The hide covering the lodge doorway twitched. The crowd grew still. A hand threw the hide aside. Steam billowed out of the lodge in a great cloud and out of the steam stepped Batul, flanked by two other elderly orcs. Geth risked falling to get a hand on Wrath as Batul raised his arms, a crook-headed hunda stick in one hand, and called out in Orc.
“The council has made a decision. Make ready to leave the Mirror of Vvaraak. The horde of Angry Eyes marches on the Bonetree mound!”
The roar that erupted from the throats of the gathered orcs seemed to shake the air itself. Cold settled over Geth. He let himself slip back down from the standing stone. Medala and Ekhaas were waiting at the bottom. They must have heard Batul’s announcement. There could have been no missing it. Ekhaas’s face was tight.
Medala’s, however, was as joyful as those of the orc warriors who now streamed back out through the camp. “Aren’t you pleased, Geth?” she shouted over the chaotic din. “You’ll fight the Master of Silence! You’ll fight Dah’mir!”
Geth’s gut clenched. Words failed him. They didn’t, however, fail Ekhaas. She looked at Medala with wary fear. “This place that Virikhad’s power took you,” she said. “Where was it? What was it?”
Medala’s lips drew back, and her teeth flashed. “You’ve guessed, haven’t you, Ekhaas duur’kala? It was everywhere. It was nowhere. It was the place where madmen go when they have the power to tear holes in the fabric of space. I have been where Dah’mir would give his tongue to go-oh, if he knew what his twisted experiments had wrought!” She looked at them both, and her pupils were once again tiny black dots in her eyes. “I’ve seen the brine pools where the elder brains of the illithids dream. I’ve seen empty palaces that wait for their daelkyr masters to return. I’ve been to Xoriat!”
CHAPTER 9
Natrac knew it was late morning or early afternoon only by the complaint of his empty stomach, though even that wasn’t strictly reliable-he had woken with a sour taste in his mouth and a vague memory of having vomited in the night. There was no other way to judge the passage of time.
There was no hint of daylight in the small room where he’d been dumped or in the larger chamber visible through the barred window set in the room’s door. Many centuries before, the chamber had likely been some fine lady’s bedroom and the smaller room, a large closet. Or maybe a nursery or a maid’s room. Many, many centuries before, when Malleon’s Gate had been the wealthy heart of Sharn and the great towers had been mere saplings. Since then, the rooms-the entire grand house-had seen a hundred different uses, a hundred refashionings, probably a dozen blockings and unblockings of the window that had once let light into the chamber.
For the last twenty years or so, the smaller room had been a cell, the larger chamber an … interview room. Natrac remembered the day when the conversion had been made very clearly. He’d had the window blocked up again specifically so prisoners would have no clue to the passage of day or night.
And for the fifteenth time since he’d woken, he muttered, “My own damn cell. The Keeper take you, Biish!”
Not that the possibility he might one day need to escape from his own cell had ever slipped passed him. Once the throbbing that the hobgoblin’s club had left in his head had eased, Natrac had crawled over to the door and pulled himself up to the barred window, surveying the chamber beyond and blessing the orc blood that let him see in the dark. The chamber was empty except for a rough table and two chairs. His knife-hand, stripped from the stump of his right wrist, lay on the table, well out of reach.
He’d gone to a corner of the cell and counted four bricks in and eighteen high. The cleverly fitted false brick he’d installed in secret had still been there. Unfortunately, the hollow behind where he’d hidden a knife and a few tools had been empty. Someone had cleaned it out. The brick hadn’t been as secret as he thought.
After that there hadn’t been much to do but wait. Natrac passed the time alternately cursing Biish, the idiot changelings of the Broken Mirror, the treacherous old goblin bartender, and himself. A return not just to Sharn but to Malleon’s Gate-what had he been thinking? Had surviving his adventures with Geth, Singe, and Dandra really given him that much of a sense of invulnerability? Had he been this stupid when he’d been young? Lords of the Host, he thought, it was a miracle he’d lived this long.
Worst of all, his misguided attempt at locating word of Dah’mir through Sharn’s underworld meant that Dandra and Singe would not just have one less ally on which to rely, but that they would almost certainly start using time they needed to locate the dragon on finding him instead. He’d told Dandra he’d be back by dawn. She might already have started worrying about him. He had become a liability. He had to find a way out of this.
He knew Biish, though. Getting out of the hobgoblin’s hands wasn’t going to be easy.
He looked up as the door in the outer chamber opened and several people, to judge by the sound of footsteps, entered. They brought a dim light with them, lighting up the square of the barred window in the cell door. That was interesting, he thought. It meant that not all of Biish’s gang were goblinoids. Someone in the other chamber needed light to see. He rose to his feet.
The large and hairy face of the bugbear from the tavern appeared at the barred window. Natrac glared at him. “Awake,” the creature grunted in Goblin and moved back.
Biish took his place and gave Natrac a leer that showed all of his oversized teeth. “I never thought I’d see you back in Sharn, Natrac,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Asking myself the same thing.” Natrac met his gaze without flinching. “How have you been, Biter?”
Biish’s skin was a deep orange color that turned deeper when he flushed. His ears lay back flat. “No one calls me Biter now, taat!”
From the utter silence that fell among those who had accompanied Biish into the outer chamber, Natrac guessed that the hobgoblin might actually be right. He held his voice steady, not allowing himself to show any sign of fear, and pushed himself up to the bars on the window. “I guess the chib can have people call him whatever he wants,” he said. “Have you been taking care of my affairs, Biish?”
That got a bark of mocking laughter out of him. “They haven’t been your affairs for a long time, Natrac.”
“I heard you closed the arena.”
“You could have sold it to me when I asked, and you would have made money,” Biish said with a cold smile. “You could have joined your gang with mine, and you might still be in power today instead of stuck in a cell you built yourself. The Longtooth is one of the most powerful gangs in Malleon’s Gate these days.”
Biish always had loved to gloat. Natrac let the hobgoblin boast while he looked past him to the band of thugs he had brought into the room. The bugbear, of course. Another hobgoblin. Two goblins, one of which looked very familiar and who glanced away when Natrac’s eyes met his. Natrac remembered him-a street rat with such a talent for picking pockets that he’d brought him into his gang personally. Not everyone had stood up against Biish’s control, it seemed. Natrac’s jaw tightened in anger, but he forced his gaze past the little traitor.
The final person in the room was the one holding the dim light-source, a small lamp. The only non-goblinoid-and the only woman-she was a half-elf, young but with hard and cunning eyes. Her hair was blond with a hint of red and bound into a knot at the back of her head. Her clothes were worn leather, and the only visible weapon she carried was a dagger at her hip, but Natrac had a feeling that wasn’t the only weapon on her. Somehow she didn’t look out of place among Biish’s guard. Instead, they looked out of place in her presence.