Dragon Forge: The Draconic Prophecies - Book Two (42 page)

Enough, Gaven thought. It’s time for the Storm Dragon to get out of the Dragon Forge. I am the storm….

But he was not the storm. It had grown easy for him, since walking the Sky-Caves of Thieren Kor, to submerge his mind in the atmosphere, to join himself with the storms that always accompanied his anger or distress. But there was no storm to join—he couldn’t find the weather at all.

It was not just his dragonmark they had stripped away. He was no longer the Storm Dragon.

Ashara’s hands moved over Cart’s inert body, finding the damage, the places where the knots of magic that gave him life were broken. Eyes closed, she saw him as a tapestry nearly ripped to shreds, almost every strand of warp and weft broken in one place or another. It would be some time before she could make him fully alive again, but he was not dead.

It was a strange thing about the warforged, and something that the living armies of the Last War had often forgotten to their detriment. A human soldier dealt a mortal blow would die before long, his life ebbing out with his blood. A warforged, though, could linger in that state of unconsciousness—still alive, but so badly wounded that he couldn’t function—for days, weeks, or months. She had heard stories within her House of warforged who lay in remote battlefields for years, then were repaired and rose up ready to battle.

She wondered what Cart was experiencing as his body lay inert. The warforged didn’t sleep, so they weren’t accustomed to dreams. Would he dream in his unconsciousness? Or was his mind simply blank, unaware of the passage of time? She would ask him when he awoke at last.

It was hard to work in the little tent, with Gaven’s screams of agony in the background, but by nightfall she was confident that Cart would be up and around. Then, under the cover of darkness, they could flee. Together.

Gaven’s resolve had drained away, and he hung from his manacles again. Without the power of the Storm Dragon, he had nothing to rely on but a sword and a handful of spells—and he had no sword. Before the Sky-Caves, before Dreadhold and his Siberys mark, sword and spell had been enough. But now, against Kelas, Phaine, Malathar, and a small company of soldiers, his situation was hopeless.

Malathar gave the dragonshard back to Kelas without a word. Gaven had neither strength nor will enough to strain for another look at the stone, though he saw Phaine shift again in hope of a better view. Kelas turned back to the eldritch machine and returned the dragonshard to the new setting of glass and gems.

“Now,” he said, “we learn the true power of the Dragon Forge.”

He grasped two crystal rods that jutted out beneath the shard, and a brilliant light flared to life between them. Gaven couldn’t look at the light, but he didn’t need to—the tracings of the dragonmark, his dragonmark, now filled the enormous room. Lines of scarlet fire etched the ceiling’s arch and turned slowly as the machine rotated the dragonshard in its setting. A cluster of artificers flocked around the machine and manipulated its controls.

The sky rumbled with thunder, a brewing storm that had nothing to do with Gaven.

It was all around him, the mark he had carried for five years, the Prophecy that had been written on his skin but out of reach of his understanding. His gaze darted around the room, trying to take it all in.

The Storm Dragon flies before the traitor’s army to deliver vengeance
.

The storm breaks upon the forces of the Blasphemer
.

When Rienne traced his dragonmark on his skin, it had been only a vague foreboding, a sense that his end might come at the hands of the Blasphemer. Now it took concrete shape in his mind, spelled out in the breadth and depth of his mark.

But did it apply to him? Without the Mark of Storm, without
the Storm Dragon’s power, he couldn’t fulfill that part of the Prophecy. But if he was no longer the Storm Dragon, then who was?

A deafening clap of thunder made the soldiers cover their ears and even Phaine looked up nervously. Rain fell in huge, splattering drops, and shouts of fear and pain arose from outside, from soldiers and laborers seared by the acidic downpour.

I am the storm…
.

Gaven remembered losing himself in a storm over the Aerenal forest, fighting off a pack of beasts with his bare hands and summoning lightning to spear them. He made one more effort to reach his mind up into the storm, but his mind was as tightly bound as his hands.

My hands …? Gaven thought.

He looked at the manacle holding his right wrist and the chain that pulled his arm out straight, almost wrenching it from its socket. The chain disappeared into an extension of the forge machinery, presumably attached to the winch he’d heard.

Perhaps the manacles were constraining more than his body. Maybe with his arms free he could command the storm again. Or at least die trying to fight his way out of the Dragon Forge.

Once he’d been known for his strength. Especially for a Khoravar, he was mighty—his body had none of the slender grace of his elf ancestors. Whenever he was in Stormhome, delivering his latest cargo of Khyber shards for use in his House’s elemental galleons, he used to arm-wrestle at taverns, to Rienne’s utter embarrassment—and he never lost. He defeated Cart at the goblin wrestling game in Grellreach. Even without a sword, he had that strength to fall back on.

The winches creaked slightly as he began to pull. He glanced around at Phaine and the guards, but none of them paid him any mind. He’d become irrelevant.

He shifted his weight to his left side and was pleased to find some relief to the burning pain in that shoulder. He’d already created some slack in the chains. With one more glance around at his guards, he pulled the chain on his right. The winch groaned and pain stabbed through his shoulder, but the chain didn’t give.

