the wizard’s district,” said the driver-then plunged into a real tunnel bored through the thick stones of one of the great towers and came back out into the night.

A wall of sparkling lights, a sweeping view of an entire arm of the city, rose above them in a spectacle so unexpected and breathtaking that even Singe found himself amazed. Their driver slowed the coach so that they seemed to be drifting into Sharn’s embrace like a leaf on the wind. The wall of light swelled before them, breaking slowly into individual lanterns in streets and windows. The coach eased up beside a landing, and the driver broke the spell by calling out, “Deathsgate district!” She grinned at Ashi. “How did you like the ride?”

Wordlessly, Ashi bent her head and touched her fingers to her shrouded lips, then to her forehead.

“That means she liked it,” said Singe. He paid the fare and added a generous tip. The driver grinned and helped them out of the coach, then sent the vessel skimming back off into the darkness. Singe looked at Ashi. “Are you going to blink?” he asked.

“I don’t think I can,” she told him.

They set off into Deathsgate. Located in the middle levels of the great towers, the district had a strangely contained feel to it. Although the ground was far below, the height of the towers above emphasized how far away they were from open sky-when they could see the sky at all. Most of the streets were more like very large passages, and the courtyards were massive enclosures with bridges leaping beneath shadowed roofs. There was no hint of the rain that had caught them earlier except for drips and leaks and one empty square where water poured in a cascade through cracks in the ceiling.

“Trickle down,” Singe explained to Ashi. “Most of the rain that falls on the upper city ends up in reservoirs, but what doesn’t has to go somewhere. They say that when it rains in Sharn, it takes two days for it to stop.”

In spite of the late hour, the neighborhoods of Deathsgate were livelier than any other they had passed through, rivaling the waterfront of Cliffside and certainly surpassing the restrained hush of Fan Adar in Overlook. The people stumbling in the streets and staggering from the doorways of taverns looked like they had more in common with the sailors of Cliffside as well. All manner of races-from humans, to dwarves, to shifters, halflings, and warforged-were represented. Most them went armed as well. Swords, spears, axes, and maces hung ready for use, and even those in the crowds who carried no obvious weapons walked with a confident and dangerous stride. Singe caught Ashi staring again and nudged her.

“Try not to do that,” he said quietly. “The more you look like someone new to Sharn, the more people will try to take advantage of you.”

“You’re scared they’ll start a fight?”

“I’m scared you might start a fight. Look around.” He nodded to the profusion of banners that decorated the buildings they passed, the strings of pennants that hung across the street, and the paint and posters that daubed bold colors onto dark stone walls. Like Overlook, Deathsgate had been decorated for the coming celebrations of Thronehold. Unlike Overlook, however, the crimson and gold of Breland were not the dominant colors. The black and red of Karrnath, the blue of Aundair, the silver of Thrane, and the green of lost Cyre were all represented in equal or even greater proportion. The colors and crests of a variety of regiments and companies, some Singe knew and others that he didn’t, added to the display.

“The people who gather in Deathsgate come from across Khorvaire, and the majority of them are no strangers to violence,” he said. “They’re old soldiers, mercenaries, treasure hunters, inquisitives, war wizards, bounty hunters, probably even a few assassins. I’d lay odds that every one of them saw something of the Last War. They’re not going to be looking for trouble, but if it finds them, they won’t back down.”

Ashi looked and a little of the intensity faded from her eyes. She nodded slowly. “You and Geth belong here,” she said.

A smile curled one corner of Singe’s lips. “I suppose we do.”

“You’ve forgiven him for what happened at Narath?”

The smile faded and an old ache grew inside the wizard. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “You can’t understand what Narath was like, Ashi.”

She turned her eyes on him, and her gaze was abruptly hot and angry. “Blood in your mouth! I may be an innocent to Sharn, but remember who you’re talking to and how we met. The Bonetree hunters raided and killed in the name of the Dragon Below. We stood in awe of dolgrims and dolgaunts as the perfect children of Khyber. I understand death.”

