Dragon War: The Draconic Prophecies - Book Three (9 page)

Gaven saw Havrakhad’s eyes go wide, and he looked at Kelas with a mixture of wonder and fear.

“That is more than enough, I assure you,” Havrakhad said. He bowed to Kelas, then turned to Gaven. “Remember, Gaven: Whatever you deserve, freedom is what you have been given. Use your freedom as if you deserved it.”

Gaven nodded. “Thank you.”

Havrakhad clasped Cart’s hand. “I hate to cause any further trouble, but I wonder if you would be willing to see me safely to my house?”

“Of course,” Cart said. “The city at this time of night can be daunting.”

“I suppose there is that, yes,” Havrakhad said, as if the threat of street thugs hadn’t occurred to him. Gaven wondered what danger he did fear.

“I’ll come as well,” Ashara said.

After a last round of bows and farewells, Havrakhad left.

Cart closed the door behind him, and Aunn let out a long breath.

Gaven wheeled on him. “Now will you tell me what in thunder is going on?” he said.

“I’ll try.” Aunn rubbed his temples. “But I’m not entirely sure myself.”

“Why don’t you start by explaining why you’re pretending to be Kelas?”

“I was hoping to learn more about Kelas’s plans,” Aunn said. “It also gives me a position where I can warn the army.”

“Warn them about what?”

“Kathrik Mel. The barbarians.”

Gaven remembered fragments of dream—a corpse-strewn battlefield, a sky darkened by vultures’ wings, the earth torn open. He sat down across the desk from Aunn.

“Kelas thought he was creating a pretext,” Aunn continued, “giving
Aundair an excuse to invade the Eldeen Reaches. He assumed that the army would have no trouble defeating the barbarians, especially with the Dragon Forge at its disposal.”

“With my Mark of Storm,” Gaven said. “The storm breaks upon the forces of the Blasphemer …”

“What’s that?” Aunn asked, looking up at Gaven. “Oh, the Prophecy. Which reminds me.” He collected a sheaf of paper from the side of the desk and straightened the pile. “Here’s another thing I want to figure out about Kelas. While you were in Dreadhold, the dwarves recorded everything you said or wrote down about the Prophecy. They sent a copy to House Lyrandar, at your family’s request. But how did Kelas get a copy?” He pushed the papers across the desk to Gaven.

Tumult and tribulation swirl in his wake: The Blasphemer rises, the Pretender falls, and armies march once more across the land
.

Gaven didn’t remember that verse, but according to the paper in front of him, he had written it on the wall of his cell sometime during the night of Zarantyr 29, 973 YK. One of his first nights in Dreadhold. He flipped through the pages, ignoring the Prophecy in its neat dwarf-printing, looking only at the dates. One entry every week or so, two or three entries to a page, covering all twenty-six years of his imprisonment—he held more than five hundred pages.

“Maybe the Sentinel Marshals or Bordan d’Velderan came to Kelas after I escaped,” Gaven said, “looking for help from the Royal Eyes.”

“That would be strange,” Aunn said, “the dragonmarked houses asking for help from a national government. And why the Royal Eyes? You haven’t spent much time in Aundair.”

“But Kelas had his own interest in me. He wanted me for the Dragon Forge. Or he wanted my mark.”

“And he was interested in the Prophecy as it pertained to you and the Dragon Forge, certainly. But that doesn’t explain how he got these documents.”

“He could have …” Gaven had reached the last pages of the stack. These were written in a different hand, a flowing script nothing at all like the block letters of the dwarves. His father’s hand.

My dear friend Kelas
.

“What is it?” Aunn asked.

I hope this letter finds you well. I’ve enclosed the latest reports from House Kundarak—more of the same. I certainly hope they mean more to you than they do to me
.

Gaven’s own father, writing to Kelas as if to an old friend?

“Gaven?”

“My father sent them.”

Gaven flipped through the last pages, scanning dates again. The last letter was dated the fourth of Eyre, 999 YK—less than a week before Gaven escaped from Dreadhold, just over a month before his father’s death.

Dear Kelas
,

My younger son and all Stormhome are sleeping soundly as I write this, but sleep eludes me. Perhaps I have let my mind be influenced too much by Gaven’s ravings, if that’s what they are. I feel the weight of the future pressing on me. My health, I must accept, is failing. But how can I accept that if it means I am never to see Gaven’s face again?

