The Road to Death

31

“We need to open that gate,” Kandler said. “If we do that without removing that guard, he’ll bring the entire fort down on our heads. It’s him or us.”

Sallah nodded, then shouldered past the justicar. “Wait here,” she said.

Flummoxed, Kandler watched as the lady knight strode straight up to the ladder. She climbed up into the guard’s post in a small niche along the narrow walkway that lined the upper edge of the wall just high enough to let a man peek his head out over the crenellations.

“Hello,” he heard her say. “I think I’m lost.”

“True enough,” the guard said, amused. “You’re a long way from Thrane.”

Kandler crept over to the barred gates, still listening.

“It’s been a long, lonely trip,” she said. “I was hoping to find some civilized company here.”

The guard laughed. “There’s little of anything civilized out here on the edge of nowhere, but I’d be pleased to do what I can to please you.”

Kandler heard Sallah try a girly giggle, but it fell flat.

“Are you all right?” the guard said. “Something caught in your throat?”

The lady knight coughed. “I’m fine,” she said. “It must be the night air.”

A pair of skeletal guards converged on the post from opposite directions. Kandler could hear their booted feet stomping along the wooden walkway above, and he pressed himself harder against the gates. He put his hand on the pommel of his sword, ready to draw it at a moment’s notice, but fearful that the sound of it clearing its scabbard would give him away.

“Just let me put these two at ease,” the guard said. “They don’t talk much, but they listen to orders.”

A moment later, Kandler heard the skeletal guards pacing back off in the directions from which they’d come. He breathed a silent sigh of relief.

“Now,” the guard said to Sallah, moving closer to her, “let’s see what I can do for you.”

“Why don’t you join me down below?” Sallah said. “I feel a bit too exposed up here. Anyone could see us.”

“An excellent idea,” the guard said. “Ladies first.”

Sallah came down through the hole in the flooring, picking her way carefully down the ladder to the ground. As she cleared the decking, she waved Kandler into a nearby patch of shadow to wait.

The lady knight stood at the foot of the ladder until the guard joined her. “Now,” he said with a leer, “just what was it you were hoping I could do for you, my pretty lass?”

Sallah sidled closer to the guard, running her hands up his chest until they rested on the front of his breastplate. “I just have one simple request,” she whispered in his ear. “Keep quiet.”

She shoved the man back into Kandler’s arms, where he put a knife to the man’s throat. The guard’s eyes grew wide, but he pressed his lips shut as if he feared some sound might accidentally escape.

Sallah tore off the guard’s tunic and used strips of it to gag and bind him. He didn’t struggle a bit. Just before she stuffed a ball of fabric in his mouth, he whispered, “My thanks to you. This job’s not worth dying over.”

“See,” Sallah whispered with a smile as she and Kandler each grabbed an end of the bar holding the gates shut, “there can be a better way.”

“Hey,” said Trisfo, the Karrn who hoped to fly Phoenix to Fort Zombie and back the next day, “do you see that?”

Xalt froze stiff. These were some of the words he dreaded to hear most in what had been a pleasant conversation so far, covering subjects ranging from the vegetation of the Mournland to the airworthiness of ships like Phoenix.

Monja smiled. “I can’t hear much of anything standing this close to the ring of fire.”

Trisfo stepped between the halfling and the warforged to peer toward the fort’s gates. “I said, ‘Do you see that?’ Puakel’s gone from his post again.” He pointed up at the guard post above and to one side of the gates. “He’s going to spend a year in Khyber for that if Berre catches him again.”

“He’s probably just gone to relieve himself,” Xalt said. When Monja stared at him, he added, “I understand humans have to do that all the time.”

“Warforged don’t?” Trisfo asked, intrigued.

“No,” said Xalt. “Compared to breathers, we have a tremendous amount of control over our bodies.”

“If you don’t eat, how do you stay alive?” Trisfo asked, still keeping one eye on the gates.

