The Gates of Night: The Dreaming Dark - Book 3 (21 page)

Darkness.

No. Stone. Black marble. She was staring at a stone wall. The air was cool, but far fresher than that of the giant tomb. She was in a hallway, and she could see the cold fire lanterns embedded along the walls. There was no dust in this place, no cobwebs. This was no ruin.

What is this place?

Disembodied as she was, Lei couldn’t judge the scale. She didn’t know if the hall was built for giants, gnomes, or humans. She studied the bare walls, searching for any clue, some hint as to the purpose or inhabitants of the building. There was something very familiar about the barren hallway, something she just couldn’t quite grasp. Then she looked at the lantern, and a shock ran through her. The ball of cold fire was held with a cage of mirrored glass and steel, designed to intensify the magical light. It was a common Cannith design, and such lanterns could be found anywhere in the Five Nations. What caught her
eye was the decorative point of the lantern—a lion cast in black steel.

Blacklion!

Lei spent her childhood in the Cannith forgehold of Blacklion, a center for warforged research and production hidden in the wilderness of Cyre. It was a lonely place for her. The Cannith artificers stationed at Blacklion, Lei’s parents among them, were absorbed in their duties and had little time for a child. Lei spent most of her time among the warforged. When the soldiers emerged from the creation forges, they underwent training before being sent out to the battlefield. Warforged learned quickly. Much of the knowledge they needed to perform their functions was carried on an instinctive level, and within a few months of training a warforged might prove a match for a veteran human soldier. During this time of instruction the warforged were much like children themselves, and Lei enjoyed the company of her metal companions. She even came to envy them. The warforged had a purpose, a place in the world, while Lei was just the little girl lost in the shadows of Blacklion.

A door opened, and a figure came into view. She was small and slender, a pale girl with coppery hair and wearing a long, blue dress. Her feet were bare, and she made no sound against the stone floor. Lei hadn’t seen this girl’s face in almost twenty years, but there was no doubt in her mind. She was looking at herself.

Watch and learn
. It was the woman’s voice again, maddeningly familiar.

Lei drifted behind the silent child. She had forgotten how somber she had been. Lei studied her young counterpart. Nine years old, perhaps?

The girl moved cautiously down the hall. She might
be silent by nature, but Lei could see that she was taking extra care to be stealthy. When a pair of magewrights entered the hallway, the child slipped into an open door, hiding until the researchers passed by. Where was she going? Lei tried to remember the layout of the building, but the passage of years had worn down her memories.

As the girl moved deeper into the forgehold, Lei heard noises ahead, the clash of steel on steel.
Battle!
For a moment, she thought that the building was under attack, but then she remembered the work that went on at the forgehold.
Combat training
. Blacklion had a virtual arena, where the warforged fought one another to draw their latent combat skills to the surface.

Lei knew what day this was.

Many levels of the forgehold were off-limits to her, butLei’s thirst for knowledge prodded her to see all of the forbidden zones, to learn everything that went on in the forgehold. She had memorized the patterns of the guards and magewrights, finding hiding places that would let her slip past patrols. She was usually caught, but every so often she managed to reach one of the restricted regions. As she had today.

She watched her younger self move closer to the source of the sounds. She entered an armory filled with racks of weapons and shields, and she slipped past a man who was checking the inventory. Creeping across the room, she walked through a large archway.

And onto a battlefield.

The war chamber mimicked conditions of battle. Physical props were combined with magical illusions to create scenarios for the soldiers in training. The girl was unaware of this; she knew only that this was a place that was forbidden to her. And so she was unprepared
for the chaotic scene. She found herself in the ruins of a city, in the foundations of a building broken by a mighty siege engine. She was surrounded by rubble and dirt. The clash of steel grew louder. Lei’s curiosity drew her forward, treading lightly over the ruined ground. Soon she crouched behind a shattered wall. The sounds of violence were just beyond, and had she ever known battle, fear might have driven her back. Instead she peered over the wall, desperate to see what lay beyond.

