The Road to Death

46

The skeletons crewing Keeper’s Claw never had a chance. One moment they were scattered about the deck of the Karrnathi airship like macabre statues, waiting for their master to return to activate them once more, and the next instant three warriors dropped into their midst from the sky.

Duro Darumnakt had been watching the airship with a few of his fellows when they saw the Phoenix soar down from out of the sun—which the undead creatures seemed to hate looking anywhere near—plummeting like a ship of that size should, instead of being suspended in the air by an unholy ring of fire. It managed to catch itself scant yards above Keeper’s Claw, and that’s when the three slid down at them on ropes cast over the smaller airship’s gunwales.

The first of them bore a longsword that sliced through the Karrnathi armor as easily as it parted the air. A tall man—human, for sure, Duro decided—with short, brown hair, he carved his way through the creatures with a trained soldier’s ease. This was a man who had seen many a battle and walked away triumphant from them all.

The second one down was a woman, another human, but like none that Duro had ever seen. She wore a crimson tabard embroidered with a blazing silver flame over a gleaming breastplate and mail made of polished chains, thin but tough, worked together in the manner Duro’s ancestors had perfected centuries ago. Her sword burned with tongues of fire the same unnatural silver color of the emblem on her tabard.

The fire-haired woman struck left and right at first, then presented her sword before her and shouted, “By the light of the Silver Flame, you shall not stand!”

The skeletons nearest her turned and fled, spilling over the gunwales of the ship and shattering on the rocks below. One of them tried to get up and flee on its splintered leg bones, but it gave up after a moment and fell into its component parts.

The third warrior, a shifter from the look of him, slid only halfway down the rope hanging from the second airship. Wrapping himself in the rope, he then started loosing bolts from his crossbow at the rest of the skeletons chasing about after the other two invaders. Some of his bolts clanged off the Karrnathi armor, but one knocked a helmeted skull right off its owner’s shoulders. Another smashed apart a skeleton’s elbow just as it was about to bring its scimitar down on the man’s back.

“What’s happening?” Kallo asked from behind him as he peered over Duro’s shoulder.

“Get down,” Duro said, shoving the young dwarf back.

Though he had barely come of age, Kallo itched to get his axe involved in a real fight. He’d notched it on one of the Karrnathi skeletons they’d fought earlier that day, but since such creatures didn’t bleed he’d technically not yet been blooded. Duro knew the difference was small but that it gnawed at the eager, young dwarf, making him less cautious than he perhaps should be.

“I don’t know what’s happening yet,” Duro said, scolding Kallo. “If you’d keep your trap shut, I might be able to figure it out.”

“Seems obvious to me,” Kallo said, thumbing the edge of his axe. “Big people who hate the skeletons are kicking them to pieces. We wait until the fight is over and then kill the survivors.”

Duro smacked Kallo on the back of the head, then grinned at him. “You are an idiot,” he said, “but sometimes even you come up with a fine idea. Spread the word to the others. As soon as the big people come down off that airship, we strike.”

“What makes you think they’ll come down?” Kallo asked, rubbing the back of his head.

“They’re here for the same reason the others came,” Duro said. “Why else would we see two airships in a place that hasn’t had a visitor in over a decade?

“Now do as I order. Go!”

“Everyone all right?” Kandler asked after he hacked the last of the Karrnathi skeletons to bits. It had been cowering behind the bridge, unable to bring itself to face Sallah’s blade. The justicar had made quick work of it, putting an end to its troubles.

A man—someone Kandler had never seen before—stood slumped over the ship’s wheel, his arms still chained to it. The justicar poked the emaciated sailor with the tip of his sword and provoked no reaction.

“I’m fine,” Sallah said, calling over from the gunwale, where she’d been making sure that the creatures she’d chased overboard weren’t somehow crawling back up to greet them.

“Fine, boss.” Burch slid down the rest of the way on the rope and went about collecting any unbroken bolts he could find. Kandler admired the shifter’s economy. Here, a long way from the nearest village, getting your hands on a decent supply of bolts would be tricky. Better to keep hold of the ones you had as long as you could.

Kandler inspected a small cut on his left forearm. One of the skeletons had slashed at him there, and he’d been too busy defending himself against another to move out of the way. The wound bled freely between the fingers he used to grasp it. He cursed himself for being so careless. They could ill afford for him to be injured right now. Esprë was depending on him.

