Мэтт Форбек - The Queen of Death

When he jumped down to the main deck, Kandler saw that the burning pitch had clumped into little fires all across the bow. Because of the nature of the source of the airship’s power, the Phoenix had been magically fortified against flame. The blazes would not spread.

One of them, though, had landed on Monja. As the halfling burned, Te’oma knelt over her, trying to beat out the tongues of fire with her bloodwings. The pitch proved to be a stubborn fuel though, and it kept scorching the young shaman in its sticky grip.

Kandler smelled the horrible stench of burning flesh as he got nearer. By the time he reached Monja, Te’oma had managed to put out all the fires on the halfling, although many splashes of nearby pitch still crackled along.

“Is she dead?” he asked.

Te’oma turned her face up toward him—her own face, not that of Shawda or anyone else—and he saw nothing but desperation there. “I don’t know,” she said.

Sallah shouldered the changeling aside and knelt down next to the halfling. Monja’s skin had blistered all over—at least where it had been exposed—and large, black flakes already peeled off it in the wind from the airship’s rapid flight. For a moment, Kandler thought she couldn’t possibly be breathing, but then she let loose an agonized scream.

“She’s not dead yet,” Sallah said. “With the grace of the Silver Flame, I may still be able to save her.”

The lady knight put up her hands in supplication and bowed her head. She murmured a soft but sincere prayer to her distant deity, and her hands began to glow with a silvery light. As she spoke, though, Monja cries turned to a horrible, hacking cough, and blood started to spurt from her mouth.

“Hurry!” Te’oma said. “You have to hurry,”

Sallah gave no indication she even heard the changeling’s words. Instead, she finished up her prayer and brought her hands down to cradle the halfling’s crispy head.

Much of the hair had been burned off it, leaving only blackened scalp behind. Kandler guessed that the burned flesh might still be hot enough to scorch Sallah’s fingers, but if the lady knight felt any pain she showed no sign of it.

The silvery glow flowed from Sallah’s hands and engulfed Monja’s head. As it did, Sallah continued to murmur prayers to the Silver Flame, praising it for its mercy as she petitioned it for yet more aid for her fallen friend.

Burch came up behind Kandler and stood mute as he watched the halfling heal. “Damn,” the shifter said. “I’m about ready to thank the Flame myself.”

Kandler looked over at his friend. The shifter sighed and said, “Telling a friend his child is dead is one of my least favorite things.”

Kandler frowned, then patted Burch on the shoulder. As he turned to go back to the bridge, he said, “Then it’s a good thing we don’t know Duro’s father.”

When Kandler reached Esprë, she said, “We have to go back for him.”

The justicar squeezed his stepdaughter’s shoulder and shook his head.

“We can’t just leave him there,” she said, her voice rising as she spoke. “They’ll kill him.”

Kandler put an arm around Esprë shoulders and hunched down next to her. He spoke softly into her ear, to make sure she could hear him. “You see what happened to Monja down there?”

Esprë nodded.

“If we go back, that could happen to any one of us—maybe to all of us—and even if we got through all that, we’d have to fight our way through an entire fortress filled with elf warriors to even get near to Duro. That’s assuming we’re not already too late.”

Esprë looked like she wanted to throw up. “I—I know you’re right,” she said, “but I just can’t stand it. The thought of him lying there dead on the dock, maybe hacked to bits like—like Shawda …”

“We don’t know he’s dead,” Kandler said. “Valenar elves are a hard but fair people. If they capture him alive, they’ll bind his wounds and nurse him back to health.”

He didn’t mention that it would likely only be so that the dwarf would be well enough to stand trial. The justicar didn’t know much about the Valenar system of justice, but he suspected that Duro might find a death sentence to be getting off easy. A dwarf could live a long time, and even if Kandler had the fortune to die in bed with his boots on, Duro might still be rotting in Aerie’s prison when it happened.

He promised himself that once all this was over he’d come back to discover Duro’s fate, whatever it might be. He knew the odds against him being able to manage it were staggering, but he tallied it up yet one more mark under the heading “Why I Can’t Die Yet.”

“Thanks,” Esprë said, pressing into Kandler’s arm while still keeping her hands on the wheel.

“For what?”

“For trying to come up with a way to make me feel better.”

Kandler snorted softly and squeezed Esprë tight. “It wasn’t just for you.”

“You re still determined to sail for Argonnessen?” Sallah said.

Kandler felt like he’d had this conversation with the lady knight a dozen times before. She already knew what his answer to this question would be, and he didn’t feel like going through it all again.

He nodded and said, “As soon as we resupply.”

The sun had set long ago, and the stars and moons shone bright and clear in the night sky. The chill wind carried the scent of the distant seas on it and swept the stench of the remains of the burnt pitch away. A distant screech from an unseen hunting bird stabbed through the roar of the airship’s ring of fire.

Esprë had the wheel now, and Xalt kept her company. The warforged and she had taken a shine to each other, and the justicar had to admit that he couldn’t have picked a better bodyguard for the girl. Without the need to eat or sleep, little could distract Xalt from his chosen duties.

Burch and Monja huddled near the hatch that led to the hold. The shifter had built a small fire there, and he and the shaman sat on the edge of its heat, talking in low, friendly tones.

Sallah’s healing powers had brought the halfling back from the edge of death, and Monja had called upon her people’s spirits to heal herself nearly as good as new. Still, her fresh-knit skin shone red and smooth, like that of a sunburned baby. Despite her smile, Kandler knew she was all too aware of how close she’d come to death that afternoon.

Te’oma knelt near the fare, cooking the remains of a tribex that Burch had felled from the deck of the Phoenix just before dusk. He had spotted a herd moving along a stream in the foothills of the Endworld Mountains, and he’d ordered the ship low enough for him to kill it. The shifter had gutted and cleaned the kill before hauling the carcass back up on deck, and Te’oma then set to roasting it bit by bit.

The changeling steered clear of Kandler and Esprë most of the time. He saw her chatting with Burch and Monja every now and then. Te’oma and Burch had formed some sort of a bond during the battle against Nithkorrh, and Monja trusted Burch’s judgment completely enough to be friendly with the changeling too.

Kandler wondered if she might feel differently about Te’oma if she’d been around when the changeling had kidnapped the girl. The first time Monja had seen Te’oma had been when she’d been tossed from the captain’s quarters of another airship after Ibrido had all but killed her. The changeling couldn’t have looked less menacing at the time.

It had been Monja who’d brought Te’oma back from the brink of death. This seemed to have forged a bond between them, despite the fact that Kandler had only wanted the changeling to be healed so she could tell him where his daughter was. Once the furor had died down, Te’oma had expressed true gratitude toward Monja, and the halfling had basked in the appreciation.