“What kind of acid burns for hours and poisons the air as it does?”
They were at the entrance now, and Sabira handed Glynn off to Olog as she and Greddark waved the others through.
“A few of them, actually, but this is the only one I know of that burns green.”
The scratch at the back of her throat had become unignorable and she started to cough. When she’d recovered, eyes still stinging, she looked over at the dwarf. They were the last ones in the cave.
“So what is it?” she croaked, trying to clear her throat.
“A little something I created in my lab,” Greddark replied as they stepped into the passageway together. “It’s actually one of my biggest failures.”
“Why do you say that?” Sabira asked, breathing easier as they hurried away from the smoke-filled cavern. “It seemed to work great… well, except for a few unpleasant side effects.”
Greddark shrugged a little sheepishly.
“I was trying to make tea.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Zol, Barrakas 17, 998 YK
Tarath Marad, Xen’drik.
Back in the main tunnel, she and Olog shook hands.
“Olladra’s luck, Marshal,” he said.
“To you, as well,” she replied. “Take care of my people.”
“I will.”
She shook Laven’s hand next.
“Stay safe, Vadalis.”
“Cleave some skulls, Deneith.”
She grinned.
“I’ll do my best.”
After Olog led his group, limping and lorn, back up the tunnel and out of sight, Sabira turned to what remained of her own small group.
Greddark, Skraad, and Zi appeared basically unharmed, though a few small blisters had appeared on the wizard’s scalp. Rahm’s color was returning and he looked more alert. Xujil was unruffled as always. But Jester hung back, and though his face could bear no expression, he looked positively despondent.
She walked back to where he stood, staring down at something in his hands. As she neared, she could see it was the mangled remains of his lyre.
She stopped next to him and he looked up, his rubylike eyes glowing dully.
“She was destroyed in the chitines’ attack. She bravely took the brunt of a blow that would have disabled me.” He made it sound as if one of their companions had stepped between him and a strike at his heart, sacrificing herself to save him. Sabira supposed she shouldn’t be surprised-he was a bard talking about his instrument, after all.
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying hard to be, and failing miserably. It was a mindset she couldn’t really comprehend. A lyre could be replaced; the same couldn’t be said for the men who’d died today. Even if some of them had been trying to kill her.
Though come to think of it, she did feel worse about the lyre’s destruction than about Thecla’s death. And she could think of several people whose unfortunate demises would upset her less than, say, scratching the cheek of her shard axe would. So maybe she understood the warforged bard better than she thought.
“What do you want to do?”
“What good am I without her? If I can’t play, I might as well return to the Canniths and become the war machine they want me to be.”
“Well,” Sabira began slowly, “you’re welcome to do that, of course, and no one will think any less of you if you do. But consider this-is your goal to play the songs of others, or to play your own? Because the only way to write those songs is to live the stories in them. You can do that if you stay here. I’m not so sure the same can be said about returning to House Cannith.”
Jester looked as if he might be considering her words. It was so hard to tell with warforged.
“But… she can’t be fixed.”
“Maybe not, but would she want you to stop playing because of that?”
Sabira was starting to feel a little foolish, talking about the lyre as if it were the bard’s lover. But she’d lost three good swords in a little over a week; if she had to coddle the warforged to keep that from becoming four, then so be it. It wasn’t as if she’d never looked the fool before, and for less cause.
“No,” he said softly, the red crystals of his eyes brightening. Then louder, more resolutely, “No, she wouldn’t. She’d want me to go on, to honor her memory by living those stories and writing those songs, just as you said.” He squared his shoulders. “I’m in, Marshal, till the climactic battle and the convenient epilogue! I’m your bard.”
Sabira’s smile was a little strained, but she doubted the warforged noticed, busy as he was composing “The Ballad of the Marshal and the Martyred Lyre” in his head.
“Glad to hear it,” she said, turning to move back to the front of the group. Jester’s hand caught her on the shoulder before she could go. She looked back at him questioningly.
“Thank you, Marshal,” he said quietly, his voice earnest.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, uncomfortable with his gratitude and what she’d done to earn it.
Back at the front, she fell in beside Greddark and motioned for Xujil to head out. Zi and Rahm took up positions behind them, and Skraad and the bard brought up the rear.
“Touching performance,” the dwarf said under his breath, knowing his voice wouldn’t carry. “I almost believed you cared. Maybe you should think about taking up the lyre yourself. You certainly have a talent for telling stories.” Sabira thought she detected a slight emphasis on the word lyre.
“Stuff it,” she hissed back angrily. But as she walked down the dark tunnel, she wasn’t sure who her ire was really directed at. The dwarf was the easy target-he’d called her on her manipulation of the naive warforged. But she was the one who, despite her own distaste for being used as a pawn, hadn’t hesitated to do it to someone else.
Far, Barrakas 27, 998 YK
Tarath Marad, Xen’drik.
The next week and a half passed in a blur of shadows, sameness, and growing paranoia. The pervasive gloom coupled with tricks of light and sound had everyone on edge. The strange forces at work here in the depths- the ones, Xujil placidly informed them, that also made teleportation back to the surface an iffy proposition- manifested in new and fun ways at every turn. Pockets of magical darkness made both the everbright lamps on their helmets and their low-light goggles temporarily useless. Even when they could see, they couldn’t trust what their eyes told them. Sabira kept glimpsing movement out of the corner of her eye, multi-legged black shapes skittering across wall and ceiling. Once she even thought she saw something that looked like a cross between a lizard and a spider watching her from the shadows, but of course when she blinked, nothing was there.
Echoes sounded where nothing was there to make them, or returned to the group tenfold and distorted beyond recognition. The bland rations and water alternately took on the rancid taste of foul mud, or the coppery tang of blood. Some of the group had had hallucinations wherein the features of the person walking next to them had stretched and morphed into something evil and alien. Rahm had almost skewered Zi the first time it happened, and now none of them could stand to look any of their companions in the face, for fear of what they might see there.
The only ones who seemed to be immune were Xujil and Jester. The drow was a creature of Khyber, so it was understandable that its madness would not faze him, but Sabira was surprised at the warforged’s resistance. Was it something in the air, or the water, neither of which he needed to survive here? Or did it have something to do with him being a construct, and the pathways to his fabricated brain just different enough to remain unaffected by the phenomena the rest of them were experiencing?
