The Road to Death

21

When plates were cleared and the flagons topped off, Monja spoke to Kandler again. A dazzling presence in the lathon’s tent, all eyes stayed centered on her as she slipped into a space cleared between Burch and her father without a needed word. She chatted with them both, taking up with the shifter as if not a day had passed since they’d last met.

Her exuberance reminded Kandler of Esprë in her brighter moments, in the days before the Mourning, before her mother had been lost to them both. Since then, a cloud had always hovered over the young elf, casting even her best days in shadow. Living in Mardakine, nestled up against the horror of the Mournland, hadn’t helped. More than once, Kandler had thought to give up on dead Cyre, but neither he nor Esprë could find the strength to tear themselves away from the place and head for more pleasant climes.

Circumstances had done that for them.

It took the justicar a moment to realize that someone had called his name.

“Kandler?” Monja said, the lilt now gone from her voice. “Are you with us?”

The justicar nodded.

“I asked if you had anything of your daughter’s with you.”

Kandler lowered his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “Burch knows her scent. We never thought we’d have to track her through the air.”

“Nothing?” Monja’s face fell. “Not even a small token she might have given you? A birthday gift?”

Kandler and Esprë had never gone in for such sentimentality. Esprina had been the most pragmatic elf Kandler had ever met—one of the many things he’d found attractive about her—and she’d passed that trait on to her daughter. Living as nomads in wartime too—and then in barren Mardakine—necessities had crowded out much else.

“Why?” he asked.

Monja’s grimace creased her childlike face, and Kandler saw her for her true age. Wisdom lurked behind those youthful eyes.

“By means of my magic, I can spy upon those far away, but I must know something about them for the spell to work. I’ve not met your daughter, so having something she once owned would be the next best thing. Without that even, I have little to go on, nothing for my magic to latch on to.” She cursed in an unchildlike way.

“Wait,” Sallah said. “I have something.”

Kandler turned to look at the lady knight, hope rising in his chest. He quashed it back down right away. “You have something of my daughter’s?” He failed to keep the disbelief from his voice.

“I didn’t say that.” Sallah reached for her belt and drew out the black blade that had once belonged to Te’oma. She’d carried it with her since the battle in Construct. Now she tossed it onto the table, where it slid and spun until coming to a rest in front of Monja.

“This was the changeling’s,” the lady knight said. “If we find her, we may find Esprë too.”

A smile spread across Monja’s face, exposing her small, pearly teeth as she handled the knife. The flickering light of the everburning torches danced across the surface of its polished, ebony blade. “This will do just fine,” she said.

With a sharp gesture from Monja, the flap at the front of the tent opened, and a handful of halflings trotted in, carrying a large, brassy basin filled with smoky water. They hauled it up and set it on the table before Monja, then she dismissed them with a curt wave.

Monja stood on the seat of her chair so that she could look down into the basin from above. Burch motioned for the others to come nearer, and soon Kandler, Brendis, Xalt, Sallah, and Halpum surrounded the basin too, craning their necks to stare into the murky fluid inside.

Monja chanted something low and soft, words that seemed to slip in and out of Kandler’s ears without stopping to mean anything in between. As she spoke, she held the changeling’s black dagger out in front of her and used it to stir the waters with a flourish. As the waters swirled, Monja kept chanting, and the cloudy concoction in the basin became pale and clear.

An image began to form on the water’s spinning surface. Monja slowed her stirring bit by bit until the dagger didn’t move at all, and the water seemed as flat and smooth as a mirror.

A wooden ceiling appeared in the water, and for a moment Kandler thought it was just a reflection. Then he remembered he stood in a tent.

Monja tilted the tip of the dagger, and the image in the water moved, panning about until it revealed an open window set in a wooden wall. Through the window, Kandler could see torches guttering in the night air. One of them moved from right to left before disappearing from view, and he thought he could make out the form of a sentry in the glow of the distant light.

Monja moved the dagger again, and the vision in the water rotated about the room, taking it in one piece at a time. A lantern burned in one corner, casting sharp shadows throughout the place. A number of beds were crammed into the room, but only two seemed occupied, long lumps resting in them beneath thin blankets.

The image in the basin rotated up and looked down on the form in the nearest bed. Kandler heard Sallah gasp as the sleeping face of the changeling spun into view.