Singe returned her gaze without flinching. “What was the largest raid you ever took part in?”

“The Bonetree destroyed the Hill Shadow clan shortly after I was made a hunter,” Ashi told him. “Their camp was maybe three times the size of Bull Hollow. We killed their warriors and gave clean death to anyone too old to bring new blood to the Bonetree.”

“The Hill Shadow clan had about a hundred people then.” Singe pressed his lips together tightly for a moment. “More than ten times that number died in Narath. Very few of them were given a clean death. And I was on their side.” He looked away from her. “I wouldn’t say that I’ve forgiven Geth. I might say that I don’t hate him the same way I used to.”

“Dandra thinks there’s more to his story-something he isn’t saying.”

“Dandra doesn’t understand Narath either.” He sighed. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Ashi. We’ve got other things to worry about. Once we get to the House Deneith enclave, I’ll see if there’s a message from Geth, then I want to ask around and see if anyone knows anything that might give us a clue about where Dah’mir and Vennet are hiding. House Deneith often has connections with the city watch, and someone might have heard something.”

“What should I do?” Ashi asked.

“Just stay close. Look around, see what goes on in a Deneith enclave. We should be able to pass without anyone recognizing your mark. Like I said, there aren’t likely to be any actual members of Deneith on duty this late-just mercenaries hiring other mercenaries.”

The Deneith enclave was a small, solid building on the edge of a largely deserted square. A guard wearing a blue jacket embroidered in silver with the emblem of the Watchful Eye superimposed on an upright sword-symbol of the Blademarks mercenary guild-stood outside the door. He straightened as Singe and Ashi approached, but Singe waved him to ease. “Singe, lieutenant of the Blademarks out of Fairhaven,” he said. “Checking for a message delivered here.”

The guard nodded and stood aside. Ashi glanced at him as they entered, then leaned close to Singe to whisper, “That’s all? Shouldn’t he have challenged you?”

“This is a recruiting center for the Blademarks. Deneith wouldn’t hire many people if they turned them all away at the door. The guard is mostly for show.”

Somewhere inside the building, a chime rang three times. Singe paused just inside the doorway and glanced back at the door guard. It didn’t look like the man had moved, but …

“Something’s wrong?” asked Ashi.

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Singe. “That was the commander’s chime. It signals the ranking officer of an enclave that he’s wanted.”

“It could be a coincidence.”

“It could,” he agreed cautiously.

He started walking again, stepping through a small foyer into the main hall of the enclave. The room was large, with recruiting displays lining the walls. Behind the glass of the cases were paintings of and trophies from battles won by Blademarks companies, along with souvenirs brought back by Blademarks mercenaries from their exotic adventures. More displays celebrated the other branches of House Deneith’s operations, the Defenders Guild and the elite Sentinel Marshals. The Defenders Guild display included endorsements from famous people who had hired Deneith’s bodyguards; the Sentinel Marshals display featured a history of the Marshals and their role in capturing lawbreakers across the Five Nations, along with a tall pillar plastered with the warrant-notices of notorious miscreants.

All in all, it was an impressive sight, well-designed to perform its intended purpose of enticing would-be mercenaries to sign up with Deneith’s companies of warriors-for-hire. It was also exactly as empty as Singe had expected it would be at this hour. A few juvenile thugs a little too young for Deneith to take on were staring with fascination at a battered old horn recovered from the infamous Battle of Falcon Hill, but the only other person in the hall was the duty officer standing behind the long counter at the end of the room-until a door behind the counter opened and another Blademarks officer stepped out.

The newcomer was younger, about Singe’s own age, with black hair worn long and vibrantly blue eyes. Those eyes went to Singe and Ashi immediately, and the newcomer exchanged a brief, quiet word with the duty officer, who promptly vanished through the door. A chill ran along Singe’s back. “Ashi,” the wizard said without turning his head. “Why don’t you wait over there at the Sentinel Marshal’s display?”

