The Shattered Land: The Dreaming Dark - Book 2 (31 page)

“That won’t be necessary.” Lakashtai had arrived as soundlessly as always. “It may be a creature of metal, but it is still driven by thought and emotion. Let me see what I can draw from this shell.”

Daine kept his sword as Lakashtai stepped forward, the point in line with one of the creature’s crystalline eyes. She moved with catlike grace through the deep snow, and the thick flakes slid off of her cloak; swathed in pure black, she seemed to be a sliver carved from the night itself.

The warforged shifted its weight slightly. The pale light glittered on its bladed arms. “Pierce, Lei—if it moves, kill it,” Daine said.

“Be still, little one,” Lakashtai said softly, her eyes gleaming in the depths of her hood. “Stone and steel were not meant to move.”

The blades snapped down against the scout’s arms, and it did not move as she stepped closer.

“Your thoughts—they extend far beyond this one form,” Lakashtai murmured. “It seems we have something in common, you and I. Let us follow that path and see where it leads.”

The blades of the warforged fluttered in place, rising slightly only to snap back down again.

Snap
.

Snap
.

Snap
.

Lakashtai’s eyes were closed. She seemed peaceful, at rest, but after spending a week in her company, Daine could see the strain—the faint furrow of her brow, the occasional twitching of her lips.
She doesn’t want us to know her limits
, Daine realized. It might be pride; it might be a cultural tradition, but he knew so little about what she could do or how the psychic attack had affected her. Was there danger here? What was this battle he couldn’t even see?

Snap
.

A chill gust of wind blew snow in his face, and Daine blinked.

Snap
.

Wood sang through the air as Pierce and Gerrion loosed arrow and bolt. Any one of these shafts would have dropped a normal man but not the warforged. Its arms spread wide as it charged toward the kalashtar, and the impact of Pierce’s bolts barely broke its stride.

Lakashtai must have sensed its hostile intent in her last moments in its mind, and she tried to throw herself to the side, but she wasn’t fast enough. Too late, Daine realized the purpose of the creature’s disproportionately long limbs. It wrapped its arms around Lakashtai and twisted to face them, using the kalashtar as a shield

“I do not die after all,” the warforged hissed, “and you see no more. Drop weapons. I leave.”

The blades on the creature’s arms were digging into Lakashtai’s flesh, and blood dripped on the snow. Her mouth was twisted in pain, but she made no sound.

“Do it.” It was Lei. She stepped forward from behind Daine, her hands held out in front of her. “All of you. Throw away your weapons.”

Keldan Ridge
. Daine nodded and tossed his blades aside.

“You’re hurting her,” Lei said, slowly walking toward the warforged. “Let me take her and ease her pain.”

Crystal eyes watched her, peering out from around Lakashtai’s waist. “No. We leave. Perhaps she survives, returns. Perhaps not.”

“You can’t take her with you.”

“You are mistaken.”

“No,” Lei said.

She reached out, and her fingers barely brushed the back of a mithral forearm. There was no burst of flame, no flash of light. The warforged simply fell apart. Connective cords snapped. Razor-sharp blades scattered across the snow like fallen leaves, leaving spatters of blood in their wake. In an instant, all that was left were chunks of wood and stone scattered around a bloody kalashtar. Lei didn’t even look at Lakashtai; she was watching the light fade from the crystal eyes of the warforged.

“I’m afraid I’m not,” she whispered.

L
akashtai stood stiffly, refusing to surrender to pain. The blades of the warforged had torn into her skin where it had grabbed her, and a few of these razors remained in the wounds. Lakashtai carefully drew each blade out, letting them fall to the snow. She closed her eyes, breathing calmly and deeply, and the blood stopped flowing from the gashes. A moment later the clotted blood flaked and fell away, leaving smooth, unblemished skin. The only hints that she’d ever been hurt were the slashes in her cloak and the tunic beneath. Despite her stoicism, she shivered slightly as the wind lashed her pale skin.

Daine found the sight slightly disturbing for reasons he couldn’t explain. He was used to supernatural healing; the touch of Jode’s dragonmark had saved his life on many occasions, and Lei had crafted a number of healing charms over the years, but Lakashtai—what limits did she have? What else could she do? He dug his swords out of the snow and strode over to her.

“Pierce is looking for tracks, Lei’s studying the warforged, and Gerrion is searching the boat,” he said. “Did you learn anything from our little friend?”

“We must leave quickly,” she said. “Lei did not kill it—him. This body is just a fragment of what we face. There are others, and they know we are here.”

Wonderful. Now
warforged
are after us?
“Do you know what they want? Are they looking for me?”

“No. He did not know who you were, but there was recognition.” She glanced off into the snow, looking for the shape moving through the shadows. “Pierce. Only Pierce was of interest.”

He knew Pierce? Is that even possible?
He remembered that moment of hesitation when he ordered the attack and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold.

Gerrion jumped down from the deck of the ship. “Three dead on board. Stormreachers, all of them—guides and servants.” He smiled. “Less competition for me, at least.”

“Glad something good could come of it.” Daine said. “Lei! We need to get moving!”

She nodded and stood up, a scrap of metal in her hand. Before she turned around, Pierce appeared next to Daine, seeming to materialize out of the snow.

