Unbroken Chain Read online

The cleric looked at him for a long time in silence. “No,” he said finally, and left the room.

  Natan locked the sickroom door behind him, though he sensed it was a futile gesture. If Ashok wanted to, he could tear the door off its hinges.

  The clerics set the litter with its burden on the floor.

  “Well, my lord?” Natan asked. “Do you believe he is a friend or a foe?”

  The body on the litter opened its eyes and sat up. Uwan stripped the fake bandages off his arms. “A rough beginning,” he admitted. “But I still believe the will of Tempus brought him here. He will serve Ikemmu.”

  “Or doom it to the fire,” Natan said. “He believes we are the enemy.”

  “Not surprising,” Uwan said. “You were right. He comes from the Shadowfell.” He looked at Natan. “We can’t let him leave the city.”

  “Keeping him here might be difficult, my Lord,” Natan said. “He gave his name, but he will answer no questions. It is only a matter of time before he attempts to escape.”

  “He was practically feral when he awoke,” Uwan said. His face turned thoughtful. “I lay in that bed because I wanted to get an impression of him, unfettered by any outside influence. I haven’t seen that reaction in a long time. I’d forgotten the desperation, the lack of control, how it transforms and imprisons a body.”

  “Like a hound himself,” Natan said. He hesitated then added, “But it seemed that he showed pity for Arnare in his fever.”

  “At last, something to thank the Beshabans for,” Uwan said. He picked up his discarded armor and donned the shadowmail vest. “We have to earn his trust by giving him ours. When he wakes next, give him food and let him leave the tower.”

  “Alone?” Natan said tightly.

  “I’ll send Skagi and Cree to watch over him,” Uwan said. He belted his greatsword at his waist and threw the black cloak of rank over his shoulders. Tempus’s sword cut the fabric down the middle in silver embroidery, the blade a phantom of the weapon at his belt.

  “What if he tries to escape?” Natan said.

  “I fully expect he will.” Uwan smiled. “It promises to be an interesting day.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  ASHOK DESCENDED A SPIRAL STONE STAIRCASE. HIS PRISON WAS A tall tower. At the bottom of the stairs there was a guarded door. A shadar-kai woman in plate armor with a helm and hood covering most of her features stood at attention beside the exit.

  Ashok hesitated, his hands aching for his chain and dagger. The familiar weights were absent, held by Natan and the rest of his captors, but they’d given his bone scale armor and shirt back to him, along with his boots and cloak.

  Natan had told him he was free to leave the tower. Did the cleric truly expect him to believe that they were going to let him walk freely out of his prison into the open air? His captors were playing with him, giving him a taste of freedom before they tightened his chains.

  He would make them regret their foolishness.

  Cautiously, Ashok approached the door. The guard stepped aside and opened the door for him herself. Momentarily stunned, Ashok recovered quickly and darted outside. The guard shut the door behind him. He stood alone in an unfamiliar courtyard, at the brink of a city for which he had only a name.

  His black eyes transitioned without effort from the light of the tower to the lantern-lit expanse of an underground cavern. Roughly twenty feet ahead of him were the remnants of a stone dwelling. Two of its walls had collapsed, leaving a small space and plenty of shadows to conceal him. Ashok ran to the dwelling and crouched among the ruined stones.

  From his hiding space he beheld a crescent-shaped guard wall in the distance, a thirty foot high stone barrier that abutted steep walls to the north and south. Shadows grew from the guard wall and moved—teleporting from one end to the other like ghosts.

  He counted sixty guards, though it was impossible to get an accurate number from such a distance. He knew of only one other shadar-kai enclave that occupied such a defensible position in the Shadowfell.

  Ashok reached inside his armor. Long ago, when he’d assembled the pieces of bone, he’d attached an extra strip of leather to the inside of the breast to form a pouch. Too small to hold a weapon, he used it instead to conceal secrets, anything he didn’t want his brothers to find. Now he removed a strip of soiled bandage he’d taken from the sickroom. Natan had left the cloth wadded up on the floor. He crouched and picked up a piece of blackened slate from the ground.

