Son of Khyber: Thorn of Breland (32 page)

Daine rose to his feet. A ball of darkness was caught in his palm, flickering with bursts of flame. He took a deep breath and closed his fist around it. Then he screamed, a howl of pain as horrible as Vyrael’s had been. The lines of his dragonmark were truly burning, the flames spreading up his arm. Daine opened his eyes and stared at his hand, gritting his teeth to cut off his cry. His eyes widened with the effort of concentration, and the flames against his skin vanished. But the mark itself was still glowing with a baleful radiance, shining in the darkness. Thorn could see the mark spreading across Daine’s skin, claiming more space on his flesh.

“I have it,” he said, his breath slow and labored. “I … I’m in control. Find Drego. There is work to be done.”

Thorn nodded. She’d dropped Steel when she was wrestling with the angel, and she called him back to her hand as she ran to where Drego had fallen.

Something’s not right
, Steel whispered. Thorn’s
attention was on Drego. He was stretched out on the floor, badly burned but still breathing.

“Never trust an angel,” he murmured as she knelt beside him.

Lantern Thorn! I believe there is danger
.

“What is it?” she asked. She knew Drego had healing supplies, and she searched through his pouches to see if anything useful remained intact. She found a vial of cooling salve and began to rub it into his burns.

“If only I’d known …” Drego muttered. “I’d have tried this long ago.”

“Shush,” she said.

Fallen angels, also known as radiant idols, are a documented threat in Sharn. The Citadel has encountered such beings before—exiles from Syrania punished with imprisonment in our world
.

“So?”

Every one is different, but all share the same punishment. They cannot fly. The air is taken from them. You saw the chains on Vorlintar’s wings
.

“And?”

Vyrael was flying
.

“Get up,” she told Drego. Though he was hurt, the initial shock had been the worst of it. Just the few minutes of rest had done wonders for him.

Vyrael wasn’t chained. She’d said it herself:
I am the guardian of this gate
. Daine told her she was a prisoner when he channeled Vorlintar’s powers. Powers which caused doubt and despair, twisting the truth.

Daine was kneeling before the throne. He had produced a number of tools from the bag of holding, and he was assembling a strange device. At the center was the shard-studded sphere she’d seen before, but he was connecting it to a set of crystal-tipped tubes.
As she watched, his dragonmark flared and pulled away from his skin, momentarily forming winglike shapes along his back.

“What is that thing?” Thorn asked. Steel was in her fist.

Daine kept his attention on his work. “I told you. A weapon that will shut down all house operations in Sharn.”

A terrible thought occurred to her. “And how will it do that, exactly?”

He stood and turned to face her. She could see that his mark had spread to both of his arms, and shadows swirled within the crimson light. “This is the Cardinal Point. The heart of the connection between Syrania and Sharn. And this … this will sever that connection.”

“What does that have to do with the houses?” Thorn demanded. “They aren’t harvesting power from Syrania. That energy is what sustains the flying buttresses, and the skycabs, and the …” Her voice trailed off as she realized the truth.

“Yes,” he said. “When the connection between the planes is broken, the buttresses will fail. Skyway and the floating spires will fall onto the city below, and the remaining towers will collapse under their own weight. It will shut down all house enclaves in Sharn, because there won’t be any Sharn when I’m done.”

“Why would you do this?” she said. “You’ll kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people.” She could already guess at the answer. Now she understood the strange sorrow she’d seen in his eyes.

“There just aren’t enough of us,” he told her. “We can’t fight this war alone. We can’t defeat the Twelve. But this … this weapon is a Cannith creation. We’re deep underground. We’ll survive the devastation. And
when you take this weapon to the Citadel, when you tell them that Cannith is responsible, all of Breland will rise up in arms. All of Khorvaire will see the danger they represent.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t. I won’t be a party to this. This is Vorlintar, Daine, poisoning your hope within you. There has to be another way. A way that won’t kill these innocent people.”

