The Gates of Night_ The Dreaming Dark - Keith Baker [44]
“Ah.” Daine looked out at the river. “So … this isn’t the way we want to go?”
Lei ran a hand along the staff, which moaned softly. “We need to cross the river,” she said, “but … we can’t touch the water.”
“What then? Do you have the energy to teleport us?”
Lei shook her head. “It took all I had left just to create the light. Perhaps we should rest here.”
Daine glanced over Lei’s shoulder and saw a twenty-foot snake slip up into the canopy. “I don’t think this is the best place to set up camp.”
“There is a bridge,” Xu’sasar said. The shadows seemed reluctant to release the drow woman as she stepped out from the forest and into the moonlight. “I can show you the way. It has a fearsome aspect, but it can provide the passage you seek.”
“Fearsome aspect?” Daine said.
“Yes,” Xu’sasar said. “The bridge is alive.”
Pierce had said little over the course of the last day. Even as he had grown closer to his friends, he had never developed a knack for idle chatter. He preferred not to speculate. If he was uncertain about a subject, he held his peace unless he was ordered to give his opinion. And so he had been silent for much of this journey, doing his best to watch Lei and to make sense of the things around him. So far he’d had little luck. The memory of Indigo lying on the floor of the Monolith lingered in the back of his mind, and his thoughts kept drifting back to that battle. The conflict with the Huntsman and the boar had been welcome distractions, but he seemed to be losing something with every battle. Indigo had shattered his flail, a weapon that had served him well for many years. And now he had but one arrow left for his bow. Pierce was far from helpless. His fists and feet were made of steel, and he could crush bone if he landed a solid blow. But he had minimal training in unarmed combat, and he felt curiously impotent, as if he were a sword that had lost its edge.
The mark on Daine’s back was another threat he could not battle. He could sense Lei’s distress, but he had no power to help either of his companions.
The mark resembles an archaic form of the Draconic language but matches no known character, Shira told him. This unusual coloration and atypical design indicates that this is an aberrant dragonmark. Such things appeared tens of thousands of years after my imprisonment, and all that I know, I know from your mind.
Pierce could feel her ghostly touch sifting through his memories. Traces of thought rose to the surface—
A history of House Cannith he’d read while studying the origins of the warforged.
His battle with an aberrant half-orc who fought with a blade of fire.
And Lei, expressing her fears at finding these aberrants in Sharn. When Daine expressed ignorance about the mark, it was Shira who suggested its possible origin, the blending of Daine’s Deneith blood and the concentrated dragonmark he had consumed. But she could provide no insights into its power or what threat it might pose to Daine himself.
The magic in this place is too strong, she thought. It is painful for me even to look through your eyes.
We are blunted blades, Pierce replied. I have lost my weapons, and you have lost your eyes.
You are my eyes, even when I cannot share your vision. We are one.
Even as he found some faint comfort in this thought, Pierce was frustrated by the mark. Daine was angry, Lei was afraid, and Pierce found himself stepping between them. For all that he respected Daine, he had to protect Lei from any threat. Pierce was relieved when they began moving again, but the tension remained. Pierce did his best to set it aside, to focus on his surroundings and on moving with silence and grace. He kept his last arrow nocked, listened to the sounds of the night, and tried not to think of Indigo.
“That’s your idea of a bridge?” Daine said.
“You seek a path across the water, and the spirits provide,” Xu’sasar replied.
“Not very well,” Daine said. “How is that a path, exactly?”
Following the dark elf along the shore, the companions came to a slight