Skein of Shadows (15 page)

She was surprised when a red-gold hand reached down to help her to her feet, and even more surprised when the arm attached to that hand gathered her into a rib-crushing hug.

“Thank you, my lady! Your quick thinking—and quicker action—kept me from ending up a pile of scrap metal and kindling at the bottom of this accursed gorge.
I shall write an epic in your honor that will put those unimaginative dwarf bards to shame!” Sensing that Sabira was having trouble breathing—or perhaps tipped off by the blue tinge in her lips—the warforged released her from his embrace. As Sabira drew in great gulps of the dry desert air, Jester continued, the frown his face couldn’t show still evident in his voice. “But how did you know I’d had my lyre strap reinforced?”

She hadn’t, actually, but it had been an easy bet to take. Most bards spent more money on their instruments than their weapons, and held their music closer than their purse strings.

“Easy,” Greddark supplied with a nonchalant shrug, saving her from having to admit that, educated as it was, it had still been nothing more than a guess. “The strap doesn’t hang as loosely as it would if it were mere leather, and you can see metal showing through in places.”

Before either she or the warforged could answer the inquisitive, the Lyrandar pilot rounded on him in belated response to his earlier question.

“
That’s
why we’re not up there,” the half-elf snarled, her face contorting with effort as she fought to calm the affronted air elemental and return the ship safely to the center of the gorge. “You think the wind’s bad down here, wait till you get up top. I’m not risking my ship—or my life—just to spare you lot some climbing.”

Fair enough. But that reminded Sabira of the question she really wanted answered.

“Why doesn’t Zawabi want the Wayfinder expedition inside the refuge?” she asked, frowning as she thought back on the warforged’s words. Kupper-Nickel had told
her about the djinn who controlled the oasis from his circular prison at the eastern edge of the small settlement. The Wayfinder had, however, neglected to mention that the powerful creature and the man who was supposed to lead her to Tilde were at odds with each other.

“He believes nothing good can come of opening the pits of Khyber up to surface exploration.”

“You’ve seen the trouble Lailat’s caused,” Quilli piped up. “Can you blame him for being worried about what ir’Kethras might stir up?”

“Who is Lailat?” Sabira asked before the dwarf inquisitive could beat her to it. The two warforged and the orc gathered around to hear the answer.

It was Kupper-Nickel who responded.

“A demoness known as the Queen of Six Swords who dwells in Serpent’s Pass. Zawabi has long feuded with her, but there is little he can do against her directly from the confines of his circle.”

“Six swords?” Greddark asked, puzzled. “So, what? She’s indecisive? Uses a different one every day and rests on Sar? Doesn’t sound like much of a threat to me.”

“No …,” Sabira said slowly, thinking. A female demon who used six swords and laired in a place named for a serpent. She’d received training on all manner of foul creatures she might face in the performance of her duties for House Deneith. Though she’d never encountered one, she knew what Lailat must be. A single one of the demoness’s foul sisters had once wiped out almost an entire contingent of Deneith Defenders who’d passed too near her lair in the aptly named Demon Wastes of western Khorvaire.

“No. If I’m right, she’s a very dangerous threat indeed.”

At Greddark’s quizzical look, she continued.

“Lailat is a marilith.”

The only change in Greddark’s expression was a slight raise of his bushy eyebrows; her revelation had clearly not enlightened him.

“A marilith is a demon with the upper body of a six-armed woman and the lower body of a snake. One of them took out Lavira Tagor’s entire bodyguard in the Labyrinth.” Well, most of her bodyguard. One man had survived to see the then-Keeper of the Flame back to civilization. With the help of a tribe of orcs who worshiped their own Binding Flame, the lone Defender had guided Keeper Tagor back across the Icehorn Mountains into the relative safety of the Eldeen Reaches.

What the Keeper had been doing in the Demon Wastes at the time was anyone’s guess, but Baron Breven had decided it wasn’t worth the lives of any more of his people and canceled the religious leader’s contract after that.

