The City of Towers

CHAPTER 2

Daine woke in the mud. Cold rain fell from the gray sky, and his woolen blanket was soaked and filthy. At least it’s just water, he thought. Compared to what they’d been in over the last six months, rain was a welcome change of pace.

The memories came unbidden to his mind, images far worse than any nightmare. For centuries Cyre had been a jewel in the crown of Galifar, a fertile land renowned for its crafts and culture. Now Cyre was a barren wasteland filled with corpses. As he traveled south, Daine heard the peasants whispering about the horrors to be found in this so-called Mournland. According to the tales, blood fell from the sky instead of rain, and the spirits of the dead howled with the wind.

The truth was far worse.

The battle at Keldan Ridge happened the night before the Mourning. The final hours of the battle were a blur. None of the survivors could remember how they escaped from the warforged marauders, and no one could actually recall when the disaster took place. How did it happen? What force could have devastated an entire country yet leave a few soldiers completely unharmed, a mere twenty feet from the border? Perhaps this amnesia was a side effect of the force that destroyed the realm, or perhaps the event was simply more than the human mind could bear.

On that terrible morning, Daine had led the remnants of his troop back into Cyre, passing through the dead-gray mists to see what lay beyond. How could they have known how vast the devastation would be? Who would believe that an entire country could be destroyed in so brief a time? For months they had pressed deeper and deeper into the wastes. All that they found was horror and death. As the weeks went by Daine’s soldiers fell one by one to the terrors of the twisted land, and only five survived the long trek back to the border-Daine, Pierce, Jani Onyll, the healer Jode, and Lei d’Cannith. But that was far from the end of their troubles. Every day brought a new clash with the soldiers of Thrane, and Jani fell victim to a last gift of Cyre-a lingering infection Jode’s touch could not cure.

Finally they moved south into Breland. After a few skirmishes, the active aggression of the Brelish soldiers faded into muted disgust. The destruction of Cyre had thrown the entire world into a state of shock, and the common folk were weary of war. The chroniclers said that King Boranel of Breland had offered sanctuary to the refugees of Cyre. Others claimed that princes and ambassadors were hammering out the terms of peace far to the north, laying the foundation of a new world that would take the place of the ancient kingdom of Galifar. The frontier garrisons held the borders against any signs of treachery, and Daine’s troop had received a bloody welcome in Thrane. But further south the people had begun to lay down their swords and return to their plows. After years of battle, it seemed that the conscripts were returning home for good.

It had been many years since Daine had a place to call home. Any past he might have returned to was buried in the ashes of Cyre. Pierce had been built to fight in a war that was all but over. Jode had never spoken of his family. Lei was the only one of the survivors whose future was clear, and so the others traveled with her on the road to Sharn-not because the city had any particular promise for them, but they had no place else to go.

Daine rose and shook the water out his blanket. Pierce was struggling to keep the fire alive, and Lei was starting to break camp, gathering the tarps and blankets. Daine joined her.

“Another fine day, hmm?” he said, handing over his blanket.

Lei smiled and shook her head. Her hair was covered with mud, but it still seemed to gleam in the firelight, as if there was true copper mixed in with the red. Folding his blanket and placing it with the others, she produced the wooden rod she used as a focus for simple magic. With a few deft gestures, she wove a domestic cantrip into the wood. A wave of this makeshift wand drove mud and water from blankets and clothes, and scoured the dirt from her skin and hair. A dry blanket was hardly the most important thing in life, but without Lei’s magic their clothes would have rotted away months ago-and her ability to conjure food was all that stood between the soldiers and starvation.

“We’re almost there,” Lei said, handing him a mug of water and a plate of cold gruel. It was about as pleasant as eating mud, but it had them alive. “If it wasn’t raining, you could see the towers from here.”

“You’re really going to go through with this?”

“Of course. You don’t understand our ways, Daine. I am an heir of the Mark of Making, and I have a responsibility to my house.”

Dragonmarks. Daine swallowed a spoonful of gruel with a grimace. No one was born with a dragonmark, but members of a select few bloodlines carried the potential to manifest a mark and the magical power that came with it. It was Jode’s dragonmark that allowed him to heal injuries with a touch. Lei’s mark had a similar effect, but where Jode could knit flesh and bone, Lei repaired metal and wood. The powers of her dragonmark were the least of Lei’s talents, but the mark defined her place in the world. In an age ravaged by war, a weaponsmith could hold more power than a king, and the dragonmarked artificers of House Cannith were the greatest weaponsmiths of modern times. House Cannith blazed the trail that led to the invention of the stormship, the wand of eternal fire, and of course, the warforged. Dragonmarks were rare even within the families that carried them, and Cannith often formed matches between the dragonmarked in the hopes that children would inherit the powers of the parents. So it was with Lei and her betrothed. Hadran d’Cannith was a widower and almost twice Lei’s age, but his gold was good and his mark was strong.

