James Wyatt - Dragon forge

“What is?”

In answer, Farren passed his hand over the wall and tripped a catch Aric couldn’t see, and a section of wall detached from the rest and slid toward them. When it stopped moving, Farren pushed it to one side, revealing a tunnel descending into blackness.

“It’s a long tunnel. From time to time some burrowing creature stumbles upon it and uses it for a nest-we don’t patrol it very often. So be on your guard. When you come out, you’ll still be in the Labyrinth, but from that point, if you go left at every branch you will soon find yourself at the feet of the mountains.”

Aric nodded, peering down the tunnel.

“Aric. I have only shown this path to one person before, and I am still not sure I did the right thing. Please do not disappoint me.”

One person before-Aric knew in a flash of insight. “Vor,” he said. “Voraash. You helped him escape.”

Farren’s eyes shot wide and his mouth fell open. “How did you know?”

“I traveled here with Vor. He’s dead now-and Kalok Shash burns brighter. You did the right thing.”

Except that Vor killed your brother, Aric thought.

“I knew he had not truly fallen,” Farren said. “I knew his heart, just as I know yours. Go now.”

Aric struggled to find words, but Farren hurried him into the tunnel and closed the door behind him without another word.

It was time for a new face. He would emerge from the tunnel, and from the Labyrinth, a new person.

As he walked through the tunnel, he began by casting his memory over past identities. Haunderk, Faura, and Laurann-those were faces he had worn during his earliest training at Kelas’s brutal hands. They would not do. Laurann, though, whose grief at killing Kyra had been so strong, and who confessed to shame, made him think of other sympathetic women. There was Caura Fannam, the soldier who escaped Haldren’s camp with Jenns, then left him alone in the forest to die. No. Maura Hann, who had been a mother as well as a lover to so many foreign spies, coaxing secrets from them when she held them close. No. He thought of Rienne, the kindest and most caring woman he had known. But he had never been that kind of woman. He had bruised too many hearts.

Baunder Fronn. He could not believe that he had lived three months as a simple Aundairian farmer. No, Baunder was not the kind of man who would walk out of the Labyrinth alive. Auftane-no, he had betrayed Dania, taking the torc from her body. Dania ir’Vran-he had thought of her when he chose another name, Vauren Hennalan. Vauren infiltrated the Knights of Thrane and found their morality rubbing off on him-perhaps he’d started this whole mess, nurtured the first seeds of conscience in the changeling’s heart. Vauren had been unable to kill the unconscious dwarf, Natan Durbannek. But Vauren was still a spy, posing as a Knight while gathering intelligence about Thrane’s troop movements before Starcrag Plain. Still Kelas’s tool.

He had always been a tool in Kelas’s hand. It was time for a new face entirely-the face of a free man.

Tall-tall and proud. Like Kauth and Aric, but less bulky, less hard. Short, straight hair, dark but with a sprinkling of gray at the temples, distinguished. Brown eyes, warm-he would need a mirror to do those properly, but he sketched them in. Skin tanned from travel but not too weathered. He would retrieve a cache of money when he returned to civilization and use it to buy new armor and clothes, so his garb would match the nobility of his face and body. He liked this person already.

Now this noble figure needed a name. Haunderk Lannath, Auftane Khunnam, Darraun Mennar. Aura, Caura, Faura, Maura. He was not very creative when it came to names-they were all variations on his real name, with the AU in the first name and the double N in the last. Laurann only needed one name. Couldn’t he just be Aunn? No more secrets, no more lies?

“My name is Aunn,” he said aloud. “I am Aunn. No, just Aunn.”

Like Gaven-no family name. But Gaven was excoriate-he’d lost the right to use his name.

“I am Aunn,” he said again. “And don’t be fooled by my handsome face-I’m actually a changeling.”

He didn’t think he could be that honest.

It was better than the prison of the dragon-king in Rav Magar, but Gaven was no less a prisoner in Kelas’s camp. The shackles never came off his wrists, and his legs were chained to a stake in the ground as well as each other. He might have been able to pull up the stake, but Haldren had spoken some ritual over it to root it in the ground. He got some food and ample water, but he remained out in the open, day and night, and the midday heat was nearly unbearable. He tried once to shade the sun with clouds, but any time clouds began to form in the sky, his guards beat him savagely. His head felt like more bump than bone.

He barely slept, and when he did nightmares plagued him. Looking for meaning, he sifted through the scraps of dreams, but found only horror and despair. He dreamed of Rienne-he saw her killed in terrible ways, wrenched from his grasp by demonic figures, and transformed into a hideous aberration or a demonic creature. He always woke with tears in his eyes, facing the Dragon Forge and feeling the evil presence at its heart. It filled him with loathing, and he was certain that it was responsible for the nightmares.

With every passing day, the Dragon Forge grew. He caught some glimpses of the apparatus the artificers were constructing at its heart-a strange thing with moving arms and long levers-but the walls going up around it soon shielded it from his view. Upon a framework of arching beams, the workers built a structure that vaguely resembled a crouching dragon. They shaped a sort of dome to resemble a dragon’s folded wings, open at the back around the blue crystal and the cylindrical receptacles, with enough space for the dragon-king to enter there. At the end of a long hall stretching forward into the canyon, they built a dragon’s head, its mouth open in a small archway leading into the heart of the forge.

From time to time, a new caravan of parts and supplies arrived in the camp, sparking a flurry of activity and some confusion. Each time, Gaven watched for an opportunity to escape, some kind of opening, but his guards remained as vigilant and brutal as ever. Wagons passed right by him, sometimes sending him scrambling to avoid their turning wheels, but only his guards seemed to notice him at all.

The days and nights blurred together. Weeks might have passed, but he could not track the time. As the Dragon Forge neared completion, Gaven started piecing together the fragments of his dreams. He was quite certain now that he had seen this forge-completed, burning with dragonfire-more than once in all his visions. He remembered looking down into the canyon, being led down an iron hall, the heat and bursts of fire-and when he followed the memories too far, excruciating pain. The memory of the pain was so vivid that it made his flesh tingle, particularly on his neck and chest, around his dragonmark.

He dreamed of that hall again, entering through the arch of the dragon’s mouth. He descended amid clouds of smoke billowing up from the heart of the Dragon Forge. Chains bound his hands and feet, clanking against the iron floor as he walked, then stumbled. A hand on his shoulder steadied him. Then it was shaking him gently, and he woke to a dark night.

“Gaven?” It was Cart.

Gaven tried to sit up, starting his chains rattling, but Cart gripped his shoulder again to stop him. “Quiet,” Cart whispered.

“What do you want?” Gaven asked, too loudly.

Cart looked around nervously at the sound. “Gaven, please. If Haldren sees me talking to you-”

“He can’t make it any worse for me. The rest is your problem.”