Caura resisted the temptation to groan at the dragon’s awkward wordplay. At least it hinted at a strategy for keeping the dragon busy, and she leaped at the opening. “But if we’re deserters, shouldn’t we be your dessert?”
The dragon opened and closed its mouth in a gesture Caura discerned as a laugh. “Well spoken, meat. But who ever heard of eating meat for dessert?”
“Don’t you think it’s sweet to meet us?” Caura glanced over her shoulder. Jenns stared at her with his mouth hanging open, incredulous. But the dragon was still enjoying the game.
“Perhaps I’ll eat your sweetbread for dessert.”
“Oh no, we’re not well bred.”
“Are you suggesting I was born in a well?” The dragon fanned its wings, breaking more branches. Caura thought she detected an impatient tone in its voice. At the thought, her mind went blank.
Jenns stepped forward to stand beside her, then bowed before the dragon. “We hope your offense doesn’t run deep.”
The dragon laughed again, and furled its wings. “The male joins in the game!”
Caura shot Jenns a smile and picked up the thread. “There must be tastier game in the forest.”
Jenns added, “I fear you’ll find us too gamey for your taste.”
“I think perhaps you’re too tasty to let this game continue.” The dragon’s tongue flicked out and brushed its lips.
“No, not at all,” Caura shot back. “Haven’t we amply demonstrated our bad taste?”
Again the dragon flapped its lower jaw. “You have indeed. I suggest you flee before I change my mind.”
Caura almost retorted, but Jenns grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the dragon as fast as their legs could run.
CHAPTER 30
Is there news?” Rienne sat in Krathas’s office, her elbows on her knees, looking at the floor to avoid the half-orc’s gaze.
The half-orc shifted some rolled papers on his desk. “There is. The woman who was with him-she’s been captured.”
“Really?” Rienne hated the tone of her voice, but she couldn’t keep the spite from her voice.
“Indeed. As I understand it, she was badly injured while she and Gaven fled from the dwarves.” A twinge of guilt pricked Rienne’s heart-she had unwittingly led the dwarves to Gaven. “Somehow, Gaven sent healers from House Jorasco to find her and bring her back to the city for care. A Sentinel Marshal apprehended her at the House of Healing.”
“Where’s Gaven?”
“I don’t know.” He paused, but something on his face indicated that there was more. Rienne waited.
“At about the same time as the Jorasco healers set out to find Senya, a horse was stolen at the eastern edge of town. It’s possible that was Gaven.”
“The eastern edge? Is that near the House of Healing?”
“Not particularly, no. Gaven might have ridden east.”
“East-toward the Mournland.”
“Right.” He rubbed the side of his face. “There’s one more thing. The horse-it found its way home.”
Rienne sat back in her chair, trying to absorb that information. Krathas found something interesting on his desk and kept his eyes low.
“Well, that might not mean anything,” she said after a moment. “I can’t imagine a horse would willingly ride into the Mournland. Perhaps he just let it go and made his way in on foot.”
“Maybe so.” He didn’t say any more, but Rienne could read his thoughts on his face: he didn’t like Gaven’s odds of surviving in the Mournland on foot.
“Why would he go in there?” She remembered her view of the roiling gray mist from the airship deck, the sense of a malevolent presence in the Mournland. The thought of walking into the Mournland made her shudder.
“I hoped you might have some idea.”
Rienne shook her head, replaying her conversation with Gaven and Senya in her mind. “He didn’t say anything.” She shrugged, feeling helpless. “It was so hard to see him. Not at all what I expected-or hoped for. He seemed so strange.”
“Strange how?”
Rienne considered her words, trying to express the thoughts that had been nagging at her since her encounter with Gaven. “He was… absent. He had no interest in talking with me. He didn’t ask me for an explanation or offer me one. I thought he would be angry. I didn’t expect him to just not care.”
“He’s had years to get over his anger.”
“So have I. But all he cared about was that damned box. What was in it, anyway?”
Krathas shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“He never told you?”
Another shrug. “I never asked.”
“He accused me of stealing it from you.” The memory stirred her anger.
“I promised him I’d keep it safe. He came to my office and found you holding it. I think I can see why he might have been upset.”
“And as soon as I left, those dwarves ran in. He probably thinks I summoned them.”
A look of profound sadness settled on Krathas’s face as he stared at his desk.
Rienne’s anger melted away. She reached out and clasped the half-orc’s folded hands. “I can’t see him go back to Dreadhold, Krathas. It’s my fault he went there in the first place. I want to help him, but I don’t know how.”
Krathas looked into her eyes. “Don’t you?” His voice was gentle.
Rienne sat in silence for a long time. Krathas held her gaze for a while, then looked back down at his desk. Finally, Rienne sighed.
“I suppose that means I’m heading to the Mournland.”
“Desolation spreads over that land like a wildfire,” Gaven muttered. He lurched forward and fell into the dust. “Like a plague.” He spat dirt out of his mouth. “A plaguefire, a virulent plague, a wasting sickness, a spreading cloud that burns and wastes and destroys.”
He scooped up a handful of the sandy ground and let it spill out between his fingers. A shadow of a dream flitted through his mind.
So many thoughts were in his mind, he couldn’t cling to one. He slowly got to his feet.
“Two spirits bound in one prison beneath the wastes,” he whispered, his eyes unfocused. Twisting caverns forming letters, letters bound together in infinite combinations of words, words that danced unfettered in his mind. “Secrets kept and revelation granted, the Secret Keeper and the Messenger.” He started to walk forward, stumbled, stopped and stared at the sky. “They bind and are bound, but their whispers are unbound.”
“Destroyer!” he shouted. “Tearer and reaver and flayer of souls, the Soul Reaver.” He staggered in a different direction beneath the featureless sky. “The Soul Reaver waits in the endless dark, where it is forever night, the un-day. Beneath the bridge of light, there will descend the Storm Dragon, the Dragon of thunder and lightning and wind and rain and hail.”
Something dark jutted up from the barren ground, tracing jagged lines against the gray horizon. Gaven turned and reeled toward it. It meant something, he knew.
“There among the bones of Khyber the Storm Dragon will drive a spear-the Eye of Siberys bound to a branch of ash, an ash tree’s branch charred with ash, a victim of the storm.”
The object began to take shape as he drew nearer-blackened branches stretching up from the earth to the sky, a memory of life where nothing else grew.
“Drive the spear into the Soul Reaver’s heart!”
A distant rumble of thunder testified to the storm that had passed and left the tree scorched by lightning.
“Where is the Eye of Siberys now, Gaven?” Gaven’s voice was suddenly clear and coherent, though lower than usual. As if startled by the sound of it, he fell to the ground again. He tore at the pouch at his belt until he got it open, then pulled out the heavy adamantine box and opened it.
The nightshard captivated him, pulsing with its purple-black light, and he mumbled at it as if answering its question. “The Storm Dragon seizes the shard of heaven, a tiny fragment of Siberys’s glory, from the fallen pretender, the bronze serpent.”
“Where is it now?” he said, clear and low again.