A heart-stopping howl rang out in the night, and for a moment Xalt forgot from where such a horrible sound could have come. Monja reached up and grabbed the warforged’s hand and started pulling him toward the gates. As he turned, he saw them start to creak open.
“What’s going on here?” Trisfo said, stunned. Then he shouted at the top of his lungs, “The gates! Puakel! The gates!”
Burch came charging out of the stables, still howling as he rushed up behind Xalt and Monja. “Stay here!” he snarled at them as he bounded past, faster than either of them could move.
Xalt halted in midstride and nearly tripped over his own feet. He turned to face Monja, who stared at him with horrified eyes.
At the same time, Trisfo kept shouting for help, screaming for Berre and anyone else to come to his aid. Skeletons came slipping down from the deck of Phoenix on mooring lines, landing all around the pair, weapons drawn.
“The gates!” Trisfo roared at them. They sprinted off toward the tall, wide, iron-banded doors as they peeled open inch by inch, foot by foot. They ran with what Xalt would have thought was bone-breaking speed, like death chasing after the fleeing shifter.
“This,” Xalt said, “cannot be good.”
“What?” Kandler yelled as Burch came sprinting toward him across the open yard, letting everyone in the place see that he and Sallah stood in front of the now-open gates. “What is it?”
With anyone else, Kandler might have been angry. He’d been in tense situations like this time and again, and he’d seen a lot of people crack under the strain. More than one perfectly good plan had gone all to pieces when someone decided to panic at the exact wrong moment.
The justicar knew that Burch, though, was as solid as they came. If he came screaming and howling at him in the middle of a delicate operation, he knew something had to be horribly wrong.
“Brendis is dead,” the shifter said as he came panting up to Kandler and Sallah and crashed into the justicar’s arms.
“No,” Sallah breathed. Kandler could feel the horror strike her. She’d lost three of her fellow knights already. With Brendis gone, she alone bore the responsibility of completing the mission with which five Knights of the Silver Flame—including her father—had been charged.
He had problems of his own though.
“Is Esprë all right?” He dreaded the answer. Although he suspected that Burch would have brought him bad news about his daughter first, he didn’t see anyway that a story that began with “Brendis is dead” could end well.
“Don’t know,” Burch said. “Found his body in the stables. It was cold.”
“But …” Kandler’s voice trailed off, unable to keep up with the thoughts whirring through his head.
If Brendis’s body was cold, that meant he’d been dead for hours, but he’d seen the young knight with Esprë only minutes ago. That meant …
“The changeling!”
Burch nodded. “She can’t be too far.”
Kandler grimaced. “So much for a clean escape. We need to rouse Berre and sound the alarm. Maybe we can still stop her, whatever her plan is.”
At that moment, the new airship, the one with the grotesque masthead, caught his eye from across the whole of the fort. “That’s it,” he said. “She has to be going for it.”
As he spoke, he thought he could make out two figures walking up the gangplank and on to the ship. The larger of them carried something slung over its shoulder.
“They’re on the—”
Before Kandler could finish his sentence, a voice rang out. “Hold! If you move a muscle, you will die!”
Kandler spotted Berre dashing toward them from across the yard. As he glanced around, he saw at least two score Karrnathi skeletons leveling crossbows at them. It seemed that the Captain of Bones didn’t make idle threats.
32
Te’oma heard the howl just as she opened the door to the captain’s quarters. It ran icicles through her veins. She shivered as she froze in the doorway. Indecision transfixed her as she tried to determine what she should do.
Ibrido pulled her into the cabin and slammed the door behind her. She heard the latch fall shut as she picked herself up off the crimson rug that covered most of the floor. She noticed Esprë laid out on the red-velvet couch in front of her. The young elf slept there peacefully oblivious, not a mark on her pale skin. The fort infirmary had been good to her, unnaturally so. Te’oma suspected that the Captain of Bones had slipped a healing potion of some sort into Esprë’s drink, something she was equally sure hadn’t been wasted on herself.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Te’oma said as she spun to face Ibrido. “We need to cast off.”
The soldier stared at her with his unblinking eyes. “The crew is set to that task already. We will be off as soon as we can.”
“Is there a good reason, then, for locking us all in here?”
Ibrido bared his teeth. “There are a few details I need to take care of before we go. As an added bonus, they may help delay any pursuit for a vital few minutes.”
“What in the Dark Six’s most damned names are you blathering about?”
Ibrido smiled as he rubbed a ring he wore on the pinky of his left hand. “I am afraid I have let you labor under a misconception,” he said, his voice as even as if he were describing the weather.
Te’oma narrowed her eyes at the creature. “What do you mean?” she said. As she spoke, she reached out with her mind, probing Ibrido’s thoughts, hoping to determine the truth behind his mysterious comments. Something frustrated her efforts though. When she reached out for him, it was as if he wasn’t there at all.
“Do you think I would be so indiscreet as to allow you unrestricted access to my innermost thoughts?” he asked, a soft snigger in his voice. “That would not make me much of a spy, now would it?”
Te’oma’s hand went to the sword hanging from Brendis’s weapon belt, the sacred, burning blade of a Knight of the Silver Flame. Before she could get it clear of the scabbard, though, Ibrido was on her.
The soldier smacked her to the floor with the back of his hand. She reached up to feel her face and brought her hand away slicked with blood trickling from her nose.
“Are you mad?” she asked, more shocked by the betrayal than the injury. “The Lich Queen will skin you alive for that. I’m to bring this child to her in Illmarrow Castle. There is no more important mission.”
“The Lich Queen?” Ibrido laughed. “You think I fear that fragile bag of bones? There are greater things in this world than long-dead elves who refuse to relinquish their hold on it.”
Te’oma stared at the Karrn, unable to make herself understand what he meant.
“Even if I cared about her, what makes you think I need you anymore?” Ibrido said as he delivered a vicious kick to Te’oma’s ribs. She felt her ribs crack as she tried to scramble away. “The Lich Queen wants the child who bears the Mark of Death. I doubt she’ll mind it if there’s one less changeling thief in the world.”
Te’oma mentally unfurled her cloak, commanding the symbiont to transform itself into a set of batlike wings that could carry her to safety. When the tips of the wings rapped against the ceiling, though, she understood why Ibrido had hauled her into the captain’s cramped quarters before confronting her.
The Karrn slammed into the changeling from below, smashing her wings flat against the cabin ceiling above her. She felt something in them snap, and pain stabbed into her through the nerves she shared with the parasitic creature. She closed her eyes as she flinched in pain, and when she opened them something terrible stood in Ibrido’s place.
The creature holding Te’oma against the ceiling looked something like the Ibrido she knew but different. Shimmering green scales covered him from head to toe. His crimson eyes were slit like those of a serpent, and his thin, black tongue flicked about the rim of his slash of a mouth when he wasn’t using it to speak. His scale-covered ears were pointed like an elf’s. He was taller than before and stronger too, and when he drew back his lips all Te’oma could see were rows of vicious, knifelike teeth.