The Killing Song: The Dragon Below Book III (16 page)

“Might?”

“It is a possibility. All of these things are possibilities—or were. You met me here and that possibility became a certainty. I know from your story that Singe and Dandra went to Sharn, so that possibility has become a certainty as well.”

Geth felt like someone had grabbed hold of his spine and was stretching it. “What about the third possibility?”

“It hasn’t happened yet, but of all the things I saw, I know when it will happen.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “In the possibility I see, the blue moon is full and bright on the horizon at dusk.”

The blue moon—the moon of Rhaan, so small it might almost have been a pale azure star. Geth struggled trying to guess when it would be full again, but Ekhaas came up with the answer first. “Eight days from now,” she said.

Medala opened her eyes and nodded. “It will be Rhaan’s first fullness since I returned. The horde must be at the Bonetree mound when it rises.”

“Do the Gatekeepers know this?” Geth demanded.

Medala looked at him coldly. “They don’t need to know,” she said. “It would distract them. The horde
will
be there. I created it. It is mine.” A hand jerked up to touch her face. “These are the angry eyes!”

“What about Sharn?” Ekhaas asked. “What if Singe and Dandra stop Dah’mir there?”

Medala cocked her head. “Dah’mir would not return to the Master of Silence if he failed. He will find what he seeks in Sharn. He will not be stopped. Anyone who stands against him will die.”

“You can’t know that.” The hand on Geth’s spine curled into a fist. “You said that Dah’mir’s return was still only a possibility.”

Medala’s lips twisted again—but this time they curved into a horrible smile. “He will not be stopped. The vengeance upon him
will
be mine.” Her eyes bored into Geth’s. “You should consider that yourself. We travel the same path for a time. You would be wise to stay on it.”

Her head rose sharply, as if at some distant noise, and after a moment, she rose to her feet. “Come with me,” she said. “You’ll want to see this.”

Wrath had come up the instant that she moved, but Medala
walked right past Geth without even looking at the sword. He stared at her exposed back, then glanced at Ekhaas. Her amber eyes were narrow—and watching Medala’s thin back, as well.

We can end this, Geth thought. We know the danger now. One blow from either of us …

Medala paused in midstride. “It takes no power to know what an enemy with a sword and an easy target is thinking,” she said without turning, “Before you act, you would do well to ask yourselves if I have told you everything that I know. What might I have left out of my story? What will happen if I die now?” She took another calm step and passed out of the tent. Geth’s hand tightened on Wrath’s hilt, until his fingers ached.

“She’s right,” growled Ekhaas.

“Tiger’s blood! I know!” Geth let Wrath fall again and leaped after the kalashtar. She had stopped just outside the tent. Geth pulled up short at her side and stared around in amazement.

The camp was absolutely silent. Orcs drifted past them—alone, in pairs, or in bands—but none of them said anything or made any sound as they walked to the center of the camp and the Gatekeeper’s sweat lodge. Mugs of ale and
gaeth’ad
were left abandoned beside campfires. Food was left to burn on the flames. Geth followed the orcs’ eyes and stifled a curse. The pillar of smoke that had risen beside the sweat lodge had stopped. The fire had been extinguished.

The surface of the Sharvat Vvaraak was nearly perfectly level. He could see nothing beyond the nearest ranks of tents except the humped peak of the lodge. One of the tall standing stones that he had spied when they arrived in the camp was nearby though. He sheathed Wrath and sprinted to it. The surface was worn nearly smooth with time, but there were crevices and nooks enough for a shifter to scale. The metal of his gauntlet scraping on rock, he swarmed up the stone until he hugged its narrow top and could peer down over tents and orcs.

Hundreds of warriors gathered around the sweat lodge in silent expectation. The largest and most important among them jostled quietly for position close to the single enormous hide that covered the doorway of the lodge. Geth felt a flash of angry jealousy—he should have been there with them, a hero taking his rightful place among the mighty—but he shook his head
sharply. The feeling was only some lingering echo of Medala’s power. He had a place fighting with the horde, but not blindly. For once in his life, he had to think, not just act.