You have long assured me that I would live to see Gaven walk free of his prison, his innocence proven at last, and that hope has sustained me through these years of our correspondence. But unless you know some way to prolong my life—or Gaven’s release is somehow imminent—I fear you have been mistaken
.

So now I am preparing myself for death. Thordren will carry on my business, as he has ably done for many years now. If you wish, I will send a letter to House Kundarak, asking them to continue sending their reports to Thordren, and instruct him to send them on to you as I have done. And I will go to the Land of the Dead and strive to retain my memories there in the endless gray, so that when Gaven joins me there—many years from now, if it please the Host—I might still know him and be able to tell him what I couldn’t tell him while I lived
.

Thank you again—a thousand times—for all that you have done for me and my son. I hope you will continue your efforts on his behalf after I am gone, for the sake of our friendship
.

Your friend,
Arnoth d’Lyrandar

    Gaven read the letter three times—the first time, blinking back tears as he thought of his father, gripped with the pain of having missed the chance to see him by a few hours. The second time, he hunted through every sentence for a hint of what Arnoth had wanted to tell him. The third time, his tears dried, he looked for a better idea of what Kelas had supposedly been doing on Gaven’s behalf.

“You worked for Kelas,” he said at last.

Aunn was holding a glass orb and peering intently into its depths. “I did,” he said, setting the orb aside on the desk.

“He sent you to join Cart and Senya, to get me out of Dreadhold.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Why?” Gaven asked.

“Why did he send me? Isn’t it obvious? He wanted your mark for the Dragon Forge.”

“Did you know that at the time?”

“No,” Aunn said. “I knew he wanted your knowledge of the Prophecy. Please believe me, Gaven, if I’d had any idea—”

Gaven shook his head. Cart had said the same thing. It didn’t matter. “Did you know he was corresponding with my father?”

“I had no idea.”

“He thought I was innocent,” Gaven said. “He called me his son, even though I was excoriate, and he always believed he’d live to see me walk free.”

“And he did, right?

“No. He knew I’d escaped, but that’s not the same thing. I’m still not free. I’m still guilty, they’d still throw me back in Dreadhold if they could.”

Aunn leaned forward over the desk. “But are you really guilty?”

“What do you mean? I did the things they accused me of.”

“But the dragon—”

“I wasn’t possessed. Its memories confused me, to be sure, but it was still me, doing what I did. As much as I’d like to avoid responsibility, I can’t. The Thurannis killed all the Paelions because of me.”

Aunn sat back in his chair, his gaze fixed on the desk.

“Bordan d’Velderan kept saying that I was no different from any other common criminal,” Gaven said. “I have to prove him wrong.”

“And how—” The glass globe on the desk began to glow, cutting him off. He looked at it for a moment, as the light grew from a faint shimmer to a brilliant glare, then reached for it. As soon as his fingers touched the smooth surface, the light faded, but Gaven could see the hint of an image inside the sphere.

“Kelas?” A woman’s voice came from the globe, as clear as if she were in the room. “What’s going on? I’ve been waiting all night!”

T
he forest to the east burned with the false promise of dawn as Rienne kept watch over Jordhan. The airship’s fiery ring held the vessel aloft just above the tops of the charred trees, but its harsh light was a small flicker in a much larger darkness, leaving Rienne to peer nervously at every hint of movement at the edge of the encroaching shadows.

No attack came, and at last the eastern sky came alive with fiery red and yellow heralding the sun’s true arrival. No bird calls greeted the dawn light, though, and as the light spilled across the ground beneath her Rienne saw the extent of the devastation left in the barbarians’ wake.

The earth was a wide field of black rock and gray ash, the charred trunks of once-mighty trees jutting up like the crumbling stone pillars of an ancient ruin, many of them half toppled, inclined almost to the ground in their grief. Bones littered the ground as far as she could see—the snarling skull of an Eldeen bear nearby, shattered ribs jutting from the blackened tatters of a chainmail coat just beyond it. Among the bones vultures hopped, flapped, and swarmed over the fresh corpse of the dragon.

Vultures wheel where dragons flew, picking the bones of the numberless dead
.

The words from Rienne’s dream sprang to her mind, and brought with them images of battle—dragons flying overhead, a bone-white banner marked in blood, wave after wave of the enemy crashing down over her and Maelstrom. A demon standing before her, his sword burning with hellfire.