  Clutching the slate in his hand, he slid his finger along the sharp edge. It opened a small wound that brought a familiar, welcome sense of focus. It was not enough pain to set his heart racing or cause a surge in his veins, but even the small wound was a pleasure. He smeared blood between his thumb and forefinger, and used the latter to ink the number of guards and the height of the wall onto the bandage.

  If he could somehow lay his hands on parchment and true ink, he would be able to draw a map of the city. When he managed to escape, he could determine how far the city lay from his own lands, and how far down. The information would be useful to his enclave when determining how much of a threat Ikemmu posed. Once they had all the necessary intelligence, his people would gather, and together they would strike at Ikemmu with all the strength they possessed. Annihilating an enclave of Ikemmu’s size would be a triumph such as Ashok’s people had never known.

  It would bring them back to life again.

  He slid the bandage back into the pouch and cautiously ventured out of hiding. The guard wall embraced hundreds of the low, blocky stone buildings like the one in which he stood, some of which had been hollowed out or collapsed by fire. Others had been repaired and were now occupied. Smoke curled from chimneys askew, and torchlight brightened the narrow avenues between structures.

  The torches made Ashok pause. With their light it was brighter down here than on the plains of the Shadowfell, where the shadar-kai were most at home. There should be no need of torches.

  He saw figures moving between some of the dwellings. Ashok backed into the shadows and crouched down to observe them. A dozen or so were shadar-kai. Small figures moved beside them—dark ones, Ashok thought. The diminutive humanoids had ratlike faces and moved in quick, furtive spurts. They scuttled along behind the shadar-kai, watching for threats from the shadows and from each other. They dressed in black and carried long, curved daggers with black hilts. Some wore scimitars at their belts.

  But not all of the figures Ashok beheld were small. He fixed his attention on the other creatures that moved in the torch light.

  Warm-skinned, some dark and others light, they possessed strange eyes that were several colors at once in a face. They wore long beards, or none, and their flesh was smooth. Ashok tasted their scent on a sudden draft that blew down through the open end of the cavern—skin and hair redolent of wood smoke, food and sweat. But it was an odd, effusive smell—not the reek of a being native to shadow.

  The shadar-kai walked among the strange ones with weapons sheathed, but many did not make eye contact with the warm-skinned beings.

  Ashok remembered the lessons his father had taught him, about his own heritage and the races that existed in the world alongside the Shadowfell.

  A world he’d never seen.

  “Human, dwarf, tiefling .… ” Ashok whispered the names he could remember as his vision tried to adjust to their appearance. His prison was growing stranger and stranger.

  As Ashok watched the different races mixing together, he slowly grew aware of the rest of the city. The shadows and torch light grudgingly resolved themselves into movement, voices, and life. Ashok turned at the sound of falling water, and as he moved from shadow to shadow, coming around the side of the prison tower, his world turned with him and became something very different from all he had experienced before.

  Ashok looked up. His vision blurred in the smoke-filled draft, and when it cleared he could take in the truth.

  Not one, but four immense obsidian towers scaled the western canyon wall,
their tops nearly scraping the immense roof of the city.

  The towers rose over a hundred feet and looked from his small vantage to be almost as wide. Ashok could not begin to guess their true girth, or take in the scores of lights shining through open archways up and down the structures. The light-filled portals begged entry into the various tower levels, but Ashok saw the guards standing at each doorway. Their masked, armored forms clutched barbed spears hung with black and red banners—Tempus’s sword and a crimson shield. They spiraled up the towers, snapping in the constant breeze.

  “Gods,” Ashok said, and he laughed out loud in spite of himself. He stepped out of the shadows, spread his arms, and bowed deeply from the waist. “Magnificent!” he cried.

  When he could think again, he considered the numbers in his head. He’d descended a spiral stair ten feet, no more, in the tower he’d just left. There had been a handful of clerics and wounded on that level, and he’d counted six doors leading to others rooms that might have been filled with shadar-kai. And those were just in the towers. More structures filled the landscape around them.

