The Queen of Death

63

Duro cursed his fate. To be caught by a pack of stinking elves was one thing, but the bastards hadn’t deigned to grant him a hero’s death. Instead of killing him and putting his head on a pike outside their foul fort’s gates—where he could have spent many more months scaring cowards who came too close—they’d beaten him senseless and tossed him in this awful cell, where he’d spent the past few weeks.

His captors had interrogated him here atop the tower for days on end, torturing him with devices both painful and cruel. He had refused to break for them under any sort of punishment. All that they had learned from him had been a series of new curses he’d concocted on the spot.

When the interrogators pushed him past his limits, they left him alone to heal for a few days. As soon as he had seemed ready, they came at him again, striving to break down his irony resolve.

This last time, though, they’d given up on him. The morning after the torturers left, the fort’s commander came to announce that his execution would be in three days’ time.

“Why three days?” Duro asked.

The commander looked down on him. “Think on your doom for three days. Perhaps it will loosen your tongue. If not, we will waste no more time with you.”

The evening before he was to be executed for his crimes, Duro peered out one of the barred windows in his high cell and watched the sun set for what he believed would be the last time. Having spent much of his life without seeing a sunset, he cherished each one he witnessed, a spectacular example of the beauty and wonder of the world in which he lived. It also served to remind him that Eberron was a large world and that he had only seen a small fraction of it. As the sun sank to the horizon, he wondered what lands it would warm next.

Most nights, Duro vowed that he would one day explore those distant locales, and the sense of possible and inevitable adventure always gave him vivid dreams. Tonight, though, watching the sunset saddened him instead. He knew he would never see another.

As Duro sat there on his cell’s floor—fashioned from wood rather than stone—his forehead resting on his arms, he heard the crackling of a large fire. He wondered if the elves had decided to get an early start on the bonfire meant to kill him or if they’d just built such a blaze to celebrate the eve of his death.

He refused to get up and peer through the window to find out. The damned noise kept getting louder and louder, though, which made it hard for Duro to ignore it. He pushed his head farther into his arms until his biceps covered his ears, and that seemed to work.

Then something clanged against the window above him.

“Get back!” someone yelled. “Get away from the window!”

Duro scrambled away from the window and put his back to the door. Staring at the window, he saw the grappling hook attached to the bars. It dangled there with its hooks wrapped around a pair of the bars.

“Go!” someone shouted. With a mighty crack, the entire window yanked away at the end of the hook, along with a good chunk of the cell’s outer wall.

Duro stood up and shaded his eyes with his hand. He saw a ring of fire crackling away from him into the dusk, then backing up and heading straight for him again. He watched it open-mouthed, too stunned to consider fleeing or—given that he had no way to flee—calling for help.

Then the ring narrowed and turned into a vertical line.

Down in the fort below, Duro heard an alarm. Soldiers shouted, and bells rang out in the gathering darkness.

The Phoenix drew close enough that Duro could make out four figures standing at the gunwale. From their silhouettes, he knew them. Kandler, Burch, Sallah, and Xalt.

The dwarf whooped with joy and ran toward the splinter-edged hole that had once been his cell wall. As he did, a gangplank stabbed out from the airship. The end of it slid toward him and came to a rest on the edge of the cell’s floor.

“Move it!” Burch shouted. As the shifter spoke, a ball of flaming pitch went sailing over the airship’s bow. “They’ll find the range soon!”

Duro charged straight up the gangplank, willing himself to not look down. If he had, he knew the hundred foot drop would have made him woozy, and this was no place to lose your footing.

When the dwarf reached the airship’s deck, Kandler and Sallah grabbed him and dragged him the last few feet. As the pair deposited him on the deck, Xalt shouted, “He’s aboard!”

Duro glimpsed Monja standing at—or rather on—the ship’s wheel. The ship took off so fast that Duro tumbled to the deck. Had Kandler not been there to steady him, he might have gone cartwheeling out over the rail.

The dwarf sat there awestruck on the airship’s deck as the Phoenix raced off in the direction of the dying glow of the setting sun. “Gods above and below,” he said. “I’d given up hope. I’d have laid odds I had a better chance with the executioner than you lot did in Argonnessen.”

“Surprised?” Burch said with a toothy grin.

“That’s a paltry word,” Duro said.

“Did you think we would leave you behind?” asked Xalt. The warforged’s curiosity seemed genuine.

Duro laughed. “The thought crossed my mind.”

Sallah put out a hand and helped the dwarf to his feet. “Honorable people don’t leave friends behind,” she said.

“So I’ve been with you the past few weeks then? I hadn’t noticed.” The lack of bitterness in Duro’s voice surprised even himself. He was too happy to be free to consider recriminations.

Kandler clapped the dwarf on the back and joined him in a celebratory roar. “Like rivers to the sea,” the justicar said. “We might run our separate courses for a while, but we always meet again in the end.”