The Road to Death

17

Esprë couldn’t remember ever feeling so bad. Her head hurt where she had banged it on the airship’s wheel—again—and pain lanced through her left arm every time she tried to move it. And it was hot, hotter than a sun-savaged desert. She licked her cracked lips and winced. She raised her right hand to her face, and it came back slicked with blood.

She couldn’t find the changeling, and the thought that Te’oma might come back to kill her sent her heart racing. She shoved off from the bridge’s console with her feet but realized she was still strapped to the wheel. As her right hand moved to release herself—she tucked her left into her waistband to offer it some support—she wondered why everything looked hazy, like she was caught in the mists of the Mournland again.

Then the smell of smoke set her coughing, something the mysterious border of that damned land had never done. Was the ship burning?

Esprë glanced up and saw the ring of fire still spinning around the ship, crackling with power that strove to shatter its mystical harness. She spied cracks in the upper binding arc, a long curve of polished, rune-crusted wood, and she wondered if the lower arc still clung to the ship.

The smoke spiraled up around the ship, past the arc, and into the sky beyond. Esprë stumbled away from the airship’s wheel, the ship pitched forward at a steep angle that threatened to pull her toward the splintered bow, but she clawed her way with her one good arm to the bridge’s aft railing and surveyed the damage.

The airship sprawled in a shallow valley surrounded by easy, rolling hills on all sides. Pieces of it lay strewn in the wake it had cut through the tall grasses of the plains as it skidded to a halt. It sat in the center of a wide circle of ash, black and gray remnants of the tall grasses that had done nothing to cushion its landing. On the edges of the circle, gouts of flame fed on fresh, dry grass, surrounding the ship in an ever-growing nimbus of fire.

Esprë gasped at the sight, then choked on the smoke that collected in her lungs. She spun about and slid back down to the airship’s wheel, desperate to move the battered thing up and away from the fire. She wondered for a moment why the fire hadn’t consumed the entire ship, made of wood as it was. Then she thought of the ring of fire that propelled the ship through the air and knew that part of the magic that bound the fiery being into the ring must also protect the ship from its heat.

She wrapped her right hand around the wheel and reached out for the elemental with her mind. Most times, she enjoyed piloting the ship. The thrill of having such a large boat driven by such a powerful creature respond to her will never got old. Now, though, the ship ignored her. Instead of the grudging pliancy she expected from the elemental, it seemed to laugh at her efforts. The crackling of the fiery ring intensified as she tried to push the creature harder, filling her ears with its mean-hearted mirth. The elemental sensed that the ship would soon fall apart and it would be free.

Esprë brought her injured arm up so she could grab the wheel with both hands, and she concentrated on getting the elemental to move the ship with all her might. She willed it to pull free from the earth that dragged it down, to slough off gravity’s greedy bonds and soar high once more through the clean, fresh skies. Sweat beaded on her scorched brow as she changed from ordering the ship to move to pleading with it.

Nothing worked. The ship stayed mired in the soft land in which it had crashed—in which she had crashed it.

Just as Esprë gave up on the ship, she heard a groan from the other side of the console. She peered over and saw Te’oma there, her body draped across the remains of the hatch that led into the ship’s hold. Back in the city of Construct, a warforged titan had torn through the hull, demolished the hold, and smashed the lid from the hatch, but its frame still squatted there in the cracked decking.

The changeling must have been flung from the bridge in the crash and caught there, Esprë guessed. Otherwise, she would have skittered along the deck and fallen into the fire that had devoured the surrounding landscape.

It stunned Esprë that Te’oma still lived. She’d tried to use the dragonmark to kill her twice and failed each time. Was it that she couldn’t bring herself to kill anyone? Or did the changeling have some kind of special hold on her, perhaps a mental block she’d telepathically placed in her head? Or perhaps Esprë just needed to try harder.

The young elf stared down at the changeling and wondered how she could make it down to her without hurting herself. Her injured arm would make navigating the deck difficult.

If she reached the changeling, what would she do? Should she kill her on the spot, finish what she’d started? Perhaps she should take Te’oma’s knife and cut her throat, but she didn’t know if she could bring herself to do it. Mustering the resolve to use the power of her dragonmark—something that was a part of her, a twisted birthright of some sort, whether she liked it or not—had taken all her resolve. To stick a blade into someone’s neck and twist it around until she died seemed impossible.

Before Esprë could even figure out how she could get off the bridge, the sound of clanking armor rang out from the crest of a nearby hill. She snapped her head around to see a handful of figures rising up on the other side of the flames, their forms silhouetted in black through the bright, hungry wall of blazing tongues.

The young elf held her breath as she watched the figures march closer to the fire and then straight through it. They emerged from the conflagration, their blackened, spike-riddled armor rattling loose on their limbs, their helmets perched on their heads at awkward angles, each with a scimitar clutched in its fist.

Esprë peered at them with their strange gaits. Who could they be, and how could they ignore the fire like that? A regular soldier would have been cooked alive in his armor.

When she got a good look at the closest one’s face, her gut twisted inside her. Empty eye sockets stared back at her from a skinless, sun-bleached skull, and the soldier’s grim, lipless rictus grinned up at her.

The young elf screamed.

Below her, on the deck, Te’oma raised her head long enough to see the creatures marching toward them with their relentless strides. As Esprë watched, she tried to struggle to her knees, but she only succeeded in dislodging herself from the hatch’s frame. She moaned in pain and despair as she slid down the pitched deck and landed in a crumpled heap where the bow crashed into the scorched earth. The ashes puffed up around her and settled on her pale skin, and she did not stir.

The closest of the soldiers reached Te’oma and walked right over her. It clambered up onto the ship’s broken bow and climbed up toward the bridge, using the spindles in the ship’s railing as a makeshift ladder. Another soldier climbed after it, then another, the last taking the railing on the port side instead. Within moments, they would be on her.

Esprë shoved back from the wheel and scrambled up the few feet of the bridge’s decking to where the ship’s aft rail had stood before the battle in Construct had demolished it. She considered jumping down to the ash-covered ground, but it looked so far away she feared she’d break a leg in the attempt. Still, as the creatures climbed closer, it seemed the only way for her to get free.

Then another of the soldiers stalked around from the ship’s bow and stationed itself straight under the bridge. It saw her leaning over the empty space and spread its arms wide like a parent encouraging a scared child to leap down from climbing a tree.

Esprë huffed in frustration then turned to see the other soldiers closing in on her. She looked down past the bridge, thinking of leaping past them, sliding along the deck to the ground and then seeing if she could outrun them, even if it meant somehow dashing through the fire, but a fifth soldier stood where she would have landed, right over Te’oma’s body.

Frustrated to the breaking point, Esprë sat down in the space behind the canted console on the bridge and caressed the ship’s wheel as she wept.