“It’s complicated,” Xalt said, warming to the subject, happy to be talking about anything but guards and gates—especially guards near gates. “Mostly we are motivated by a complicated system of magical means, much like a golem. We don’t need any more sustenance than that. However, the wizardly researchers who designed us wanted us to have some measure of free will—as much as any other self-aware creatures, it seems. To that end, the running theory is that they decided to make us as much like breathing people as possible.”

“Fascinating,” Trisfo said, now completely engaged by the conversation again. “You mean to say that you have a heart, lungs, a brain?”

“In some sense, yes,” Xalt said. “You might even recognize them as such if you were to dissect one of us. They have the same form, even if they are not constructed from the same substances.”

“Then there is no flesh to you nor bone?”

“Not, again, in the traditional sense. I have an underlying framework that is just as strong as bone, and I have fibers that move in much the same way as your muscles, but they do so without need for food, drink, or even—”

A heart-stopping howl rang out in the night, and for a moment Xalt forgot from where such a horrible sound could have come. Monja reached up and grabbed the warforged’s hand and started pulling him toward the gates. As he turned, he saw them start to creak open.

“What’s going on here?” Trisfo said, stunned. Then he shouted at the top of his lungs, “The gates! Puakel! The gates!”

Burch came charging out of the stables, still howling as he rushed up behind Xalt and Monja. “Stay here!” he snarled at them as he bounded past, faster than either of them could move.

Xalt halted in midstride and nearly tripped over his own feet. He turned to face Monja, who stared at him with horrified eyes.

At the same time, Trisfo kept shouting for help, screaming for Berre and anyone else to come to his aid. Skeletons came slipping down from the deck of Phoenix on mooring lines, landing all around the pair, weapons drawn.

“The gates!” Trisfo roared at them. They sprinted off toward the tall, wide, iron-banded doors as they peeled open inch by inch, foot by foot. They ran with what Xalt would have thought was bone-breaking speed, like death chasing after the fleeing shifter.

“This,” Xalt said, “cannot be good.”

“What?” Kandler yelled as Burch came sprinting toward him across the open yard, letting everyone in the place see that he and Sallah stood in front of the now-open gates. “What is it?”

With anyone else, Kandler might have been angry. He’d been in tense situations like this time and again, and he’d seen a lot of people crack under the strain. More than one perfectly good plan had gone all to pieces when someone decided to panic at the exact wrong moment.

The justicar knew that Burch, though, was as solid as they came. If he came screaming and howling at him in the middle of a delicate operation, he knew something had to be horribly wrong.

“Brendis is dead,” the shifter said as he came panting up to Kandler and Sallah and crashed into the justicar’s arms.

“No,” Sallah breathed. Kandler could feel the horror strike her. She’d lost three of her fellow knights already. With Brendis gone, she alone bore the responsibility of completing the mission with which five Knights of the Silver Flame—including her father—had been charged.

He had problems of his own though.

“Is Esprë all right?” He dreaded the answer. Although he suspected that Burch would have brought him bad news about his daughter first, he didn’t see anyway that a story that began with “Brendis is dead” could end well.

“Don’t know,” Burch said. “Found his body in the stables. It was cold.”

“But …” Kandler’s voice trailed off, unable to keep up with the thoughts whirring through his head.

If Brendis’s body was cold, that meant he’d been dead for hours, but he’d seen the young knight with Esprë only minutes ago. That meant …

“The changeling!”

Burch nodded. “She can’t be too far.”

Kandler grimaced. “So much for a clean escape. We need to rouse Berre and sound the alarm. Maybe we can still stop her, whatever her plan is.”

At that moment, the new airship, the one with the grotesque masthead, caught his eye from across the whole of the fort. “That’s it,” he said. “She has to be going for it.”

As he spoke, he thought he could make out two figures walking up the gangplank and on to the ship. The larger of them carried something slung over its shoulder.

“They’re on the—”

Before Kandler could finish his sentence, a voice rang out. “Hold! If you move a muscle, you will die!”

Kandler spotted Berre dashing toward them from across the yard. As he glanced around, he saw at least two score Karrnathi skeletons leveling crossbows at them. It seemed that the Captain of Bones didn’t make idle threats.