Two warforged were locked in battle. One was a shock trooper, a heavily armored warrior built to drive deep into enemy forces. He bore a massive tower shield on his left arm, and held a morningstar studded with vicious spikes. As Lei looked on, he landed a solid blow on his opponent, denting his enemy’s armor and sending the smaller warforged staggering backward.

This opponent, a lighter model of warrior designed for stealth, was surely faster than his foe and should never have let his enemy close the distance between them, but he lacked experience, and he hadn’t realized how seriously outmatched he was in close combat. The young Lei gasped as the dark warforged landed another blow, a powerful stroke that sent his opponent crashing to the ground. The victor looked down on his foe, searching for any signs of motion; when his victim remained still, he strode off into the ruins, in search of a new enemy.

The girl scrambled over the wall and rushed to the side of the stricken scout. The morningstar had punched a hole through his chestplate, revealing a mass of metal and stone surrounded by torn tendrils. Watching as a ghost, the elder Lei could see that the scout was simply inert. While he was unconscious,
his condition was stable and he was in no real danger. But the child didn’t know this. She only saw the wound, and she was certain the creature was dying. She reached out, desperate to comfort him, to save him. She laid a hand on the warforged, and she stiffened in shock. Lei remembered that moment, the very first time she had seen the web of energy that comprised the life and consciousness of the warforged … the day her dragonmark had appeared. It was strange to see it from the outside, to watch mystic energy ripple around the child’s hands and to see warforged’s damage fade. Within seconds torn tendrils had regrown, and gouged metal straightened itself and fused over the wound. Light flared in the warforged’s crystal eyes, and the child beamed as the soldier sat up and stared at her.

“Halt!” The voice echoed around her, louder than any thunder. “All units disengage!”

The child’s eyes widened as her surroundings changed. Much of the cityscape was an illusion, which faded to reveal the true arena of Blacklion. The walls and rubble were obstacles fixed to the ground, and the ground itself was a carpet, designed to feel like soil but clearly artificial in nature. Before she could move, she was caught in a brilliant pool of light.

“Don’t move!”

A man in a blue doublet stepped out of the darkness. The girl didn’t know that these events were closely monitored, or that magewrights were standing ready to repair the damaged warforged. The man stepped back in surprise as the warforged soldier rose to his feet.

“What have you done, girl?” he said.

Young Lei had no response. She didn’t know the
answer. She was overwhelmed by the experience, and even the elder Lei found that she had no memory of what had happened next. She had passed out, awakening much later to find that she was the youngest Cannith heir to develop a dragonmark.

“Out of my way, Banon.” It was Lei’s father, older now than when she’d seen him in Xen’drik. Age had made him harder, and his voice carried cold authority. The magewright stepped away from the warforged without question. Talin bent down and picked up his daughter. “Lei,” he said. “Are you hurt, Lei?”

The girl went limp in his arms.

“She’s sick!” he said. “Banon, examine this unit. I’ll take care of my daughter. And don’t breathe a word of this until I speak to you, is that understood?”

“Yes, master,” the magewright said.

Talin carried his daughter across the arena, and Lei found herself following him. Her thoughts raced. She’d passed out. She knew that. It was stress, the unprecedented manifestation of her dragonmark. That was what she’d been told, what she knew to be true.

But when her father touched the girl, when he picked her up … Lei had seen the moment of concentration, and she’d seen the mystic glow around his hands, out of Banon’s view. She hadn’t collapsed on her own. Her father had done something to her. But what? And why?

Talin made his way out of the war chamber and into a storeroom. This room was filled with props used in the arena, objects that could be hauled out and cloaked with illusion to become trees, walls, and other obstacles. Lei’s father walked to the back of the chamber. He glanced around, making sure he was alone, and then shifted his grip on his daughter and placed his right
palm against the wall. He paused, and then he stepped
through
the wall.
An illusion!
Lei was drawn after him, passing through the seemingly solid wall and into the chamber that lay beyond.

