The Road to Death

43

Chains rattled in Esprë’s ears as she regained her senses. They hung from manacles on her wrists, and a set of walking bones dressed in battered Karrnathi armor held their other ends.

“No more time for sleeping,” she heard Ibrido’s voice say. “We have an engagement to keep.”

She shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun, which stabbed lances of pain into her brain, and stared up at the dragon-elf, who towered nearby but out of reach. She cursed herself for her foolishness. She should have known better than to attack a trained warrior barehanded, even with hands flowing with the deadly energy of her dragonmark. If she was going to kill him, she should have bided her time, waited for the right moment, and struck. Only when his guard was down would he be vulnerable, and now she had guaranteed that he would not be so incautious around her perhaps ever.

A pair of skeletons escorted her to the starboard gunwale. She couldn’t say if they were the same two that had watched over her in the captain’s cabin, but she supposed it didn’t matter. One dead body was the same as another.

The skeletons made the perfect soldiers. They obeyed their orders without question. Being already dead, they had no fear of death. Since they all seemed equal in skill and talent, they could be swapped in and out of positions at will.

Best of all—from Ibrido’s point of view, at least—Esprë’s powers were useless against them. You couldn’t make the dead any deader.

The young elf followed along after the skeleton that held her chains and peered over the edge of the ship. A rope ladder hung there, leading down to a level spot on the mountain’s slope. She rubbed her aching temple and turned to glare at Ibrido.

“I don’t think I can climb down there with these chains on,” she said.

The dragon-elf bared his teeth, though whether in amusement or frustration, Esprë could not tell. “I suggest you hold onto them tightly,” he said.

Then he pointed to the skeleton paired with the one holding her chains. “Put her on the ground,” he said.

The skeleton reached out with its bony hands and grabbed Esprë under the arms. She shrieked and kicked at the creature with all her terrified might, but her blows glanced off its armor. She grabbed on to her chains above her manacles, just before the skeleton heaved her over the side of the ship.

Esprë screamed as she tumbled toward the rocks below and then again as the chains caught short, the other ends held firm in the grasp of the skeleton above. The manacles scraped against her wrists, biting into the skin there and drawing blood. Her arms felt like they might pull from their sockets, but they held. She looked down to see her feet swinging a mere yard from the hard, unforgiving ground.

The skeleton above played out the chains, lowering Esprë to the ground. When her feet rested on the rocks, she sighed in relief and rubbed the blood from her injured arms. After her last outburst, she wondered if Ibrido hoped to anger her again or put her in her place. Either way, she refused to give him the satisfaction. She mastered her temper, and she stuck out her chin, determined to see this through with the grace her mother had always shown.

Esprë’s outburst had frightened her as much as anyone, probably more than Ibrido. She had never felt the power of her dragonmark course through her like that. She had been sure that nothing could stand against her—right up until the dragon-elf smacked her to the deck. The humiliation of her miscalculation burned in her more than the scrapes along her wrists.

A pair of skeletons escorted her away from the rope ladder, and Ibrido crept down in their wake. He shouldered past her and followed a path in the stone that she hadn’t seen until he started down it. The skeletons grabbed her by the elbows and pulled her along after him.

The path narrowed, and one skeleton walked in front of Esprë while the other followed close behind. The slope dropped away dozens of feet onto stunted trees and sharp rocks to her right, and to her left the cliff face became so steep as to be unscalable. She held her breath and focused on looking straight ahead of her as she walked, concentrating on the solid breastplate of the skeleton in front of her, grateful that it wore some kind of armor so she couldn’t just see straight through it. The path continued up for awhile before it turned into a small hole secreted behind a thick clump of gnarled bushes rooted in the side of the cliff.

Esprë balked outside the hole, but the skeleton in front of her gave a firm tug on her chains, and she followed it into the darkness beyond. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that she was inside a small, dry cave no larger than the main room in the house she’d shared with Kandler in Mardakine.

Ibrido uncapped an everburning torch and handed it to the skeleton standing between him and Esprë. The creature passed it back to the young elf, who held it up before her.

“The rest of us do not need the light,” Ibrido explained, “but I’d prefer that you didn’t slip into a bottomless shaft by some sick twist of fate.”

As an elf, Esprë’s eyes were better than Kandler’s in the dark, but the pitch black of an unlit cave would have blinded her as well. She nodded at the dragon-elf, not in thanks but for him to proceed.

They crept through the caves for some time, always working their way lower and lower. Most of the passages were natural, but some had been carved by skilled hands and reinforced to keep them from collapsing. Esprë had never been in such a place, but she recognized the handiwork of dwarves. Temmah, one of Kandler’s deputies back in Mardakine, had often spun tales of such glories for her, locked deep away in his ancestral home in the Mror Holds. These were no crude tunnels but clean passageways cut from the living rock by skilled hands.

Even so, the passages seemed long unused. Dust kicked up around Esprë’s feet as she walked, and a stale smell permeated the place. Underneath it lay a subtle stench of rot that grew as they worked their way deeper into the mountain.

At one point, the passage emerged into a large chamber, so expansive that the light from Esprë’s torch could not reach the ceiling or the opposite wall. Tall pillars of stone stabbed high into the vaulted darkness, each carved with intricate statuary that depicted ancient tales of the dwarf clans that Esprë hadn’t the time to study or comprehend. Graffiti marred some of these, scrawled in some sub-literate hand, pictograms that seemed to speak of violence, blood, and death. In other places, rubble from the carvings littered the floor where they’d been torn down or broken to pieces with hammers and axes.

Esprë gawked as she moved through the chamber, and several times the skeleton leading her had to yank on her chains to bring her along. As an elf, Esprë knew that she would—could, at least—live for many centuries. If the Undying Court somehow allowed her to ascend into its ranks, she might walk this world for millennia untold. As young as she was now, though, she had only the barest idea of what this entailed, and the thought of things as old and full of history as this chamber standing abandoned and unused filled her with sadness.

“This was once the Great Hall of Clan Drakyager,” Ibrido said. His voice echoed in the empty darkness, bouncing from distant walls at which Esprë could only guess. “They were a wealthy and powerful line in those bygone days, but they fell into decadence and could not stand against the Jhorash’tar orcs who overran this part of the mountains a hundred years ago.”

Esprë stopped and gaped at what little of the hall she could see at once. To her delight, Ibrido halted as well, and the skeleton leading her by her chains stopped next to him. The other skeletons that walked with them clustered about them for a moment, an earless audience of the dead.

“Who were those dwarves who attacked us as we approached then?” she asked.

The dragon-elf snorted. “The remnants of that once-proud clan. The Iron Council in Krona Peak granted them the right to attempt to return here in exchange for accepting a solemn duty, a responsibility with which none of the other clans cared to be charged.”

“What was that?” Esprë brought her torch closer to one of the pillars and saw a carving of a great dwarf king sitting atop a mound of gold and jewels. Its head was missing, and several empty spots stared back at her from the carving, possibly where real jewels had once rested before being pried out by trespassers and thieves.

“Guarding the home of my superior, of course.” Esprë could see Ibrido’s bared teeth glowing softly in the torchlight. “Come now,” he said. “Our host will be waiting.”