  Ashok’s mind whirled as he considered the numbers. As many as ten thousand, he calculated, maybe more, but not many less. There was no knowing.

  “So this is Ikemmu,” he said. “City of towers.”

  He’d forgotten the sound of falling water. The tower in Ashok’s shadow was backed by a massive waterfall that slicked down the cavern wall, darkening the stones and ending in a large basin. The figures of dark ones, as well as the warm-skinned races, flitted about with jugs, collecting water and chattering at each other in the shadar-kai tongue.

  Overcome by the grandeur of the city, Ashok put aside his instinct to hide, walked up to the water, and kneeled. The others cleared a path for him and kept their gazes averted. Ashok cupped his hands in the water. He raised the liquid to his lips and drank. It tasted glorious.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow slide onto the water.

  Ashok sliced the basin’s surface with the flat of his palm, sending water up in sheets. Squeals and shrieks sounded the dark ones’ retreat, but the shadow dodged to the side. Ashok spun and kicked, but the figure that had approached jumped out of the way, and there came movement to Ashok’s left.

  With no other ready defense, Ashok vaulted the basin and stood to his thighs in the cold water, the stone lip a barrier between himself and two male shadar-kai warriors. The warrior on his left was armed with katars, while the one on the right held an elegant falchion. Hanging from his belt was Ashok’s chain and dagger.

  “You’re a skittish one, aren’t you?” the man holding his weapons said, not waiting for an answer. “We’re not here to ambush you.”

  “Just as well,” Ashok said. “I’d have killed you if you were.” Water flowed past his thighs, its chill biting into his legs and cooling his tensed muscles. “What do you want?”

  Amusement played across the shadar-kai’s gray features. “We’ve come to show you the city,” said the one with his weapons. He took Ashok’s chain off his belt and tossed it at him. Ashok caught the hand guard at one end; the other hit the water, sending wet spikes into the air. His dagger was held out toward him by the curved blade.

  Ashok stepped out of the basin, took the weapon by the hilt, and sheathed it. “Are you the leader here?” he said, his eyes taking in the belly of the canyon and the teeming city.

  “Not by long ranks. I’m Skagi,” the man said. He nodded at his partner. “My brother, Cree.”

  The other shadar-kai nodded at Ashok and grinned. He was smaller than his brother but quicker, Ashok thought, and silent in his black leather armor. It was Skagi’s shadow Ashok had seen first. By the time he’d detected Cree, the man might have had a katar blade in his throat.

  Ashok cursed himself. Too slow, fool. Your soul is on the block for the taking. You’re letting the city impress you too much.

  Ashok wound the chain and hooked it on his belt. “Why return these to me?” he asked.

  “Orders,” Cree said. “We’re to escort you around the city. Anywhere you want to go.”

  “Except the gate,” Ashok said.

  “You don’t like our hospitality?” Skagi asked. “We saved your life. It was our patrol that found you on the plain.”

  “I’ve never seen a lone warrior take on an entire pack of shadow hounds,” Cree spoke up. “How did you do it?”

  “Cree,” Skagi said.

  Cree laughed. “My brother wants to pretend he’s not curious, but he aches to know as much as I do,” he said. “How did you do it?”

  “They were going to kill me,” Ashok said. “No matter what I did, no matter how I attacked. Once I’d swallowed that, everything after was just good sport.”

  “For you or for the hounds?” Skagi asked.

  Ashok shrugged. “Both,” he replied.

  The brothers were silent. Skagi watched him appraisingly. Ashok saw he had dark green tattoos covering the left side of his body. The symbols looked like chains and spikes woven together in a complex pattern. Ashok couldn’t imagine how long it must have taken to complete the tattoo. In contrast, Cree had only two symbols that Ashok could see: curved blades above each of his temples.

  Capable warriors, Ashok thought. More captors sent to watch over him. Maybe he could use them to his advantage.

  Ashok turned and faced the guard wall. “Will you take me there?” he asked.

  Skagi and Cree exchanged a glance. “You’re mad if you think you can escape,” Skagi said.

  “Who says I’m not mad?” Ashok replied. He removed the chain from his belt and held it ready at his side.