It was an arcane workshop, as well equipped as anything Lei ever seen in a Cannith facility. One wall was devoted to alchemy, with a vast assortment of herbs and fluids spread around bubbling beakers, alembics, and other tools. Ahead of her, a pylon rose from the floor, a stone pillar encrusted with glowing dragonshards and mithral inscriptions; while Lei could not divine its purpose, there was no question that this was an eldritch machine designed to channel vast amounts of magical energy.

Talin laid the little girl down on a long stone slab set into the floor, a table covered with runes of divination and conjuration. He adjusted a flexible cold fire lantern, focusing a beam of light directly on the child. Five other identical slabs were spread around this operating theater, and Lei felt a terrible chill. She couldn’t remember having seen this place in waking hours, but she had been here in her dreams. When she’d passed out in the sewers of Sharn, when she’d nearly died in the vault beneath Stormreach, she’d found herself here, lying on that same table where her father was now examining her younger self.

“What is it?” A woman stepped out of the shadows and rushed to the table. Lei’s mother. Older now, just like her father, but unmistakable. “What’s happened to her?”

“I’ve disabled her,” Talin said, his voice cold. “We have problems. She just repaired an inert scout in the battle room, and there were witnesses.”

“Repaired?”

“Repaired. Restored a critically damaged soldier to peak condition with a touch.”

“So soon? But this is more than we could have hoped for!” Aleisa’s voice was filled with amazed joy, but Lei’s father was still cold.

“Don’t you see?
There were witnesses
. They won’t rest until they have an explanation. And we can’t risk exposure so soon.” He looked down at the unconscious girl and shook his head. “We’ll have to destroy her. A freakish accident, a dragonmark arising before the body is ready—”

“Are you
mad?”
Aleisa shoved her husband away from the child. “This is our
daughter!”

“I knew you’d be emotional about this,” Talin said. “But think of the greater goal!”

“Lei’s always been my greater goal,” her mother said. “I thought you understood that.”

“Aleisa.” Talin looked down at the child. “I love her too. You know that. And even I am amazed at what she has done today, and what it says of her potential. But we have
always
known this day could come. She is the most dangerous thing we have ever created, and if our designs are revealed, excoriation is the least of the horrors awaiting us. All that is flesh and blood must die, Aleisa, and she dies today.”

“No!” Aleisa said. “What of our faith? This is a challenge. And you would surrender? There must be another path, a way to emerge from this stronger than before.”

“There’s no time—”

“Hold.” Aleisa’s eyes narrowed, and now Lei could see the more familiar face of her mother, the calculating artificer. “You said that we can explain her death as the early manifestation of a dragonmark.”

“Yes.”

“What if she manifests the mark—and lives?”

“Explain,” Talin said.

“If we
give
her a mark, that explains what she has done. It gives us reason to begin her training at this unprecedented early age. Should she flare again, it will be dismissed as the talent of a prodigy, which is essentially the truth.”

“Yes,” Talin said. “For her to manifest the mark at this age … a historic event, but hardly one requiring a thorough investigation. I am humbled by your wisdom, my love.”

“It will take time to synthesize a mark that will meet all tests, but for now the outline will do,” Aleisa said. She sorted through a rack of arcane tools, twisted rods, and strange blades. “This should be sufficient,” she said, holding up a rod of ebony bound with brass and tipped with a dark dragonshard. “Where shall our daughter have her dragonmark, my husband?”

“Why, I think she should take after her lovely mother,” Talin said.

Aleisa smiled at that. “Prepare her, then.”

Talin turned the child onto her stomach, brushing her hair to the side.
“Verentis ierjyx!”
he said, and the power in these syllables tore at the air. The column in the center of the chamber burst into brilliant light, and runes covering the table were traced in lines of fire. The girl herself
glowed
, as if power were flowing through her.

Aleisa cut her palm with a silver blade. Blood dripped onto the floor as she gripped the ebony rod. “Now, my daughter,” she said. “Let my blood flow into you once more. Take this gift, and may it save us all.”

She pressed the rod against the child’s neck, and as
she did so, Lei felt an agonizing pain as if her dragonmark were acid against her skin. She tried to scream, but she had no voice. The pain consumed her, and the chamber burned away in a burst of white light.