Haldren led them a short way outside of town, then gathered them into a circle. Gaven brooded as he walked, and the others seemed happy to share his silence.
“What’s our next destination, Lord General?” Cart asked. The warforged was the only one who didn’t seem subdued after the confrontation, and Gaven wondered what he had thought of Haldren’s threats.
Haldren didn’t answer. He seized Senya’s hand in his left and Darraun’s in his right and began the now-familiar chant of his spell without waiting for the others. Cart and Gaven quickly closed the circle. Senya clung fiercely to Gaven’s hand before Haldren completed the spell that yanked them through space once again.
They stood in a mountain valley, barren rock stretching up on two sides. The bands of red and gold in the cliff faces suggested that they had not traveled far from the Torlaac Moor with its outcroppings of similar stone. Haldren gazed upward at something behind Gaven, so Gaven spun around, pulling his hand from Senya’s grasp.
A towering ruin loomed before them, what had once been a grand city nestled among the mountains. A broken wall formed a ring at the head of the valley, each end blending seamlessly into a cliff wall. A gate was built into the wall on a massive bridge straddling a dry river bed. Colossal statues flanked the gate, mostly crumbled away but still showing traces of what looked like gnome features. The carvings were odd, and Gaven stared at them for a long moment trying to puzzle them out.
“Paluur Draal,” Haldren announced. “We are high in the Seawall Mountains now, in land claimed by Zilargo. This city is one of the most important ruins of the ancient goblin Empire of Dhakaan in Khorvaire. Scholars from the Library of Korranberg have explored and catalogued it extensively, but they say there are many secrets yet to uncover.”
“And what are we doing here?” Gaven said.
“We are looking for a map,” Haldren said. “Specifically, one that will point us to the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor.”
“So if this is a Dhakaani ruin,” Senya said, “why are there gnomes guarding the gates?” She was staring at the same carvings that had puzzled Gaven.
“Those carvings were originally hobgoblins, or perhaps bugbears. However, several races inhabited Paluur Draal over the centuries—kobolds, humans, and gnomes most recently. By the time the gnomes settled here, the original statues were worn to mostly smooth pillars, so the gnomes carved them again in their own image.”
“And where are we going to find this map?” Gaven said.
“We’re going to look for it, as I said.”
“Out here?”
Haldren didn’t answer, but started walking toward the gate. Cart followed on his heels, with the others trailing more slowly after.
Heavy drops of rain began to fall as they entered the ruins, forming tiny craters in the dry earth. Gaven glowered up at the slate gray sky with a sense of satisfaction. Anger brewed like a storm in his mind, furrowing his brow and hunching his shoulders, and the rain seemed like a proper complement to his mood. He flexed his hands and arms as he walked, itching for a fight—for anything that would let him give vent to his frustration. He was tempted to attack Haldren outright, but he doubted he could take the sorcerer, Senya, and Cart by himself. He wondered which side Darraun would take.
So intent was his glare at Haldren’s back that he barely saw the ruined city as they walked through it. He had an indistinct impression of stone buildings in varying states of ruin, none too different than what they’d passed in the fields outside Grellreach. They wandered along streets paved with shattered cobblestones and clambered over piles of rubble that blocked their way, and slowly made their way toward the cliff face at the back edge of the ancient city.
But Gaven noticed no details, took in none of the grandeur. His attention was solely on Haldren’s back, imagining his new blade striking the sorcerer down. Despite his rage, Gaven couldn’t swallow striking anyone in the back. He’d draw the sword, call for Haldren’s attention, give the man a moment—no more—to ready himself, then bring the blade across and down. No. A quick death would be too good for Haldren. Gaven imagined summoning the fury of the storm itself, lightning falling to blast the sorcerer’s smug grin from his face.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Gaven could feel the burning tingle of the storm coursing through him. He smiled and opened his mouth to call for Haldren—
A mountain troll emerged from a fissure in the cliff face. The troll’s gray hide was covered with warty bumps like gravel. It was three times Gaven’s height when it reared up, bellowing a rumbling roar, then it shambled forward using one rubbery hand to help it over the slippery ground, a splintered log held in the other hand.