“They have to see!” Daine cried, and once again the mark flowed out from his skin, forming the brilliant silhouette of angel’s wings. “Don’t you understand?
Cannith made this
. Perhaps I’m the one who will trigger it. But it
could
have been them. And if you ignore the threat, someday it will be.”

“But not today,” Thorn said.

There was no alternative. Steel was right; Daine’s mark had driven him mad. Her mission had been clear: Find the Son of Khyber and kill him if necessary. Daine was distracted. His sword wasn’t in his hand. She’d bury Steel in his right eye. She tried to throw—

And nothing happened. Every muscle was frozen. It was the same as when she’d fought Fileon. And the same spell Drego had used against her allies in Droaam.

“This is what has to happen,” Drego said, stepping forward. He seemed to have completely recovered from his injuries; his clothes weren’t even burned. “You need to understand. Try to remember, beloved. There’s much more at stake than Breland.”

In that instant, a half-dozen pieces came together in her mind. A corpse that vanished, without even leaving ashes to mark its passage. Drego’s arrival so soon after that death. Drego … a sorcerer of considerable skill, who seemed to have some talent for transmutation or
illusion. But most of all it was the way he said that one word—
Beloved
. Had Drego been Dreck all along? Was he just watching House Tarkanan … or had he been watching her?

She had no voice to ask the question. She called on Lantern discipline and raw fury, but both shattered against Drego’s mystic bonds.

“So it’s ready?” Drego asked.

“Almost,” Daine replied. “I just need the power of one more soul. One more outsider.”

“What?” Drego cried. “How do you expect to accomplish that now?”

Daine laughed. His dragonmark burned even brighter, and as he stretched out his hand, long tendrils of energy lashed out and wrapped around Drego, digging into his skin. “We’ve come to the end of the game. My mark lets me taste the souls of those around me. I recognized both of you as soon as you entered my presence. You’ve been a valuable ally, Drego Sarhain. And now you will give me the power I need to finish my task and fulfill my destiny.”

Drego writhed and twisted in Daine’s grasp, and suddenly he changed. He was taller, stronger—and he had the head of a tiger, deep black fur traversed with stripes of flame.

“You’re nothing next to Vyrael or Vorlintar,” Daine said. “But you’ll do.”

All the pieces suddenly fell into place. In Droaam, Drego had aided the demon Drulkalatar, the tiger-headed demon lord. Even in her dream, he’d hovered by the creature’s skull. He hadn’t been working for Thrane at all. He must have been Drulkalatar’s ally all along.

And even as she realized this, something else became clear. Drego had released her from her spell.

She didn’t hesitate. Drego howled as Daine’s dragonmark dug into his skin. And Thorn stepped forward and thrust Steel into Daine’s eye, slamming her free hand against the pommel and driving the blade into his brain.

The Depths

I
t was a perfect blow. Thorn had killed enough men to know that. But she’d never fought the Son of Khyber. Daine jerked, and Drego collapsed to the ground as the crackling tendrils released him. For a moment, Daine’s good eye focused on Thorn, and she saw that same look of sorrow.

He fell into her arms. At least, his body did. Daine’s flesh became dead weight against her, but as he collapsed, his dragonmark remained, a mass of pulsing crimson lines in the rough shape of a man. Ignoring Thorn, it reached out for the crumpled form of Drego, wrapping new tendrils around the stunned demon. Thorn lashed out with Steel, but the blade passed through the glowing dragonmark with no effect at all.

You’ll know
, he’d said.
You’ll know what you have to do
.

And in that moment, she did.

She reached out, thrusting her hand into the middle of the glowing dragonmark. She remembered Toli falling at her touch. Sorghan d’Deneith. And
she remembered the dragon in her dream, swallowing Drulkalatar.

And she pulled at Daine’s soul.

