Lost mark 3 The Queen of Death: (9 page)

Kandler squinted at her smiling face. Here, in the sun, she had a few freckles across the bridge of her nose that he’d never noticed before.

She reached out and caressed his cheek. "I knew you couldn’t hide it from me, that you wouldn’t. That’s not your way.”

Kandler smiled back at the lady knight. Then his face fell. Such compliments meant little in the way of consolation if it meant she was going to leave. His eyes fell to where her hands rested on the wheel, then he glanced up to check the position of the sun.

"I noticed you haven’t changed course,” he said.

Sallah shook her head. "I’ll stay with you until we reach the coast.’’

Kandler sighed in relief, then caught himself. "I knew you wouldn’t abandon us.” Then, seeing the look on her face, he added, "Yet.”

"Do you know anything about Krezent?” she asked.

"Just what Burch told me.”

"It’s the remotest sort of remote. The reason no one but the yuan-ti live there is that it’s not suitable for other sorts. They have little contact with the outside world, just the occasional trading caravan that wanders through—or off course, as happens more often than not.

"If I disembarked there, I wouldn’t have any way to go anywhere. I’m sure the priests there would take me in and protect me, but finding passage for me back to Thrane might take weeks or even months. Better that I stick with you until we cross a better-traveled path.”

"Ah,” Kandler said, his face falling. The spark of hope in his heart that they might be able to work something out faded without catching fire.

"I’m not going to Argonnessen with you,” she said, her voice tinged with regret. "It’s a fool’s journey. The Order has lost enough knights in this quest already. I’ll return to Flamekeep to tell your tale.”

"Don’t you want to know how the story ends?”

"If you go through with your plan to cross the Dragon-reach to take your fight to Argonnessen, I’m afraid I already do.”

She kissed him. This time, he responded, knowing it might be the last time. When they broke apart, he turned and walked away.

"You see those horses?” Burch asked, pointing down at a trio of riders who had broken off from the main force of cavalry.

Kandler shaded his eyes as he watched them gallop off to the south. They rode faster than the airship, although Espre wasn’t pushing the
Phoenix
hard right now. Kandler had asked her to take the wheel at the first sighting of the army, and the others had joined him at the prow to learn what they could of the tableau below.

"Those are Valenar cavalry, the best in the world,” Burch said. "They go out of their way to prove it any chance they get. They’re bastards, and they’re always spoiling for a fight.”

"Then what are they doing out here in the desert? ” Duro asked. "There doesn’t look like much around here to pick on other than lizards and birds.”

"Some of the clans of my people used to roam these lands,” Monja said. "They got tired of dealing with these invaders, so they looked for friendlier lands with better neighbors.

Kandler nodded. "The Valenar warclans used to run strikes into southern Cyre every couple of weeks. Ironic when you consider that Gyre brought them into the Last War as an ally in the first place.”

"They do not bother the warforged or the Lord of Blades,” Xalt said. "The Lord of Blades sometimes sends his best fighters to test their mettle against the warclans, though. Sometimes a warclan will wait for weeks outside of the Mournland, waiting for a warforged force to show itself and enter battle.”

"That’s madness,” Te’oma said. "They fight just to fight?”

"Not everyone does it for money,” said Burch. "Some people take pride in their work.”

"I never took pleasure in it,” the changeling said.

"Can they do anything to harm us up here?” Sallah asked.

She addressed Kandler directly. The two of them were speaking to each other again; although they both treated each other so respectfully, so dispassionately, Kandler felt like they might as well have kept their distance instead. Still, if she wanted to play things that way, he didn’t wish to stop her. Being with her, even in such a stilted way, was better than not being with her at all.
_#

"No,” he said. "We’re too high up now. Sometimes they have a wizard or sorcerer in their retinue though. That’s why I had Espre move us higher as soon as Burch spotted them.”

"Where are those riders headed?” Sallah asked.

