The druin favoured Clay with a sharp-toothed smile as he drew back his hood. His hair was long and fine, draped like silver cloth over slim shoulders. A pair of tufted, blue-grey ears sprouted from the top of his head. They were nicked and weathered, but still firm. Some of the older druins Clay had met—Vespian included—had sported ears that drooped like a hound’s. This one’s eyes were almond shaped, with crescent-moon pupils against orange irises. They were the eyes of a predator, though this fellow didn’t come off as particularly threatening.
“You startled me as well,” the druin told Sabbatha in common courtspeak. His eyes lingered a moment on the feathers cresting her shoulders before he addressed the others. “I don’t see many humans around these parts, as you might imagine.”
“What should we call you?” Clay asked him. Since the Dominion’s fall, the druins had become a largely nomadic people. They wore names like cloaks, oft-times casting them off in favour of something new.
The druin brightened. “I call myself Shadow.”
“What are you doing here?” Gabriel probed.
“I am a scavenger,” he answered. “Or a claw-broker, as I believe you call us. I collect whatever I find out here—old weapons, scraps of armour, skins, horn, bone—and I sell it in Conthas or Castia, whichever is like to offer the greater profit.”
Moog ran a hand over the bald spot on his head. “Well, I wouldn’t visit the Republic anytime soon. There’s a Horde besieging Castia.” He shot Gabriel a pitying look before adding, “It doesn’t look good.”
The claw-broker’s ears wilted like a flower dead of thirst. “Ah. He’s done it, then.”
“He?” Gabriel looked suspicious. “You know Lastleaf?”
Shadow nodded. “Of course. He and I were as brothers once, before …” he shook his head as if to dispel some troubling thought. “But he has changed, and is no longer a friend to our kind. He has spent years inciting rebellion in Endland, forging alliances and treating with dark powers, goading the Heartwyld’s inhabitants into a frenzy.”
“He certainly hates the Republic,” said Matrick.
“Not just the Republic,” said the druin. “Lastleaf despises any who mistreat the fey, and these days Grandual is as guilty of that as Castia ever was. I fear what is happening in Endland is only the beginning. I suspect he plans on opening the Threshold.”
Moog shook his head. “Impossible.”
“What’s a Threshold?” asked Sabbatha.
“The Thresholds were portals that allowed the Dominion to cross vast distances with a single step,” Moog explained. “Druin magic, extremely cunning. There were three of them, or so I’ve read. Great big arches wide enough to drive an argosy through. One was out west near Teragoth, another in Grandual—Kaladar, to be exact—and the last was somewhere to the east, though I’m not exactly sure where.”
“Antica,” said Kit.
Matrick scoffed. “Antica?” He looked to Moog. “As in the island old Doshi was always going on about? Is Antica real?”
“Antica was real,” Kit assured them. “In fact, its Threshold is still intact. Both are at the bottom of the ocean, however, and the city is infested with mermen.”
“Mer …men?” Matrick asked.
“What, you didn’t think they were all women?”
“Of course I thought that. Everybody thinks that.”
“Excuse me,” Shadow cut in. He gestured toward the sword strapped to Gabriel’s back. “Is that …Vellichor?”
“It is,” Gabe confirmed.
The druin’s reverence for the weapon was evident. “The blade used by Vespian himself to carve a path between worlds …”
“So they say,” murmured Gabriel.
“I’ll confess I was … disappointed upon hearing the Archon had given it to a human, but you seem a worthy sort. It would have been a shame for such a treasure to have been lost, or to have fallen into the hands of someone undeserving of its legacy.”
Kit’s throat made a gurgling sound when he cleared it. “A scavenger, for instance.”
Shadow paid the ghoul no mind at all. “May I see it?” he asked.
Gabriel smiled warily. “Maybe later,” he said.
His answer seemed to satisfy the claw-broker. “Will you be spending the night, then? I visit this fort whenever I pass through the Bone Marsh. It is as safe a haven as one is likely to find in the Wyld.”
Gabriel looked up, peering beyond the crumbling battlements at the darkening sky above. “Looks like,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Tamarat
“So these Thresholds,” wondered Sabbatha, “they’re broken, right? Or else why not use the one in Kaladar to reach Castia instead of walking all the way there?”
They had built a fire in the courtyard and shared out the meagre supply of rations Gabriel had wisely procured in Conthas before they left. As he had during every meal since departing the Boneface village, Moog grew sulky, lamenting the loss of his enchanted hat. The daeva’s question lifted the spell of melancholy in an instant.
“Well, they’re not actually broken,” he informed her. “They just … don’t work.”
“So they’re broken,” said Ganelon, which earned him a scowl from Moog and a sly smile from Sabbatha.
It had been days, Clay realized, since he’d felt the pull of the daeva’s uncanny allure. So far as he could tell, none of the others were affected by it, either. Gabriel, he supposed, was too focused on Rose to give a damn. Matrick was afraid of her, and the daeva wasn’t exactly Moog’s cup of tea. And Ganelon … well, the warrior wasn’t especially susceptible to enchantment. He could turn down a naked succubus if he had to—Clay had seen him do so, in fact.
“Well.” The wizard looked to Kit. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe each Threshold requires a keystone without which it will not open.”
“And let me guess: The keystones are lost?”
“Indeed they are,” said Moog, “or we’d have been to Castia and back by now.”
“And we’d have a Heartwyld Horde pouring out of the Threshold in Kaladar,” said Ganelon.
The wizard bobbed his head. “Well, yes, that too. So it’s probably for the best.”
Gabriel, who was sitting cross-legged by the fire with Vellichor across his lap, looked over his shoulder at Shadow. “You mentioned Lastleaf might try and open the Threshold near Teragoth. How?”
“Technically speaking,” said the druin, “not all of the keystones are lost.”
The claw-broker was kneeling near a breach in one wall of the fortress, striking flint over a charm made of broken twigs. He’d set a number of them around gaps in the perimeter, claiming the smoke (and no doubt a dose of druin magic) would ward off predators. When he looked toward the fire his eyes flashed like an animal’s in the dark.
Moog craned his neck to look at him. “They aren’t?”
Shadow finished lighting the last of his charms and trotted back into camp. He gave Gregor and Dane a wide berth as he did so, and Clay wondered if it was because the ettin was a monster or because Dane, having listened to his brother describe the druin’s ears earlier, had giggled and asked, Like a bunny rabbit? To which Gregor had replied, Exactly!
Shadow settled himself on the ground between Sabbatha and Matrick. His robes were changing colour as he moved, Clay was sure of it now. This close to the fire they were the pale grey of day-old ashes, mottled with shades of blue and pale orange.
He rifled through one of his dozen satchels as he spoke. “Well, Antica’s keystone was lost when the city was claimed by the sea, and the key to Kaladar’s Threshold was in the hand of that city’s Exarch when a slag drake swallowed him, so we can assume that it, too, was destroyed.”
A safe assessment, Clay mused. He had seen a slag drake only once, and if asked to describe it he might have said it was something between a giant lizard and a small volcano: skin like fire-glazed stone, and a mouth that opened onto an inferno and belched out globs of magma that could disintegrate steel. So yeah, it was safe to say that particular keystone was (like the Exarch who’d been holding it) long gone.
Moog leaned forward like a kid at a hearth-fire story. “And the last?” he prompted.
The druin sighed. He drew forth a handful of what looked like small black seeds, sorting through them with a pale finger. “Teragoth’s keystone is rumoured to be still intact, though setting hands upon it would prove somewhat … troublesome.”
“How so?” asked Ganelon.
“Because it is still in Teragoth,” said Shadow, showing his jagged teeth. “But so is Akatung.”