The dwarf roared in frustration and hurled himself at the skeleton with his one good arm, blood trailing behind him from his other arm and legs. He fell upon the creature, and the two rolled down the slope in an uncontrollable double cartwheel. The spectacular fall ended only when the pair cascaded off a small ridge and came smashing down onto the rocks below. The dwarf landed atop the skeleton, smashing it to pieces, but he smacked his own head open on a pointed rock as he went, dashing his brains behind him.
Esprë screamed as a rough, scaly hand landed on her shoulder. She spun about, terrified, to find Ibrido staring down at her with his unblinking eyes. He bared his teeth at her, and she cringed.
“It is beautiful, is it not?” he said to her. “The ballet of battle, the dance of death. It is poetry at its most savage and desperate, each stanza featuring a victor and a vanquished.”
“It’s horrible,” Esprë said. “Disgusting.”
Ibrido nodded. “It is all that and more, but somehow you can’t bring yourself to stop watching it, can you?”
The dragon-elf’s words rang true, but Esprë refused to admit it, even to herself. The sight of the battle had frozen her with fear, she told herself. She wasn’t some kind of voyeur of death. Right?
Esprë curled up on the deck, hugging her knees to her chest and closing her eyes. The dragonmark between her shoulder blades began to burn. She wondered if it had some kind of a mind of its own. Would it start talking to her someday, if it grew large or powerful enough? Or would that just be her mind cracking if that happened?
With all that pounded at her these days, she sometimes feared for her sanity. She didn’t think she could be blamed if it somehow gave way. She was far too young to be expected to carry such a burden as her dragonmark, and the series of kidnappings, and the fact that a continent—or perhaps two—full of the most dangerous creatures in the world wanted her, and everyone who could possibly be related to her dead.
Esprë threw back her head and screamed. The ear-piercing blast forced Ibrido to step back and cover his ears. The sound hurt Esprë’s head, which made her scream even louder and longer, as she channeled every bit of her frustration and fear into it.
At that moment, Esprë was sure that Kandler, Te’oma, Burch, Xalt, and Sallah would never catch up with her. She was on her own, and she was doomed to be torn to pieces—physically, mentally, and spiritually—by the most ancient and evil inhabitants of Eberron.
The dark powers of the Mark of Death surged into Esprë’s hands, freezing them into the shapes of claws. They glowed black with her unimpeded wrath, and the color—or absence of it—snaked up around her arms and danced across her shoulders.
Ibrido stepped back at the sight of the vengeful young elf, and for the first time she saw fear in his reptilian eyes. A laugh leaped to her lips and burst from her mouth in savage delight as she jumped to her feet and reached for the dragon-elf.
“You do not know the powers you toy with,” she told Ibrido as she stretched toward him, determined to put an end to him, no matter what the skeletons might do to her afterward. They would be too late to save him, and at the moment that seemed it would be enough.
Ibrido’s fist flashed out and caught Esprë squarely on the chin. She went sprawling back onto the bridge’s railing, blood spiraling out from her face. Before she could recover, the dragon-elf waded in under her defenses and beat her senseless.
Esprë felt her power fading, waning from her under Ibrido’s relentless battery. She tried to grab at him again, but he knocked her to the ground with a blow to her temple, and all the fight ran out of her.
“Neither,” Ibrido said, as she collapsed to the deck, “do you.”
43
Chains rattled in Esprë’s ears as she regained her senses. They hung from manacles on her wrists, and a set of walking bones dressed in battered Karrnathi armor held their other ends.
“No more time for sleeping,” she heard Ibrido’s voice say. “We have an engagement to keep.”
She shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun, which stabbed lances of pain into her brain, and stared up at the dragon-elf, who towered nearby but out of reach. She cursed herself for her foolishness. She should have known better than to attack a trained warrior barehanded, even with hands flowing with the deadly energy of her dragonmark. If she was going to kill him, she should have bided her time, waited for the right moment, and struck. Only when his guard was down would he be vulnerable, and now she had guaranteed that he would not be so incautious around her perhaps ever.
A pair of skeletons escorted her to the starboard gunwale. She couldn’t say if they were the same two that had watched over her in the captain’s cabin, but she supposed it didn’t matter. One dead body was the same as another.
The skeletons made the perfect soldiers. They obeyed their orders without question. Being already dead, they had no fear of death. Since they all seemed equal in skill and talent, they could be swapped in and out of positions at will.
Best of all—from Ibrido’s point of view, at least—Esprë’s powers were useless against them. You couldn’t make the dead any deader.
The young elf followed along after the skeleton that held her chains and peered over the edge of the ship. A rope ladder hung there, leading down to a level spot on the mountain’s slope. She rubbed her aching temple and turned to glare at Ibrido.
“I don’t think I can climb down there with these chains on,” she said.
The dragon-elf bared his teeth, though whether in amusement or frustration, Esprë could not tell. “I suggest you hold onto them tightly,” he said.
Then he pointed to the skeleton paired with the one holding her chains. “Put her on the ground,” he said.
The skeleton reached out with its bony hands and grabbed Esprë under the arms. She shrieked and kicked at the creature with all her terrified might, but her blows glanced off its armor. She grabbed on to her chains above her manacles, just before the skeleton heaved her over the side of the ship.
Esprë screamed as she tumbled toward the rocks below and then again as the chains caught short, the other ends held firm in the grasp of the skeleton above. The manacles scraped against her wrists, biting into the skin there and drawing blood. Her arms felt like they might pull from their sockets, but they held. She looked down to see her feet swinging a mere yard from the hard, unforgiving ground.
The skeleton above played out the chains, lowering Esprë to the ground. When her feet rested on the rocks, she sighed in relief and rubbed the blood from her injured arms. After her last outburst, she wondered if Ibrido hoped to anger her again or put her in her place. Either way, she refused to give him the satisfaction. She mastered her temper, and she stuck out her chin, determined to see this through with the grace her mother had always shown.
Esprë’s outburst had frightened her as much as anyone, probably more than Ibrido. She had never felt the power of her dragonmark course through her like that. She had been sure that nothing could stand against her—right up until the dragon-elf smacked her to the deck. The humiliation of her miscalculation burned in her more than the scrapes along her wrists.
A pair of skeletons escorted her away from the rope ladder, and Ibrido crept down in their wake. He shouldered past her and followed a path in the stone that she hadn’t seen until he started down it. The skeletons grabbed her by the elbows and pulled her along after him.
The path narrowed, and one skeleton walked in front of Esprë while the other followed close behind. The slope dropped away dozens of feet onto stunted trees and sharp rocks to her right, and to her left the cliff face became so steep as to be unscalable. She held her breath and focused on looking straight ahead of her as she walked, concentrating on the solid breastplate of the skeleton in front of her, grateful that it wore some kind of armor so she couldn’t just see straight through it. The path continued up for awhile before it turned into a small hole secreted behind a thick clump of gnarled bushes rooted in the side of the cliff.