At last! Here was the chance Gaven had been craving. The attack of the displacer beasts had caught him unprepared, the argument with Haldren had filled him with rage; but now he had a sword in his hand and a reason to fight. Gaven looked up at the enormous creature. A grim smile lit his face, and lightning flickered above them.
Then the creature’s smell—a mix of carrion and excrement—hit him and nearly knocked him off his feet. Gaven was glad for the sword in his hand but nervous about his lack of armor. He circled to one side and let Cart take the brunt of the troll’s initial charge.
With a word, Gaven made crackling lightning erupt along his elven blade. He ran forward, put all of his rage and frustration into his swing, and brought the sword around in a wide arc. The blade bit deep, and the lightning coursed up the creature’s body. It howled in pain. Gaven glanced behind it—and noticed two smaller trolls emerging from the cave entrance. Perhaps that first roar hadn’t been anger but a command, summoning the creature’s followers to its aid.
“More on the way!” Gaven shouted.
The mountain troll’s club came at him, and Gaven ducked, feeling the wind from the massive limb sweep over him. His attack had drawn the troll’s attention. Either that, or the creature was smart enough to recognize an unarmored foe as a soft target. Following the big troll’s lead, the other two moved in.
Gaven looked up at the trolls surrounding him. The big one was twice the size of the other two, but even the smaller ones were head and shoulders taller than him. Their claws reached for him even as the mountain troll raised its club.
Gaven kept his sword up, batting aside the smaller trolls’ tentative slashes and grabs. The trolls stepped back, and Gaven dodged as the massive club came crashing down. He knew he couldn’t outlast them in a hand-to-hand fight. They were too big, too fast, and too damned strong.
He focused his mind and chanted the syllables of another spell. Gaven’s body erupted in violet flames, and the rain hissed into steam as it touched him. All three trolls recoiled.
The mountain troll turned from Gaven with a grunt and swung its club hard into Cart. The warforged took a couple of steps back, then shook off the blow and renewed his assault. Senya darted around the mountain troll’s feet, finding its most vulnerable spots, the weaker parts of its thick, stony hide, and slashing at them with her light blade.
The two smaller trolls overcame their initial shock at the appearance of flames around Gaven, and one took a swipe at his back. The claws raked his skin, but the troll roared in pain as the violet flames engulfed its claws, searing its rubbery flesh. Both trolls backed away. Gaven brandished his sword with a roar of his own, and they scurried further back, unwilling to be seared by Gaven’s fire.
“Gaven!” shouted Haldren.
Gaven tumbled and rolled back the merest instant before an eruption of flame struck the trolls, Even so, it seared him badly—the flames around his body burned the trolls that attacked him, but did nothing to protect him from other fires. He got back to his feet in a fury. Haldren had cast the spell, he was sure, and didn’t seem to mind that Gaven had been caught in the blast. Despite his rage, Gaven had to admit that the spell had been effective. Both smaller trolls lay on the ground, their unmoving bodies charred black from the flames, and the mountain troll showed signs of serious injury. It could have been much worse.
Thunder rolled overhead, and Gaven leaped at the giant troll, channeling all his anger into each swing of his blade. It dropped to one knee, nearly overwhelmed, and Senya ran up its back to drive her sword into the base of its skull. The troll fell hard, throwing Senya to sprawl on the ground, but it did not move again. The fight was over. As Gaven tried to catch his breath, silence fell back over the ruins of Paluur Draal.
Gaven whirled on Haldren. “So what is it, Haldren? Are you dragging me along to help you on your fool’s quest, or do you want to get rid of me?” He stood nose to nose with the old man again, and grabbed a fistful of Haldren’s shirt. “Because if you want to get rid of me, I’ll go. There’s no need to kill me.”
“Don’t be absurd, Gaven.”