“It is difficult to follow any tracks in these conditions,” Pierce said. “The wind is quickly covering any traces of movement, but a group of people—five, possibly six—headed southwest sometime within the last few hours.” He gestured off into the blowing snow.

Daine found his hand was on his sword, and he forced it away.
This is my friend. He’s saved my life a dozen times
. As he looked at the metal mask that was his companion’s face, Daine felt traces of doubt.
He’s not human. He’s not even flesh and blood. What is going through his mind? Is this even Pierce, or could he have been replaced by some other warforged?
It was a ridiculous thought, and Daine felt vaguely ashamed for even allowing it to cross his mind; he could just as easily worry that Lei had been replaced by a changeling, but still.
Only Pierce was of interest
.

Pierce was still waiting for a response. “Good work,” Daine finally said. “Gerrion! If you know where we’re going, lead the way. If not …” He glanced down at the ruined corpse spread across the snow. “Well, it doesn’t seem to be a good day for guides.”

“Not to worry, captain,” Gerrion said with a chuckle. “I’ll see what I can do about getting you out of the snow. This way.”

The others followed Gerrion into the wind. They were heading south, and Daine was relieved to see that the path veered away from the trail Pierce had uncovered.

They were walking through a frozen jungle.

Vast trees towered above them, draped in thick vines and moss. Huge, tropical flowers were crusted with frost, strange blooms weighed down with snow. The cold was worse than anything Daine had ever encountered in Cyre, and the icy wind felt like shards of glass digging into his skin. His fingers were stiff and numb, and he prayed that he wouldn’t have to try to wield a blade before they found warmth.

“What did you find?” he called out to Lei.

He would have preferred to keep the conversation quiet, but there was no hope of whispering over the howling wind. Besides, who was he trying to hide from? Gerrion might have saved their lives in Stormreach in the first fight with the Riedrans, and Pierce—even if he did listen to any of these lurking fears, Pierce’s hearing was keen enough to pick up a whisper on a battlefield.

“I’ve only seen a warforged like that once before,” she called.

“… at Keldan Ridge.” He completed the sentence for her.

“Yes. It had none of the standard markers indicating the forge of origin, purpose, nationality, or anything like that. I’ve seen a lot of ’forged who’ve had those marks removed since the war, but that usually leaves traces. This one—whoever made it wanted to keep its origin secret.”

“Why would anyone do that?” he shouted, as the wind picked up.

“I don’t know! The whole design—it doesn’t feel right. It’s as if someone was playing a game, designing a warforged like you might craft a doll for a child, just to see how it might look with teeth and longer arms, but creating new designs is a difficult and expensive process. Once Cannith came up with a reliable design, that’s what they used. A few variant models were produced—the adamantine soldier, the smaller scout—but you don’t make a new warforged just to see what happens.”

“I saw you take something from the body—what was it?”

Lei rummaged in the side pocket of her pack and produced the scrap of metal. It was curved, and flat on one side. After a moment, Daine realized that it was part of the scout’s
head—a wedge of steel engraved with an abstract glyph, perhaps a letter in an alien alphabet. Every warforged had a similar mark on its forehead; Daine had always assumed it was a unit insignia or maker’s mark.

“It’s called—”

“It is a ghulra.” Pierce said, interrupting Lei. The warforged had been taking up the rear, and he had silently drifted up behind Daine. “The mark of life.”

Lei glanced over at him. “That’s right. Each mark is unique. No one knows why. It’s something inherent to the design, something shaped when the body and spirit are fused.”

“What do you mean, ‘no one knows why’?” Daine said. “Didn’t your people—House Cannith—design the warforged in the first place?”

“Well, yes …” Lei said, letting the sentence trail off.

“The true origin of the warforged is a mystery,” Pierce’s deep voice was clear even through the wind. “Many say that House Cannith scavenged the most important elements of their work … from Xen’drik, actually, that even Merrix and Aaren d’Cannith did not truly understand the source of the warforged spirit or how they had bound life to metal and stone.”

“You’ve picked up more history than I realized,” Lei said.

“I have been reading. The history of the warforged was a logical place to begin.”

Daine was still thinking about what Pierce had said. “If Cannith scavenged the knowledge from the past …”

“It could mean that there were once warforged in Xen’drik, or at least, something quite similar to the warforged. There may be much about my people that House Cannith does not understand.”

My people
. “Pierce, did you know that warforged, the one we killed on the beach?”

“I had never seen it before, Daine.”

There was no hesitation, and of course, Pierce had no expression to read. In a warm, well-lit room Daine might have been able to draw some conclusion from Pierce’s stance; even the warforged had body language, though it took time to understand it. If there was anything suspicious about Pierce’s behavior, Daine couldn’t see it.

“Lakashtai said that it recognized you.”

“That seems unlikely. It may have mistaken me for another warforged of my line.”

Perhaps
, Daine thought. He’d never seen another warforged soldier of precisely the same model as Pierce. He’d always assumed this was simply a factor of age; Pierce had been on the battlefield before Daine had learned to talk, but a few other thoughts nagged at the back of his mind. He remembered an encounter with Director Halea d’Cannith at the forgehold of Whitehearth; she had been prepared to offer five elite ’forged units in exchange for Pierce.
What did they want with one old ’forged?

Even as he tried to shape a question, they stepped out of the snow and into sunlight.