The Road to Death

29

The crackling fire roared past the window of the room in which Kandler slept, and he awoke. He pried open his eyes to see Xalt’s shape silhouetted in the window, a warm, flickering light setting off the edges of his form from the night beyond.

“What is it?” Kandler asked, sure he wouldn’t like the answer.

“Sounds like an airship,” said Burch.

“Ours?”

Xalt shook his head. “The skeletons are still working on an old ship in the yard. This craft must be the military one Berre referred to.”

“It’s early,” Kandler said. “Damn Karrnathi efficiency.”

“Does this change things?” Brendis asked.

The young knight looked as if he’d been sitting on the edge of his bed watching the others the entire time. There were only three beds in the room, and Burch and Kandler had taken the others, as Xalt had insisted that since he didn’t need to sleep, the beds were useless to him.

Kandler nodded. “I’m just not sure how.” He paused to think for a moment. “We should let them unlimber the new ship, tie it down. The crew will be tired and want to sleep. Once they’re settled, we can move. We need to be out of here long before dawn.”

A knock at the door made Xalt jump. Kandler and Burch fastened on their weapons as Brendis crept toward the door, his hand on the hilt of his sword. Before he could put his hand on the door, it burst open, and Esprë, Sallah, and Monja spilled into the room.

“Did you see the airship?” Esprë asked.

Kandler nodded as he stood to gather the young elf in his arms for a quick embrace. Then he turned to the others.

“The plan’s the same,” he said. “We just need to sit tight here for a bit. Then we move.”

“Are you sure this is still a good idea?” Xalt said.

Monja looked up at him as the two strolled across the fort’s open yard toward the battered airship. “It’s a little late for second thoughts,” she said. “They’ve already spotted us.”

Xalt stared up at the ship with the black, unblinking stones that served as his eyes. Skeletons still swarmed over the thing like ants across an anthill, building, building, building. The banging of hammers and the high-pitched rhythmic zipping of saws didn’t skip a beat as they neared, but an overseer in full Karrnathi armor—black, solid, and covered with burled spikes—standing on the bridge pointed down at them as they approached.

Xalt marveled at how well the repairs had gone so far. He hadn’t thought animated skeletons capable of such craftsmanship, and the thought shamed him. Many breathers underestimated warforged in the same way, considering them nothing more than heartless killing machines. He’d spent his entire life—most of it, anyway—proving that notion wrong.

To Xalt’s eye, the airship looked almost ready to go. The skeletons had even painted a name across the ship’s stern: Phoenix. Somehow, the gesture made the ship seem much more than just a mode of transportation, and Xalt realized that he would miss it.

He wondered for a moment if they could somehow manage to steal the airship and escape on that instead. He had no idea how to defeat all the skeletons, sever the mooring lines, and then take off into the night, but he thought perhaps Kandler would. Then he remembered that the airship’s ring of fire would be like a beacon in the darkness. The other airship would race after them and bring them down long before they could make it to the cover of the Mournland.

He almost laughed at the notion that the Mournland represented safety, but he didn’t think Monja would share his feelings. Still, he’d spent almost two years living in the blasted land, sharing space with others of his own kind. For someone who could go without food, drink, and sun, it represented a haven. Most breathers feared to enter the place, which made it safe—at least from them.

Then Xalt noticed that the ship’s rudder lay on the earth beneath it. The skeletons had taken it down for repairs. The changeling had nearly torn it to pieces that night she’d plucked Esprë right from the ship’s deck. Despite that and all the action it had seen since then, it looked in fine shape now, needing only to be hoisted back into place.

“What’s that?” Monja called to the Karrnathi overseer. Her too-innocent tone rang false in Xalt’s ears.

“I said,” the Karrn called down, “what are you doing out here? You need to return to your quarters. Now!”

“I couldn’t sleep,” the halfling shaman said. “I decided to go for a stroll. My friend here doesn’t need rest, so he agreed to escort me.”

“You can’t be out here. I have my orders.”

“I just wanted to see the airship,” Xalt said. “It has many memories for me.”

A rope ladder dropped over the side of the ship, and the overseer slid down it to the ground. “You spent some time on this beauty?”

The overseer didn’t seem like a monster, as Xalt might have guessed from the way the others spoke of the Karrn. He was a tall, lanky young man with an easy smile set in a tanned face still battling acne. His dark hair looked as if he’d let one of the less competent skeletons cut it with a rusty knife.

“How many knots do you think she can make?” the Karrn said. “I’ve never piloted one of these, and I’m looking forward to taking her out for a test soon.”

