The Gates of Night_ The Dreaming Dark - Keith Baker [62]
“Halt!” The voice echoed around her, louder than any thunder. “All units disengage!”
The child’s eyes widened as her surroundings changed. Much of the cityscape was an illusion, which faded to reveal the true arena of Blacklion. The walls and rubble were obstacles fixed to the ground, and the ground itself was a carpet, designed to feel like soil but clearly artificial in nature. Before she could move, she was caught in a brilliant pool of light.
“Don’t move!”
A man in a blue doublet stepped out of the darkness. The girl didn’t know that these events were closely monitored, or that magewrights were standing ready to repair the damaged warforged. The man stepped back in surprise as the warforged soldier rose to his feet.
“What have you done, girl?” he said.
Young Lei had no response. She didn’t know the answer. She was overwhelmed by the experience, and even the elder Lei found that she had no memory of what had happened next. She had passed out, awakening much later to find that she was the youngest Cannith heir to develop a dragonmark.
“Out of my way, Banon.” It was Lei’s father, older now than when she’d seen him in Xen’drik. Age had made him harder, and his voice carried cold authority. The magewright stepped away from the warforged without question. Talin bent down and picked up his daughter. “Lei,” he said. “Are you hurt, Lei?”
The girl went limp in his arms.
“She’s sick!” he said. “Banon, examine this unit. I’ll take care of my daughter. And don’t breathe a word of this until I speak to you, is that understood?”
“Yes, master,” the magewright said.
Talin carried his daughter across the arena, and Lei found herself following him. Her thoughts raced. She’d passed out. She knew that. It was stress, the unprecedented manifestation of her dragonmark. That was what she’d been told, what she knew to be true.
But when her father touched the girl, when he picked her up … Lei had seen the moment of concentration, and she’d seen the mystic glow around his hands, out of Banon’s view. She hadn’t collapsed on her own. Her father had done something to her. But what? And why?
Talin made his way out of the war chamber and into a storeroom. This room was filled with props used in the arena, objects that could be hauled out and cloaked with illusion to become trees, walls, and other obstacles. Lei’s father walked to the back of the chamber. He glanced around, making sure he was alone, and then shifted his grip on his daughter and placed his right palm against the wall. He paused, and then he stepped through the wall. An illusion! Lei was drawn after him, passing through the seemingly solid wall and into the chamber that lay beyond.
It was an arcane workshop, as well equipped as anything Lei ever seen in a Cannith facility. One wall was devoted to alchemy, with a vast assortment of herbs and fluids spread around bubbling beakers, alembics, and other tools. Ahead of her, a pylon rose from the floor, a stone pillar encrusted with glowing dragonshards and mithral inscriptions; while Lei could not divine its purpose, there was no question that this was an eldritch machine designed to channel vast amounts of magical energy.
Talin laid the little girl down on a long stone slab set into the floor, a table covered with runes of divination and conjuration. He adjusted a flexible cold fire lantern, focusing a beam of light directly on the child. Five other identical slabs were spread around this operating theater, and Lei felt a terrible chill. She couldn’t remember having seen this place in waking hours, but she had been here in her dreams. When she’d passed out in the sewers of Sharn, when she