Greddark did look surprised at that, and even more so when Jester interrupted.

“Oh, I think I know that one! Though in the version I heard, one man survived. Of course, I’m sure that was pure embellishment on the part of the storyteller. It makes for a more exciting story if a single survivor lived to tell the horrors that the Keeper himself would never reveal. I’d have done the same, if I’d been the bard spinning the tale. Then tailored the manner of those horrors to the tastes of my audience, to better encourage their coins into my hat.” The red-armored warforged paused, metal finger to lipless metal mouth. “Well, if I had a hat, of course. I should probably see about acquiring one.”

“One Defender did survive,” Sabira said shortly, sorry now she’d brought it up. She couldn’t help thinking of Elix being summoned by the new Keeper, and wondering if whatever mission the girl had for him might end the same way. Or worse. “But that’s not the part of the story that should concern you.”

“Oh?” Jester asked, and Sabira made a note to see about outfitting the would-be bard with moveable eyebrows. She was sure some artificer—maybe even Greddark—could come up with a trick to make it work, and it would add even more drama to his theatrical tones, make those coins jump from purse to hat that much faster.

“
One
marilith took out close to a dozen Defenders—that’s more than twice our number of extremely well-trained fighters, in case some of you aren’t quite so good with math. The djinn who controls this place can’t even face one of them alone, but she and her kind are not what he’s afraid of—they’re not why he won’t let ir’Kethras set foot in his oasis.”

She paused, waiting for the question.

Surprisingly, it was Skraad who obliged.

“Then what
is
he afraid of?”

“That whatever we’ll find in Tarath Marad will be even
worse
.”

A
fter Jester’s scare, Sabira declared that there would be no jumping from the gangplank, Zawabi’s paranoid edict notwithstanding. There was more than one way off an airship, as she well knew—though the last time she had cause to leave one without the benefit of a gangplank, there’d been a few enraged yrthaks involved. After she related the tale to Greddark, the artificer made a few adjustments and their motley group disembarked the airship on life rings, tethered to the deck with long ropes and weighted down with sand bags for a speedy, but relatively safe, descent.

When they were all on the narrow ledge, spread out like statuettes on a shelf, Sabira barked out quick orders. She wanted to get moving before the wind blasted them again. The footing was much less sure here, and they no longer had the dubious protection of the railing between them and the canyon floor. And while the distance they had to fall from the ledge was shorter than it had been from the deck of the airship, it would also now involve
bouncing off the canyon wall, so the end result was likely to be the same—bloody and decidedly unpleasant. Better to get on firmer ground where the capricious wind was an annoyance, not a deadly threat.

Sabira sent the two warforged and Skraad climbing up the western side of the canyon to where ir’Kethras’s caravan waited. Meanwhile, she and Greddark made their way up the eastern side toward the settlement, where Kupper-Nickel had told them they could find the other Wayfinder. Quilli had agreed to accompany them at Kupper-Nickel’s insistence, ostensibly to keep them from coming to unexpected harm on the precarious route to the oasis. Sabira had no doubts about the sailor’s real job, however—preventing them from doing anything to anger Zawabi and endangering the warforged Wayfinder’s berthing rights.

They followed the narrow ledge along the canyon wall, in some places having to inch along slowly with their backs pressed up against the sheer rock. Sabira couldn’t fathom how ir’Kethras was able to get supplies up this tortuous route. Breven had mentioned that the Wayfinder was a wizard; perhaps he teleported them from the oasis to the caravan? She certainly hoped so. She didn’t really want to have to make this trip twice.

The ledge finally widened out and joined the rising canyon floor. As they climbed upward, small patches of green scrub began to appear, nurtured by water from the nearby oasis. By the time they’d reached the plateau that housed the djinn’s settlement, they were greeted by massive trees older than Sabira and Greddark put together, their drooping green limbs dotted with white and purple flowers.

