The Shattered Land_ The Dreaming Dark - Keith Baker [129]
For a moment they stood in silence. Then, slowly, she took her hand off his chest. “Where are the others?” she said at last.
“Destroyed or trapped below. It makes no difference. They will not trouble us again.”
Lei looked at him. “How? What defeated them? How did you escape?”
“I defeated them,” Pierce said, “though I had to wait for you to free yourself.”
Lei thought about the way Pierce had been speaking with the blue warforged, and an ember of suspicion flared up again. “I thought they were your new family.”
“I have a family,” Pierce said, “and you are a part of it.” He walked past her, and picked up his flail, replacing it in its harnesses. “Earlier, you said that you knew Harmattan. What did you mean?”
“I …” Lei paused.
She wanted to explain, but somehow it was difficult to force the words out. It had been a year since her strange dream, and she’d never mentioned it to Pierce. Somehow, when she tried to speak, her brain and her tongue just refused to act.
Pierce noticed her discomfort. “What is it? Are you in pain?”
“I …” Lei closed her eyes and collected her thoughts. “I had a vision last year, beneath Sharn. I’ve had others, since then. I … I think my parents may have created Harmattan.”
Pierce nodded slowly. “Why is that?”
“In one of my dreams … My father, he held up a piece of a warforged, a head. I remember him saying ‘This is how you defeat death.’ Harmattan keeps his face hidden, and when I saw it that once, it was battered and scorched, but it was him. I’m sure of it now. I don’t know how they did it, but my parents made him.”
“And they made me.”
She nodded, slowly.
“I have had one of these visions as well, but I do not think it was a dream. I think it was a memory.”
Lei shook her head. “No … my visions have drawn on current events, on my surroundings. They’re just dreams. They must be.” She remembered a jeweled blade poised above her eye, and she shuddered.
Pierce considered this carefully. “If not memories … what if these are visions of the present?”
“What?”
“Perhaps someone is watching us. Monitoring you from within.”
This is our daughter, not just another experiment!
The words echoed through Lei’s mind, but her mother wasn’t the only voice she heard.
All that is flesh must perish, her father said, we knew that from the start.
Harmattan hissed: You destroy failures. It is the way of your house, and I was not talking about humanity. I was talking about you.
“You said you saw Harmattan—as a severed head,” Pierce continued, “but he was built with the body of a warforged soldier. You were an adult when I saw you. Did you see Hydra in your visions?”
“No.”
“Yet in many ways, Hydra was just as strange as Harmattan. Would you have any idea how to create such a warforged?”
“No,” Lei said. “A personality spread between multiple bodies? I can’t begin to imagine it. The sensory input alone would overwhelm a normal spirit.”
“But you said you’d seen similar designs …”
Lei completed the sentence. “At Keldan Ridge.”
“You’re certain it wasn’t a Cannith forgehold?”
“At this point, I’m not certain of anything,” Lei replied, “but there were so many strange varieties of warforged there—economically, it didn’t make any sense. You don’t hand-craft warforged, and they didn’t have the house markings.”
“Can anyone else create warforged?”
“Not without the Mark of Making, no. Except …” Lei paused. “I’m sure you’ve heard the stories—that the secrets of the warforged are hidden in Xen’drik, that Cannith expeditions built the first creation forges using knowledge stolen from Xen’drik. My parents came to Xen’drik, too. The sahuagin guide on the Kraken’s Wake, he said something about it … ‘She wanted to find ways to improve the warforged, but she did not want to share this knowledge with her kin.’” And she spoke of her desire for a daughter, Lei thought, but she kept the thought within. “What if … what if there was