“Blood above love,” said Daine. “I’ve heard it before. All I’m interested in is the gold you promised us. It’s just … I’ve seen you covered in mud and blood. I have a harder time seeing you as lady of the manor.”

“You think I like sleeping in ditches and watching my friends die?” said Lei as she handed a plate of gruel to the groggy Jode.

“None of us like it. But it’s those who can do it without letting it kill them that make soldiers. You lived through things that killed hardened veterans. You’re one of us.”

Lei shook her head. “My service in the guard was duty to my family. Just as my marriage is. Of the two, I’ll enjoy marriage far more.”

“Ever been married before?”

Lei opened her mouth to retort.

“Please, Captain Daine, my lady Lei!” Jode interjected with a brilliant smile. “If we have only a day’s travel ahead of us, let us enjoy one another’s company while we still can, yes?”

Lei and Daine mumbled apologies and returned to the gruel.

Though the sun was still buried behind the clouds, it was just past dawn when they broke camp and headed back toward the Old Road, the path that connected the great cities of Breland. They’d chosen to sleep in a clearing well away from the road so Pierce could watch for enemies. But a tangle of the King’s Woods lay between the travelers and the road, and it was there that trouble struck.

From behind a tree stepped a man out-a rangy, pock-faced Brelander wearing the patched leather tunic of a Brelish soldier. Perhaps he was a deserter or a retiree with nowhere to go, but Daine thought it just as likely the man had torn his ill-fitting armor from the corpse of its true owner. A gray woolen cloak shielded him from the rain, and he waved a wooden cudgel in their general direction.

“Ho there, travelers!” the man called, his voice a gravelly rasp.

Daine stepped to the front of the group, signaling the others to halt.

“Morgalan’s the name. By your dress, I take you to be strangers in our lovely land. Mourners, are you?”

“Mourners?” asked Daine.

“Refuse from what’s left of Cyre. They’re calling it the Mournland now, on account of there being nothing for you lot to do but mourn for what you lost.”

“If you’ve got a point, make it quick.” Daine’s hand went to his sword, but he held his temper in check. This was far from the first time they’d been harassed, and Daine smelled a trap.

“I have a bit of a nose for the energies of the arcane, and I can see that there’s more to the young lady’s backpack than meets the eye. I’ll be taking that, along with any coin you might have on you.”

“Four to one, by my count. Not odds in your favor.” Daine scratched the back of his neck, using the opportunity to make a few swift gestures to his companions with the tips of his fingers.

“Things are rarely what they seem.” A crossbow bolt flew from the trees and struck the ground near Daine’s feet.

“True,” Daine said, but he was already in motion, charging at the highwayman, drawing his sword and dagger as he ran.

From the corner of his eye, Daine saw Pierce raise his enormous longbow and send two blue-feathered arrows back along the path of the crossbow bolt. There was a cry from the woods and the sound of a man falling from the trees.

Two men and a woman, all three dressed in tattered leathers and armed with hatchets, burst out of the woods to Daine’s left. He slowed his charge long enough to be sure the others had them.

Lei was waiting for them. She hurled a small stone in their direction. It burst with a blinding flare of golden radiance. As the bandits threw up their hands to shield their eyes, Pierce was already loosing more arrows. Within seconds, all three lay stretched out on the ground.

Morgalan met Daine’s charge head-on. With a furious cry and a blow of his cudgel, he knocked Daine’s blade from his hand. But the sword was the lesser threat. Daine’s dagger was Cannith-forged from adamantine and could slice through steel with ease. Daine ducked beneath the bandit’s next blow, and with one swift stroke he cut the cudgel in two, leaving Morgalan with a bare stump of wood.

Dropping the ruined remnant of his club and stepping back, the bandit made an intricate gesture with his left hand while muttering words in a language Daine had never heard. Daine felt the touch of enchantment, and for a moment it was difficult to focus.

Morgalan … Morgalan … why were they fighting, after all? Surely this was a misunderstanding. His friend Morgalan needed his help, needed his assistance against these three brutes …

Daine had dealt with sorcerers before, and Saerath had occasionally tried a charm when he’d been ordered to dig latrines. Gritting his teeth, Daine shook his way free of the intrusive thoughts and drove his dagger into the shoulder of the bandit.

