Skein of Shadows (2 page)

Harûn grunted, but didn’t respond. He kept his attention focused on the floor and ceiling, sparing an unfriendly glance at their Umbragen guide, Xujil. The black-eyed drow had come highly recommended by Brannan ir’Kethras, the Wayfinder whose money and persistence had been instrumental in unearthing the caverns of Tarath Marad in the first place. Apparently, Xujil’s people, a heretofore unknown
branch of the dark-skinned elves, had been looking for a way out of their underground home just as eagerly as Brannan had been looking for a way in. But while the Umbragen had come to the surface after a centuries-long exile, seeking new magic to defeat their ancient enemies in the depths, Brannan’s goals—like most of those of the members of the Wayfinder Foundation—had been a bit more mercenary. Discovering new cultures meant cornering the market on their artifacts, though the Wayfinder’s exclusive access hadn’t lasted long, and now he made the bulk of his money outfitting other people’s expeditions into the deeps, including providing guides like Xujil.

When it came to their guide, Tilde couldn’t blame Harûn for his suspicions. The drow spoke seldom and with odd inflections; he practiced disturbing, barbaric rituals; and he moved with an eerie, oily grace, as if he were made of the very shadows that had already housed so many horrors on this damnable expedition. First there had been the ranks of ghouls in the desert night, then bloody slimes that dripped from the cavern ceilings, subsuming and inhabiting the bodies of whomever their rancid ichor touched, and finally that unholy behemoth in the lake that had wiped out half of what was left of their party.

And then, of course, there were the spiders.

The eight-legged creatures crept and climbed at every turn, more and more of them the deeper Tilde’s group went into the vast network of caves. Giant hairy spiders, swarms of smaller transparent spiders, spiders with scales, even creatures that looked humanoid but scuttled about and spun webs like the arachnids that crawled all over them.
Dol Dorn
, but it was disgusting! Tilde was no shrieking
maidservant to be frightened of an insect or a mouse, but there was something so alien and repulsive about these deep spiders, with their creeping, segmented legs and their knowing, multifaceted eyes that she couldn’t help but shiver whenever she encountered one—right before she blasted it back into the depths of Khyber, of course.

Harûn didn’t much care for spiders either, going out of his way to crush the creatures underfoot whenever he saw one, even the ones that appeared harmless—if that word could truly be applied to anything in Tarath Marad. Xujil had tried to stop him from destroying a fat-bodied female, heavy with eggs, shortly after they entered the caverns, and the Blademark hadn’t trusted him since. Truth be told, neither had Tilde. The only thing spiders were good for was getting rid of flies, and considering bats like her little Shieldwing did the same thing without biting you in the process, there really was no earthly need for the abhorrent creatures at all.

As if awakened by her disparaging thoughts, a mound of fungus to her left began to tremble as she passed. The mosslike green growth sloughed off to reveal an egg sac ready to burst and release its chitinous burden on the world. Before Tilde could bring her own magic to bear, Harûn was there, stomping on the sac with his heavy boots, the look of relish on his face not unlike that of a child jumping in puddles after a welcome spring rain. Xujil looked back as the Blademark ground the pulpy mass into the rock, his dark face betraying nothing and his eyes too veiled to read. Still, the hairs on the back of Tilde’s neck bristled, and she vowed to watch the drow more carefully from here on out. As Ned had always loved to say, when dealing with
the unknown, there was no such thing as
too
cautious.

They followed the drow for an indeterminate amount of time through the dim tunnels, and the only sure evidence Tilde had that they weren’t actually walking in circles was the gradual disappearance of the omnipresent fungus. She’d become so inured to the monotony that the reason for the fungus’s absence didn’t register until Harûn called for a stop at the entrance into a small cavern, pointing down to a portion of the tunnel floor made of the strange living rock they’d seen several times on their journey. Marginally softer than the inanimate stone around it, the rock held only the faintest of impressions, but the Blademark could read them easily, even in the gloom.

“Footprints. Booted. A lot of them.”

He and Tilde looked up at Xujil expectantly.

The drow came back to where they stood and glanced down at the stretch of stone, which to Tilde looked no different than any of the surrounding rock.

