The Exalting

by Dan Allen

  Dana let the wood drop.

  A deep moan issued from deeper in the pile. The men would soon find their way out.

  “Mercy, Forz—I’m so sorry.”

  Shaking with pain, Forz’s face wrenched into an expression that tore Dana up inside. “I’ll never walk again.”

  “Don’t say that.” Dana ran her hand through his hair. “I have to go—but I’ll come back. I’ll fix your leg. I promise.”

  Forz’s answer was a scream of pain.

  People would hear it. They would be coming.

  Dana lifted the shoulder bag with the mechanodron and ran to the back of the shop. She pulled back the lock pin and raced into the back alley.

  How had they known where she was?

  They had come too quickly for somebody to have gotten the information out of Brista.

  Unless her family had gone to the civic guard.

  Never. They would never have betrayed me.

  It could only have been the Vetas-kazen. Had they dressed as Norrian rangers and tipped off the civic guard? Were they already in the city searching Brista’s attic room?

  With Vetas-ka’s fleet approaching, Dana had to get back to Shoul Falls, and quickly. But first she had to hide somewhere the Vetas-kazen would never look. Then she could make the direct journey to Shoul Falls by night.

  But carrying the thirty-pound mechanodron in a sack, she wasn’t going to get far. She needed somewhere close, somewhere nobody ever went.

  The answer came from the clanging of the chapel bell.

  Rest day. The sayathenite mines are closed.

  I can hide in a mine.

  Dana slowed as she approached the back entrance of the city. A single guard manned the post.

  “Worst meditation ever,” Dana mumbled. “Glad I snuck out for a picnic.” That would explain her heavy bag.

  “I hear ya,” said the guard. “Almost glad I’m on duty.”

  He didn’t keep a register of everyone who went in and out. Nobody would ever read the thing. He only had to note anything out of the ordinary.

  A teenager skipping out of meditation—that was the epitome of normal.

  And I have blond hair. He didn’t recognize me.

  Dana walked until she was out of earshot and then forced her aching muscles to run uphill while shouldering the awkward benchtop mechanodron.

  “Why didn’t I steal another greeder?”

  But a teen sneaking out on a greeder would have been highly out-of-the-ordinary.

  Thanks to the ban on logging within a half mile of the city, the tall, purple pines provided fantastic cover. But the further she went, the more anxious she felt.

  Forz could be a cripple because of her. He was in excruciating pain, and there was nothing she could do about it. With luck, he could claim it was an accident, and the civic guard wouldn’t blame him for the collapse—obviously he was hurt, too.

  I just left him there.

  Perhaps he could train a mechanodron leg brace. Of course he would. But how would he live a normal life? Was his future destroyed? Would Brista still want him if he was maimed and helpless?

  She would. But every night he would take off his brace and rub his aching leg remembering the times when he could walk through the hills as he pleased.

  At seventeen, part of his future had already faded.

  “What have I done?”

  Dana hadn’t just risked her life in coming back to Norr. She had risked her friends as well.

  Why did I take the stone?

  Why?

  Shock and terror drove Dana on toward the sayathenite mines. The oldest mines in the mountain’s massive complex of limestone caverns were only a mile from the city. Following the miner’s road into the south fork canyon, she came to the first of the caverns. It was no longer in operation—either mined out or too dangerous.

  Perfect.

  Dana climbed over the locked gate and its warning sign, then improvised several torches from branches of bushes. She bound them with old wire lying on the ground and carried them inside the cave before lighting the first with her knife and flint. She pushed ahead into the darkness, following the mineshaft as it descended. A hundred and fifty feet later, she came to a pool.

  Colorful limestone stalagmites rose out of the pool, scintillating in the flickering light of her torch. Ages ago an animal had carried a bloodstone into this cave system. Here, where roots from the surface wound through coral and dipped into the pool, trading nutrients for water, the organisms had somehow found a way to survive. The pool undoubtedly hosted a sayathi colony or the miners looking for sayathenite would not have come this way. Wading into the pools to recover sayathenite was dangerous business. But with the right breathing mask and protective gear, the Norrians had built an entire economy based on it.

