City of Towers_ The Dreaming Dark - Keith Baker [1]
Trembling, the wizard looked up at the approaching stormship. He wove mystical patterns with shaking fingers, whispering words of unbinding and dismissal. As he finished the incantation a ball of flame fell from the sky, struck, and the world disappeared in fire.
Lei saw the fireball strike the center of the camp, and she wondered if Saerath had been caught in the blast. Alive or dead, he’d accomplished his task. As powerful as the stormship was, it relied on a web of delicate enchantments, and the abjurer had managed to disrupt this tapestry of spells. The ring of stormclouds wrapped around the waist of the ship buckled. Bereft of its elemental propulsion the ship plummeted toward the ground. The disruption was temporary, but it lasted long enough. The stricken stormship came crashing down, timber and bodies scattering across the Cyran camp. There was a gust of hurricane wind as the elemental was released from its bonds, and Lei staggered against the gale. But even as a ragged cheer went up from the Cyran survivors, a second wave of warforged emerged from the night.
Two of the enemy soldiers—a massive warrior with a long cleaver fused to one arm and a smaller scout with a dagger in each hand—reached Lei’s position. Like Saerath, Lei was a non-combatant. As a member of House Cannith, she maintained the warforged and other magical weapons that the Cyran army had purchased from her house. According to the rules of war, she was a forbidden target—and likewise, she was not allowed to participate in any violence. But the enemy wasn’t playing by the rules. Paralyzed with fear and surprise, Lei just watched as the soldier raised its razored arm. Having worked with warforged all her life, it seemed impossible that she would die this way. She saw her reflection in the blade as it fell toward her face, but at the last moment she was shoved aside by a small figure—Jholeg, the goblin scout. Behind him Cadrian, Donal, and Mal moved in to engage the warforged with their halberds. Jholeg grinned at her, even as he darted back in to stab at the construct’s leathery guts with his curved blade. He dodged a cleaver blow that would have removed his head, then made a quick thrust at the knee of the armored giant.
Lei had never seen warforged like these before. Despite their heavy armor, these ’forged moved with an unnatural speed, and they had strangely diverse set of weapons and designs.
“Get out of here, Lady Lei!” Cadrian shouted. “We’ll—”
His order was cut short as the ’forged’s cleaver sheared through his helmet and split his skull. Mal was next to fall, and as Lei saw his blood dripping from the blades of the warforged something inside Lei snapped. Almost without thinking, she walked up to the massive construct. Ducking under a blow intended for Jholeg, she reached out and placed her hand on the warforged’s chest. She concentrated, and time seemed to recede as her senses expanded. She could feel the layers of magic binding the myriad components of the warforged together, the mystical energies that gave the creature thought and motion. Since she was a child she had been taught to weave these webs, to create magical artifacts and bring life to the lifeless. Now, with Cadrian’s ruined face fixed in her mind, she hardened her thoughts into a blade and struck at the glowing core of the mystic web. There was a moment of timeless discontinuity, and then she was back in the battle. As she removed her hand the warforged soldier simply fell apart, collapsing into a heap of metal and stone.
Although the giant was down, the smaller warforged scout was still on its feet. Still covered with the blood of her friends, it danced straight for her like a ghastly silver puppet. There was a flash and a warm sensation across her belly, and she found herself falling to the ground. As the fires and the sounds of war grew faint, she was vaguely aware of a new group of people arriving on the scene, of the tiny