“Sentries,” he confirmed. “We are below the City of Shadows. What you seek lies ahead.” He blinked at them, owlish. “Vigilance is recommended.”

“Oh, truly?” Harûn scoffed. “A Deneith is ever-vigilant, elf—and ever-vengeful.”

The old saying made Tilde think of her brother again, and she reflexively reached for the medallion at her neck. Made of thin gold, the chimera-inscribed disk had been Ned’s gift to her when he entered the Blademarks, leaving her alone in the big old house that had belonged to their parents. She was already deep in her own studies by then, and would leave for the Tower of the Twelve soon after, but he knew how the loneliness would weigh on her in the
meantime. He’d given her the necklace as a reminder, and a promise. If she ever needed him to come home, all she had to do was snap the thin gold in two and send half of it to him. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, the moment he saw that half-moon shape, he would return to her.

The irony being, of course, that it was he who’d needed her help in the end, and he’d had no medallion of his own to send. So he’d died in a cavern not so different from the one she stood in now, while his partner, Sabira “Saba” Lyet d’Deneith—the self-styled “Shard Axe”—had stood by and done nothing to save him.

Tilde tried to shake the dark thoughts from her mind, her lank blonde hair bouncing in response to the violence of the motion. She hated that thoughts of Saba were never far behind whenever Ned crossed her mind. If she could have erased the Sentinel Marshal from her memory completely—or better yet, from Eberron itself—she would gladly have done so. But like it or not, Sabira and Leoned had been inextricably linked, first by their partnership and then by his death, which had vaulted her to her position as both a Marshal and a dwarven folk hero. Tilde would never be free of the other woman until one of them was dead—preferably Sabira.

But she’d be the one who got there first, waiting to greet her red-haired nemesis in Dolurrh if she didn’t focus on the task at hand, especially now that they were finally getting close to their goal. In addition to the narrow time frame, the Prophecy fragment had also spoken of a treasure bound by eight locks that could only be opened by “a daughter of Stone and Sentinel”—a phrase which Breven had been certain applied to her, the last remaining scion of the ir’Thul
line, known of old as the House of Stone. His interpretation ignored the fact that her mother had given up the Deneith name when she married into the ir’Thul family, so Tilde was not technically a member of the House. And while that fact hadn’t stopped Ned from serving in both the Blademarks and the Defenders Guild, it had meant Tilde’s own studies had been relegated to the Arcane Congress at Arcanix. The wizards in the Tower of the Twelve would accept only members of the dragonmarked Houses as their students and teachers, and Breven had not seen fit to intercede on her behalf as he had on Ned’s. He’d said it was because he needed her eyes and ears in Arcanix, but in all her years there, both as a student and later on staff, he’d only ever asked her for information once.

She didn’t regret her time there though. In an odd way, she supposed she should be grateful to Breven, because if she’d gone to the Twelve, she never would have met Idris. A beautiful young elf too clever for his own good, Tilde had fallen in love with him immediately. He’d quickly become her favorite student, and if some whispered his affection had more to do with his desire to graduate at the top of his class than his desire for her, his tender words and gentle touch had made them easy to ignore.

But then he’d decided he needed to prove himself, the night before she was set to administer the Maze of Shadowy Terror test to him as part of his final exams. There, he’d fallen prey to one of the magical creatures inside, and by the time she’d found him, it had been far too late. She held him in her arms as he died, and then resigned her post the same night.

And had promptly been chided by Breven for it, the
first and only time he’d ever taken any interest in her teaching career.

Still, she was Deneith, in blood if not in name, and she served the House with honor, regardless of whether that service was condemned, rewarded, or acknowledged at all.

Which was another mental path that would only end in thorns. She shook herself again, causing Shieldwing to click at her in annoyance. She didn’t need to dwell on the injustices of the past; if she succeeded in bringing this artifact—whatever it was—back to Karrnath, Breven would have no choice but to recognize her as the woman whose actions had raised Deneith to preeminence.