The hide covering the lodge doorway twitched. The crowd grew still. A hand threw the hide aside. Steam billowed out of the lodge in a great cloud and out of the steam stepped Batul, flanked by two other elderly orcs. Geth risked falling to get a hand on Wrath as Batul raised his arms, a crook-headed hunda stick in one hand, and called out in Orc.

“The council has made a decision. Make ready to leave the Mirror of Vvaraak. The horde of Angry Eyes marches on the Bonetree mound!”

The roar that erupted from the throats of the gathered orcs seemed to shake the air itself. Cold settled over Geth. He let himself slip back down from the standing stone. Medala and Ekhaas were waiting at the bottom. They must have heard Batul’s announcement. There could have been no missing it. Ekhaas’s face was tight.

Medala’s, however, was as joyful as those of the orc warriors who now streamed back out through the camp. “Aren’t you pleased, Geth?” she shouted over the chaotic din. “You’ll fight the Master of Silence! You’ll fight Dah’mir!”

Geth’s gut clenched. Words failed him. They didn’t, however, fail Ekhaas. She looked at Medala with wary fear. “This place that Virikhad’s power took you,” she said. “Where was it?
What
was it?”

Medala’s lips drew back, and her teeth flashed. “You’ve guessed, haven’t you, Ekhaas
duur’kala?
It was everywhere. It was nowhere. It was the place where madmen go when they have the power to tear holes in the fabric of space. I have been where Dah’mir would give his tongue to go—oh, if he knew what his twisted experiments had wrought!” She looked at them both, and her pupils were once again tiny black dots in her eyes. “I’ve seen the brine pools where the elder brains of the illithids dream. I’ve seen empty palaces that wait for their daelkyr masters to return. I’ve been to Xoriat!”

  
N
atrac knew it was late morning or early afternoon only by the complaint of his empty stomach, though even that wasn’t strictly reliable—he had woken with a sour taste in his mouth and a vague memory of having vomited in the night. There was no other way to judge the passage of time.

There was no hint of daylight in the small room where he’d been dumped or in the larger chamber visible through the barred window set in the room’s door. Many centuries before, the chamber had likely been some fine lady’s bedroom and the smaller room, a large closet. Or maybe a nursery or a maid’s room. Many, many centuries before, when Malleon’s Gate had been the wealthy heart of Sharn and the great towers had been mere saplings. Since then, the rooms—the entire grand house—had seen a hundred different uses, a hundred refashionings, probably a dozen blockings and unblockings of the window that had once let light into the chamber.

For the last twenty years or so, the smaller room had been a cell, the larger chamber an … interview room. Natrac remembered the day when the conversion had been made very clearly. He’d had the window blocked up again specifically so prisoners would have no clue to the passage of day or night.

And for the fifteenth time since he’d woken, he muttered, “My own damn cell. The Keeper take you, Biish!”

Not that the possibility he might one day need to escape from his own cell had ever slipped passed him. Once the throbbing
that the hobgoblin’s club had left in his head had eased, Natrac had crawled over to the door and pulled himself up to the barred window, surveying the chamber beyond and blessing the orc blood that let him see in the dark. The chamber was empty except for a rough table and two chairs. His knife-hand, stripped from the stump of his right wrist, lay on the table, well out of reach.

He’d gone to a corner of the cell and counted four bricks in and eighteen high. The cleverly fitted false brick he’d installed in secret had still been there. Unfortunately, the hollow behind where he’d hidden a knife and a few tools had been empty. Someone had cleaned it out. The brick hadn’t been as secret as he thought.