Rienne shook herself—had she fallen asleep?—and walked the perimeter of the deck. She and Gaven had visited the Towering Wood once, chasing a rumor of a dragonshard deposit, and she had loved the feeling of shelter she found beneath the arching branches of the ancient trees. The ground seemed like a magical twilight world where the sun never quite reached,
yet it was warm and alive. Now the ruin of the forest was laid bare to the dawn, extending as far as she could see in every direction.

She turned Maelstrom over in her hands, searching the blade for the hundredth time for any pit seared into the steel by the dragon’s acidic breath or blood, any nick left behind as the blade pierced its armored plates. Maelstrom was perfect, as sharp and whole as the day she’d received it.

“Lady Alastra,” the messenger said, bowing low, “your presence is requested at the home of Master Kevyen.”

She knew instantly what had happened. Her master was dead. It was not a shock—he had been ailing for months. Still she was too numb to feel the grief, and she would later be ashamed to realize that the first thing she felt was a tiny surge of joy. Maelstrom would be hers
.

The tears came as she followed the messenger through Stormhome to the master’s home, hurrying to keep up with his fast pace, wondering if it would be the last time she walked this particular path through the city’s winding streets
.

The modest house had been a blur of confusion in the wake of the master’s death, and she stood in the midst of it, trying to find a still center of calm and patience. At last the steward had found her and carelessly thrust the case into her suddenly awkward hands
.

She fell to her knees and the commotion around her faded. She ran her hands over the velvet that covered the case, the color of wine, and breathed in the musty smell of it. The smell awakened such memories in her! She remembered kneeling before the master at the beginning of her studies, at the age of three, and seeing the blade for the first time. Every day for nearly seventeen years she had admired it
.

And now it was hers. She lifted the lid of the case at last and stretched out her fingers to touch the blade. Then she curled her fingers around the hilt and lifted it from the blade, swearing a rash oath in her heart that she would never let Maelstrom hang on display as the master had. She would wear it, carry it into battle, and let it do what it was made to do
.

According to Kevyen, Maelstrom had been the sword of the great explorer Lhazaar, who carried it on her legendary expedition from Sarlona to Khorvaire, three thousand years ago. In her hand, the blade had helped to tame the wilderness of the eastern islands and fight back the remnants of the fallen Dhakaani Empire that threatened the first human settlers. There it had earned its name, for in Lhazaar’s hand it had been a whirlwind of steel that caught all her foes in its inexorable grasp and drew them in to annihilation. That was as much as her master had known or chosen to
reveal, but after Maelstrom came into her possession, Rienne learned as much as she could about its history.

Two thousand years ago, a hero named Darven, native to the citystate of Fairhaven long before it became the nation of Aundair, wielded Maelstrom in battle against the armies of Karrn the Conqueror. Cathra d’Lyrandar carried the sword in the War of the Mark, five hundred years later, and used it to cut off the head of Maggroth the Warlock Prince before she herself was killed by the aberrant lord Halas Tarkanan. Less than two hundred years ago, a paladin used the blade to kill the werewolf queen Ragatha and each of her twelve sons, the leaders of twelve vicious werewolf packs across the Five Nations. The paladin, strangely, used Maelstrom’s name as his own, supposedly to convey the idea that he was merely a sword in the hand of the Church of the Silver Flame. She never learned how Maelstrom came into Master Kevyen’s possession, but she had always suspected a connection of blood or training between her master and that nameless paladin.

“The day you first touched that sword,” Gaven said, “you set a course for a much greater destiny. It’s a sword of legend, Ree. Great things have been done with it, and more greatness will yet be accomplished.”

Rienne had called Maelstrom hers for forty-two years, carrying it into the depths of Khyber, across the Five Nations, and all the way to Argonnessen in her adventures at Gaven’s side. Before Gaven’s madness, she used it to kill the monstrous prophet of a cult of the Dragon Below, a hideous, tentacled foulspawn with burning eyes. In the months since Gaven escaped from Dreadhold, Maelstrom had nearly killed the red dragon that attacked their airship on the way to Starcrag Plain, then she had cut a swath through the Soul Reaver’s hordes and killed a beholder. And she had killed the black dragon that was feeding the vultures beneath the airship. To her mind, though, all her adventures did not seem like the stuff of legends. She was no Lhazaar, and the monsters Maelstrom had slain in her hand were not villains on the scale of Ragatha or the Warlock Prince. Great things had indeed been done with the weapon, but her own greatness was yet to come. The sword of Lhazaar, Darven, Cathra d’Lyrandar, and the paladin known as Maelstrom was in her hand, the sword of champions, and her destiny was linked to that sword.