Orshok just stared at the sculpted tree. “Why?” he asked. “What is it here for?” He glanced at Ashi, but she shook her head.
“Light of il-Yannah!” Dandra thrust out her arm. “Look there beside the tree.”
Geth followed her pointing hand. Close beside the stone tree-in its shadow-stood a strange heap of metal tubes and wires interspersed with pieces of glass or crystal. His eyes widened and his heart seemed to skip a beat. He’d seen something like it before, in memories Dandra had shown him through the kesh of her time as Dah’mir’s prisoner. It was a near match for the device Dah’mir had used to trap Tetkashtai in the psicrystal and place Dandra in her body.
“I think we need to take a closer look.” Singe grasped Dandra’s hand and drew her after him down the stairs. Geth and the others followed, picking their way carefully. The same footsteps that they had followed in the dust along the corridor marked the dust of the stairs as well. Ekhaas had been this way. When they reached the floor of the of the chamber, however, he was surprised to find that there was no dust on the floor at all-it had all been swept away.
Ashi noticed as well. “Someone was trying to hide their presence, I think,” the hunter said.
“Why here then and not in the corridor?” Geth asked.
Ashi shrugged.
The device beside the tree was considerably smaller than the one in the memory Dandra had shown Geth. In her memory, Dah’mir’s device towered overhead. The device before them, on the other hand, was only a little taller than Ashi.
“This isn’t the same size,” Geth said.
“No,” Dandra agreed, “it isn’t.” She circled the device and stopped before to a niche built inside it. To judge by the broken metal surrounding the niche, Geth guessed that something had been pulled out from inside the device. Something large-something the size of a crouching child.
“And find what waits in the shade of the Grieving Tree,” he quoted. “That’s where the Bonetree found Dah’mir’s dragonshard.”
“He built a model of his device?” said Natrac.
“I don’t think so.” Singe stepped close to the device and pushed against a piece of age-corroded metal. It crumpled like paper, sending green flakes drifting to the ground. All of the bits of metal and wire that made up the device, Geth realized, were similarly corroded, the crystals among them clouded by time. “Dah’mir was here two hundred years ago. This is a lot older.”
They were all quiet for a moment before Geth said. “The Dhakaani made this?”
Dandra stepped back and stared at the device. “That’s impossible.”
Singe spread his hands. “Maybe not. By all accounts, the Dhakaani were accomplished smiths. Their weapons helped fight off the daelkyr. I’ve never heard of Dhakaani artifacts that use dragonshards before, but-”
“No,” said Dandra. “It’s impossible that the Dhakaani could have made something to affect kalashtar.” Her eyes were wide. “This device has to be thousands of years old, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” said the wizard. “The Empire of Dhakaan fell after the Daelkyr War. I think historians agree it was dead by about five thousand years ago.”
Dandra raised her hand and wrapped it around her psicrystal. “How much do you know about the history of the kalashtar?”
Orshok and Ashi looked at her blankly and shook their heads. Geth spoke up, repeating bits and pieces that he had heard during the Last War. “Kalashtar come from across the Dragonreach. From the continent of Sarlona.”
“They come from farther away than that,” Singe said. He frowned. “Kalashtar are the descendants of humans and spirits from Dal Quor, the plane of dreams. That’s why you have psionic powers.”
Dandra nodded. “We’re not descendants as such-the Quori spirits that formed the first kalashtar were exiles from Dal Quor, and they were given refuge in Eberron by merging with a group of humans in the nation of Adara in Sarlona. As those first kalashtar married and had children, the original Quori spirits splintered among their lineages. The point is, we know exactly when kalashtar came into being. It was eighteen hundred years ago.” She pointed her spear at the Dhakaani device. “How could an empire that was dead more than three thousand years before kalashtar even existed build something to affect us? Why would they?”
“Maybe they’re not the same device,” said Orshok. All eyes turned to him and the young druid shifted uncomfortably. “Dah’mir’s device was bigger, wasn’t it? A knife and a sword have a lot in common, but you don’t use them for the same thing.”
Singe’s eyebrows rose. “But both devices were built around the same Khyber shard. Once a shard is attuned to a particular magic, it can’t be changed.”
Geth was abruptly conscious of the weight of Adolan’s stone collar around his neck. During the battle at the Bonetree mound, the Gatekeeper magic within the collar had protected him from the mental assault of a mind flayer. The Dhakaani sword at his waist had been forged to kill illithids and the other aberrant servants of the daelkyr; the ancient hobgoblins must have known about the tentacle-faced creatures’ deadly abilities. “Dandra,” he said, “are the powers of mind flayers psionic or magical?”
Her mouth opened, then closed as her eyes narrowed. After a moment, she said, “Psionic. They might come from the madness of Xoriat instead of the dreams of Dal Quor, but they’re still psionic. It’s like the difference between the magic of druids and the magic of wizards.”
“The Dhakaani fought mind flayers during the Daelkyr War.” Geth looked to Singe. “What if the binding stone traps things with psionic powers and all the wires and crystals around it are like …?” He struggled to put the idea in his head into words. “Like a sieve that only lets certain things through. What if the Dhakaani built a device that let the shard capture mind flayers, but Dah’mir made a new device that captures kalashtar instead.”
Singe drew a long, shallow breath and pulled on his whiskers as he turned back around to stare at the device. “Twelve moons,” he muttered. He spun around sharply and walked to the nearest wall. Closing his eyes for a moment, he spoke a word of magic and laid a hand against the wall, then opened his eyes again and stepped back to scan the wall. His gaze seemed strangely unfocused but he clenched his teeth. “Twelve bloody moons.”
“You can read it?” asked Dandra.
“Yes and no,” Singe said. “No, because it’s not all words. A lot of it is research notes, just like that researcher at Wynarn. And yes-” He blinked and turned around to face Geth. “-because you might be right.”
Geth felt his gut tighten at the angry disgust in the wizard’s voice, but no one else seemed to notice. Dandra was pushing forward. “It was meant to trap mind flayers?”
“I think so, but it’s hard to tell.” Singe turned and traced a hand across the wall, his eyes going unfocused once more. “These are mostly notes and calculations. They talk about illithids and arrangements of crystals that would attune the binding stone to their aura. I can only follow bits of it. They look more like the notes of an artificer than of a wizard. Other passages don’t make any sense at all.” He shifted his hand to another section of text. “This describes a sphere made of carved stone beetles linked together-it sounds like a child’s puzzle.” He touched other words. “This curses workers who fled the kraat. This tries to work breakfast into the equation for binding mind flayers. This-” He winced and lifted his hand away. “This just repeats over and over ‘My name is Marg. My name is Marg. My name is Marg.’”
“I think someone lost themselves in their work,” said Natrac. “You were right when you said you felt madness in the air, Dandra.”
“Why would a Dhakaani have built something like this, though?” asked Ashi, still circling the ancient device. “Dah’mir had to tie Tetkashtai and the other kalashtar down to use his device on them. Wouldn’t it be easier just to kill a mind flayer directly?”