“She’s hurt,” Xalt said, his voice betraying more concern for the changeling than Kandler thought he could have mustered.

“Not bad enough,” Burch growled. Kandler looked over to see the shifter flexing his hands, popping his claws.

“Try the other bed,” Kandler said.

Monja dragged the tip of the dagger an inch across the water, and the image panned straight over the other sleeping form. Esprë lay there below them, a purplish bruise across the bridge of her nose spread out to blacken both her eyes. Her breath came soft and even, though, and she seemed peaceful despite her location.

Kandler felt his heart clench in his chest. He wanted to reach out through the image to touch her, to stroke her golden hair, to whisper that everything would be all right, but he feared it would break the spell and steal her from him forever.

“It’s some kind of sick room,” Sallah said.

“I wonder what happened to the airship,” said Brendis. The young knight had been the last of them to fly the craft.

Not for the first time, Kandler wondered if the knight felt responsible for it getting away from them and thereby Esprë too. Brendis couldn’t have done a thing to prevent it, but Kandler knew that knights like him often let guilt eat at them. Such feelings motivated some of them to make amends, to repair any damage done. In others, though, the emotion festered, always open and raw.

“Where are they?” Kandler said.

Monja shook her head. “The spell only shows me the person I’m looking for, not her location on a map.”

“Can you move the image out through the window? Just looking around a room doesn’t tell me enough.”

“The vision centers on the changeling. If she moves, I can follow her. Otherwise … perhaps we can try again in the morning.”

“No need,” Halpum said. “I recognize that place. Spurbin—one of my best hunters spent a long week there once.”

All eyes locked on the lathon.

“It’s the infirmary of a Karrnathi outpost far to the north of here on the border between our land and that of King Kaius. We were hunting a swordtooth titan, a big lizard, tall as a dozen halflings put together. They rarely wander so far from the central lands, but this one was hungry and mad with pain. It lost one of its spindly upper arms in a fight, along with a double armload of its yard-long teeth.

“Even wounded, the beast was dangerous, maybe worse than ever. It rampaged through one of our hunting camps, killing a dozen good halflings before we ran it off. We tracked it from there, following it north.”

“Like following a herd of cattle, right?” Burch said. “The tail alone on a thing like that’s wider than a wagon.”

Halpum nodded. “Crazed as it was, it ran fast and hard but wandered all over the place as it went. We kept a good distance from it, wary of it scenting us and turning to attack. I figured it would run itself out soon enough, then we could put it down. A kill like that is worth a little risk.

“Instead, the dumb beast ran right at that Karrnathi fort. Fort Bones, they call it. Stuck inside those wooden walls, the soldiers had nowhere to run, and it tore through their defenses like they were kindling.

“Of course, it didn’t help that most of the soldiers there aren’t more than bones either, tools some necromancer raised from peaceful graves to serve in the Karrnathi army until the moons all fall from the sky.”

“We met some of their friends in Mardakine the night Esprë was kidnapped,” Kandler said.

“More meat on those bones,” Burch said. “Stinking zombies.”

Halpum shook his head. “Karrnath’s always liked recycling their dead soldiers. You don’t have to feed them, and they always follow orders. They’re dumber than a clawfoot, but you can’t have everything.

“Fort Bones uses only skeletons for its operation. Fort Zombie sits forty leagues to its west, closer to the Mournland. You can guess what kind of guards they have there.”

Sallah nodded. “It seems that our changeling may have friends in Kaius’s court at Korth.”

“I always hated Karrnath.” Kandler fought the urge to spit. As an agent of the Citadel, he’d been to the northern nation many times, and he’d come to dislike its leaders, whom he found as cold and merciless as one of their brutal winters.

“The Karrn aren’t all bad,” Halpum said. “After we helped them bring down that big lizard, they invited us in for a feast. All that lizard meat and only a handful of living Karrn to share it with. We stayed a week, until Spurbin could move again. He nearly lost an arm to the thing. Just lucky it bit him with one of the gaps in its teeth.”

“Fort Bones, you say,” Kandler said. As he spoke, he looked down into the basin. The waters had clouded through again. “How far north is this?”

“About seventy leagues,” Halpum said. “You can leave at first light.”