  “Go on, Skagi, he’s testing you,” Cree said. He slapped his brother on the shoulder, but Skagi wasn’t paying attention. He was still watching Ashok.

  A breath passed, then another, and finally the tension broke. Whatever Skagi had been considering, he’d obviously made his decision, for he grinned and relaxed. “Fine then, if you want a look. Uwan said we were to take you anywhere in the city you wanted to go.”

  “Uwan,” Ashok said, after they’d started off. “He’s your leader?”

  “For almost as long as we’ve been alive,” Cree said. He pointed to the south, to the fourth tower rising against the canyon wall. Enclosed by an iron fence, the tower was carved up by doorways and guards, the same as the others, but in between them were carvings of Tempus’s sword. There were other pictures too: engravings of humanoid beings—not shadar-kai, Ashok thought, but maybe one of the other races he’d seen roaming the city. Vast wings sprouted from the backs of many of them. Even the ones that were barren suggested flight in some form or another, by the positioning of the carvings.

  Ashok’s gaze drifted up to near the tower’s top. Here there was a carved image of a single eye. Outlined in white, it stared down at the fenced tower yard and out over the city.

  It was not a large drawing, nor was it as absorbing as the sword carving he’d seen on the wall of the sickroom. Looking at it, Ashok thought it was out of place, hovering above the city, watching, waiting for something to happen.

  “Is that where Uwan dwells?” Ashok asked, pointing to the tower and its unblinking eye.

  “Most of the time he’s below in the training yard,” Skagi said. “That’s Tower Athanon,” he added, pointing to the fenced obsidian. He turned and looked to the tower where Ashok had awoken. “Tower Makthar, the temple home,” he continued. “And in the middle, Tower Pyton and Hevalor, the trade houses.”

  Ashok repeated the names and functions of each tower in his head. The warriors were young, like him, but too eager, too trusting. In his own enclave, they would have been killed long before for these weaknesses.

  They reached the outer wall. Guard posts had been set up at various points at the base of the wall and on it. Ashok counted slowly, keeping track of the shadar-kai moving along the wall.

  “Convinced?” Cree asked, breaking Ashok’s concentration.

  “Of the might of Ikemmu? Yes,�
� Ashok answered honestly.

  “Caravan inbound!”

  The shout came from the south. It was picked up by the other guards and carried the length of the wall.

  Cree turned his attention from Ashok. “How far?” he called up to the nearest guard.

  “Won’t be long,” came the reply. “They’re moving fast.”

  “Ready the gate!” came a voice.

  Ashok, Cree, and Skagi turned to see a woman standing at the center of the wall near the gate. Her head was shaved, and a tattoo like raking claws covered the back of her bare skull. She wore gray robes with black sleeves and gazed out over the wall, her black eyes unfocused.

  “That’s the Sworn of the wall,” Cree said, pointing to the woman. “Neimal the witch. She holds the flame. No one enters the city without her leave.”

  “Is she watching the caravan?” Ashok asked.

  “It’s eating up the last dirt before the portal down to the city,” Skagi said. “We open it and the gate ahead of their coming, so the wagons won’t stall outside.”

  “Makes the beasts anxious,” Cree said.

  “Horses?” Ashok said with a snort. “They should be better trained.”

  Skagi laughed. Cree shook his head. “You’ll see,” he said.

  They waited at the base of the wall. Ashok looked up. The wall was thirty feet high, just as he’d judged. A pair of spike-studded wooden doors and an iron portcullis comprised the gate. Ten guards with longbows on the wall surrounded the entrance, and five more stood on the ground, directing foot traffic off the main path into the city. From their side of the city, Ashok could see how badly damaged most of the stone dwellings were.

  “There was a fire here,” Ashok said.

  The buildings, even those that had been repaired, were little more than hovels propped up against the greater towers. Ashok noted the dark scars where fire had touched the towers, though that damage was not nearly as severe as that where the flames had raked the lower city.

  “It happened before our time,” Skagi said.

  “Before you were born?” Ashok asked.