“Let me help you with that,” Sallah said. The lady knight sheathed her blade and walked over to put her hands on the cut. She chanted a few words to the Silver Flame, and Kandler watched as a golden light suffused her hands then spilled off them to soak into the justicar’s injured flesh.

When Sallah removed her hands, she wiped the blood on the arm away with her fingers. The skin beneath was unmarred, healed as if it had never been cut open. She smiled up at Kandler as she cleaned her hands on the edge of her tabard. He noticed that the fabric was the same color as his blood, and he wondered if the Knights of the Silver Flame had chosen that hue on purpose.

“We’ve got two airships,” Burch said. “Now what?”

Kandler grimaced at his friend as he thanked Sallah. “This is just the first step. We’ve cut Ibrido off from his escape. There’s no way he can get away from us. Now all we have to do is find him.”

“When we find him, we find Esprë,” Sallah said.

“Exactly.” The justicar looked around. “We don’t have enough hands to fly both ships at the moment, but we need to make sure that Ibrido can’t get his hands back on this one.”

Kandler walked over to the gunwales and started hauling up the mooring ropes hanging over the edge of the ship. Sallah and Burch joined in as well.

When they were done, they had one rope left. Kandler slid down it first, drawing his sword as soon as his feet touched the small, flat shelf on the rocky slope. Sallah came down after him, with Burch coming last.

“What about this rope?” Burch said.

Sallah drew her sword, which burst into silvery flames. She touched it to the rope and ran it up and down the fibers as far as her blade would reach. It caught fire quickly, and the flames began to work their way up the length, toward the ship above.

“Good thing these airships are fireproof,” Burch said. The ring of fire surrounding Keeper’s Claw seemed to grow louder to punctuate his words, as if the elemental within wished it could find a way to consume the craft to which it was bound.

“Which way?” Kandler said.

Burch stretched and growled, drawing upon the blood of the werecreatures that ran through his veins. Those ancient ancestors might be long dead, but they still lived on in the way the shifter could call on their legendary powers.

As long as Kandler had known Burch, this still made him a bit uncomfortable. When the shifter called on his animalistic side, he became less like the justicar’s friend and more of the kind of savage beast some of the “civilized” folk from Sharn assumed all of his kind to be. In any case, it was part and parcel of who Burch was, and Kandler had to admit it came in handy at times like this.

Burch knelt down toward the rocky ground and sniffed about like a bloodhound hunting for a scent. He wrinkled his nose more than once, then performed a crouching walk in a circle around the entire shelf. His search complete, he stood up once more and pointed off to the south, along the mountain’s slope.

“Follow me,” he growled.

Kandler trotted along straight after Burch, with Sallah falling in behind him, her sword still out and ready. Kandler drew his own blade, wanting to be prepared for anything that might happen. They had no idea where Ibrido and Esprë were, after all. The last they knew from Te’oma, the pair had somehow entered the mountain to find his master, but anything could have happened since then. They had to expect that the dragon-elf might be cautious about people following after him. Around any corner, there might be another pack of skeletons waiting to—

“Halt!” a low voice shouted in a thick-accented version of the common tongue of the Five Kingdoms of Khorvaire.

Burch looked up from where he’d been bent over the narrow trail that cut along the mountain’s slope, still sniffing out Esprë’s path. They’d reached a small shelf where the trail switched back, and a dark hole appeared in the face of the rock before them.

Kandler swung his neck around and spotted a pair of dwarves coming up the path behind them. They were stunted creatures, even for dwarves, and their pasty skin and squinty eyes told Kandler that they rarely saw the light of day. They wore light suits of armor and metallic helmets covered with dirt and dust the same color as the mountain itself, allowing them to blend in. They each bore an axe or hammer and carried a loaded crossbow that was pointed straight at Kandler, Burch, and Sallah.

“Surrender or die!” one of the dwarves on the lower trail called up at them.

Kandler glanced at Burch and Sallah. “I don’t like the looks of that hole much,” he whispered.

“Esprë went in there,” the shifter said.

Kandler grinned. “All of a sudden, I like it a lot more. On my mark, we charge into it. Ready?”

Before the justicar could get to “set,” another handful of dwarves emerged from the blackness, their double-sided axes out and ready to taste blood.