Morgalan gasped and the mystical pressure faded. Daine grabbed the man by his neck with his free hand, yanked the dagger free, and threw Morgalan into the mud. He leaned down, his foot on the bandit’s neck and his blade at his throat.

“Listen to me, Brelander,” he growled. “I’ve been fighting your kind for six years. Every instinct I’ve got says I should slit your throat and leave you bleeding in the dirt.” He struck the pale man across the face with the pommel of his dagger, slamming his face into the mud. “But the war’s over, and I am a stranger in your land. Don’t give me a reason to start fighting again.”

Daine stood up, deliberately cutting Morgalan’s purse from his belt. He tossed the leather pouch to Lei and picked up his fallen sword. Across the way, Jode was tending to the wounds of the bandits Pierce had feathered, while the warforged kept the injured ruffians covered with his massive bow.

“Leave them be, Jode,” Daine called. “We’ve got other business in this ‘lovely land.’”

There was little conversation following the attack, and they eventually joined the stream of travelers on the Old Road to Sharn. Jode rode on Pierce’s shoulders, singing an occasional song in the liquid tongue of his distant homeland. Daine brought up the rear, watching Jode and wondering. After all the years they’d spent together, the many battles they’d been through, Jode was still an enigma to him. The halfling had come from the distant Talenta Plains, a barren land said to be home to huge lizards. The glittering dragonmark of Healing was spread across his bald head as plain as day, but Jode had never acknowledged any ties to House Jorasco, and he did not wear the signet ring of a dragonmark heir. He was always ready with a cheerful story or a song, but his own past was a mystery. Daine had never pushed him. He had pain enough in his own past, and if Jode had secrets, it wasn’t Daine’s place to steal them.

Midday the clouds cleared, and there it lay before them-Sharn, the City of Towers. Even at this distance, the towers stretched up to the sky-dozens of shining spires, each bristling with minarets and turrets. The Old Road passed through flat farmlands, and over the course of the day it seemed less as if they were moving and more as if the towers themselves were growing, rising up higher and higher with every passing hour. Slowly details emerged. Daine noticed that a few of the smaller towers seemed to be floating in the air, unconnected to the main columns. Tiny dots moved to and fro-boats and other vessels darting through the air. As the sun sank beneath the horizon, the lights of the city became visible, twinkling like stars.

“House Cannith lit the city, you know,” Lei said. “Casalon d’Cannith perfected cold fire almost seven hundred years ago. The impact on Galifar was truly remarkable. In many ways it set the stage for-”

“I thought the elves developed cold fire thousands of years ago,” Daine said.

Lei scowled. “Yes, well … Cannith brought it to Khorvaire.”

Daine smiled, though Lei did not see it. The elves of Aerenal had been working with magic for more than three times the length of recorded human history, and Daine had once met an Aerenal ambassador who was over seven hundred years old. It was only natural that elven skills would exceed those of the younger race, but it was one of the only ways to derail Lei’s effusive monologues about the virtues of her house.

“How do they keep the towers from falling?” asked Pierce.

It was as much as he had said in the last week. The warforged warrior, never talkative in the best of times, had become positively taciturn in recent months. Daine was hardly surprised; Pierce had been built to defend Cyre, and now the country was destroyed, the war over. What purpose did Pierce serve in this broken world? So far he’d continued to follow Daine’s orders. But how long would this loyalty last?

“There are places in the world where arcane energies behave in an unusual manner,” Lei said. “Many sages believe that this is the result of other worlds touching this one. So a place touched by Dolurrh is filled with despair, while Lamannia causes vegetation to bloom. Along these cliffs, spells of air and flight are empowered. The enchantments that support these towers could not be performed in most places. The city itself is drawn to the sky. You’ll see flying boats and similar things-all the result of the magic of this place.”

“So if they’re all supported by magic … what happens should the spells unravel?” Daine’s mind flashed back to the stormship tumbling from the sky after Saerath disrupted its bindings.

“Well … actually, I believe that towers have fallen in the past. During the war. Presumed sabotage, though it was never proven.”

“And I imagine your beloved lives in one of the highest towers?”

“Yes.” Daine didn’t turn to look, but he could hear the frown in her voice.

“Wonderful.”

As the sun slipped below the cliffs, the Old Road came to the tower called Tavick’s Landing, then ran beneath a vast bronze statue of Queen Wroann ir’Wyrnarn, her sword raised in defiance of the laws of Galifar. Black-cloaked guards manned a dozen separate gates, listening to the tales of merchants, travelers, and peasants. The traditions of a century of war were still in effect, and no one entered Sharn without passing the Guardians of the Gate.

