The Road to Death

30

“Where are we going?” Esprë said as Brendis led her by the hand from the bedchamber in which they had sat waiting for the others. Kandler had instructed them to wait there for fifteen minutes before making their way toward the gate as fast as they could. If they heard any uproar outside, they were to charge toward freedom straight away.

Only ten minutes had passed, and Brendis had taken Esprë by the hand and said, “It’s time to go.”

At first, the young elf had thought perhaps her nervousness about the escape had made the time they’d spent alone, in wordless contemplation of the chaos to come, seem shorter than it had been. Maybe the time had passed, and she just hadn’t noticed it. There hadn’t been a clock in the room, not like the ones perched atop some of the shining towers of far-off Sharn. She just couldn’t tell.

Then, when they left the room, Brendis took her to the right instead of to the left, which would have brought them closer to the gate.

“This isn’t the way,” she said to him. “The gate is back in that direction.”

Brendis’s grip tightened on Esprë’s hand. “That way isn’t safe,” he said.

“But that’s the way everyone else went.” Esprë felt her heart freeze in her chest.

“I know.”

The young elf yanked her hand from the knight’s grasp. “I’m not going a step further until … Oh, my holy ancestors.”

The knight stopped and turned to stare at Esprë, a secret little smirk on his face. “You didn’t think I’d leave you behind just like that,” he said, “did you?”

Esprë drew back a breath to scream, and a firm hand clamped down across her lips. She tried to spin away from it, but another strong arm wrapped around her, pinning her arms to her sides.

“You are my captive,” a low voice said in her ear. “I’d like you alive, but you will do dead. Be silent.”

Esprë nodded against the hand across her face, but it stayed in place. She recognized Ibrido’s voice and manner, and she knew that he would not hesitate to break her neck given half a reason.

She had to defend herself. She felt the dragonmark on the back of her neck start to burn, and the sensation sluiced down the backs of her arms to pool in her hands. Even here in the darkness, they seemed to glow black, their unnatural absence of color standing out against even the night.

Now, if she could just raise her hands enough to touch him—or the changeling. She lunged forward at the false Brendis, but Ibrido’s embrace held her fast.

“Stop her,” the Karrn said. “Or I’ll kill her now.”

A bolt of pain stabbed into Esprë’s mind. It felt as if her brain had shrunk to the size of an apple and now rattled around in a skull that was far too large.

Then the hand around her mouth slipped down to her neck and squeezed. The arteries there closed off, and the world went black before the young elf could shout a word of protest.

“That was close,” Te’oma said in her own voice, although she maintained Brendis’s form. “Did you see her hands?”

“What of it?” Ibrido asked as he slung the unconscious Esprë over his shoulder. “She is but a child—a valuable child, but too young to hurt one such as me.”

“Think what you like,” Te’oma said as she shifted into a new shape. “She almost killed me with but a touch.” She glanced down at herself, trying out a new voice. “How do I look?”

Ibrido parted his lips and exposed his teeth in what Te’oma could only guess was meant to be a smile. “Just like our esteemed Captain of Bones,” he said, scanning her from head to toe, “if you can ignore the fact you’re dressed as a Knight of the Silver Flame and stand at least foot taller still. Wear this, and slouch over.” He tossed her a black cloak, which she flung over her shoulders and draped over Brendis’s armor.

“Much better,” he said. “In the darkness, the guards should not be able to ascertain any differences. Assuming we don’t stumble across Berre herself, your disguise should be impenetrable.”

Ibrido turned and stalked down the hallway until he reached a ladder that led to a hatchway in the ceiling. Toting the young elf along as if she weighed as much as a feather pillow, he shoved the hatch back and launched himself up through it into the well-lit night beyond.

Te’oma followed close on his heels, struggling just a little with mimicking Berre’s shorter gait. The changeling preferred her own long legs, and those of a dwarf seemed cramped and bothersome.

When she popped her head up through the hatch, Te’oma saw the Karrnathi airship hovering above her. It stretched longer and wider than the one the justicar and his friends had stolen from Majeeda, the mad elf trapped in her own tower in the Mournland, and the ring of fire that encircled it like a ring around a finger crackled even louder.