Both Brannan and Xujil had assured her that the treasure in question was in fact a powerful magical device from the Age of Giants that would give its wielder control over the depths of Khyber itself, though neither of them had been very clear on what that actually meant. Xujil’s people could not use the artifact themselves—their own magical power came from a force they called the Umbra—but they wanted it removed from their enemy’s arsenal beneath the city of the Spinner, whom they also called simply “the She.” A service Baron Breven was more than happy to provide, since he desired to harness that power for the gain and glory of Deneith. They were already the greatest of the dragonmarked Houses on Eberron (or so Breven liked to claim), and the fact that the Prophecy called out their mark specifically was only proof that they were meant to be the greatest below it, as well. All Brannan cared about, of course, was his finder’s fee.

But none of them would get what they wanted if Tilde’s group wasn’t able to deliver the artifact to the surface, and
the worshipers of the Spinner weren’t likely to just hand such a prize over to them, no matter how politely they asked. So they were sneaking in through a series of tunnels Xujil’s people had discovered in their long war against the Spinner, but which they had never been able to utilize to any great effect themselves because the passages were simply too narrow to accommodate an invasion force. But while no invading army could use the close, labyrinthine tunnels to infiltrate the city, a single spy—or, say, a small party bent on thievery—might just be able to manage it without getting caught.

Tilde had been checking periodically for magical signatures as they traveled through the depths, using both Shieldwing and her arcane abilities to look for traps, hidden passages, and creatures lying in wait, while Harûn did the same with his more mundane skills. She had to assume the drow was doing likewise, since he’d helped them avoid more than one unpleasant encounter as he’d led them downward into the dark. But now, with the end of their quest so near, the sorceress drew on her innate power to enhance her awareness, not trusting to intermittent castings. So she wasn’t surprised when the small cavern they’d just entered proved to have no exit.

“Secret door?” Harûn asked as he felt the blank stone in front of them with one hand; the other was still wrapped firmly around the hilt of his sword.

Tilde shook her head.

“No—it’s just what it looks like, a wall of rock. But what we want is on the other side. I can feel it.”

The power emanating from beyond the stone must be incredible, indeed. Tilde felt like she’d stepped too near
a bonfire, and the heat would burn her even if the flames did not. No wonder Breven wanted whatever was on the other side of that wall. It wouldn’t just make Deneith the mightiest House—it would make it the
only
House.

“One of the eight locks?” the Blademark asked.

Tilde glanced at him sharply.

“Maybe,” she conceded. “But if so, it’s one I’ll have no problem unlocking.”

So saying, she reached into a pouch on her belt and withdrew a small handful of seeds. She spoke a word, drew in a deep breath, threw the seeds into the air in front of her face and blew out again as hard as she could. Propelled both by her breath and her magic, the tiny missiles slammed into the rock wall, burrowing deep into the stone until they disappeared from sight, leaving the gray surface smooth and whole.

Nothing happened for long heartbeats, and she felt Harûn shift impatiently beside her. Then an opening appeared in the stone, large enough for a gnoll to walk through unimpeded.

Tilde gestured to Xujil, who had stood by watching curiously as she worked.

“Lead on.”

The Umbragen hesitated for a moment, then inclined his head and stepped into the blackness. Tilde followed, Shieldwing alert on her shoulder, and Harûn took up the rear.

The passage continued for about ten feet, then opened up into another cavern, this one alight with the glow of unfamiliar runes carved into the walls at regular intervals. Tilde counted them swiftly, unsurprised to see that there
were eight of the purplish sigils, one on each wall.

Though the runes pulsed with a power of their own, it was nothing compared to that coming from a stone outcropping in the center of the room. On its unhewn surface rested a circular chest with no visible seam separating lid from base.

As soon as Tilde stepped into the room, Shieldwing catapulted from his perch on her shoulder with a high-pitched screech, careening about the chamber in crazed circles, slamming into ceiling and walls indiscriminately. Though Tilde couldn’t hear it herself, it was clear she had triggered some sort of alarm when she entered the room.

She pivoted on one foot, grabbing Harûn as he entered the chamber and pulling him bodily from the passageway she’d created. As the sole of his boot cleared the tunnel, she dismissed her spell and the wall closed off behind them, leaving them trapped in the chamber with no visible means of escape.