“Put me down.” Tolar’s voice was cool and calm. Zaehr had never seen the old man lose his composure. She set him down, and he walked over to the jagged edge of the bridge and stared down at the path of destruction, thoughtfully running a finger across his red-and-white beard.
Zaehr stepped up beside him. She released her hold on the animal spirit and felt her teeth and jaws retract to their natural shape. Looking down, she could see flames where fragments of the burning hull had lodged along bridges and tower walls. She could see a greater light below, where the ship had finally struck ground.
“Get down there,” Tolar said. He’d produced a silver disk from one of his belt pouches, and he pressed it into her hand without looking at her. “The flames will soon consume what the impact left behind. Study the point of collision and any bodies you can find—especially the dragon.”
“Right.” Zaehr looked at the disk, bright metal embossed with the image of a single feather. A wind token, designed to protect people who fell from towers or bridges by slowing the descent at the last minute. “And you?”
“There are other matters I must attend to,” Tolar said. The breeze snapped at his long burgundy overcoat. He looked up at the sky, studying the shattered moorings on Lyrandar tower.
“Right,” Zaehr said. “To work, then. And thanks for, you know, saving my life.”
Tolar ignored the sarcasm. “Go.”
Zaehr sighed. She’d done this before, but it wasn’t something you soon grew used to. Taking a deep breath, she wrapped her fingers tightly around the wind token and dived off the edge of the broken bridge. How did I get into this? she thought.
It was a rhetorical question. Tolar had found her in the sewers of Sharn. Most likely she’d been born to one of the bands of shifters that lurked in the undercity, surviving by scavenging the midden heaps and sifting through the garbage of the world above. Tolar believed that her family had abandoned her because of the strange color of her skin and eyes, most likely leaving her to die—but she’d proven to be a survivor. Tolar had been an old man even then, facing a young and feral shifter who could only speak a few words. Tolar Velderan was an inquisitive. He made his livelihood through investigation. He’d never said what task had brought him to the depths that day, but he’d chosen to solve her mystery. He’d calmed her and convinced her to follow him to the surface. In the months and years that followed, he taught her to speak, to read, to follow the pulse of information as it flowed through the streets. She’d saved him a dozen times. But he’d given her life. Without him, Zaehr would still be hunting rats in the dark. He was the only father she’d ever had.
The streets of Sharn rushed up to meet her. She could feel the heat rising from the burning yacht. The magic of the medallion took hold, slowing her descent, and she twisted in the air, adjusting her weight so that she’d drift to the side instead of landing in the wreckage. A crowd had gathered around the shattered ship, and she wondered how many had been crushed beneath her.
The destruction of a Lyrandar airship was a remarkable event. But the dragon? That was something else entirely. A dragon was a thing of legend. It was said that the world itself was formed from a battle between three celestial dragons. The first age of Eberron was a time of terror when fiends and demons ruled the world—until the dragons had risen up and imprisoned these dark spirits in the depths of the underworld. Since then there were stories of the occasional dragon sighting. A drunken explorer once told Zaehr that he’d encountered a dragon with scales the color of midnight in an ancient ruin in the jungles of Q’barra, but he’d also claimed to have found a diamond the size of his head and then dropped it from his airship. Zaehr had always thought that both tales were simply in his imagination.
What lay before her was no adventurer’s tale. The silver dragon was tangled in the wreckage of the ship, its head still hidden inside the shattered vessel. It was crumpled and twisted, but Zaehr guessed that it was over eighty feet long from the tip of its muscular tail to the hidden jaws. Its hind legs had been shattered by the impact, and Zaehr noticed that even its blood looked like liquid silver, leaking out from between the armored scales and hissing against the flames. She touched down on the cobblestones next to the dragon’s left hind foot. Even its toes were larger than she was.
It’s just another victim, Zaehr thought, and it’s time to get to work.
A dozen different blades were tucked along the black leather harness Zaehr wore, and she selected one—a thin stiletto she liked to use as a probe. Stepping up to the dragon’s foot she fought to shut out the screams and yammering of the surrounding crowd, focusing her attention on the sight of the corpse, and more importantly, on the smell—the world of scent that humans couldn’t begin to understand. Fire, blood, wood, heat, and dozens of shattered lives—all of these stories stretched out before her, painted in the language of scent. Strongest of all was the smell of fresh rain—a smell that soon she realized was the odor of the dragon’s blood.
Silver rain battled burning wood as Zaehr grew closer to the ship. The vessel was still burning, but Zaehr had no fear of fire. Tolar had told her to trace the corpses, and it was possible there were survivors. Besides, she wanted to see the creature’s head. Ignoring the crowd, Zaehr leaped onto the side of the stricken dragon and climbed along its chest, pulling herself to an opening in the hull of the shattered ship.
She’d wanted to see the dragon’s head. But the legends, her expectations… nothing had prepared her for what she found inside.
The smell of blood and smoke filled Zaehr’s nostrils—the coppery tang of human blood blended with the thick rain-scent of the silver dragon. The floor was at a sharp angle, but Zaehr was a talented climber. Her fingernails and toenails were thicker and stronger than those of a human, coming to a natural point, and they helped her maintain a grip on the wooden surface. Absently, she brushed the back of her hand against the steel studs embedded in her black leather jerkin, activating the enchantment held within the armor—a spell that helped to hide her from prying eyes and to disperse any sounds she might make. Zaehr didn’t know what she might find in the ship, but she was a hunter by nature—and she’d decide whether or not to reveal herself.
She was standing in a small stateroom. The eastern wall had been shattered by the expanding dragon, but she caught the scent of human blood within the rubble and saw a finger protruding from under a plank. Carefully sifting through the wood, she found the body of a young male half-elf wearing the bloodstained livery of House Lyrandar—a servant from the look of him, lacking the rough hands of a sailor or the clothing of a House noble. The fire hadn’t killed him. From the looks of the corpse, the explosion hadn’t reached him. But the damage was terrible. Both his lungs had collapsed, and he had at least a dozen broken bones. Blood was still flowing from his mouth.
As powerful as the explosion had been, much of its force had blasted away from the ship; it might have knocked this boy off his feet, but it hadn’t killed him. The dragon had done that. Its body had expanded, smashing through walls and finally through the hull itself, crushing everything in its way in an inexorable tide of armored flesh. Glancing around and tasting the air, Zaehr identified another dozen corpses buried in the rubble. A few carried the scent of burned flesh, no doubt drawn from deeper in the ship and closer to the explosions. The others had been caught in the path of the dragon and crushed like ants beneath a child’s foot.