James Wyatt: Dragon war

"Shall I carry him?" Cart said, stooping down beside Gaven.

It seemed they were back in Dreadhold, standing over Gaven in the wreck of his cell. Aunn's eyes stung.

"Not yet," Ashara said. "We need a plan."

Aunn's mind couldn't handle making plans yet. Cart cleared away enough of the forge's debris that he and Ashara could sit on the ground near Gaven, and he started tracing a rough map in the sand. Aunn heard them talking, but his mind couldn't process their words. His eyes kept wandering to Gaven, to the wreckage of the Dragon Forge all around them, and finally he left them to their planning and wandered away.

The iron dome of the forge was open to the sky, torn asunder and strewn in masses of twisted metal around the canyon. The towering apparatus at the forge's heart had collapsed into a pile of rubble, half filling the trenches beneath it, scattered plumes of smoke and steam still billowing into the air around it. The camp that had grown around the forge was deserted, and its tents and structures were a shambles, torn up in the fury of Gaven's storm. The sky was clear and blue, the air perfectly still and warm. The shaft of clear crystal that towered over the end of the canyon, though, had clouded over into blue-gray stone, smooth and hard, only slightly out of place among the other rock formations of the canyon. The sense of malevolence that had spread from it was gone.

What of the Messenger? Aunn had felt its presence, too, like velvet whispers in his mind, reassuring him and guiding him. That feeling was gone as well, and Aunn's heart felt empty without it. He slid his hand absently into a coat pocket and felt the cool metal of Dania's torc against his fingers.

He drew out the torc and examined it closely for the first time. When he first brought it to Kelas, he had barely given it a second glance-professionalism, he'd told himself at the time, but the truth was that it hurt to see it. It reminded him of Dania's death, and pricked at his conscience. When it fell from the surface of the blue crystal prison, he stuffed it into his pocket and moved on to deal with more pressing matters, like finding Gaven. Now he held it up to the sunlight and took in every detail.

It was pure silver coiled into the shape of a serpent, about as thick as his thumb. It was hinged at the back, but the hinge was so well concealed that it seemed like a single piece of metal. Each one of the serpent's featherlike scales was carefully engraved, and two feathered wings were barely noticeable near the head, held close to the body. The glittering eyes were pools of quicksilver, somehow liquid but firmly rooted in the solid metal head.

Tiny black pockmarks dotted the edge of the torc, where the silver tracery had joined it and siphoned power through it to the Dragon Forge. He ran his thumb along their rough edges. His skin scraping against the metal sounded like the harsh whisper of the Secret Keeper.

The torc had been a gift to Dania-a gift of the spirit that imprisoned a different fiend beneath the earth in a distant place. It had appeared around her neck in a blaze of silver fire. As Aunn held it, it seemed that it had become a gift to him, the Messenger's acknowledgement of the good he had done. But still marked by evil, much like his own heart. He took a deep breath, pulled open the torc's hinge, and placed the metal around his neck.

Aunn couldn't say what he had expected, but what he felt was… nothing. The metal was cool against his skin, but quickly warmed at his touch. It fit him, which was a bit surprising since it had coiled close around Dania's slender neck. But there was nothing more, no sudden surge of power or great revelation. He ran his hand across the front and considered taking it off, but decided against it. There was a reason for the Messenger's gift, if that's what it was, and he would honor the gift and the giver by wearing it.

He turned and looked at Ashara and Cart, still sitting close and talking quietly. They no longer looked at the map on the ground, but at each other, and Aunn looked away, not wanting to intrude on what seemed like an intimate moment. Or would have, if Cart had been a man of flesh and blood. He looked back at them, but the moment-if that's what it was-had ended, and their faces were turned back to the ground.

Then his eyes fell on Gaven again, still curled into a ball, lost in his own mind. It was time to do something. He walked back to Cart and Ashara and sat down, facing them across the map.

"What is this all about?" he said.

"What?" Ashara's face was flushed, and her brown eyes glistened.

"All this." Aunn gestured vaguely around at the wreckage. "The Dragon Forge, House Cannith, the Arcane Congress, the queen. It's not just about the war, reconquering the Reaches, and it's more than just seizing power in Aundair, isn't it?"

"There's a great deal I don't understand," Ashara said, not meeting his eyes.

"It seems we all have fragments of information," Cart said. "We were all tangled in different parts of the web. Perhaps combining those fragments will give us a better picture of the whole."

"Exactly," Aunn said. "So-" He stopped. Cart and Ashara knew nothing about him or his role in Kelas's plans from the start. His first inclination was to extract information from them, stitch it together with what he knew, and keep them in the dark. To do otherwise could be a deadly breach of security.

But he didn't care anymore. He drew a slow breath. "So I'll start," he said. "I'm a Royal Eye. I've worked for Kelas my whole life." He saw Ashara's eyes widen, and he had Cart's full attention. "Kelas sent me to join your expedition to free Haldren and Gaven, and after Starcrag Plain I took Haldren back to Kelas. My main purpose was to bring Haldren around to where he'd help Kelas, instead of trying to seize the throne for himself. That done, Kelas sent me to the west, to the Demon Wastes-I think primarily to get me out of the way while he did whatever he was doing here. To kill me, most likely. But if I also managed to achieve my stated purpose, so much the better."

"And that purpose…?" Ashara asked.

"To provoke a barbarian warlord into attacking the Eldeen Reaches. Which I did." He saw in his mind the plume of smoke rising above Maruk Dar, and his voice faltered. "The goal was to give Aundair an excuse to invade the Reaches from the east, ostensibly to protect its own borders from the threat of the barbarians."

"Which Aundair has now done," Ashara said. "The war has begun."

"But they're not taking the threat seriously," Aunn said. "Kelas wanted a pretext, but he roused a dragon." Farren's words rang in his mind: I want you to make sure that a big enough army meets him soon, before his evil can spread far. Because of Aunn, the Maruk Ghaash'kala had failed in their sacred mission, to confine the evil of the Demon Wastes, to keep it from spreading beyond the Shadowcrags.

"You think the barbarians actually threaten Aundair?" Cart asked.

"I fear that they do."

Why did he say that? Farren's foreboding, Marelle's warnings, the verses of the Prophecy that Gaven had mentioned-Dragons fly before the Blasphemer's legions. They combined into a sense of impending doom, as though the approach of the barbarian horde spelled the end of the world.

Ashara shook her head. "They'll never reach the Wynarn, much less cross it and enter Aundair."

"Kelas was counting on the Dragon Forge to stop them," Aunn said. "We've destroyed that hope."

"We had to," Ashara said. "We never should have tapped into the fiend's power."

Aunn looked around at the wreckage of the Dragon Forge. "Weapons more terrible than their foe…" he said, and Marelle's pearl-green eyes shone in his mind. He could almost feel her cool hand on his cheek. "You built it?" he asked Ashara.