“Good thing these airships are fireproof,” Burch said. The ring of fire surrounding Keeper’s Claw seemed to grow louder to punctuate his words, as if the elemental within wished it could find a way to consume the craft to which it was bound.
“Which way?” Kandler said.
Burch stretched and growled, drawing upon the blood of the werecreatures that ran through his veins. Those ancient ancestors might be long dead, but they still lived on in the way the shifter could call on their legendary powers.
As long as Kandler had known Burch, this still made him a bit uncomfortable. When the shifter called on his animalistic side, he became less like the justicar’s friend and more of the kind of savage beast some of the “civilized” folk from Sharn assumed all of his kind to be. In any case, it was part and parcel of who Burch was, and Kandler had to admit it came in handy at times like this.
Burch knelt down toward the rocky ground and sniffed about like a bloodhound hunting for a scent. He wrinkled his nose more than once, then performed a crouching walk in a circle around the entire shelf. His search complete, he stood up once more and pointed off to the south, along the mountain’s slope.
“Follow me,” he growled.
Kandler trotted along straight after Burch, with Sallah falling in behind him, her sword still out and ready. Kandler drew his own blade, wanting to be prepared for anything that might happen. They had no idea where Ibrido and Esprë were, after all. The last they knew from Te’oma, the pair had somehow entered the mountain to find his master, but anything could have happened since then. They had to expect that the dragon-elf might be cautious about people following after him. Around any corner, there might be another pack of skeletons waiting to—
“Halt!” a low voice shouted in a thick-accented version of the common tongue of the Five Kingdoms of Khorvaire.
Burch looked up from where he’d been bent over the narrow trail that cut along the mountain’s slope, still sniffing out Esprë’s path. They’d reached a small shelf where the trail switched back, and a dark hole appeared in the face of the rock before them.
Kandler swung his neck around and spotted a pair of dwarves coming up the path behind them. They were stunted creatures, even for dwarves, and their pasty skin and squinty eyes told Kandler that they rarely saw the light of day. They wore light suits of armor and metallic helmets covered with dirt and dust the same color as the mountain itself, allowing them to blend in. They each bore an axe or hammer and carried a loaded crossbow that was pointed straight at Kandler, Burch, and Sallah.
“Surrender or die!” one of the dwarves on the lower trail called up at them.
Kandler glanced at Burch and Sallah. “I don’t like the looks of that hole much,” he whispered.
“Esprë went in there,” the shifter said.
Kandler grinned. “All of a sudden, I like it a lot more. On my mark, we charge into it. Ready?”
Before the justicar could get to “set,” another handful of dwarves emerged from the blackness, their double-sided axes out and ready to taste blood.
47
The dragon waited for Esprë to stop screaming before it spoke. Its low, rumbling voice sounded like a pair of giant millstones being ground against each other, and its breath smelled like a charnel house on a hot day.
“Finally,” it said. “The Mark of Death returns.”
Esprë wanted to scream again, but she’d already run herself hoarse. Instead, she stood there mute, with the swirling waters bubbling around her knees, and stared in horror at the massive beast.
She had heard stories about dragons before, but they were nothing like meeting one in the scale-decked flesh. She felt grateful that she could not see the entire thing at once. The light from the everburning torch she held didn’t stretch far enough to encompass the entirety of the beast in its glow. She could only see its long, horned head, its sinuous, snakelike neck, and the broad expanse of its chest.
Black scales covered all of these, ebon-colored bits of mail that could turn aside the mightiest sword. They fitted seamlessly over the beast, stopping only at its mouth, nose, ears, and eyes. Its toothy mouth dripped with some disgusting green fluid that reminded her of nothing more than distilled stomach bile. Its nostrils flared at her as the stale atmosphere of the cave hacked its way in and out of its phlegm-coated lungs. Its batlike ears waved at her independently of each other, as if batting at tiny creatures that lived inside their tattered flaps. Its orange eyes seemed to glow with a fire that threatened to devour her body if not also her soul.
Every bit of Esprë wanted to run, but something in her brain kept it from happening, some instinct that told her to freeze when confronted with something so large. Despite her fear, she listened to that instinct and held her ground.
“You have done well, half-breed,” the dragon said to Ibrido. “Capturing the bearer of the Mark of Death is not something done lightly. Is she …?”
It reached out with a taloned claw that stretched as long as Esprë’s arm. Its breath wrapped around her, and she struggled not to gag on the stench. Her eyes began to water, and she couldn’t say if it was entirely from the smell or not.
“Unharmed?” the dragon finished. The green fluid spilled from between its long, sharp rows of teeth as it spoke. Where it landed, the blackened waters fizzed and foamed in protest.
Ibrido stepped forward, a half pace in front of Esprë. “For the most part, Nithkorrh. The journey here was not an easy one for her. Before she came into my care, she was in an airship crash.”
Two, Esprë thought, but she didn’t wish to correct the dragon-elf at that moment.
“Yet she survived?” the dragon said.
It bared all its teeth in a way that Esprë could only guess was a dragon’s means of smiling, just as she’d seen on Ibrido’s face. On such a massive scale, though, it scared her all the more.
“Fate would not have placed the Lost Mark on a creature unblessed with a certain amount of luck,” the dragon said, “or so the prophecies would have us believe.”
“I …” Esprë started to speak and then thought better of it and let her voice trail off.
“Yes?” The dragon craned its neck back around toward her, inching its face closer to her as it did.
Esprë remained mute. She’d brought the creature’s full attention to her, and it had addressed her directly for the first time. She knew it expected an answer, but that was the last thing she wanted to give it.
“Answer the great Nithkorrh,” Ibrido asked. “Dragons do not like to be kept waiting.”
Esprë tried to keep her lips sealed, but this meant breathing through her nose, and the scent of the dragon and the place in which it lived soon made her nauseous. She parted her lips so that she could breathe without smelling the stench, and the dragon leaned in even closer. She could feel the chill from its cold-blooded breath. It stank like a sodden garbage pit.
Esprë looked up into the dragon’s eyes—twinned orange lanterns floating in the darkness before her—and found it difficult to tear her gaze away. Still, she managed to glance over at the dragon-elf and down at the remains of several flesh-bare skeletons staring up at her from under a thin veil of water. Then she looked back up into Nithkorrh’s eyes.
“This doesn’t seem very lucky to me,” she said.
Esprë felt Ibrido freeze next to her, unsure as to how the dragon would react to such impudence. She discovered that she didn’t care any more. If the creature killed her, then at least this ordeal would be over.