It was a bitter struggle. The thing she was fighting was more than just Daine. She could feel Vyrael’s burning rage and the despair of the fallen Vorlintar. And now that she’d proven herself a threat, the composite being had turned its hatred against her. Thorn could feel the power of the unbound mark tugging at her, seeking to consume her spirit. She’d managed to channel this power, but she still didn’t fully understand it.

But there was someone who did.

She thought of her dreams, of the gown in the crystal room, the great dragonskull, the dark reflection she’d seen in Far Passage. She felt the pain of the Khyber shard in her neck, and she embraced it, pulled it to her.

Time slowed to a crawl. Then the thoughts flowed through her mind.

What have we here?
It was a strange sensation, feeling another force think with her mind. It seemed as if they were her own thoughts, but they were filled with cruel joy.
Daine, Daine. I always knew I’d have you some day. And a pair of angels as well
.

The balance had changed. The voice within Thorn took charge of the struggle, twisting the dragonmark wraith’s power against it, cooling and crushing it with its own rage. And the instant its resolve broke, the force within Thorn
pulled
against it. Thorn felt a terrible sense of disorientation, and the shard in her neck burned.

The ghostly dragonmark was gone. Yet the force in her head remained. Now it struggled with her, seeking to push
her
into the stone.

You’ve had your time, Nyrielle. Now it’s my turn
.

It was a horrible sensation, as if all of her thoughts and memories were being compressed into a ball and crushed.

Don’t fight, girl. You can’t possibly match me
.

For a moment, she couldn’t even remember who she was. But there were things she could never forget, and she drew those out.

The face of her father when he returned from the wars.

The last time she’d seen her mother.

Lharen’s soft words in a darkened room.

And as she drew on these memories, she felt power growing within her. She forged her emotions into a vise, and she wrapped it around the alien presence in her mind. Slowly—too slowly—she forced it back into the prison of the shard.

And then it was over.

Daine’s corpse lay on the floor, the dragonmark gone from his flesh. The tiger-headed fiend she’d known as Drego was also stretched out across the ground, slowly stirring. Thorn placed one knee on Drego’s chest, and Steel against his throat.

His eyes opened. His features blurred, and now it was the handsome Thrane who lay beneath her.

“That won’t accomplish anything,” he told her, gesturing toward Steel with his eyes. “I can’t die. If you kill me, I’ll just be reborn.”

“Drulkalatar said the same thing,” she replied, running her free hand along the soft skin of his cheek.

He paled.

“Who are you?” Thorn asked. “What is this all about?”

He chuckled softly. “So you still don’t remember. You still think you’re Thorn.”

“I am Thorn.”

“You’re Sarmondelaryx. The Angel of Flame. The Devourer of Souls. Condemned by the Conclave of Argonnessen—and yet, they need you, if the Prophecy is to fall as they wish it.”

“And what does that make you?” she said.

“One of the true children of Khyber, born in the first age of this world. Not the mightiest of my kind, certainly. But cleverer than many with more power. I served the ancient Lords of Dust in the war against your kind—the war over the Prophecy, the struggle to shape the future. Then I met you. Or, I suppose, I met her.”

“And I suppose you fell in love?”

“I don’t expect you to understand. You’re just a child now. But you could be her again. Embrace the dragon within you. Embrace your power. Let us be together again and mock dragon and tiger alike.”

What he was saying was horrifying, and yet she knew it was true. The dreams, her senses, the way the fire wouldn’t touch her …

All gifts of Sarmondelaryx.

“No,” she said. “I am who I am.”

“For now.” Drego grinned, the same playful grin she’d seen so many times. “But every time you draw on her power, she grows stronger. It’s only a matter of time.”

“So I won’t use her powers.”

“You’re being used,” Drego told her. “How did you happen to be in the right place to fight Drulkalatar, and why were you able to transform in that battle? You’re a puppet, and you don’t even know who’s pulling the strings. Release Sarmondelaryx. At least she’s the mistress of her own fate.”