She reached a branch where another wide road wound up to the fifth tier, and she sped around the corner, praying to the Sovereigns that she’d find someplace to hide. Instead, less than a hundred paces up the street, she found her path blocked by another group of guards, pointing heavy-bladed polearms at her. She glanced over her shoulder and confirmed that the other soldiers were still behind her. Trapped.
Rienne struggled to quell her panic and quiet her mind, reaching for the still point of energy within. It eluded her. She stopped running, mindful of the positions of both groups of soldiers, closed her eyes, and drew a deep breath. Letting it slowly out through pursed lips, she found her focus, and the still point rippled out through her body. With a sharp burst of breath, she resumed her run. One foot landed on a carved stone dragon by a doorway and she leaped.
She turned once in the air, then landed on her feet on a peaked roof, looking down at the astonished soldiers. Another slow breath, then she turned and ran. She dropped from her perch to another roof, crowning a building on the street where she’d first met the guards. Turning then, she ran up the sloping roofs and down the other side, leaping from building to building without breaking her stride. When she neared the far end of that street, she was confident that she had eluded the guards, and she dropped down into an enclosed garden behind what might have been a temple or another shrine of the Prophecy.
Her hand on Maelstrom’s hilt, she stood silent in the garden, listening for any sign of approaching movement. An emerald green dragonet screeched at her and flew away, and then all was still.
As her pulse slowly calmed to normal, she sat with her back against the smooth stone wall and wept.
For three days, she huddled in the shadows of Rav Magar. She ate from the magic journeybread that had sustained her and Gaven since they made land and wondered what Gaven was eating. She wrapped herself in her silk, trying to cloak her appearance, perhaps pass as a withered and elderly dragonborn shielding her skin from the sun. By day, she slept fitfully in gardens or courtyards, starting awake at every sound. At night, she skulked in the darkness, avoiding any contact with the dragonborn and working her way slowly up to the highest tiers of the city.
Rav Magar was quiet and mysterious at night. In contrast to a busy city like Stormhome or Fairhaven, where any hour of night saw some people about on business, whether legitimate or not, the streets of Rav Magar were all but deserted by a few bells after sundown. The dragonborn marked the onset of night much as they did the dawn, with strange songs and what seemed to be simple household rituals conducted at window-side shrines. Dragonets crowded the air, jostling for the scraps of meat offered to them in these rituals. As the dragonets flew off, satiated, lamps winked out and the city drifted into silence.
In the silent night streets, Rienne drifted as well, thinking of Gaven and staring up at the ten full moons that began to wane as the two others waxed to prominence. Slowly, she navigated the maze of streets to the highest tiers of the city. Only once in three nights of wandering did she encounter another patrol of soldiers. She crouched beside a large dragon statue and watched them pass, drowsy-eyed and completely unaware of her presence.
On the third night, she reached the pinnacle of the city, where the dragon-king’s palace raised its single tower to the sky. Every entrance was a great archway large enough, she realized, for a dragon to pass through. Four entrances opened onto the street, and three more yawned in the walls up the entire tower’s height. She saw dragonborn guards, clad in armor made of blackened bone, posted at all seven arches. Staying to the shadows, she watched the palace for the rest of the day and through the night, noting when the guards switched shifts, observing the few dragon-born who entered and left the palace.
Sneaking in seemed impossible. When the guards changed, there was no lapse in the watch-the guards didn’t leave until their relief was settled in place. The guards searched all who sought to enter the palace, confiscated their weapons, and questioned them extensively. There was no entrance that had fewer than four guards, and the ones she could get to without sprouting wings all had at least six.
She could fight her way through six or eight guards with little difficulty, but then what? The alarm would be raised, wave upon wave of guards would arrive to block her way. Gaven would get extra guards-they would know she was there to find him. Assuming he was actually in the palace and not in some prison elsewhere in the city.
Three more days passed in watching, waiting for something to change, some opportunity to arise, some sign to appear. On the morning of her sixth day of watching, something like a sign appeared. A dragon flew overhead, its scales gleaming copper in the sunlight. Its wings rippled rather than flapped as it swooped down and landed in one of the high arches of the palace. It perched there like an enormous bird for fully half an hour before jumping down into a chamber below.
Rienne wanted desperately to be that dragon, to spread great wings and fly to an open archway, to peer down and see, she imagined, Gaven on the floor of the chamber below. She would jump down beside him, let him climb on her back, feel his hands on her smooth scales, and then she’d fly back up and out, far away from Rav Magar-she’d fly until Argonnessen was a distant memory and the lands of Khorvaire spread out before them, until the towers and docks of Stormhome came into view.
A rumble of thunder jolted her from her reverie. The sky was clouding over, clouds forming from nowhere, directly over the dragon-king’s palace. Gaven was inside and alive! And in danger.
She sprang into action, tossing aside the tattered rags that wrapped her. Maelstrom had already begun its deadly dance by the time she reached the guards at the nearest gate, and two of them fell before they knew what was happening. Thunder rumbled again, and she lifted her voice in elation. Two more guards lay dead. Lightning struck the palace, very near, shaking the ground and walls around her. She was past the guards, but more were charging down the passage toward her.
She heard rain on the roof, and she laughed as she cut through the guards. He’s here! she thought. He is the Storm Dragon, and his storm will lift us out of here, together.
Another blast of lightning shook the palace, and wind howled through the passage, blowing at her back as though Gaven were calling her to him. The second wave of guards was dead or dying, and she ran unhindered with the wind. It led her unerringly through a maze of corridors until the passage opened into a chamber. Lightning struck again as she hurtled toward the archway. She saw the wind lifting dust and rubble into a whirlwind, and she knew that Gaven stood at the top of that column of air.
“Gaven!” she cried, but the wind swallowed her voice.
A flash of copper broke the whirlwind and brought Gaven to the ground. A shimmer of white light filled the chamber. She was almost there-in a moment she would be with Gaven again.
An enormous slab of stone fell from the roof of the chamber and crashed to the ground. The wind died, and she peered through a cloud of dust to the empty chamber beyond.
CHAPTER 32
Aric spent the remainder of the afternoon in the only form of meditation he knew-concentrating on every part of his body in turn, top of the head to soles of the feet, fixing the details in his mind. Seeking perfect focus, but constantly struggling to banish memories of Kelas, thoughts of his companions on this journey, and worries about the ceremony ahead. “Who are you?” he asked himself.
“Aric,” he answered, unsure what else to say. “From the Carrion Tribes, but I don’t know the name of my tribe. I’m about to join the Ghaash’kala, because the alternative is death. I’m a coward, a soft-hearted fool, and a travesty of a spy.”