“Well,” Sabira began slowly, “you’re welcome to do that, of course, and no one will think any less of you if you do. But consider this-is your goal to play the songs of others, or to play your own? Because the only way to write those songs is to live the stories in them. You can do that if you stay here. I’m not so sure the same can be said about returning to House Cannith.”
Jester looked as if he might be considering her words. It was so hard to tell with warforged.
“But… she can’t be fixed.”
“Maybe not, but would she want you to stop playing because of that?”
Sabira was starting to feel a little foolish, talking about the lyre as if it were the bard’s lover. But she’d lost three good swords in a little over a week; if she had to coddle the warforged to keep that from becoming four, then so be it. It wasn’t as if she’d never looked the fool before, and for less cause.
“No,” he said softly, the red crystals of his eyes brightening. Then louder, more resolutely, “No, she wouldn’t. She’d want me to go on, to honor her memory by living those stories and writing those songs, just as you said.” He squared his shoulders. “I’m in, Marshal, till the climactic battle and the convenient epilogue! I’m your bard.”
Sabira’s smile was a little strained, but she doubted the warforged noticed, busy as he was composing “The Ballad of the Marshal and the Martyred Lyre” in his head.
“Glad to hear it,” she said, turning to move back to the front of the group. Jester’s hand caught her on the shoulder before she could go. She looked back at him questioningly.
“Thank you, Marshal,” he said quietly, his voice earnest.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, uncomfortable with his gratitude and what she’d done to earn it.
Back at the front, she fell in beside Greddark and motioned for Xujil to head out. Zi and Rahm took up positions behind them, and Skraad and the bard brought up the rear.
“Touching performance,” the dwarf said under his breath, knowing his voice wouldn’t carry. “I almost believed you cared. Maybe you should think about taking up the lyre yourself. You certainly have a talent for telling stories.” Sabira thought she detected a slight emphasis on the word lyre.
“Stuff it,” she hissed back angrily. But as she walked down the dark tunnel, she wasn’t sure who her ire was really directed at. The dwarf was the easy target-he’d called her on her manipulation of the naive warforged. But she was the one who, despite her own distaste for being used as a pawn, hadn’t hesitated to do it to someone else.
Far, Barrakas 27, 998 YK
Tarath Marad, Xen’drik.
The next week and a half passed in a blur of shadows, sameness, and growing paranoia. The pervasive gloom coupled with tricks of light and sound had everyone on edge. The strange forces at work here in the depths-the ones, Xujil placidly informed them, that also made teleportation back to the surface an iffy proposition-manifested in new and fun ways at every turn. Pockets of magical darkness made both the everbright lamps on their helmets and their low-light goggles temporarily useless. Even when they could see, they couldn’t trust what their eyes told them. Sabira kept glimpsing movement out of the corner of her eye, multi-legged black shapes skittering across wall and ceiling. Once she even thought she saw something that looked like a cross between a lizard and a spider watching her from the shadows, but of course when she blinked, nothing was there.
Echoes sounded where nothing was there to make them, or returned to the group tenfold and distorted beyond recognition. The bland rations and water alternately took on the rancid taste of foul mud, or the coppery tang of blood. Some of the group had had hallucinations wherein the features of the person walking next to them had stretched and morphed into something evil and alien. Rahm had almost skewered Zi the first time it happened, and now none of them could stand to look any of their companions in the face, for fear of what they might see there.
The only ones who seemed to be immune were Xujil and Jester. The drow was a creature of Khyber, so it was understandable that its madness would not faze him, but Sabira was surprised at the warforged’s resistance. Was it something in the air, or the water, neither of which he needed to survive here? Or did it have something to do with him being a construct, and the pathways to his fabricated brain just different enough to remain unaffected by the phenomena the rest of them were experiencing?
Whatever the source of his apparent immunity was, Sabira wished she shared it. The nightmares were becoming both more intense and more frequent, and they were beginning to plague her waking hours now in addition to the few moments of sleep exhaustion forced upon her.
Greddark’s face had become Orin’s, burning and melting as his legs had done beneath Frostmantle, leaving nothing but a grinning, accusing skull. Rahm had become Elix, leaning in for a kiss, only to have a tentacle covered with staring eyes snake out of his mouth, hungrily seeking hers. In reality, the chainmail-clad man had simply leaned toward her at a rest break, asking her to pass over a canteen of water.
It got so bad that Sabira actually welcomed the few encounters they had with denizens of the deep. As soon as either Jester or Xujil confirmed that the threat was real, she was the first one in, wielding her urgrosh with abandon. Though the cave spiders and blood oozes-nightmares she had some hope of destroying-were a poor substitute for those she couldn’t.
She found herself constantly fingering the half of Tilde’s medallion she carried in her pocket. Elix had given it to her before she’d left Vulyar. She didn’t ask how he’d acquired it, but she knew his father would have been loath to part with it. He told her it was for luck, but she knew him better than that. He was afraid that if Tilde was still alive when they found her, she might not be in her right mind. He knew that while the sorceress might not recognize Sabira as a friend, she would almost certainly remember Ned’s necklace. Elix hoped that would be enough to keep her from killing Sabira outright.
Having seen what the sorceress could do, especially when she was angry, Sabira hoped so too.
The tunnel they’d been traveling through had been getting narrower and shorter for some time, and while some of the passageways they’d been in had clearly seen other feet, this one looked relatively untouched, at least by any of Tarath Marad’s new explorers. Its inhabitants were, of course, another story.
Xujil made his way back to them.
“The tunnel ahead is blocked by an ancient deadfall, but a small opening exists. We will have to crawl for some distance, but we will be able to pass through unharmed.”
Greddark frowned, peering over the drow’s shoulder in the gloom. None of the luminous fungus grew here, and even the everbright lanterns were starting to wane.
“Can’t we just clear it?”
Sabira couldn’t blame him for asking. Despite their love of mining and being underground, many dwarves had a paradoxical fear of tight, enclosed spaces. Sabira didn’t much care for them herself.
“Perhaps with the proper equipment, a dozen duergars on a leash, and the luxury of time, yes.” Xujil blinked at him. “But as we do not seem to have any of those things to hand, I believe crawling is our best course of action.”
Sabira held up her hand to forestall Greddark’s retort.
“I’ll let the others know.”
She passed the information down the line, then gestured for Xujil to lead the way. As they followed the drow, Greddark caught her sleeve.
“A dozen duergars on a leash?” he repeated in a low voice.
Sabira didn’t miss a beat.
“Can you think of a better place for them?”
She didn’t wait to hear his answer, instead following the drow as he climbed quickly up a pile of broken rock to a small aperture and, crouching down, disappeared into it. Eyeing the sharp rubble, she shrugged her pack off and dug in it for a moment, coming up with a pair of leather gloves. Slipping them on, she replaced her pack and began the precarious ascent, careful to test each hand- and foothold before putting her full weight down. The guide had made the climb look easy, but she was no elf, and this was going to be challenging enough without having her palms cut to ribbons in the process.