Damn them. Damn Tallis or whoever did this.
“I am sorry,” she said, using anger to steel herself. “Aegis, I am here to find justice for the ir’Daresh family. I am here to avenge them, and I need your help, to know what you know.”
The construct turned sharply. “The half-elf intruder! He was masked.”
Tallis was a half-elf? She looked at Jotrem, who nodded.
“Half-elf, was it?” Jotrem repeated, a proud set to his jaw. “The warforged confirms what Sergeant Bratta and I have already told you, Miss Otänsin. Tallis was there. He is either the killer or the killer’s accomplice. You cannot doubt that.”
Soneste ignored him, distracted by this new information. She looked to the construct, whose attention was fully upon her. “Yes, I need to know more about him and about your master. I need to know everything you can tell me.”
Aegis advanced again on the bars. “I have failed in my duty!” he said. “Is this why I am caged?”
Soneste looked to the White Lions at the door. “This warforged is to be released from custody. Ask the Civic Minister, if you must, but I will see it done!” She slipped the writ from its folder and held it before them. The two guards looked to Jotrem, uncertain.
“Miss Otänsin,” the older inquisitive said. “The construct remains a suspect. It is not-”
“I will take responsibility for him, and he will bear no weapons.” Soneste narrowed her eyes. “Will you not ‘cut these ministerial webs’ and demonstrate your usefulness?”
Jotrem said nothing, but he nodded to the White Lions.
Soneste turned to face the warforged again, cognizant of the Karrns watching her. “Aegis, we are in a foreign land, you and I. Not all facts are known to me yet, and the citizens of Karrnath do not see you as your master did, nor as I do. If you are released, you must go where I say and do what I ask.”
“I will,” Aegis answered with clear fervor.
“The warforged’s loyalties are uncertain,” Jotrem said coldly. “It is dangerous.”
Aegis tapped his forehead, where a mystic sigil was engraved in the metal. All warforged possessed such symbols, or ghulra. Each one unique, the ghulra were a signature of their creation. “I was made to fight for Breland.” The warforged’s tone was solemn. “But after the war, I chose to serve Ambassador Gamnon ir’Daresh and his family. That is my loyalty.”
Soneste nodded. “I will find your master’s killer.”
“Then I will serve you now, Mistress. I failed my master, Lady Maril, Rennet. Vestra. I will help you bring them justice in whatever way I can, but I am a warrior, not an investigator. I will guard your life and do as you request.”
“You will have that chance,” Soneste said, “but first I need you to tell me everything that you remember. Tell me about this masked man.”
Aegis pointed one of his thick fingers through bars at the hooked hammer she’d tied to her haversack. “That is the weapon he used against me.”
Soneste didn’t need to look to know Jotrem was smirking.
Chapter ELEVEN
Mol, the 9th of Sypheros, 998 YK
With the pretense of needing something from her room, Soneste returned to the Seventh Watch. She asked Aegis to accompany her while Jotrem waited in the lobby, then went up to her room, Tallis’s weapon in her hands.
“Please bear with me, Aegis,” she said. “I am not merely biding time.”
She calmed her mind, sat upon the floor, and laid her hands over the cold metal of the hooked hammer. The weapon-her one solid lead-had a story to tell, and she would do her utmost to learn it. Veshtalan had once attempted to teach her the ability to read the psychic impressions he claimed all people left on the things they touched. “If someone possessed an object long enough,” the kalashtar had said, “deep imprints would form, strong enough to be analyzed by a properly focused mind. Like yours, Soneste.”
“Give me something that has meaning to you-for a moment only,” Veshtalan had said. As always, the kalashtar’s voice was soft, patient but demanding.
Soneste had complied, slipping off the carved onyx talisman she wore around her neck. Veshtalan had grasped the smooth, flat stone, tracing the owl-shaped object with delicate fingers then closed his eyes. A soft hum had surrounded them both and the onyx talisman appeared to glisten in his hand. After several long minutes of concentration, the handsome kalashtar had opened his eyes and smiled back at her.
“This stone was given to you by a human-your father? — when he was forty-one, a gift for his adolescent daughter, in apology for an event he’d been unable to attend.”
“Boldrei’s Feast,” Soneste had said quietly.
The kalashtar continued. “He’d purchased it from a shifter woman somewhere on his tour of duty. She was fifty-nine, a mother devoted to her family and willing to part with the semiprecious stone to feed her children in hard times. The shifter, in turn, had found the amulet in the pocket of a dead young human, not yet nineteen winters old. That boy’s father had given it to him only two days before on the day the boy had manifested the Mark of Making …”
Soneste had been impressed by the kalashtar’s abilities, but she was skeptical by nature and knew he might have fabricated most of the information. Her father had given her the onyx carving when his duties in the field prevented him coming home for Boldrei’s Feast that year. There was no way Veshtalan could have known that without the use of his powers, but try as she might, she’d been unable to produce the same effect with other objects-though she’d never stopped trying. Her mentor had insisted that doubt, and a lack of desire to succeed, had failed her.
As Soneste sat in perfect silence, she grasped Tallis’s weapon, closed her eyes, and tried her utmost to see it with her mind. Several minutes of mental exertion followed, giving her a headache instead of psychic insight. She maintained her focus, willing to learn more about the man who’d carried this very metal in his grasp. She wanted, needed, to know more! Just when she could hold her focus no longer, she had a brief moment’s image-not visual, not sensory at all, but somehow it felt more like a memory that wasn’t her own. She could envision the cold metal of the hammer pass from one pair of hands to another. Small, calloused hands-a gnome’s-passing the weapon over to larger, gnarled hands-a dwarf’s. Then again, a new hand grasping the hammer-long-fingered, delicate but strong. A half-elf’s-
Soneste stopped, her body drenched in sweat from her efforts. She washed up and returned to Jotrem again. Aegis had spoken not a word during this time.
“The Bluefist,” Jotrem had answered when she’d asked him where one might purchase dwarf-made weaponry in the city. “It set up shop immediately after the dwarf-lords of Mror declared their independence. They specialize in advanced arms, but they do not supply in bulk like many of the dwarf merchants. Even the Conqueror’s Host carries Bluefist blades. But hooked hammers are made by gnomes.”
Soneste had shrugged. “Trust me. We need to go there.”
The Bluefist of Mror was little more than a block of stone with residential flats stacked above it. The only ornamentation was its entrance, a threshold stylized to resemble a miniature dwarfgate of the Mror Holds. Above it, an iron plaque displayed a blue fisted gauntlet against a gray mountain. Just beneath, a Cannith seal was carved into a wooden placard and painted black, denoting the smithy as licensed by the dragonmarked house. After Soneste had read the old Chronicle articles, House Cannith, an omnipresent fixture of Khorvairian society, seemed more sinister.