“Absurd? You nearly blasted me into the fires of Fernia!”
“Hardly,” Haldren said.
Gaven suddenly felt like a small child getting a scolding, and his anger boiled. He pulled Haldren up so his toes just dragged on the ground. “I’m not an idiot, Haldren.”
“Of course, Gaven.” No trace of fear came through in Haldren’s voice. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you, certainly not kill you. I simply realized too late that you had moved into the area of my spell. I did try to warn you.”
Gaven realized that his threatening steps toward the retreating trolls had taken him closer to the center of the fiery blast, so Haldren’s excuse might have been true. That possibility did little to diminish Gaven’s rage, though. He pushed Haldren away and stalked over to Darraun, who crouched on the ground beside Cart.
It seemed the troll had gotten one good blow in before it fell. Cart’s left arm looked badly hurt—or did it hurt? Gaven realized he had no idea if the warforged felt pain. In any event, Darraun ran his hands over the damaged arm, and his touch straightened bent plates and knotted broken cords back together. It was amazing and strangely fascinating—although, he realized, it wasn’t too different in principle from the way a healer’s magic knit flesh and bone back together. That was just a magic he was more used to seeing.
While Darraun tended to his injuries, Gaven traced a finger in a groove that ran through the stone on which he sat. He didn’t like to watch a healer’s magic when it was his flesh being knit together. A flash of light drew his eyes up to Haldren, who had just cast a spell to brighten the darkness inside the cave from which the trolls had emerged.
“Finished,” Darraun said, and he rose to join the others, who were gathered around the cave entrance, staring upward.
Gaven started to get to his feet, but the groove he’d traced caught his attention. He had run his finger along a straight part of the groove, but it was not straight for long—it traced the outline of Kraken Bay.
“Behold!” Haldren announced, sweeping his arm across the cave entrance. “The sixteen gods of Dhakaan!”
Gaven brushed a thin coat of mud away from the stone, his heart racing. He glanced up at Haldren, but the sorcerer was completely absorbed in the spectacle within the cave. He looked back at his work, smiled, and tried to sweep mud back over the map he had uncovered.
* * * * *
Darraun looked over Haldren’s shoulder at the cavern beyond. The cave might have been natural in origin, but the ancient builders of the place had carefully enlarged it, hollowing the ceiling and smoothing the walls. The debris of a thousand years and the more recent remnants of the trolls’ habitation littered the floor, but as Darraun’s eyes followed the arches up he realized that the grandeur of the ancient city was far better preserved here than anywhere else they had been so far.
Sixteen enormous figures stood around the far wall, their stone heads near the ceiling and their feet a troll’s height above the floor. Most of the figures were proud hobgoblins, dressed in archaic armor and carrying ornate weapons. Two loomed taller than the others, bugbears with their hairy hides and fang-filled mouths, and one goblin crouched near the center of the frieze, half the size of the burly bugbears. As Darraun looked, Haldren started naming them.
“On the left end is Norrakath the Hunter, who slew the great serpent and roped in the sea with its corpse. When humans first came to Khorvaire, they identified him with Balinor.”
Norrakath was a fearsome bugbear, leaning on a bow that seemed to be made of the bones of some beast—perhaps the ribs of the great serpent. He was a far cry from any representation of Balinor Darraun had ever seen, though the god of the hunt was sometimes depicted as a half-orc. Balinor smiled in every depiction Darraun had seen. Norrakath, on the other hand, snarled like a beast.
Haldren continued. “Beside him is Uthrek the Keeper. He was so fearsome a god of death that the early humans adopted him completely into their beliefs, though his Goblin name disappeared. He remains the evil god of death, the Keeper.”
Uthrek was so gaunt as to be almost skeletal, perhaps intended to be an undead hobgoblin. Darraun had seen the Keeper depicted in similar fashion, but he was more commonly shown as a grossly fat human, hungry for the souls of the dead and a god of greed as well as death.
