Gaven flexed his hand, and the one orb split into three that danced into the air around him, lighting the tunnel walls.
“Thunder and lightning,” he muttered, reading the Draconic character inscribed on the wall beside him. He started, and looked around. “Cart?” he called weakly. “Where did you get off to?”
CHAPTER 52
Trailing one hand along the wall, Gaven retraced his path, back to the base of the Crystal Spire. As he walked, his mind filled with the words traced on and by the twisting tunnel, words that spoke of the Storm Dragon, the gates of Khyber, and the bridge to the sky. The verbs, though-those most flexible of words, allowing so many nuances of action and meaning. The nouns were facts, the bare facts of the situation as it stood. The verbs were possibility.
The ululation of the Soul Reaver’s hordes had diminished slightly, and the voices no longer rose in unison. The cries all seemed to be coming from somewhere far above, as though new waves of monsters were pouring out through the chasm from the upper reaches of Khyber and swarming anew over the battlefield.
He rounded one last bend and threw a hand up to shield his eyes from the brightness of the Crystal Spire, which had grown more intense since he left it. Light leaked out to cast deep shadows on the tracings of the cavern wall, and shone on Cart’s impassive face. The warforged stood on the dragon’s lower jaw, poised at the very edge of the Crystal Spire.
“Planning your ascension, Cart?” Gaven could barely find his voice-his throat was raw from yelling, and the lingering taste of the Soul Reaver’s slime made his tongue feel thick.
“Have you come to stop me, Storm Dragon?”
“I don’t care, one way or another. I don’t plan on passing through that gate.”
“What about the Prophecy?”
“There are many ways to bring the Prophecy to pass.”
“I try not to think about it.”
“Uncommonly wise.”
“What god watches over my people, Gaven?” Cart’s voice was strangely melancholy, and he rocked ever so slightly on his heels as he stared down into the dragon’s gaping maw. “Which Sovereign has our interests at heart?”
“Are there gods for each race and people?” Gaven asked. “Doesn’t the whole Host keep watch over us all?”
“Perhaps. But the gods made all the other races. We were made by artificers and magewrights. Does Onatar then care for us, the god of the forge? Or perhaps the warlord Dol Dorn, since we were made for war? Or do they see us as many mortals do-simply as tools for war? There is no god of swords or siege engines. Perhaps there is no god for us.”
“You want to be one, then? God of the warforged?”
Cart shrugged. “I am torn. I am not accustomed to feeling so divided.”
“I’ve never heard you speak of warforged as your people before.”
“I have always felt that the best way to serve warforged everywhere was to fulfill my own duty, to live out the purpose for which I was made.”
“And you were made for war.”
“I was. That’s why I followed Haldren. He was my commanding officer, and I honored and respected him for that. But he also promised a return to war. I wanted that-I wanted to see the world plunged into violence again, just so I could find purpose again. What is a warforged to do in a world no longer at war?”
“What would you do, then, as god of the warforged? Would you urge them into war?”
Cart stroked his chin. “Power is quite a temptation, isn’t it? It’s one thing to think of all the good one might do. But I can so easily imagine abusing that power. To become a dark god of war, the destructive mirror of Dol Dorn, calling for war for its own sake. I think the Dark Six would become the Dark Seven.”
Gaven nodded. “Exactly.”
Cart stepped back from the Crystal Spire, and shadows fell over his face. “Well, Storm Dragon? How will the Prophecy come to pass?”
“The Storm Dragon bursts through the gates of Khyber and blocks the bridge to the sky.”
He came and stood across from Cart, on the face of the snarling dragon, and looked up. The Crystal Spire rose forever above him, its light showing hints of movement along the edges of the chasm far above but blocking any detail from his view.
“That’s not what you said in the City of the Dead,” Cart said.
“No, it’s not. But there are many ways to translate Draconic verbs, many layers of meaning that are expressed better in context than in isolation. And if I am to be the Storm Dragon, then I am the context for those words. They can’t be interpreted apart from me.”
“So you will choose your own destiny after all.”
Gaven smiled. With one more glance skyward, he stepped forward into the Crystal Spire.
He dropped down into the dragon’s maw, but then wind whipped up from nowhere, whirling furiously around him and holding him aloft. The earth rumbled as lightning probed the chasm, and a shower of rocks tumbled down from above, catching in the whirlwind and circling him. He lifted his hands to the sky high above, where the Crystal Spire broke through the swirling storm clouds, and a great bolt of lightning flashed down through the chasm, striking the stone dragon’s mouth and adding to the swirling hail of stone around him. Then he surged up on the wind, sloughing the rock behind him.
He burst up through Khyber’s gate in an explosive shower of rock splinters. The cavern went dark as the dragon’s mouth collapsed in on itself, great slabs of stone falling in on the gate and dousing the light of the Crystal Spire. Reaching a hand toward Cart, Gaven lifted the warforged into the whirlwind behind him and hurtled up through the chasm.
Flashes of lightning illuminated the darkness around them as they rose, revealing tunnel mouths crawling with gibbering monsters clambering toward the surface. Gaven shot past them, rising faster than he had fallen, emerging into open air in the space of a few gasping breaths. Lightning crackled in the air around him, and great thundering bolts struck the ground below. The whirlwind below him hurled monsters off the brink and into the yawning depth of the chasm, and more lightning blasts sent enormous slabs of earth plummeting down after them. The Storm Dragon stretched out his arms, and sheets of lightning struck along the length of the chasm, shattering rock to fill it in. Thunder rolled continuously like the rumbling of a mighty earthquake, and when it was done, the chasm had become just another scar on the face of the Starcrag Plain.
Haldren’s stallion galloped across the plain. Rienne stroked his neck as she rode, encouraging him to greater speed. He was no magebred horse or Valenar steed, but he was amazingly sure-footed on the rocky ground, which more than made up for a lack of raw speed. The earth thundered with the pounding of his hooves-no, she realized, the earth shook from tremors far below the battlefield, which seemed to bode ill for Gaven’s well-being.
The battle was over, as far as Rienne could see. Haldren’s soldiers had fallen or been routed from the field entirely, and until she drew near the chasm she saw only a few clumps of monsters scattering away from the field-heading for new haunts in the Starpeaks or the Silver Woods. She could see no dragons still aloft, whether they were all dead or driven away or just brought to ground. She spurred the stallion toward the towering shaft of light, a beacon in the midst of the furious storm.
She was halfway across the plain when the beacon flickered and went out. Her mind raced through a handful of possibilities as she spurred the stallion on: Had Gaven crossed the bridge to the sky, collapsing it behind him? Had he failed, proving that he was not the Storm Dragon after all? Had Gaven perhaps been wrong about the whole Prophecy and the Crystal Spire? Perhaps it was not any kind of bridge to the sky, but some kind of beacon or signal, and Gaven had destroyed it.
She drew a slow breath, calming her pounding heart, and tried to lose herself in the rhythm of the stallion’s gait.