The Queen of Death

55

Sallah hated screaming, but she couldn t help herself. She’d thought that Deothen had long ago hammered the urge out of her during her childhood training drills. Having a dragon queen breathe fire down at her seemed to have subverted all that though.

The lady knight took a deep breath, as if to scream once more, but this time Xalt slapped a steely hand across her mouth. He held it there until the urge to scream passed from her, and she pulled his fingers away.

The dragon put an eye up to the other side of the crystal, which magnified it until it seemed the yellowish orb had to stand at least twenty feet tall. It growled as it did, although Sallah couldn’t tell if the dragon meant to say something in Draconic or just wished to growl in frustration at the way the crystal blocked most of the effects of her flames.

While the jet of fire from the dragon’s mouth hadn’t been powerful enough to reach all the way around the crystal, much of the heat from it had. Sallah felt rivulets of sweat slipping down the inside of her armor, soaking her from head to toe and plastering her red curls against her neck and forehead.

“I will run to the left,” Xalt said. “When it follows me, you run for the doorway.”

“You’ll be killed.”

Xalt nodded toward the dragon’s monstrous eye. “That seems inevitable. This way, at least, one of us might have a chance.”

Sallah considered this for a moment, then made to bolt to the left. The warforged’s arms shot out and stopped her. “Let me do this,” he said.

“I can’t let someone else die in my stead.”

“I might not die. I’m not flesh and blood like you. The fire might not affect me as much.”

“Do you believe that?”

The warforged stared at her with his unblinking obsidian eyes. “Not really.”

Sallah reached over and kissed Xalt on the cheek. Despite the fact that his face was made of metal and wood instead of skin, it felt warm and smelled something like wet copper.

“You’re sweet,” she said, “but we’re getting out of this together or not at all.”

The crystal before them shuddered as the dragon queen slammed one of her mighty wings into it.

This time, Xalt screamed.

Monja wished nothing more than to fly the Phoenix straight into the observatory. She couldn’t tell for sure if the airship would fit through the gigantic doorway at the end of the landing platform, but that didn’t matter so much to her. She wanted to crash the craft into the observatory and destroy her, unleashing the rebellious elemental trapped in the ship’s ring of fire.

With luck, such an explosion would bring the observatory tumbling down. She knew it might kill every one of her friends—and perhaps herself—but if it killed the dragons too it would be worth it.

Unfortunately, the dragon-man refused to leave her alone. She knew that he could kill her in an instant. If he wanted to, he could murder her and be off the ship before her corpse even smacked into the deck.

“Go ahead,” he said to her. “Try it.”

Monja stared at the dragon-man. His eyes burned like lava.

“You never know,” he said as he turned to gaze at the observatory. “It might work. You might kill her. You might save them all.”

Monja bit her lower lip. “You just want an excuse to kill me.”

The dragon-man’s lips peeled apart, showing his several rows of pointed teeth. “What makes you think I need one?” ¹

Monja’s hands felt sweaty on the airship’s wheel. “You want me to kill your mother?”

The dragon-man pursed his lips and kept staring straight ahead at the observatory. “I’ve waited a long time to become king.”

“How long?”

“Your people were still living in tents instead of burrows.” Monja’s brow creased. “We do live in tents.”

The dragon-man arched an eyebrow. “See? The Prophecy isn’t infallible after all.”

“You would let me kill your mother.”

The dragon-man looked down at the shaman. “I would probably stop you.”

“You don’t sound too sure of yourself.”

Monja could feel the elemental in the airship’s ring of fire straining at her will. The creature had no doubts about what should be done. If it could have spoken, it would have begged her to chance it, to aim the ship at the observatory’s doorway and smash her into the place, to leave this world in a glorious blaze.

“No matter what you do, I win,” the dragon-man said. “If you stay here, it does me no harm, and my mother will be pleased that I obeyed her orders. If you attack the observatory and fail, you will convince her that those from beyond the borders of our fair isle are unbalanced. That kind of paranoia I am sure I can exploit to my benefit.”

“And if I do not fail?”

“Then I become king.”

Monja waited for the dragon-man to continue talking, but he did not. Somewhere inside the observatory, Sallah screamed.

“Is this not what you want?” The palms of Monja’s hands began to itch.

“Mine is a long life, and I have many tomorrows before me.”

The dragon-man looked back at the halfling. “If I were to blink, your life would escape me entirely. Time is my friend.” He turned back to gaze at the observatory. “It is not yours.”

Monja felt the ship inch forward, right toward the open doorway. The Phoenix moved without the halfling willing her to, but Monja knew that the elemental within still obeyed her. The shaman wanted to charge the airship straight into the place and lay about with her until everything came tumbling down, but she knew she couldn’t.

She had to trust her friends. She had to give them a chance.

She had come along with Kandler, Esprë, Burch and the others to help—to heal them when they needed it and to fly the airship. As a shaman, the need to aid others ran thick in her blood, but she had to admit that she would have come along just so she could keep flying the airship.

Monja had spent much of her life soaring through the air on the back of one glidewing or another. Since childhood, she’d taken to the sky whenever she could find one of the winged lizards ready to give her a ride.

Soaring above the waving grasses of the Talenta Plains gave the halfling the kind of perspective she could find nowhere else. In the air, she could leave her earthbound problems—which were mostly other people’s problems— behind and revel in the vibrancy of life.

Flying the airship didn’t feel the same.

A glidewing flew in concert with the winds. It rode the updrafts and downdrafts and currents and eddies of the sky. It danced with nature.

The airship represented power. She did not respect the weather but defied it. Nothing stood in the way of the Phoenix.

Monja recognized the irony that a fiery elemental—the quintessence of a natural force—powered the airship. Trapped in the rune-crusted restraining arcs, the ring of fire had been harnessed to allow the craft to own the skies. Up here in the air, it could challenge anything— even a dragon.

To have all that power in her hands intoxicated Monja. She took every spare shift at the helm that she could cadge from the others. Even though she had to stand on the middle spars to be able to see over the bridge’s console, she spent almost all of her moments behind the wheel with a gleeful grin on her face.

To have all that power now, it seemed a shame not to use it. Monja felt the Phoenix edge forward again, and she reined the airship in hard.

From somewhere in the tower, she heard a strange bellow. It could only be the sound of a warforged’s scream.

“Are you a coward?” the dragon-man asked.

Wondering what her father would think of her, Monja felt sick. What would he do in such a situation? Would he tolerate the dragon-man’s taunting? Or would he make the vicious creature pay?

As lathon of the tribes of the Talenta Plains, Halpum knew all about war. He had fought bitter struggles in his youth to prevent other ambitious laths from destroying their tribe or bringing it to heel, but in his elder years, he had shunned the horrors of the battlefield for the comforts of the campfire.

It had been he who had represented all of the Talenta tribes at the peace talks that brought an end to the Last War. He had brought his fractious peoples together not through strength of arms but force of will. He had used that same skill with others to help forge the peace that now held over most of Khorvaire, ever since the signing of the Treaty of Thronehold.

He was no coward. Nor was his daughter.

Monja smiled as she wiped her hands on her shirt and then readjusted them on the airship’s wheel. Despite removing her fingers from the controls for a moment, the fire elemental had not moved the ship an inch. It knew who held sway over it—at least now that she held sway over herself.

“I am content as I am,” Monja said, the words flowing from her like wind under wings.

The dragon-man scowled.