The gates of Fort Bones stood far enough from the airship to be shrouded in darkness but for a pair of large, everburning torches ablaze at the top corners of the gates. There, standing atop two open platforms, they served as signal lights for travelers in the dark as well as light for the pair of living sentries passing the long night hours by playing dice behind the crenellated walls.

Kandler and Sallah crept along the inside of the fort’s outer wall until they reached the gates. As they did, they heard the steady trod of iron-shod bones tromping along the walkways overhead, Karrnathi skeletons on their ceaseless patrols.

“What’s the plan from here?” Sallah whispered as they stopped for a moment, leaning against a darkened patch of wall.

Her armor made it hard for her to move quietly, but the crackling of the airship’s ring of fire, along with the sounds of the repair crew on the other side of the yard, had covered the occasional jangling of the chains in her mail.

“I got us this far,” said Kandler as he peered at the gates, only yards away.

A large, heavy bar—a banded log, really—lay across both sides of the gate, resting in a set of iron braces. Moving it would not be easy, but he guessed that the two of them, one on each end, could handle it together. As soon as they did, though, the guards would sound the alarm, and the entire fort would descend on their position.

Kandler pointed to the ladder at the west side of the gate. “We need to get up there,” he said.

Sallah glared him. “No,” she hissed. “Those men up there are innocents. They’ve done us no harm. I won’t take part in killing them.”

Kandler gaped. “You picked a damn poor time to develop a conscience,” he said. “You’ve killed plenty since I met you.”

Sallah grimaced. “I fought to defend myself and those around me. Those were just and honorable battles. This,” she spat, “this is assassination.”

Kandler held his head in his hands. “I knew I should have brought Burch.”

The shifter cursed softly as he slipped in a pile of horse apples. He caught himself with an outstretched hand before landing in the mess, but that did little to improve his mood. He scraped the dung from his bare sole as best he could against the inside of the stable’s wall and wiped off the rest on some fresh hay.

Burch finished saddling up the black horses they’d need: seven by his count. Then he removed the ropes from across the faces of each of the stalls. There were a dozen horses all told, and he wanted to be able to get them all racing out of the place at the same time. A loud noise from the rear of the last stall should be enough to drive them all out, he hoped. The thought of loosing a howl at the docile creatures made him smile.

As he reached the stall farthest from the door, he smelled something under the standard stable stench. For a moment, he chalked it off to the fact the stalls hadn’t been mucked out in far too long, but then he recognized the scent: death.

Burch cursed again. On a tight schedule like this, he couldn’t afford to have anything get in the way. Maybe the smell came from a body the Captain of Bones—or some seconded necromancer from the Karrnathi army, more likely—hoped to turn into another of the fleshless soldiers that gave Fort Bones its name, or maybe the cook had just tossed the remains of the freshly butchered pig they’d had for dinner out here.

The shifter wanted nothing more than to just ignore the smell and leave. If any of the others had taken up this assignment instead, they would never have noticed it, he knew.

Instead, Burch reached into one of the packs he’d hung across the saddle horn of a nearby horse. After rummaging around for a moment, he withdrew an everburning torch and uncapped it, exposing its cold, magical flame.

The sudden light stabbed into the shifter’s eyes as he tried to stand between it and the stable’s outer wall, hoping that he could keep anyone outside from seeing the glare through the unsealed gaps through which the wind sometimes whistled. Burch blinked until his yellow, slit eyes readjusted. Then he followed his nose into the back of the rear stall.

The horse standing there spooked a bit at the proximity of the torch, but Burch calmed it with a quick word and a stroke along its smooth, black neck. It moved aside for him as he pressed further into the back of the stall, seeking the source of the stench.

There, in the far corner, he saw a bare elbow peeking out from under a pile of fresh hay. Perhaps it had once been covered and the horse had brushed the hay over it aside. Either way, there it was.

Burch probed into the hay with the flickering torch, its flames leaving the hay untouched but setting them aglow where its stalks touched the light. He swept the golden stuff aside, exposing the naked body underneath.

The corpse lay face down in the muck, but as soon as Burch saw its short, black hair, he knew who it was. He reached down to drawback the head by that hair, pulling Brendis’s face into view. The young knight’s neck bore vicious red marks from some kind of rope or strap. His eyes were open, although the pupils had rolled back into his head.

He was as dead as he could be.

Burch closed Brendis’s eyes and lowered the young knight’s head back into the hay. Then he cursed, cursed, and cursed again.