The Doom of Kings_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [38]
The station master appeared again. “We’ll connect your carts as soon as the train is unloaded. The coach departs again at the seventh bell this evening, but you’ll be able to board your carts whenever you wish.”
There seemed to be a consensus among the delegation that they would prefer to wait several hours on board the cart rather than go back into the city. Ekhaas was certainly in agreement. Besides which, the carts—or at least the cart that Tariic had hired for himself and the other senior members of the delegation—were remarkably comfortable. When the time did finally come to board, she heard Ashi gasp as she climbed up into the cart.
“By Kol Korran’s golden bath, this is amazing!”
“Stop staring, Ashi,” said Vounn, pushing past. “You look like a peasant in a cathedral.”
Ashi didn’t stop staring, and Ekhaas couldn’t blame her. The interior of the cart was as luxurious as a fine House Ghallanda inn, with thick carpets, soft couches, and cabinets of books and good wine. “Didn’t you travel to Karrlakton on the lightning rail?” Ekhaas asked.
“Not like this,” said Ashi.
“We travel as representatives of Darguun,” Tariic said. “The lords of any other nation would travel in the same way. To accept less would only confirm everything people like that merchant say about us.”
Other passengers on the southbound coach appeared over the course of the afternoon, settling into the passenger carts or waiting in the terminal until the coach was ready to depart. Together with Ashi, Ekhaas wandered the platform, peering into the other coaches and resolutely ignoring the hostile glares that many of the Thrane passengers directed at her. The Darguul soldiers had been settled into the two other private carts hired by Tariic. They traveled in far more modest conditions than the senior members of the delegation, especially the cavalry riders who shared a cart with their tiger mounts and the delegation’s baggage. The great tigers dozed in their cages. Ashi studied them with a healthy respect, going right up to the bars before stepping back.
“I wouldn’t want to face one of those in the middle of a battle,” she said. She looked around. “There’s a lot of room still in this cart. Couldn’t Tariic have hired one less?”
“The tigers need space,” Ekhaas lied. “No one wants to sleep too near a cage.” So close and still not able to tell Ashi the truth! She gestured. “We should go back to our cart. It’s almost time for the coach to depart.”
Precisely at the seventh bell in the evening, the elemental bound to the crew cart snapped and crackled into activity. Leaning out the window of their cart, Ekhaas and Ashi saw the ring of lightning that was the manifestation of the elemental’s power spitting and hissing around the crew cart. A shudder ran through the entire coach. On the platform, the station agent blew a last piercing whistle to signal that all passengers were aboard. The crew answered with a shriek from the coach’s whistle. As smooth as milk poured from a pitcher, the carts of the coach began to move, sparks of lightning arcing between their undersides and the conductor stones laid out in a straight path below. They moved slowly at first, and the evening lights of Flamekeep crept by, but as the coach left the city behind, it gathered speed until they were fairly flying through the falling night.
They would take it, Ekhaas knew, all the way to Sterngate near the border of Breland and Zilargo, the homeland of the gnomes, before