  Dana stepped closer to the water, wondering if she could sense the sayathi in the pool. A rock caught her boot, and she pitched forward, dropping the torch as she reached out to stop her fall.

  The torch sizzled as it touched the water.

  In the darkness Dana realized four things almost instantly. First, her wrist stung. She had fallen onto the sharp edge of the mined coral and cut it. Second, to her horror—her hand had landed in the pool. Her wrist was underwater.

  Terror at dying like the poor greeder flooded her.

  But her arm was glowing.

  “What? That’s impossible.”

  Sayathi only glowed when they sensed their own colony.

  She scampered back from the edge of the pool.

  Dana checked the cut on her wrist. It had already sealed.

  “They’re not attacking—they’re healing me.” Dana shook her head “How?”

  She was forty miles, at least, from Shoul Falls, though roughly at a similar elevation.

  Dana thought back to the day she had visited the Sayathi Sea where the colonies perennially waged war, trying to conquer the others. Had the colony somehow spread itself inside the mountain?

  If so, this was the largest colony on the planet. It could force any minor colony to submit by sheer force of numbers.

  Does Vetas-ka know? Or did he just come for an unclaimed bloodstone?

  Was this colony large enough to withstand the ruling sayathi of Vetas-ka’s bloodstone? Would it believe it could survive the fight?

  This colony’s crystalline electrical conduits ran through the entire mountain. It knew its strength.

  Dana’s sifa trembled. She moved to the edge of the pool, lifted the bloodstone out of her pocket, and held it out over the water.

  The water near Dana lit with enough blue-green light to show the roof of the chamber overhead. The sayathi sensed their bloodstone, pouring their energy into it, feeding the ruling sayathi organisms bound within the crystal.

  Pulses of light ran along the floor of pool toward her, attempting to connect to the bloodstone.

  Dana dipped the stone in the cool water and touched it to one of the coral veins. Pulses ran out instantly, disappearing into the darkness of the cave.

  Dana smiled as she imagined the electrical signals from the bloodstone arriving in Shoul Falls forty miles away. “Hey, guys. Headquarters moved.”

  Dana lifted the stone and slid it back into her pocket, then she leaned close and dared to drink from the pool.

  She felt nothing.

  It is my colony.

  In awe, she sat back against the rock wall. This was possibly the largest sayathenite colony on Xahna.

  But this cave had been mined by Norrians for a reason. The mining company wouldn’t have paid expensive Norrian workers in their protective equipment to mine if they could have hired Shoul Falls workers to simply wade in and collect sayathenite nodules.

  More importantly, the Shoul Falls cave system could not have conquered another without its bloodstone, which meant that for generations before, when there was a ka in Shoul Falls, the colony hadn’t grown.

  The two cave systems had to have come into contact and fought in the time since her grandfa
ther had given up the bloodstone.

  Perhaps the mining in the southern canyons had broken a barrier and the water table had shifted. News of caves flooding was common enough, and the Norrian miners had delved further into the cave systems than any other city in history.

  A trickle of excitement ran through Dana.

  Forty miles . . . There had to have been dozens of conquered colonies between Shoul Falls and Norr.

  Perhaps the roots of trees, desperate for water in the last drought, had cracked ancient barriers. Or, the cave fish of Shoul Falls had become aggressive and created fissures when the bloodstone had been returned, hoping to grow their territory.

  Dana had seen the cave-dwelling rakefish brought back by miners, some as large as her torso with teeth as long as her fingers and articulate clawed fins.

  Dana’s mind whirled with imaginings as she sat in the dark, waiting for night to fall outside, when she could begin her journey back to Shoul Falls.

  What am I going to do with this mechanodron?