“The one closest to the door?”

He nodded and caught a glimpse of her eyes narrowing as she studied the new man behind the counter. “Not a friend?” she asked.

“No. His name is Mithas d’Deneith.”

Her eyebrows rose. “He carries a dragonmark?”

“Worse,” murmured Singe. “He’s ambitious, a gambler-and a sorcerer. Wait for me and watch him in case he tries to cast any spells. I have a feeling that we won’t want to stay here long.”

The hunter glided over to the display with the grace of a hunting cat. Singe crossed the room with long deliberate strides, the chill along his back slowly changing to an angry heat. “Mithas,” he said when he was close enough.

“Etan!” Mithas greeted him with a joy that was blatantly hollow. “What brings you to Sharn?”

“I’d ask you the same thing,” Singe said, “but I’m not really interested. You’ve wriggled your way into command of a recruiting center. Congratulations.” He put his hands on top of the counter. “A message may have been sent here for me. Have you seen it?”

Mithas made a show of looking under the counter. “A message? Let me see … Bayard … Bayard …” He stood straight, still smiling. “No, nothing for-”

“It will be addressed to ‘Singe.’”

“Oh, of course! Singe.” He opened one side of his blue Blademarks uniform jacket and extracted a folded sheet of grayish paper from an inner pocket. “That would be this message. It arrived through House Sivis just the day before last.”

Singe held out his hand. Mithas lifted the message out of reach, and his smile took on a predatory gleam. “What, no thanks? I see a message addressed to my old friend, take personal charge of it, even leave instructions to be summoned when you arrived, and this is what I get for my troubles?”

“More likely you saw my name and wanted to see what you could get out of me. How much money do you need this time that a command posting can’t pay for it?” An idea sprang into Singe’s head, and he let his hand fall as he grinned. “You’re not the commander here. Twelve moons, I knew no commander would stay the night at a recruiting center!”

Two bright spots of color leaped into Mithas’s face, and his smile faltered. “I’m the night commander!”

Singe let out a short, barking laugh. “That’s not a posting-that’s punishment! What did you do this time to …” He cut himself off with a shake of his head. “No, I don’t care what you did. I don’t know what you think is in that message, but give it to me or I will go to your commander and let him know that you’ve been interfering with private messages. And I’ll guess that you paid someone to tell me to come back at night if I showed up during the day shift, so that’s bribery.” He held out his hand again. “Message. Now.”

The man on the other side of the counter looked as if he was working hard to maintain even a semblance of friendship. Singe heard the young thugs behind him muttering and glanced over his shoulder to see them watching the brewing confrontation. Ashi was beyond them, half of her attention on the Sentinel Marshal display, the other on the thugs and on Singe. He turned back to Mithas.

Just in time to catch him glancing toward the door behind the counter-the door through which the duty officer had disappeared. The skin on the back of Singe’s neck prickled. He hadn’t made it through the war without developing a good sense of when someone was up to something. Mithas looked back to him, meeting his eyes, and the smile vacated his face. Reflexively, he lifted the message higher. Singe kept his eyes on the other man’s face.

“What’s going on, Mithas?” he asked softly, dangerously. “Waiting for your friend?”

“Just making sure he doesn’t come back too soon,” Mithas said. “He doesn’t need to see money changing hands.” He twitched the paper. “You’ve got to be good for … what? A hundred?”

His voice was light. Deceptively light. He was stalling. “You’re going too far,” Singe growled at him. “Give me that message before you get yourself into trouble.”

For a moment, fear flickered across Mithas’s face, but then his expression hardened. “You want to be careful about starting trouble, Singe. You’re already in enough of it.” The cold smile came back to his face. “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what you’re doing in Sharn when you were last seen running from a burning village in the Eldeen Reaches?”