After that there hadn’t been much to do but wait. Natrac passed the time alternately cursing Biish, the idiot changelings of the Broken Mirror, the treacherous old goblin bartender, and himself. A return not just to Sharn but to Malleon’s Gate—what had he been thinking? Had surviving his adventures with Geth, Singe, and Dandra really given him that much of a sense of invulnerability? Had he been this stupid when he’d been young? Lords of the Host, he thought, it was a miracle he’d lived this long.

Worst of all, his misguided attempt at locating word of Dah’mir through Sharn’s underworld meant that Dandra and Singe would not just have one less ally on which to rely, but that they would almost certainly start using time they needed to locate the dragon on finding him instead. He’d told Dandra he’d be back by dawn. She might already have started worrying about him. He had become a liability. He had to find a way out of this.

He knew Biish, though. Getting out of the hobgoblin’s hands wasn’t going to be easy.

He looked up as the door in the outer chamber opened and several people, to judge by the sound of footsteps, entered. They brought a dim light with them, lighting up the square of the barred window in the cell door. That was interesting, he thought. It meant that not all of Biish’s gang were goblinoids. Someone in the other chamber needed light to see. He rose to his feet.

The large and hairy face of the bugbear from the tavern appeared at the barred window. Natrac glared at him. “Awake,” the creature grunted in Goblin and moved back.

Biish took his place and gave Natrac a leer that showed all of his oversized teeth. “I never thought I’d see you back in Sharn, Natrac,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Asking myself the same thing.” Natrac met his gaze without flinching. “How have you been, Biter?”

Biish’s skin was a deep orange color that turned deeper when he flushed. His ears lay back flat. “No one calls me Biter now,
taat!”

From the utter silence that fell among those who had accompanied Biish into the outer chamber, Natrac guessed that the hobgoblin might actually be right. He held his voice steady, not allowing himself to show any sign of fear, and pushed himself up to the bars on the window. “I guess the
chib
can have people call him whatever he wants,” he said. “Have you been taking care of my affairs, Biish?”

That got a bark of mocking laughter out of him. “They haven’t been your affairs for a long time, Natrac.”

“I heard you closed the arena.”

“You could have sold it to me when I asked, and you would have made money,” Biish said with a cold smile. “You could have joined your gang with mine, and you might still be in power today instead of stuck in a cell you built yourself. The Longtooth is one of the most powerful gangs in Malleon’s Gate these days.”

Biish always had loved to gloat. Natrac let the hobgoblin boast while he looked past him to the band of thugs he had brought into the room. The bugbear, of course. Another hobgoblin. Two goblins, one of which looked very familiar and who glanced away when Natrac’s eyes met his. Natrac remembered him—a street rat with such a talent for picking pockets that he’d brought him into his gang personally. Not everyone had stood up against Biish’s control, it seemed. Natrac’s jaw tightened in anger, but he forced his gaze past the little traitor.

The final person in the room was the one holding the dim light-source, a small lamp. The only non-goblinoid—and the only woman—she was a half-elf, young but with hard
and cunning eyes. Her hair was blond with a hint of red and bound into a knot at the back of her head. Her clothes were worn leather, and the only visible weapon she carried was a dagger at her hip, but Natrac had a feeling that wasn’t the only weapon on her. Somehow she didn’t look out of place among Biish’s guard. Instead, they looked out of place in her presence.

And she was watching him.

Natrac wrenched his gaze from her and back to Biish as he finally ran out of words. “If you’re so powerful,” he said to the hobgoblin, “then you have nothing to worry about from me. I’m out of this game. You know it.”

“Are you asking me to let you go?” Biish’s wolf ears rose. “For one, I don’t think you are out of the game. I know you wouldn’t have dared to come back to Sharn and Malleon’s Gate unless you had some important reason. For another, there’s the matter of why I’m using your fine old headquarters instead of mine.” A flush crept back into his face. “They still talk about the explosion in some taverns.”

Natrac looked him straight in the eyes. “As long as you were running me out of Sharn, I wanted to be sure you had something to remember me by.”