Kandler looked to Burch. "Probably Taer Shantara,” the shifter said. "It’s one of the six forts that stretch around the last stable border Valenar had. The warclans always try pressing out farther—into Q’barra and the Talenta Plains these days—but geography and weather always tar up their supply lines. Besides which, none of the Valenar elves want to bother with guarding a supply caravan instead of being in the thick of things, so eventually they run out of food and water and come galloping home.”

Te’oma stared at the shifter. He raised a quizzical eyebrow at her. "I think that’s the most words I’ve ever heard you say in one stretch,” she said.

"You’re not usually worth talking to.”

"Are we headed for Taer Shantara?” Sallah said. "It seems it would be a logical place to gather supplies for your journey across the sea.”

Kandler noticed that she hadn’t included herself in that journey.

Burch shook his shaggy head. "The elves at Shantara are too war-crazy, and those riders are sure to get there before us to warn that we’re the vanguard of an invasion from the north.” He held up a hand to cut off protest. "True or not, it doesn’t matter. Better to pass them by for Aerie instead.” "That sounds like my kind of place,” said Duro. "Clear mountain air and filled with eagle-riding dwarves, I’m sure!”

Burch snorted. "It’s the westernmost Valenar fort, the favorite launching pad for raids into Q’barra. It sits in the foothills at the very end of the Endworld Mountains, overlooking the sea. It’s our last chance to stop.”

"Assuming the elves there don’t decide that we’re the leaders of an invading force too,” said Sallah.

Burch smiled, showing his pointed fangs. "Last chances are last chances,” he said.

Chapter

14

Let me do the talking,” Burch signaled as he and Kandler threw the
Phoenix’s
mooring lines out to the elves standing on the cliffside dock.

Kandler nodded. He’d never been to this part ofValenar before, and he trusted the shifter’s judgment. He didn’t want any trouble here, just to stock up with plenty of supplies and head out over the Dragonreach, which beckoned beyond. His instincts told him that the longer they waited before making the trip the harder it would be.

"This doesn’t look much like what I expected,” said Espre. She’d stuck close to him ever since they’d spotted the warclan and its riders.

The thought of exposing her to a society of elves bothered him a bit. Since Esprina had died, they’d had precious little contact with elves. None but Espre had lived in Mardakine. Esprina had never sought the company of her own kind, instead preferring to surround herself—and by extension her daughter—with all sorts of people, mostly human.

"I love the human perspective,” Esprina had once said to Kandler. "It’s so fresh and immediate. There’s a touch of innocence to it, which you’d expect in people so young, but that just makes it all the more precious.”

She’d never wanted to talk much about why she’d left Aerenal. It had happened decades before Kandler had been born, when Espre had been just an infant. Whatever the reason, she hadn’t tarried in Valenar either, despite landing there when she reached Khorvaire.

"Your mother and you didn’t spend long here,” Kandler said.

Espre shook her blond head. "We spent less than a week in the capital, Taer Valaestas. Just long enough to get our bearings. I barely remember it. Then we were off for Cyre.”

A gangplank thrust out from the dock and over the airship’s gunwale. Burch went down it first, with Kandler and Espre close behind. Sallah and Monja came after them, leaving Xalt, Duro, and Te’oma on the airship.

Te’oma had morphed herself to look like Shawda, the last woman who’d shown up dead in Mardakine before the changeling had come to town with Tan Du and his vampire spawn. Kandler respected that the changeling didn’t want to call any attention to herself—any changeling would have done so in a village like this—but her choice of disguise riled him. He saw tears well up in Espre’s eyes every time her eyes happened to fall on the false Shawda, and that made him want to stomp over to Te’oma and beat her face into another shape.

Kandler feared, though, that the sight of such a conflict might send Espre right over the edge. It had turned out that Espre’s dragonmark had caused her to kill a number of people in Mardakine while she’d been sleeping. Shawda—the mother of the girl’s best friend, Norra—had been the last of these, and Espre and the rest of the people of Mardakine had seen the woman’s body only after the Knights of the Silver Flame had hacked it to pieces. Seeing a copy of the woman standing on the bridge of the
Phoenix,
her hands wrapped around the wheel, turned Kandler’s stomach.