The path led them up behind one of the settlement’s
large white stone and wood buildings. As they passed it on their right, Quilli told them it housed Masei’s Imports, which was actually an export business. Sabira imagined it wasn’t a particularly profitable one—in order to export products, you had to have things people actually wanted to buy. What could the owner possibly have to sell, other than sand, rocks, and an occasional scorpion stinger?

Another building on the left played home to a dwarf smith and her team of apprentices who made finely crafted weapons for those foolhardy enough to come to the desert without their own. Greddark perked up at the woman’s name.

“Forgemaiden? I knew a pair of sisters from that family back in the Holds. Hair like molten gold, arms like warhammers, legs—”

“I don’t really want to know what their legs were like, thanks,” Sabira said quickly, wrinkling her nose in distaste. Dwarven compliments ran the gamut from utilitarian to graphic and often included detailed descriptions of the exploits that had prompted the appreciative remarks in the first place. Not the mental image she wanted in her head when she met Brannan ir’Kethras for the first time. Or ever, really.

“I wonder if this Jaidene is a younger sister, or maybe a cousin. Come to think of it, the hilt on my blade
is
a little loose. Maybe—”

“You’d have better luck at the Watering Hole at this time of day,” Quilli interrupted with a salacious grin, pointing up ahead and to the left. “She’ll be taking breakfast there with her apprentices and the refugees. So the forge’ll be empty, if she decides to finish early and give you a look at
her … warhammers.”

“Onatar’s branding iron, don’t encourage him!” Sabira swore at the halfling sailor, but Quilli just laughed.

Greddark quirked a bushy eyebrow at the two of them.

“I think I’m insulted. I assume we’ll be leaving at sundown. That’s not near enough time for a dwarf of my considerable knowledge to truly appreciate a good warhammer.” He harrumphed and stalked off in the direction Quilli had indicated. The two women followed him up a wooden ramp onto a stone patio that boasted a large bonfire and several long tables filled with people eating and talking quietly. A dark-skinned human woman in red dancer’s silks greeted them warmly as they entered the outdoor tavern.

“Hello, travelers. My name is Oh’tula.”

She gestured to the end of one table where three spots were just opening up as an old human couple followed another red-garbed woman toward some wagons clustered not too far away. As they took the newly-vacated seats, a yellow-eyed warforged came up to them.

“The name’s Raff. I run this little watering hole. Can I get you something?”

Greddark opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again as he caught sight of something just beyond the warforged. Sabira, who was sitting across from the dwarf, turned to look at what had caught the inquisitive’s attention. It was another dwarf—a woman, with long blonde hair flowing free except for a single braid over each ear and thickly muscled arms adorned with wide gold bands. Jaidene Forgemaiden, she presumed.

As Sabira turned back, Greddark was rising. He
returned Sabira’s dark look with a shrug.

“What? The hilt really
is
loose.”

Then he looked up at Raff with a hopeful expression.

“Tell me you have tea, and I may never leave.”

As Greddark sipped his sweet mint tea and plied his countrywoman with news of their homeland in exchange for information on the desert, Sabira sampled cactus sap and boiled scorpion and waited for ir’Kethras to arrive. Having fought many of her breakfast’s larger brethren in the islands north of Stormreach, Sabira was somewhat dubious about trying the desert delicacy, but she found that the meat inside the hard carapace was actually both tender and flavorful. The sap, on the other hand, was thick and oily and left her wanting to go drink from the oasis.

“In the desert, water is a kiss.”

Startled, Sabira looked up to see yet another dwarf standing in front of her, this one with an odd spiraling tattoo that started up on his forehead, curved down across his right eyelid and continued on to his cheek. There, the swirling design almost disappeared into a thick brown beard that was plaited into two heavy braids, both of which were free of adornment. He wore a blue shirt, brown vest and green pants and boasted a painful-looking sunburn across every exposed inch of flesh.