Kandler turned on Berre. “You left her alone with her kidnapper?”
“With a guard outside and one in here.”
“Where’s that guard?” Sallah asked.
Burch kicked a bleached femur from under a nearby bed, rattling what sounded like a pile of them as he did. “I wondered who handled your housekeeping around here.”
Berre cursed. “This is the problem with having to rely on the unliving for everything.” She stuck her head out through the curtained doorway of the room and bellowed, “Lieutenant!”
A moment later, a handsome, dark-haired man charged through the door. “Yes, my captain!” “Where is the changeling?”
The officer glanced at the empty bed across the room from Esprë’s. His rock-steady eyes did not blink. Kandler wondered if they ever did.
“Gone,” the lieutenant said, no expression marring his face. “I will gather a crew to scour the entire fort for her. If she is still here, I will find her.” With that, he turned on his heel and left.
Berre held up her hands in frustration. “Who did I anger to get stationed here among these idiots?” She snarled. “It’s an important post, but it’s on the backend of nowhere. Do you know why the place is staffed with undead? They can’t find anyone else willing to sit here, at least since the war ended. It’s too damned dull.”
The dwarf glanced at Monja. “It’s not that the halflings aren’t worthy adversaries, but we haven’t seen as much as a hunting party within a league of this place in over a year. The biggest excitement we’ve had involved a visit from your lathon, and that was eighteen months ago.”
Berre stormed over to the bed covering the pile of bones and sat down hard on it. “My apologies,” she said. “These are my troubles, not yours. I’ve added enough to yours as it is.”
Monja walked over and put an arm around the dour dwarf’s shoulders. “None of that matters. If we never see this changeling again, we would all be happy. Let’s hope she took the opportunity to escape and never looks back.”
Kandler wanted to believe that too, but his gut told him different. He held Esprë even tighter.
“She likely killed the guard and flew out the window by means of that fantastic cloak of hers,” Xalt said. As the words left him, he stopped and cocked his head. “Can you ‘kill’ something that’s already dead?”
“Her cloak?” Berre asked.
“A symbiont,” Sallah said. “A living creature attached to her like some unholy parasite.”
Berre put her head in her hands and groaned.
“It’s not important,” Kandler said, trying to believe the words as he said them, finding they offered him little solace. “We have Esprë now. She’s safe.”
“I’m just so happy to see you!” Esprë said.
“As am I, despite all my errors,” said Berre, sighing as she stood up. “I request that you all join me for dinner tonight. We dine at sunset, which should fall in but a few hours. In the meantime, I asked for quarters to be arranged for you. I’ll have one of my soldiers bring up your things.”
“I can take care of that,” said Xalt.
“If you can spare the time,” Berre said, “I’d rather chat with you before dinner. It’s not often that I get to interview a resident of the Mournland. Living so near to it as we do, I find it fascinating.”
Xalt cleared his throat at the request.
“It’s fine,” Kandler said. “If you don’t mind, it’s the least we can do to repay her.”
“I’ll gather our things,” Brendis said.
“That’s not necessary,” Berre said, “I’m sure my …” She grimaced at the young knight. “Yes, that might be best.”
Kandler nodded his thanks at Brendis, then turned back to talk with Esprë about everything they’d both seen since Construct.
26
Brendis walked past a dozen skeletons in Karrnathi armor as he found his way to the stables where he and the others had stashed the packs they’d carried with them all the way from the Wandering Inn. The creatures set him on edge. Although they seemed to ignore him, he couldn’t read a thing in their empty eye sockets to put his mind at ease.
As a Knight of the Silver Flame, Brendis believed that all undead creatures, be they vampires, skeletons, zombies, ghouls, wraiths, ghosts, or things even worse—were inherently evil. Each of them should be resting peacefully in the ground, their spirits wandering off to their respective rewards. Instead, they were animated by a necromantic power that could only be classified as evil. By the gifts granted him by the Silver Flame, he could feel their evil radiating from them like the dark glow of a lantern that shed naught but chilly death.
By extension, that meant the people who controlled such creatures should be evil too, but Berre seemed as solid and good a dwarf as Brendis had ever met. He fought to reconcile these two ideas in his brain, but it only frustrated him. He ached to call down the power of the Silver Flame to eradicate the skeletons around him or at least to force them to flee from his sight forever, but here they seemed to serve a greater good. He determined to leave them alone for as long as they returned the favor—at least for now.
What, he wondered, would Sir Deothen have done?
He had missed the elder knight’s leadership since they had lost him in Construct, crushed to death beneath the mobile city on the orders of the warforged lieutenant Bastard. He knew that Sallah, Deothen’s daughter, likely missed him even more. She’d done her best to stand in her father’s stead, but with only the shaken Brendis left to lead, the effort sometimes rang hollow. She needed a chance to grieve for her fallen father, and he hoped now that they had finally found Esprë, this time would come to her soon.
As he made his way to the central yard, he spied the battered airship floating there in the middle of the place. When he and the others had entered the fort, he’d stopped in his tracks and stared at the thing. It had been through so much he found it hard to believe it hadn’t been destroyed.
The restraining arcs that held the ring of fire in place around the craft bore countless small cracks and a few larger ones. He knew that if the mystically charged arcs ever gave out entirely, the creature of elemental fire trapped in the ring would lash out with explosive, destructive force, possibly consuming every shred of wood in the entire ship, as well as anyone unfortunate enough to be on it at the time.
Brendis had borne all that in mind as he’d rammed the airship straight into the stands of the arena in Construct on Deothen’s orders. It had been the bravest thing he’d done in his life, the kind of thing he’d trained for, ever since being accepted as a prospective Knight of the Silver Flame. He’d followed his commander’s directions without hesitation or concern for his personal safety, and for that he felt no little pride. That the battle had ended badly reflected more on the unfathomable will of the Silver Flame rather than his own dedication to it.
Now, though, hope leaped in his heart that their whirlwind journey had finally come to an end. With luck, Sallah would be able to convince Kandler that the safest place for Esprë was in Flamekeep, the Thranite capital. There the full force of the worshipers of the Silver Flame could be deployed to keep the girl from the hands of others until they could determine what ultimate fate must befall one who bore the Mark of Death.
Brendis marveled that such a sweet young creature could be burdened with such a dragonmark. As far as he knew, no one else had received such a mixed blessing in well over three millennia, during the closing days of the legendary Dragon-Elf War. That it had reappeared now, after so many centuries, could only mean trouble.
He knew that some in Flamekeep would advocate killing the girl as the only means of being sure of eradicating this dangerous mark once more, but he didn’t see how they could prevail. The Church of the Silver Flame respected the fire of life above all else, and to extinguish it as it burned in the soul of an innocent young elf flew in the face of that. Still, people who knew anything of the Mark of Death feared it, and those ruled by fear often made choices they might normally abhor.