“Kin to Uthrek, beside him is Korthrek the Devourer, likewise adopted into human myth as one of the Dark Six.” The god of the stormy sea was a hobgoblin with the many-toothed jaws of a shark.
“Next is Tauroc the Hammer, god of the forge. Obviously identified with Onatar.” Darraun was used to seeing Onatar depicted as a dwarf, but he could easily see the similarities between this hobgoblin smith and the burly Onatar. The god’s hammer, in particular, appeared the same as in many modern depictions of the god.
“Then we have Kol Korran, or I should say Rantash Mul, the Thief.” Darraun started in surprise—this hobgoblin bore no resemblance whatsoever to any depiction of Kol Korran. Perhaps modern humans valued trade more highly than the ancient hobgoblins did, because Rantash Mul was sickly, sinister, and unpleasant. Kol Korran, by contrast, was usually shown as fat and cheerful.
“Next is Dukash the Lawbringer, sort of a culture hero of the Dhakaani. I’m afraid we humans neutered him when we identified him with Aureon. His exploits as a hobgoblin are something to read about.”
Darraun could see the contrast. Aureon was the god of knowledge as well as law, and he was usually depicted as a somewhat frail, elderly wizard—sometimes even as a gnome. Dukash, in contrast, was the most vibrant figure before them now. He looked ready to leap out of the frieze, and his craftiness shone in his eyes.
“And now we come to the great mystery of the Dhakaan Empire,” Haldren said, pointing at the figure in the middle. Its body had the erect posture of a hobgoblin, though it was taller even than the hulking bugbears at either end. Its face, however, had been completely obliterated. “This god was the greatest of the goblin pantheon. When the humans conquered Khorvaire, they identified some goblin gods with their own gods—Aureon and Kol Korran, Onatar and the other Sovereigns. Six goblin gods worked their way into human myth as the Dark Six. This one alone was suppressed, forgotten, struck from written legend, and wiped from memory.”
A voice at Darraun’s shoulder startled him. “The first of sixteen.” Darraun had not heard Gaven come up behind him.
“Yes, Gaven, the first of sixteen,” Haldren said. “The Gold Serpent whom the world has long since forgotten.”
It took Darraun a moment to remember where he had heard the words before, but then he could hear the cold, clear voice of Senya’s deathless ancestor in his mind. Snippets of that strange conversation between Gaven and the undying elder flashed through his mind.
In the first age of the world, sixteen dragons transcended their mortal forms to become like the Dragon Above who had made them.
“Wait,” Darraun blurted, causing Haldren to turn and face him. “Senya’s ancestor said that sixteen dragons became gods in the first age of the world. So you’re suggesting that these sixteen dragons were the gods of the goblins, and fifteen of those gods are also the gods of the Host and the Dark Six?”
“Indeed,” Haldren said. “That is exactly what I am saying.”
“But why was that sixteenth god forgotten?”
“That is the great mystery of Dhakaan. It might be that the god was so closely identified with the Dhakaani that the humans obliterated any record of him in order to quell any resistance from the goblins they conquered.” Haldren paced as he spoke, and he sounded as though he were thinking out loud. “Perhaps they believed that wiping out all memory of the god would also extirpate all memory of the goblin empire. On the other hand, the words of Senya’s ancestor suggest that the god himself abandoned the world. Perhaps he stopped granting spells to his clerics. Or perhaps the goblins grew convinced that their god had abandoned them in allowing their defeat at human hands, and they themselves obliterated his memory. It could be that he abandoned the world because the world forgot him.”
“I’m still not clear on what happened with the other fifteen,” Senya said. “You said the humans identified some gods with gods of the Host, and adopted others like the Keeper? Those are the Dark Six?”
“Exactly,” Haldren said, putting a hand on Senya’s back. “As far as we know, the first humans to come across the sea worshiped nine gods—the Sovereign Host. They encountered the goblin pantheon of sixteen gods, and apparently they were willing to believe that they had lived in ignorance of six more. But those six were the most destructive and evil of the fifteen, the Dark Six, and they were made inferior to the Sovereigns.”