The gate to which Daine and his companions came was manned by a burly dwarf whose beard resembled a patch of black thorns. “You don’t look like you’re from these parts,” he growled. He studied Pierce and then fixed on Daine’s rank insignia. “Mourners, are you? Serves you right, you ask me.” He nodded up toward the statue of Wroann, the queen whose rebellion had started the Last War. “Stand against Breland, and see what it gets you.”

Jode stepped forward before Daine could speak. “I see that little escapes your keen eyes, sergeant. I take it you’ve encountered Mourners before, hmm?”

The dwarf studied him carefully. Jode’s dragonmark was spread across the top of his head-and a dragonmark usually meant power and wealth.

“That’s right. High Walls is lousy with ’em. Used to be where they kept traitors. Some would say it still is.”

Again, Jode interjected before Daine could speak. “Well, it’s a simple mistake to make, but ours is no simple tale, sir. Yes, Lord Daine wears the dress of a Cyran soldier, but there is far more here than meets the eye. Allow me to introduce the Lady Lei, heir to the Mark of Making.”

Lei curtsied and extended her hand, revealing her Cannith signet ring. The dwarf examined the ring closely.

“Lady Lei is betrothed to Lord Hadran d’Cannith, whose name I certainly hope you recognize. As any child could tell you, House Cannith had its seat of power in the confines of Cyre, and after the disaster, Lord Hadran wished to ensure the safety of his beloved. Thus he hired the three of us-Lord Daine, a master swordsman trained by the Blademark of House Deneith; Pierce, a stalwart warforged warrior handcrafted by my lady’s parents to ensure the safety of their only daughter; and myself, Jode d’Jorasco, a healer without equal.”

Minutes passed as Jode wove his tale, describing the great dangers the trio had faced in their hunt for the lost Cannith heir. The dwarf stood spellbound as Jode recounted the battle with the warped warforged and the living darkness. A blackcloaked woman wearing the badge of a captain came over and rapped him on the side of the head, snapping him out of the daze. “Horas! Process this lot and move on! You’re holding up the line!”

The dwarf blinked and shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “Uh, yes … yes. Sorry. Just … make a mark here on the ledger and you can be on your way. I trust you’re not bringing dangerous materials into the city? Pyrotechnics, dragon’s blood, dreamlily?”

“I do have three warforged in my pack,” Lei said. “Is that a problem?” Jode sighed.

“In your … May I see them, please, Lady d’Cannith?”

Lei took off her pack and unfolded the funnel-shaped cloth cone at the top. “Pierce, do you mind?”

A murmur ran through the waiting crowd as the massive warforged warrior crawled into the tiny backpack. A moment later he emerged, dragging the battered body of a small warforged scout.

“All three are inert,” Lei explained. “I haven’t had time to see if they can be restored, but we found them during our travels, and I wanted to return them to the house.”

“I … see.” Clearly Cannith heirs transporting damaged warforged were not a part of this guard’s daily routine. “You … you can go about your business, my lady. Enjoy your visit to Sharn.”

Lei smiled as Pierce pushed the wounded warforged back into her extraordinary pack. “Thank you, sergeant,” she said. “I’m sure I will.”

Once they were safely out of earshot of the guards, Jode turned to Lei, shaking his head. Pierce and Daine were straggling behind, their eyes turned skyward to the towers, awnings, bridges, and buildings that stretched upward and out of sight.

“My Lady Lei,” said Jode, “there really was no need to mention the warforged at all. I had the situation well in hand.”

“I’ve always wondered if you had formal ties to House Jorasco, Jode. Why don’t you ever talk about it?”

“I made that up, my lady. I had the sense that our sergeant would be more impressed by the emissaries of a powerful house as opposed to a few ‘Mourners’ in search of refuge.”

“That would explain that bit about the fight with the cannibal children.” Lei frowned. “My parents were involved in the early work with the warforged, though … it’s entirely possible they did build Pierce.”

Jode shrugged. “I was simply speaking extemporaneously, my lady. I had no idea my words held even one grain of truth.”

“Huh. And Daine?” Lei glanced back at Daine and Pierce, neither of whom were paying she and Jode the least bit of attention. “He didn’t actually train with House Deneith?”

“I’m no oracle, Lady Lei. I was just spinning a tale for our prickly sergeant. Besides, can you really see our captain in a house of mercenaries?”

Lei smiled, then broke into laughter. After a moment, Jode began to laugh with here. Daine scowled as he and Pierce caught up to them. “All right, you’ve had your fun. Now let’s get on with it. I want to sleep in a bed tonight, and we still have to find your loving suitor, Lei.”

“Follow me … Lord Daine.”

Still smiling, Lei led them through the crowd.