Still, if Espre could manage to ignore it, then so would he. At least with the changeling staying on the ship with Duro and Xalt, they wouldn’t have to put up with it much longer.

As Kandler and Espre reached the dock, he glanced around. The
Phoenixhad
come upon Aerie from its northern edge, and the land there sloped up gently to the only gate set in the fort’s tall stone walls. A horsed patrol galloped out onto the dusty road there as the airship came in for a landing.

The southern wall of Aerie looked out over a sheer cliff that fell more than a hundred feet to the wide, fertile plains below. Beyond these gentle lands, Kandler could see a long shore of white sand at which the roaring waters of the Thunder Sea began.

As the elves who founded this place came up from that wide beach and crossed the untamed lands, this spot must have seemed like perfect place for a band of warriors to build a nest. From here, they could watch over all the lands around, like hungry birds hunting for prey.

At Burch’s instruction, Te’oma swung the airship out around the fort, far out of catapult range from the place’s walls. Then she came up slowly and easily to the airship dock that topped a short section of the southern wall, jutting out over the precipitous drop. The elves there flashed a welcoming signal—or so Burch said—and Te’oma brought the ship in to moor.

Kandler spoke fluent Elven, which had come in handy both as an agent of the Citadel and in courting his wife. He and Espre sometimes used it as a code in front of the ignorant, but it would not serve them well that way here, where everyone would speak the tongue better than they.

As he, Espre, Sallah, and Monja waited on the dock, Kandler nudged his stepdaughter. Jerking his head toward Burch, who stood talking with a stern elf dressed in full battle regalia, he shot Espre a questioning look. She shrugged.

Kandler noticed that every one of the elves he’d seen so far wore a suit of armor and some kind of weaponry. The dockworkers favored spears or short swords, but the lookouts further down the wall in each direction carried longbows and stood nearby loaded ballistae and catapults that were ready to loose their loads at anyone so bold as to invade the space around the fort without permission.

Every piece of equipment bore fine filigree run through with images of death and war, and they looked delicate by human standards. Kandler knew, though, that they’d likely been made by the finest smiths and crafters. Valenar elves never made anything cheap or fragile. By comparison, the
Phoenix
seemed like a crude bit of hackwork churned out in a mill staffed by idiotic children.

The buildings of Aerie might have seemed ridiculously ornate to the untrained eye. Kandler knew that they would stand up to an assault better than all but the best fortifications in the Five Kingdoms. He spied few balconies or terraces built to take advantage of the spectacular views to the south. Those he did see were framed with trellises and colonnades that let in vast amounts of sky. They would also, however, protect from any attacks from above, whether by airship or some other means. The people of Aerie took their security seriously, as they should, given their proximity to the frontier nation of Q’barra, the border of which lay scant miles to the east.

"I do not care for this place,” Sallah said quietly.

Monja nodded in agreement, her head bobbing like that of a small child. "A fort like this can quickly change from a haven to a trap.”

Burch bowed to the elf he’d been talking to then trotted back to the others. Try as he might, Kandler could not read the shifter’s face. He’d known Burch long enough to realize that this was not a good thing.

"The dockmaster welcomes us to Aerie,” Burch said. "Just how welcome are we?” Kandler asked.

Burch pointed at the heavy weaponry mounted on the turrets nearest the airship. "Those aren’t for show,” he said. "I’m told the elves who staff them don’t care much for dwarves and have itchy trigger fingers.”

Espre gasped. "Shouldn’t we bring Duro with us then?” she said. "We can’t just leave him out there to be shot down.” Burch smiled. "He’s safer there than he would be in the fort. At least out there an elf would have to work at it to pick a fight with him. Here, he’d find himself in a tangle inside an hour.