Darraun shook his head. “And all sixteen of these gods—the nine Sovereigns, the Dark Six, and the missing one—all of them were actually dragons who became gods during the first age of the world?”
“Correct. And according to the Prophecy, there’s a vacancy in that roster of sixteen gods. Khorvaire will have a new god—Vaskar, the Storm Dragon. Right, Gaven?”
Darraun looked at Gaven. He was staring up at the statue with its marred face, apparently lost in a trance. Then his lips moved, but no sound came out.
“What was that, Gaven?” said Darraun. “What did you say?”
Gaven’s voice was a whisper. “The Bronze Serpent seeks the face of the first of sixteen,” he said. His voice trailed off, though his lips kept moving.
Haldren stepped forward, his face purple with rage, and slapped Gaven hard across the face. “Speak,” he said, “so I can hear you.”
Strong and clear now, Gaven repeated his earlier words. “The Bronze Serpent seeks the face of the first of sixteen.” A wind stirred the stale air in the cave. “But the Storm Dragon walks in his paths. The Bronze Serpent faces the Soul Reaver and fails. But the Storm Dragon seizes the shard of heaven from the fallen pretender.” The wind swirled around Gaven, kicking up a whirlwind of dust and pebbles around his feet and whipping his hair around his face.
The color drained from Haldren’s face, and he took two steps backward, away from Gaven. “No,” he murmured. “The Bronze Serpent … Vaskar is the Storm Dragon! He must be!”
Senya grabbed Haldren’s arm. “But what if he’s not, Haldren?”
“No!” Haldren’s eyes were wild, and he stumbled backward. Cart took up a position between Gaven and Haldren, as if to ward his commander from an attack. Darraun stayed out of the way, watching and waiting to see how the situation played out.
“What if it’s Gaven?” Senya clung to his arm, her voice an entreaty. “Look at him—the Mark of Storm he wears. The wind blows at his command, the rain outside—”
With another crash of thunder outside the cave, the wind swirling around Gaven died. Gaven slumped to his hands and knees and stared at the ground, shaking his head.
“You old fool,” Gaven said, then lifted his eyes to Haldren. “Vaskar’s not the Storm Dragon. You’ve hitched your chariot to the wrong horse.”
Haldren found his feet and pulled his arm away from Senya’s grasp. “And you think you’re the one?”
Darraun couldn’t read his voice—it might have been an accusation, but there was a hint of genuine wonder.
Gaven scoffed. “The Storm Dragon? No. No matter what Senya says.”
The mention of her name made Haldren wheel on Senya. “You have betrayed me,” he whispered.
“I’m trying to help you,” Senya said. Darraun had expected her to cower in the face of his wrath, but she stood her ground and met his gaze. “Abandon Vaskar, Haldren. He’s doomed to fail. It’s not too late! If we work with Gaven—”
Senya broke off as Haldren turned his gaze back to Gaven, fury burning in his eyes. Gaven had dropped his head again and was staring at the ground. Haldren shook his head.
“No,” he said. He grabbed Senya’s hand and yanked her toward him, then reached out for Cart’s hand. “Take hands. We’re leaving.”
Cart took Darraun’s hand, and Darraun bent over Gaven, helping him to his feet and holding on to one hand. Senya gently took Gaven’s other hand in hers.
Haldren began the words to his spell, and Darraun found himself lost in the rhythm of them. He looked around the troubled little circle. Haldren’s eyes were closed as he focused on his spell; he was suppressing his anger in order to keep his mind clear. Cart stared impassively ahead. Senya’s eyes were on Gaven, her brow furrowed, and she clung to his hand. Gaven’s head hung down, and Darraun couldn’t see his eyes.
The spell built to its conclusion, and Darraun felt the first tugs that would carry them across hundreds of miles. In that instant, Gaven’s hand wrenched free of his. Haldren shouted the last syllable of the spell as if he couldn’t choke it back, and they were gone.