  Showing up at the sanctum with the mechanodron in hand would be presumptuous at a minimum and quite possibly a very bad idea. She had to protect it until she knew she could get it safely into the sanctum.

  She would have to stash it near the sanctum and wait for the best opportunity to use it.

  Her plan lacked one crucial detail: what to do with the bloodstone. She could go rogue, keep the stone for herself, usurp the power, and fight Vetas-ka herself. Arguably a safer approach, aside from the fact that she would be committing the highest sacrilege on Xahna.

  The alternative was to return the stone to Shoul Falls yet again and hope that after the kazen attack, the city had realized the danger they were in and that they had to ordain a ka immediately.

  The odds they would choose her were obviously not the best.

  At least the second option gave the citizens some choice in the matter.

  More-or-less protecting the citizens’ right had justified Dana’s theft—rescue—of the stone. This time she would have no such excuse.

  Trusting her life to people she hardly knew was terrifying. But she could imagine they felt the very same thing about her having the stone.

  I’ll worry about the stone later. I just need to get away from Norr.

  This time she would take the direct path to Shoul Falls along the trade route. It was far shorter than the coastal route she had first taken or the circuitous mountain route she had used to come back.

  Short, but dangerous.

  With luck, the kazen would still be looking for her on the other side of the divide. Perhaps the druid pursuing her had died of exposure or gotten lost.

  The fact was, she simply didn’t have the strength to go any other route.

  If only I had someone to carry this mechanodron for me.

  Dana laughed out loud. She was in a mine. Miners never carried ore.

  Ha! I’m so smart.

  When she was sure night had fallen, she retreated back out of the cave. Sister moon was already up, and Dana navigated further up the canyon and found a large pack-mechanodron outside an active mine. The hauler closely resembled Forz’s seven-foot-tall mechanodron Blamer.

  Dana strapped her mechanodron sack to its back. Then, borrowing a couple of fresh sap containers from a storage bin, she refilled the mechanodron’s sap jars. As the sugary syrup ran through its rhynoid muscles, the thing roused and stood up, waiting for a command. Dana imitated Forz, using low and high whistles to guide it toward her. The hulking thing maneuvered by the feel of the ground. Despite its hesitant footing, the thing had an enormous stride and managed to keep up with her as she traversed the ridge into the next canyon.

  By morning the mechanodron was out of fuel sap, and she abandoned it. At least it had carried the prototype mechanodron two-thirds of the journey.

  She had a day’s hike left and one very obvious problem. The sack on her shoulder was an invitation for interrogation.

  Where am I going hide this thing?

  Furthermore, she still had the problem of what to do with the stone.

  She couldn’t just hide it somewhere, or the moment she showed up without it, they would arrest her for theft. And she couldn’t show up with it either or the city might just confiscate it and destroy it. She had to keep it out of their reach but ensure they knew it was safe.

  Dana slept the morning through and then continued south through the forest toward Shoul Falls, following a ribbon of limestone that ran along the mountainside. The swath of sayathi just inside the mountain would hopefully mask her presence to any enchanter passing on the nearby trade road.

  The strap of the shoulder sack with the mechanodron alternately dug into her right shoulder and then her left. The annoyance was nothing compared to her blistered feet, and that was nothing compared to the agony Forz would be in.

  A cripple.

  Dana asked herself why it had to happen. She replayed the scene over and over, trying to see if there was some other possible ending that would have left Forz whole and well.

  His quick thinking had saved her. And at what cost?

  The situation only made Dana more determined to become the ka. She would have the will of a warlock to break and straighten his leg, and the will of an alchemist to meld the bone, infusing it with steel to protect the bond—the will of an enchanter to block the pain.

  I could heal him. I have to.

  As she neared Shoul Falls, Dana found a secluded cave in the coral layer. A trickle of water ran out of the seam in the rock, and Dana just managed to wedge herself in, dragging the sack with the mechanodron in after her. Once inside, the soft glow of the sayathi in the water illuminated her way into a tight cavern with a narrow ledge beside a shallow pool. There were even a few sayathenite nodules here, where animals had made instinctual blood offerings to bind themselves to the perennial source of water.