The Karrnathi airship hung moored over the northwest corner of the fort, as far away from the fort’s front gate as possible. Several ropes held it in place, and a wooden gangplank led from the crenellated rear wall up and over to the ship’s main deck. The name of the ship—Keeper’s Claw, named for the icy grasp of the god of the dead—sprawled across the bow in blood-red letters, just beneath the masthead hanging under the bowsprit. The massive wooden carving depicted a monstrous skeleton with a demon’s horns and a werewolf’s teeth flying along as if it held the entire rest of the ship on its tremendous back. Painted a gleaming white, it looked like it might somehow detach itself from the rest of the ship and go on a deadly rampage at the slightest provocation.

Ibrido stopped halfway up the gangplank and beckoned for Te’oma to hurry up. She doubled her pace and reached his side in seconds. As she approached, she gazed at the unconscious Esprë on his back. For someone in such mortal peril, she slept blissfully unaware, and Te’oma smiled at that.

“You are in charge of this fort,” Ibrido said. “Remember that.”

Te’oma nodded, irritated that the Karrn felt he had to tell her about her business. She’d been impersonating people her entire life, so often that she sometimes wondered who she was. She recalled a moment as a teenager when she’d been unable to tell if she’d returned to her own form or just something that looked a great deal like it. She’d cried herself to sleep that night, only confident about her own self when she awoke the next morning, comfortable in her own skin.

She suspected that was why the natural form of a changeling was so plain, almost blank. It was too much effort to try to know every inch of a complex physique—far simpler to be a simple person in the first place.

It seemed that no living creatures stood on the ship, that they had all gone to the guest barracks in the fort below, leaving their crew of Karrnathi skeletons behind. These were not so well armored as the ones working in the fort, who served as guards full time. Instead, they had little clothing at all, making it easier for them to move about the ship at speed. Each of them wore a black vest lined with crimson silk and many pockets to give them someplace to store tools and the like. Each also had a long knife in a leather sheath strapped to its right femur. Some of them had a brightly colored bandanna either tied around their neck or wrapped around their naked skulls. Te’oma couldn’t be sure, but they seemed to be some indicator of either rank or position. She supposed you might need such a thing to tell the creatures apart if you were trapped on a ship with dozens of them for a week or more at a time.

None of the creatures moved a single bone as they waited for their visitors to board their ship. The silence among so many creatures made Berre’s skin crawl over the changeling’s flesh. She expected them to burst into lethal action at any moment and wasn’t sure she could stand waiting for that any longer.

Te’oma brushed past Ibrido on the gangplank and stepped onto the ship’s wide, polished deck. This seemed even more like a boat than the other airship, wide enough that she could ignore for a moment the fact that the craft hung floating high in the air rather than in an open sea.

A gaunt, sunken-eyed man wearing a black, silk bandanna tied around the crown of his head stepped forward as she boarded the ship. Some of the skeletons aboard the ship seemed to have more mass than this lean figure, who stepped forward and saluted Te’oma. “Bosun Meesh, at your service,” he said in a dry, unused voice.

“I am Berre Stonefist, Captain of Bones, in charge of this fortress and all who come within its bounds. I am taking command of this ship. Prepare to cast off.”

The bosun stared at Te’oma with his cavernous eyes, his lips frozen for the moment. The changeling felt like she might vomit. She had no idea how the Karrn maintained a chain of command over these soulless creatures, and she feared that they were as likely to tear her to shreds and feast on her flesh as accept her orders.

Ibrido reached around Te’oma’s chest and pulled a fold in the cloak open to expose a silver wolf’s head embroidered in profile there. A set of three knucklebones rested beneath these, stitched fast to the cloak’s fabric in a triangular pattern.

At the sight of these, the black-capped man developed a thin-lipped smile and said, “Aye, aye.” Then he turned and made a complex signal to the ship’s skeletons, each of which had been gazing at him with an empty stare. They launched into a burst of chaotic activity, working fast to remove the moorings and pull the gangplank up behind Ibrido.

“Soon we will be on our way,” the Karrn said as he carried Esprë’s body to the captain’s quarters in the ship’s forecastle. “Then no one will be able to stop us.”

Te’oma smiled at those words as she followed Ibrido, hoping they were true.