Another clap of thunder shook the roof and walls, and sparks shimmered down along the metal walls to the ground. Kelas looked up for the first time, then looked at Gaven. He strode over to stare Gaven in the face.

“Did you do that?” he demanded.

“I thought you were making the storms now,” Gaven said. His throat was raw from screaming, and his voice came out a rough scratch.

Kelas’s face flushed with anger. “I am,” he said. “I made it. Did you make the lightning strike the forge?”

“Lightning is a willful mount. Sometimes it goes where it wants to go.” Gaven’s heart thrilled at the idea that he might still have influence over the storm, might still be able to control it. “It especially likes metal buildings.”

Kelas slapped him, surprisingly hard for a man half Gaven’s weight. “Before treating me like an idiot, remember who has done this to you.”

Anger flooded Gaven’s body, surging into his muscles and pounding in his heart. He would never forget who peeled the dragonmark from his skin. The winch on his right creaked again, louder, making Kelas wheel to look.

Just as Kelas called out—“Knock him out! Get him out of here!”—something cracked inside the forge and the chain rattled loose. Gaven yanked the chain free, grabbed a loop of it, and swung it hard into Kelas’s face, sending him reeling backward.

A needle of pain lanced Gaven’s shoulder and his arm went limp. Gathering more chain in his left hand, he wheeled to see his attacker. Phaine stood there, the very tip of his dagger stained with blood. Gaven glared—of all his captors, Phaine had managed to make Gaven loathe him most of all. He aimed right at the elf’s smirking face, but the chain, still attached to the winch, caught him up short. Phaine vanished into the gloom, then another quick stab of pain numbed his left arm.

“Do you like that?” the elf whispered over Gaven’s shoulder. “We use that to incapacitate people we aren’t quite ready to kill. Yet.”

Gaven’s foot shot out behind him, cracking into Phaine’s shin. He tried to tangle Phaine in the chain binding his legs, but the elf
stepped nimbly away. At least Gaven had the satisfaction of seeing Phaine favor his injured leg.

In a panic, Gaven tried to shake his arms, to bring feeling back into them or make them move, but they just swung from his shoulders, useless. Phaine vanished into shadow again, and Gaven spun just in time to see the Thuranni appear right in front of him. He jerked his head forward and down, smashing his forehead into the bridge of Phaine’s nose. As the elf stumbled back, clutching at his bloodied nose, Gaven kicked at his knee. Gaven had almost reached the end of the chain that held his left arm, but he just had room to bring his foot down on the prone elf’s neck—

His right arm jerked up across his chest, pulling him back and off balance before his foot came down. Kelas had hold of the chain, and Gaven’s limp arms now crossed in front of him, holding him firmly in place.

“Damn it, Thuranni!” Kelas yelled. “Stop playing games and get him out of here!”

Gaven threw his weight away from Kelas, yanking the chain from his hands. Some feeling was returning to his right hand, and he fumbled trying to grab hold of another loop of chain to use as a weapon.

A sharp jab of pain in his neck made his whole body go limp, and the world went black as he slumped to the floor.

Ashara laid her hands on Cart’s shoulder, giving him one last infusion of magical power, and he was as strong as when he’d come out of his creation forge. He watched her as she worked, bewildered by the attention she gave to him, by the concern in her eyes and the care in her hands.

“There.” She sighed. “Feeling better?”

“Why are you doing this? I turned against Kelas, killed Haldren—” The memory of what he’d done overwhelmed him. He killed the Lord General, the man he’d sworn to serve, the man he’d helped break out of Dreadhold.

“You really don’t know?”

Cart shook his head.

“You’re my friend,” she said. Then her brow furrowed, unsure of his reaction. “Aren’t you?”

Friend. Cart cast his memory back over the thirty years of his life. He’d been one of the first warforged, born as a slave to House Cannith and then sold to Aundair’s army. He was a successful soldier, not just surviving year after year of battle, but rising through the ranks to Haldren’s right hand. Soldiers had called him comrade, or they’d called him Captain. Haldren had described him once as his most trusted ally, and he’d included Cart when addressing his “friends”—but Cart knew full well that Haldren used that word to manipulate his audiences. Always in the plural.

No one had ever called him friend before, not really.

“I … I hope to be,” he said, and she smiled.

“Good. Then let’s get out of here.” She stood and held out a hand to help Cart up.

“Wait. What happened to Gaven?”

The smile fell from Ashara’s face. “I’m told the Dragon Forge worked perfectly, and that Kelas is very pleased with me.”

“Is he dead?”

“Dead? No, not yet.” She looked at the ground. “But the Thuranni has him in custody. It might take a while, but death will come.”

“I need to free him,” Cart said, getting to his feet.

Ashara sighed. “I thought you’d say that. But look where it got you last time. It’s far easier for you and me to sneak out of this camp than for us to break Gaven out of Phaine’s hands.”