Te’oma brushed past Ibrido on the gangplank and stepped onto the ship’s wide, polished deck. This seemed even more like a boat than the other airship, wide enough that she could ignore for a moment the fact that the craft hung floating high in the air rather than in an open sea.
A gaunt, sunken-eyed man wearing a black, silk bandanna tied around the crown of his head stepped forward as she boarded the ship. Some of the skeletons aboard the ship seemed to have more mass than this lean figure, who stepped forward and saluted Te’oma. “Bosun Meesh, at your service,” he said in a dry, unused voice.
“I am Berre Stonefist, Captain of Bones, in charge of this fortress and all who come within its bounds. I am taking command of this ship. Prepare to cast off.”
The bosun stared at Te’oma with his cavernous eyes, his lips frozen for the moment. The changeling felt like she might vomit. She had no idea how the Karrn maintained a chain of command over these soulless creatures, and she feared that they were as likely to tear her to shreds and feast on her flesh as accept her orders.
Ibrido reached around Te’oma’s chest and pulled a fold in the cloak open to expose a silver wolf’s head embroidered in profile there. A set of three knucklebones rested beneath these, stitched fast to the cloak’s fabric in a triangular pattern.
At the sight of these, the black-capped man developed a thin-lipped smile and said, “Aye, aye.” Then he turned and made a complex signal to the ship’s skeletons, each of which had been gazing at him with an empty stare. They launched into a burst of chaotic activity, working fast to remove the moorings and pull the gangplank up behind Ibrido.
“Soon we will be on our way,” the Karrn said as he carried Esprë’s body to the captain’s quarters in the ship’s forecastle. “Then no one will be able to stop us.”
Te’oma smiled at those words as she followed Ibrido, hoping they were true.
31
“We need to open that gate,” Kandler said. “If we do that without removing that guard, he’ll bring the entire fort down on our heads. It’s him or us.”
Sallah nodded, then shouldered past the justicar. “Wait here,” she said.
Flummoxed, Kandler watched as the lady knight strode straight up to the ladder. She climbed up into the guard’s post in a small niche along the narrow walkway that lined the upper edge of the wall just high enough to let a man peek his head out over the crenellations.
“Hello,” he heard her say. “I think I’m lost.”
“True enough,” the guard said, amused. “You’re a long way from Thrane.”
Kandler crept over to the barred gates, still listening.
“It’s been a long, lonely trip,” she said. “I was hoping to find some civilized company here.”
The guard laughed. “There’s little of anything civilized out here on the edge of nowhere, but I’d be pleased to do what I can to please you.”
Kandler heard Sallah try a girly giggle, but it fell flat.
“Are you all right?” the guard said. “Something caught in your throat?”
The lady knight coughed. “I’m fine,” she said. “It must be the night air.”
A pair of skeletal guards converged on the post from opposite directions. Kandler could hear their booted feet stomping along the wooden walkway above, and he pressed himself harder against the gates. He put his hand on the pommel of his sword, ready to draw it at a moment’s notice, but fearful that the sound of it clearing its scabbard would give him away.
“Just let me put these two at ease,” the guard said. “They don’t talk much, but they listen to orders.”
A moment later, Kandler heard the skeletal guards pacing back off in the directions from which they’d come. He breathed a silent sigh of relief.
“Now,” the guard said to Sallah, moving closer to her, “let’s see what I can do for you.”
“Why don’t you join me down below?” Sallah said. “I feel a bit too exposed up here. Anyone could see us.”
“An excellent idea,” the guard said. “Ladies first.”
Sallah came down through the hole in the flooring, picking her way carefully down the ladder to the ground. As she cleared the decking, she waved Kandler into a nearby patch of shadow to wait.
The lady knight stood at the foot of the ladder until the guard joined her. “Now,” he said with a leer, “just what was it you were hoping I could do for you, my pretty lass?”
Sallah sidled closer to the guard, running her hands up his chest until they rested on the front of his breastplate. “I just have one simple request,” she whispered in his ear. “Keep quiet.”
She shoved the man back into Kandler’s arms, where he put a knife to the man’s throat. The guard’s eyes grew wide, but he pressed his lips shut as if he feared some sound might accidentally escape.
Sallah tore off the guard’s tunic and used strips of it to gag and bind him. He didn’t struggle a bit. Just before she stuffed a ball of fabric in his mouth, he whispered, “My thanks to you. This job’s not worth dying over.”
“See,” Sallah whispered with a smile as she and Kandler each grabbed an end of the bar holding the gates shut, “there can be a better way.”
“Hey,” said Trisfo, the Karrn who hoped to fly Phoenix to Fort Zombie and back the next day, “do you see that?”
Xalt froze stiff. These were some of the words he dreaded to hear most in what had been a pleasant conversation so far, covering subjects ranging from the vegetation of the Mournland to the airworthiness of ships like Phoenix.
Monja smiled. “I can’t hear much of anything standing this close to the ring of fire.”
Trisfo stepped between the halfling and the warforged to peer toward the fort’s gates. “I said, ‘Do you see that?’ Puakel’s gone from his post again.” He pointed up at the guard post above and to one side of the gates. “He’s going to spend a year in Khyber for that if Berre catches him again.”
“He’s probably just gone to relieve himself,” Xalt said. When Monja stared at him, he added, “I understand humans have to do that all the time.”
“Warforged don’t?” Trisfo asked, intrigued.
“No,” said Xalt. “Compared to breathers, we have a tremendous amount of control over our bodies.”
“If you don’t eat, how do you stay alive?” Trisfo asked, still keeping one eye on the gates.
“It’s complicated,” Xalt said, warming to the subject, happy to be talking about anything but guards and gates—especially guards near gates. “Mostly we are motivated by a complicated system of magical means, much like a golem. We don’t need any more sustenance than that. However, the wizardly researchers who designed us wanted us to have some measure of free will—as much as any other self-aware creatures, it seems. To that end, the running theory is that they decided to make us as much like breathing people as possible.”
“Fascinating,” Trisfo said, now completely engaged by the conversation again. “You mean to say that you have a heart, lungs, a brain?”
“In some sense, yes,” Xalt said. “You might even recognize them as such if you were to dissect one of us. They have the same form, even if they are not constructed from the same substances.”
“Then there is no flesh to you nor bone?”
“Not, again, in the traditional sense. I have an underlying framework that is just as strong as bone, and I have fibers that move in much the same way as your muscles, but they do so without need for food, drink, or even—”