  It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but it gave Dana a fitful night’s sleep, save her nagging worries about what to do with the bloodstone.

  Dana rose early enough to be sure it was still dark outside. With the air outside still chill enough to keep her from wanting to leave the cave, Dana drew the crystal out, curious to see its effect on the pool. She lowered it slowly into the narrow pool.

  The water lit with a brilliant glow as she settled the bloodstone within a cluster of sayathenite nodules.

  Soft pulses of light ran tentatively out along the electrical conduits of the coral, connecting first one node and then another, the stones joining in a pulsing dance as they reconnected with the ruling sayathi protected in the bloodstone. The pulses gradually ran farther out, disappearing into the darkness of the cavern, only to return moments later as echoes.

  The bloodstone was reconnecting with its colony.

  In a moment of panic, Dana realized those same pulses would be seen at the pool in the sanctum.

  She reached for the stone, then stopped.

  Wait. This is perfect!

  Those in the sanctum would see the faint pulsing and know the bloodstone had been returned somewhere close. They knew it was safe, but nobody besides her would know where it was.

  Dana left the mechanodron on the ledge—she wouldn’t need it without the bloodstone—and headed out into the chill of the early morning.

  In the dim of the early morning, Dana could make out only a few lit windows in the distant city. She took her bearings and tried to memorize the spot, noting the angle of the city, the rock formations above the cave, and the distance to the edge of the trees below her.

  Certain her visual memory could find the spot again, Dana headed for Shoul Falls. Vetas-ka’s fleet was on the way. She had only a few days to convince the city to choose a new ka—her.

  Dana maneuvered slowly, walking carefully to avoid a slip on the rocky slopes where drop-offs and boulders rose one on top of the other in a kind of contest to create the most treacherous passage. When sunlight kissed the shallower mountains on the eastern horizon, she was descending.
/>   Careful. This is where you got into trouble last time.

  By the time she navigated to the cleft in the rock where Ryke had led her into the sanctum, she found three kazen standing in her way.

  On the left was Remira, the enchantress. Dana shivered as she felt Remira’s presence touch her mind.

  On the right was a bearded man she’d seen at the sanctum before. This time he had a small bird-hawk on his shoulder.

  A druid. Possibly he was the head druid named Ritser that she had never reported to.

  In the center stood Korren.

  He was smiling.

  Smiling?

  He reached out his hand. “Welcome home, Dana.”

  Chapter 27

  Jet was crammed into the Nautilus’s cockpit bridge beside the rest of the crew, watching the tactical display with icons depicting the shuttles approaching the ASP frigate. Come on. Just one hit.

  “We should be in range of their lasers in the next half hour,” Angel noted. “Unless their beam stabilizers were damaged in high-g deceleration.”

  “Who the heck was that?” Decker looked around the room.

  “Sorry, that’s Angel, my tactical AI,” Jet said. “She’s side-along booted on one of Tiberius’s cores.”

  “She’s still on there? Sounds so real.”

  “I am real, sir.”

  “Well keep real quiet,” Decker snapped.

  Monique stared at the long-range telescope image of the ASP ship. “It looks like they’ve started another scan with their telescope. We’ve got to keep their optics on us, or they’ll spot the shuttles.”

  Yaris tugged on the braided lock of hair that ran in front of his ears. “Or focused on the planet.”

  “Yes.” Dormit stomped on the deck. “Yes! Get them to turn their telescope planet-side.”

  “If I may make a suggestion,” Yaris raised a finger. “Order one of our surveillance satellites to leave orbit. Send it on a trajectory uncomfortably close to wherever they landed their dropship on Torsica.”

  Decker clapped his hands. “Brilliant. Somebody give that elf a raise.”

  “As a legal advisor, my pay grade is currently higher than yours.”