Omax lay upon the pallet, covered with a thin blanket knitted in a riot of color. Seren couldn’t help but smile at the odd sight. The blanket did a warforged no good, but Omax was too polite to remove it. The warforged’s head turned slightly as she entered. His face was, as always, an expressionless mask of scarred metal. The flicker of blue light in his eyes brightened when he saw her. At least both his eyes now shone again and had lost the sickly red light they radiated after Marth wounded him. Seren was no expert in warforged anatomy, but that seemed to be a good sign.
“Seren,” he said. His once rumbling voice was now cracked and hollow.
One of the halfling healers followed Omax’s eyes, looking at Seren. The little man smiled warmly and gestured for her to enter.
“Omax,” Seren said. She hurried into the tent and knelt beside the warforged.
“You may visit him, but do not tarry. He needs his rest,” said Mother Shinh, the elder halfling kneeling at Omax’s right side. She rose, as did the others. The flutist slid his instrument into a leather case at his hip. “If you need us, we will be nearby.”
Seren murmured her thanks as the healers filed out of the tent.
“I keep telling them that I do not rest,” Omax said. “They do not listen.”
Seren laughed softly.
“Mother Shinh has done what she can, Seren,” the warforged said, “but she can do nothing more.”
“You don’t know that, Omax,” Seren said. She reached out and grasped his hand. The three thick metal fingers coiled around hers with surprising gentleness.
“Tristam believes that his failure caused this,” Omax whispered. “He is wrong. It was my own failure. A warforged does not heal naturally as a creature of flesh does. If I had told anyone how truly injured I was …”
“I thought Norra Cais repaired you,” Seren said.
“She tried,” Omax said with a rueful chuckle. “She helped, but the full extent of the damage was beyond her skill. How strange that with all the threats and terrors that haunt this world, the deadliest enemy is the self.”
The warforged lay back on his pallet. He stared up through the hole in the ceiling at the sky, lost in his thoughts.
Seren wanted to offer words of encouragement, but could find none. She could not speak at all.
FOUR
If something was at all important, it either began in Sharn or ended there.
It was an old saying-one Norra Cais was fond of. It was coined by a Sharn poet, of course. Norra’s own bias was fairly evident, as a native of the city, but she was fond of the saying nonetheless.
Norra sat alone in a small passenger compartment, watching the landscape as the lightning rail sped through the heart of Breland. She had taken pains to appear inconspicuous. Her short robe and breeches were a conservative gray. Her blond hair was braided and coiled into a severe bun. She clutched a small leather duffle against her lap and kept to herself in a private cabin. With international relations as they were, a traveler who kept to herself and caused no trouble received little attention.
As the lightning rail crested a hill, Sharn came fully into view. Even to Norra’s jaded eyes, the City of Towers was an amazing sight. Impossibly tall spires of metal and stone reached into the sky. Islands of magically enchanted clouds hovered above the city, hosting even more towers that had never known contact with the crude earth. Even from here she could see the graceful skycoaches and much larger airships that soared through the city. Sharn was, quite literally, an impossible city. It was even more amazing for how starkly it stood out from the surrounding landscape, bordered by a mighty river and a lush jungle.
Sharn skirted the laws of possibility only because the boundaries between realities were thin here. In this place, Eberron bordered closely upon the plane known as Syrania, the Azure Sky. Syrania was a glittering paradise-infinite sky broken only by perfect flying cities of shining crystal. So close to Syrania, that realm’s laws imposed themselves over Eberron’s. The towers of Sharn could stretch as high as they wished and not topple. Skycoaches could take to the air, drawing upon only a fraction of the power needed to fuel a genuine airship. Sharn lived and breathed magic. For a woman whose life’s work was to create arcane wonders, it was an inspiring sight. Norra had not intended to return from the Frostfell, but it was good to be home.
The lightning rail cruised slowly to a halt, depositing its passengers at the Coggsgate rail station. People surged forward to board the train, pushing through the station’s crowded corrals in a jumbled sea of humanity.
Norra stepped out onto the walkway, her bag slung over one shoulder. Hovering signs drawn in pure magical energy guided passengers on their way to the appropriate exit. Norra ignored the press of the crowd as she looked for the right gate. She searched the pockets of her short robe, digging out the few silver coins she had remaining, and found a skycoach.
The vehicle resembled a long rowboat with no oars, featuring a covered passenger area in the rear. It hovered in the air like an airship, but without an airship’s ring of fire. A lumpy old dwarf captain sat hunched in the bow. He sat up and greeted Norra amiably, but his smile evaporated under the force of her unfriendly glare. Norra Cais was a woman with little patience for pleasantries.
“Menthis Plateau,” she ordered. She climbed aboard the skycoach and took her seat. “The university.”
“Yes, my lady,” the dwarf said. He shoved a felt cap onto his head and whispered a word of command, causing the skycoach to lurch skyward.
The dwarf made a few token attempts to engage his passenger in conversation, all of which Norra rebutted with a noncommittal grunt or ignored entirely. At the end of their flight she gave him a few soveriegns for the fare. He uttered a short curse in his language, which she pretended not to understand as she disembarked.
Norra leaned her head back, taking in the sight of Morgrave University once more. The school was housed in Dalannan Tower, a thick structure of polished black stone that rose higher than the other buildings in this quarter. Five spires stretched from its heights, each representing one of the Five Nations. Morgrave was not the largest university in Khorvaire, nor was it the most prestigious, but it was well respected. The students of Morgrave were known for using unconventional methods to achieve results in the name of profit. Though Norra might easily have secured a place at any number of the continent’s institutions of higher learning, none granted her the freedom that Morgrave did.
It had been her home for most of her adult life-first as a student, later as an associate professor. Though she was extremely talented and knowledgeable in several fields of arcane artifice, prejudice against her youth had prevented her from securing a position as a full professor. Her ego chafed at the lack of recognition, but at least that granted her time to conduct her research free of the university’s watchful eye.
She strode briskly up the tower’s main steps. Metal gates parted silently at her approach, allowing her access to the courtyard beyond. A few students sat on benches or on the grass, studying from textbooks or talking quietly with one another. They paid little mind to Norra as she strode past them, entering the lower levels of the library. She continued onward through darkened stacks, pushing open the door to a small side office and stepping inside. A middle-aged man in a scholar’s dumpy gray robes looked up from his reading with a start, nearly knocking over the lamp on his small desk.
“Norra?” he said, shocked. “Is that you?”
“I won’t deign to address such a stupid question, Petra,” she said. She set her bag on the floor and sat on a stool across from him.
“I see your trip has not softened your demeanor,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you again after your quarters were found empty.” His eyes widened as he spoke. He shifted nervously, as if he expected her to leap at him at any moment. Petra Ghein had been a junior librarian at the university as long as Norra could remember. He was always a nervous man, but at least that made him reliable. He didn’t have the courage to turn on her.