The prickling on Singe’s neck turned into a painful burn. Caught up in his anger, Mithas twisted the knife of his words a little more. “Word filtered back to the House a few weeks ago. The survivors of some kind of raid on a little backwoods settlement were full of praise for the heroic death of Toller d’Deneith, but it seemed no one knew what happened to his lieutenant. I think the lords of Deneith would like to have a talk with you, Singe. And I’m going to be the one to give them that chance, thanks to this.” He snapped the gray paper of the message between his fingers. “I know opportunity when it spreads itself out in front of-”

At the other end of the hall, Ashi let out a startled exclamation, and there was a sudden, sharp sound like tearing paper. Mithas glanced past Singe, and a look of surprise and anger flared in his eyes.

Singe didn’t let the moment of distraction go to waste. He leaped up and forward, thrusting himself across the smooth wood of the counter. Mithas tried to twist away with the message, but the message wasn’t Singe’s target. He kicked out with one swinging leg and clipped Mithas’s shoulder, spinning him into the wall. Before the other man had even managed to turn himself around again, Singe was on him. He punched Mithas hard across the jaw, then pinned him against the wall long enough to hammer a second blow into his belly. As Mithas doubled over, Singe plucked the message from his fingers.

“You never know when to shut up,” he told the choking man. “That’s why you always lose at cards too.”

He stuffed the message inside his vest and vaulted back over the counter. Ashi was halfway along the hall, her eyes wide with surprise, her sword half-drawn, and a piece of paper clenched in her fist. The young thugs were standing back out of the way-one of them had a knife out but didn’t look like he sure whether he should use it or not. Singe ignored them and intercepted Ashi.

“What just happened?” she asked.

“Nothing to worry about right now,” he said, turning her around. “We’re leaving.”

“Singe, look at this.” Ashi tried to put her scrap of paper into his hands. He pushed it back at her.

“Later!”

There was a groan and a whistling intake of breath behind them. Singe’s belly tightened and he whirled. Mithas was up again and leaning heavily against the counter. His eyes flashed malevolently. He flung out a hand, and words of magic rippled from his tongue, raw and half-formed to Singe’s ears, the intuitive magic of a sorcerer rather than the practiced spell of a wizard, but just as dangerous. Singe darted his fingers toward Mithas and tried to call out a spell of his own, something to break the other man’s casting, but Mithas was just a heartbeat faster. Before he could even gather his will to resist it, a kind of peaceful calm rolled over him. The fiery syllables of his spell froze, then faded, on his tongue. Ashi grabbed him and shook him, but it seemed as if all he could do was focus on his old friend Mithas.

The sorcerer pushed himself off from the bar. “Why don’t you just come back here, and we’ll keep talking, Etan?” he said through teeth clenched tight with pain. “You’re not in a hurry to leave, are you?”

Something at the back of Singe’s mind screamed that yes, he was, but the words that came out of his mouth had no urgency at all. “No, I’m not in a hurry. What did you want to talk about?” He shrugged off Ashi’s hands and started to amble back toward Mithas, but the hunter seized him and swung him around again.

“Rond betch!” she spat. Singe watched her eyes narrow in concentration, felt a sudden heat in her grip-and the eerie calm that had gripped him shattered like glass as the power of Ashi’s Siberys mark brushed aside Mithas’s magic. Singe stumbled, anger washing over him once more, then spun back to Mithas. The sorcerer’s eyes were bulging in confused amazement at the sudden, effortless breaking of his spell.

“You dabbling bastard!” Singe hissed at him.

Mithas just choked, “How-?”

And that was when the thug with the knife managed to find the nerve to attack. Whooping like a halfling raider, he threw himself at Ashi, his blade raised high. It was a ridiculous, clumsy attack, and Ashi didn’t even bother to draw her sword, but just reached up, grabbed the wrist of the young man’s knife hand, and wrenched it. Her assailant’s knife flew in one direction while he flipped in the other, arms and legs flailing.

His waving hand caught her scarf and ripped it free. He hit the floor hard, and the fabric slithered down on top of him, covering his face-but leaving Ashi’s bare, the vivid patterns of her dragonmark exposed.