Tarrel limped over and looked down at the dead elf; Mordan answered his questioning glance with a curt nod. The Brelander relaxed a little, closing his eyes for a moment.
It was only then that Mordan noticed that the airship was flying above the forest now, beside and a little behind the Ministry craft. Haldin stood at the helm. He was steering with one hand while the other held his sapphire dragon over the wheel, and he seemed to be talking continuously. It seemed that he had come to some arrangement with the undead elemental that powered the craft. Meanwhile, Adalrik crouched beside the control column, inspecting the workings of the mechanism with great interest. Bodies littered the main deck, but to Mordan’s relief most of them seemed to be long dead; casualties among the boarders seemed to be few and light.
A sudden ray of light made Mordan look around; behind them, the sun was rising. With one last look at Dravuliel’s corpse, he sheathed his rapier and leaned on the rail, watching the color slowly return to the world as the darkvision spell wore off.
“So have you decided what you’re going to tell your folks?” Tarrel joined him at the rail, taking a long pull from a flask of a healing potion. He offered it to Mordan, who drank gratefully.
“Not yet,” he said. “It’s going to be a little while before I’m sure what happened myself.”
He paused and looked at the Brelander.
“What about you?” he asked. He didn’t envy Tarrel the task of reporting back to Brey’s father.
“I don’t know,” he said, scratching his head. “I might just leave out the unpleasant details and tell him she died fighting evil, like a good paladin. That is, if your government ever lets me go. I have a feeling they’re not going to want word of this to get out.”
“It is going to be a little complicated, I must admit,” said a wheezing voice from beside them. They glanced down at Haldin, and then at the helm; a half-elf crewman was manning the wheel.
“Don’t worry,” said the gnome, “he’s a good helmsman. And the necromental keeping us aloft is surprisingly reasonable for an undead creature. We should arrive in Korth in a matter of hours.”
Chapter 25
Loose Ends
Mordan sat in his room, staring idly out of the window at the rooftops of Korth. It was comfortable enough, but that didn’t make it any less of a prison.
In the days since the party had returned from the Nightwood, he had been kept strictly separated, and submitted to polite but determined questioning by various Ministry officials. He guessed that the others were going through the same process. Still, he thought to himself, free room and board. It wasn’t as though he had any pressing business anywhere. For the first time since he returned from the Talenta Plains, he wondered what to do next.
He also thought about what—if anything—he would tell the family. The official report of Gali’s death on the Day of Mourning had taken a terrible toll on both his parents, and telling them the truth could only make things worse. The news that their beloved elder son had been corrupted by an evil necromancer and turned into a murderous wight would be bad enough, without adding the fact that the disgraced Kasmir had added fratricide to the list of his crimes. He decided to wait until he knew what the official report of the whole affair would say, and decide then.
He also debated whether it would be better to remain Kaz Mordan, the veteran from the Company of the Skull, and let the disgraced—and still wanted—cadet Kasmir ir’Dramon fade from memory. That was harder to decide. He knew the charges against him were false, but he also knew that proving his innocence would be almost impossible. He had known that all along, which is why he had deserted in the first place. Why should he even try? He had no rose-tinted expectations of being forgiven and welcomed back by his parents if he could clear his name. He would never replace Gali in their affections, no matter what the truth might be.
But he knew, too, that there was more at stake than the reputation of one former cadet. He still knew the things he knew—the things that had nearly resulted in his death—and that would never change. He could bury his head in the dust of the Talenta Plains for a hundred years and it would make no difference. Kasmir ir’Dramon had been raised in the Karrnathi tradition of service and loyalty, for all the self-centered cynicism of Kaz Mordan.
The idealistic cadet and the world-weary veteran argued back and forth inside his head as he waited for whatever the Ministry of the Dead would decide. There was a cancer festering at the heart of the Rekkenmark Academy—the place that, above all others, stood as a shrine to Karrnathi ideals—and the thought that he could do nothing about it was becoming intolerable. It was his duty to both king and country, the cadet maintained, to bring this evil to light. The veteran cautioned that one man stood little chance of success against such a well-entrenched conspiracy. The traitors had tried to kill him once and would almost certainly do so again—and again, until they succeeded. His only protection was anonymity.
He found himself wondering what Brey would advise him to do. She had certainly altered his opinion of Thranes. During the War, he had accepted the propaganda view that they were all dangerous fanatics bent on subjecting the whole of Khorvaire to their theocratic tyranny. She didn’t come across as a brainwashed fanatic, though. There was something more than unthinking fanaticism in her constant struggle against the darkness of her vampiric condition, and even though she knew her church and her country would never accept her back—even though she could no longer so much as speak the name of her deity—she never let the darkness win. It was more than simple revenge against those who had destroyed her life: she fought to remain herself, to stay true to her ideals despite everything. That took real strength. He knew what she would say. Never give up, always fight for what is right, no matter what it costs you. But he was no paladin.
He thought of Tarrel, the Medani inquisitive. The dogged half-elf had tracked Brey across half a continent and found her even though she didn’t want to be found. Then, rather than simply dragging her back to her father and collecting his payment, he joined her to help redress the wrongs done to her. In the end, she had died saving his life. What would he say? Perhaps Mordan owed him an explanation, since he had rebuffed him so rudely on the boat that night. He made a mental note to try to talk to him, if he saw him again.
Then he thought of Dria d’Cannith. Like him, she had been searching for a missing relative. Although captured and imprisoned, she had never given up, using her flying homunculus to look for a way out and, in the end, to bring them to her aid. Like him, she had been shocked by what she saw when she finally found her cousin. Unlike him, her family would want to know, and he wondered what she was going to tell them. Would she lie to protect Adalrik, or would her duty outweigh her personal feelings?
And what of Adalrik himself? Had he been coerced into helping Dravuliel with his plans to create undead warforged, or was he willing? Was that what he meant by calling himself a renegade, or had he violated the laws of House Cannith in some other way? It seemed that he would not be welcomed back with open arms by the House of the Mark of Making, any more than Kasmir would be welcomed back by the house of ir’Dramon—but judging by the shock and grief in Dria’s eyes when she first saw him, his fate would be worse than simple banishment.
Thinking of all this, his own problems came into clearer perspective. They were still not trivial by any means, but they did not seem so completely insurmountable.
Haldin was the one he couldn’t figure out, though. From what he had seen at Fort Zombie and in the Nightwood complex. Mordan knew that he must be a powerful cleric, and yet he had never spoken of religion. Mordan wasn’t even sure what god or group of gods he followed. The sapphire dragon statuette was some kind of holy symbol, from the way the gnome had used it against their undead foes, but Mordan had no idea what it signified.