Matt Forbeck - Marked for Death

The warforged in the crowd gasped. Kandler winced at the knight’s words. It was just that sort of pervasive attitude that had kept the Last War raging for so long and which threatened to spark it up again. All eyes turned to Bastard.

Kandler readjusted his grip on the sword. He eyed the line carefully. It would take only a single blow to sever it, he hoped. Maybe two. He was sure he wouldn’t get the chance to try three.

The warforged leader raised the golden horn to his face again and spoke. “I will not repeat my offer. If you do not accept it, my titans will drag you down to your death. We will hang your remains from the front of our city as a warning to all who would impede our progress. Willingly or not, you will lend us aid.”

“You have your answer, fiend,” Deothen yelled. “No quarter asked and none given!”

Kandler readied his sword for his swing, then Bastard did something that surprised him. The warforged leader beckoned for the guards to bring Sallah to join him at the front of the leader’s box.

“In that spirit,” the warforged leader said, “allow me to demonstrate how we treat intruders in our city.” He reached out and traced a line along Sallah’s jaw with a metallic finger. “Those who come with nothing to trade but their lives.”

Kandler’s heartbeat pounded in his ears. He realized his hands were sweating, and it wasn’t because of the heat from Sallah’s sword.

Deothen shouted to the lady knight. “The Silver Flame will embrace you, my daughter. You have been a brave and valiant knight, and it will merge your light with its own.”

Bastard drew a massive sword from beside his chair and held it to Sallah’s throat. He drew its edge across her porcelain skin until the point rested in the hollow of her neck. Her blood ran red along the length of the blade. She did not make a sound nor shed a tear.

“Would you sacrifice your own child so easily?” the war-forged leader said.

Kandler’s face grew ashen. “That’s not his daughter!” he shouted. The words surprised him as they leaped from his lips. He grimaced at drawing attention to himself, but he pressed on. “He calls everyone that!”

Bastard looked down at the justicar. “He calls you ‘daughter’?” he asked without a trace of irony.

“No!” Kandler said, “He says ‘my son’ or ‘my daughter’.”

“And are you his son?”

Kandler looked up at the bridge of the airship and saw Deothen whispering something to Brendis as he wrapped his hands in a set of the leather straps along the rear rail. “No!”

“So you are not his daughter?” Bastard asked Sallah. As he spoke, he pressed the end of his sword into her throat. The lady knight pressed her lips together until they were white, and she shook her head.

“Do not deny me now, my daughter!” Deothen said. “I want this creature to know who is killing him and why!”

Bastard threw back its head and rasped out a laugh. “You see,” he said, pressing his blade against the lady knight’s neck again, “I am right.”

Kandler shook his head in confusion. This was one thing he’d never suspected.

“Father!” Sallah said. “No!”

“Now!” Deothen shouted at Brendis. “Full speed ahead!”

The airship lurched forward-straight at Bastard’s box.

Bastard dropped its sword, and the guards holding Sallah and Burch let their prisoners go and dove for their lives. The airship sped forward, her hull looming larger than a moon before the people on the box’s platform. Burch glanced around, desperate for any way to escape.

“Stop!” Bastard said through his golden horn.

The two titans hauled back on the airship’s rope ladder and mooring line, and the craft came to a shuddering halt. Deothen pitched forward off the bridge and went skittering along the deck until he came to a stop at the railing across the bow. Still anchored by the two titans, the side of the ship bounced off the arena floor shy of its mark, the ring of fire causing the wooden panels to burst into flames.

“More power!” the senior knight shouted as he scrambled to his feet.

The ship rose back into the air as she strained upward and forward, and Deothen reached out over the railing as if he wished for nothing more than to strangle the gloating warforged below with his bare hands.

Burch took advantage of the distraction to scoop up Kandler’s blade where it lay near his feet and vault down onto the arena floor. He turned and beckoned Sallah to follow, but Bastard reached out and snagged the lady knight by her sleeve.

Burch was about to race back into the private box when he heard a roar from behind. He looked back to see Kandler raising the blazing blade he’d borrowed high over his head in a two-handed grip as he dashed the few steps toward the mooring line. The titan next to the justicar spotted him coming and smashed at him with its hammer-hand, but it miscalculated Kandler’s intent and the blow went wide.

The vibration in the floor from the falling hammer might have caused Kandler to stumble, but he leaped into the air before the shockwave hit him. Stretched as far as he could go, the justicar slashed down at the mooring line with every ounce of strength in his arms.

The long rope snapped. The titan holding on to the loose end tumbled backward to the hole its hammer blow had just made. It tried to stop its fall, but its hammer-limb disappeared into the hole. There was a terrible crunching sound as the arm was twisted around under the moving city in a direction it was never meant to go.

The mayhem in the stands drowned out that noise. The weight of the titan no longer pulling it back, the airship darted forward and crashed into the stands like a meteor falling from the sky. As the ship came careening in, Sallah tore her arm away from Bastard, leaving him holding an empty sleeve of her shirt. Free from the warforged leader’s grasp, she dove out of the box and toward the arena floor.

The airship’s bowsprit lanced into Bastard’s reserved seats, and Deothen hurtled over the railing. He landed amidst the wreckage of the box. Only his armor saved him from being impaled on the collection of jagged boards on which he landed.

The titan still attached to the rope ladder sailed along after the ship, yanked off its feet by the sudden change in momentum. It crashed into and through the bottom of the airship’s hold, its top half wedged in the hole it made. Its legs landed in the airship’s ring of fire and were incinerated.

The airship’s restraining arches held, although they creaked with the effort. The lower arch broke through the arena floor like a plow cutting through a field. The stands beneath the airship burst into flames as the ring worked to reestablish its natural shape by turning everything in its path to ash. Burch grabbed Sallah’s arm and dragged her away from the fiery ring.

The warforged in the stands trampled over each other as they tried to escape the disaster. Some near the top opted to leap over the exterior wall to the platforms far below rather than brave the flames or the stampedes. Some of these crashed through the platforms to the earth moving beneath.

“Hey!” Kandler said, as he dashed up behind Burch and Sallah. “I think you have something of mine.” He held up Sallah’s sword.

Burch handed Kandler’s blade to him, and the justicar returned the sacred sword to Sallah.

“That’s a fine blade,” the justicar said.

An amplified voice called out from the burning wreckage of the stands. “To me, my people!” It was Bastard. “Kill the intruders! Save me! Save-! No!”

The voice stopped, and Burch led Sallah and Kandler around perimeter of the ring of fire to where they could peer through the smoke engulfing the stands. As they watched, two silvery forms came flashing out of Bastard’s private box, their polished surfaces glinting in the angry light of the airship’s blazing ring.