by Frank Morin
Verena understood. Connor tried to push thoughts of the beguiling Builder from his mind as he struggled to his feet and broke into a run. It took a few seconds to reach full fracked speed, and by that time Padraigin had already rounded the Sculpture House. He needed to focus or she was going to win by enough of a margin that he'd be the one having to worry about damage to his reputation.
As he sprinted toward the Sculpture House, planning ways to delay Padraigin, thoughts of Verena wormed their way into his mind, just as she had so often wormed her way under his arm. Those were precious memories, made all the more valuable by the knowledge that he would never again get the chance to hold her that way.
Instead of rounding the Sculpture House like Padraigin had, Connor threw himself into the air with fire, vaulting the building and gaining a precious second. She didn't try hindering his flight that time. She was so far ahead, she probably figured the match was all but won. All she had to do was round the broken remains of the Rhidorroch and reach the main gate of the Carraig.
The sight of the still-devastated obstacle course made Connor wince. The ice dome was finally being taken down, with pie-shaped sections already gone. The bulk of the construct still remained, rearing high over the grounds of the school in a glittering testament to Connor's success. As soon as the dome came down, the Sentries could remove the earthen banks they had raised around the dark wall of the Rhidorroch. Connor longed to see it standing proud on the field again, rebuilt and ready to test the students.
But first, Connor had to deal with Padraigin.
Sucking again on marble, Connor formed whips of fire around her. The very speed of her legs worked against her, wrapping the flames tight, tripping her, and sending her tumbling.
Connor made sure to keep the flames away from her hair. He'd learned the hard way the dangers of messing with a girl's hair when he'd burned Shona's. The lesson had been beaten home again when he'd been forced to cut off a huge chunk of Princess Catriona's hair.
So leaving the hair, he formed the end of the distant flames into little legs that started running back toward the Sculpture House, dragging the shouting Padraigin in his direction. The earth rose up to block the flames, but Connor kept them running her in circles, distracting her long enough to catch up.
He finally released the flames after sprinting past, again confident that he could win.
She raised a wall of earth right in front of him.
Connor bounced off, spitting mud. It tasted nasty, as if she'd somehow pulled earth from under the distant privy. He turned to the right and tried running around the wall, but it grew, extending to block his path. He increased speed, but the wall kept pace as he closed on the gigantic obstacle of the Rhidorroch.
Connor couldn't let Padraigin take the lead again. They were too close. She wasn't supposed to completely block his path, but what if Rory allowed the wall as a valid delaying tactic? He didn't dare take the time to purge basalt and absorb granite. Superhuman strength could bash through the wall, but that wouldn't win the race. He needed to try something different, something unexpected.
And he needed to do it fast, because he was about to run into the Rhidorroch. He couldn't afford to rush around the far side. That would delay him too long.
He glanced up at the mighty dome rearing hundreds of feet into the air.
And grinned.
Connor max-tapped basalt, sprinting straight toward the looming wall.
This was going to be amazing.
Chapter 3
Defeating Padraigin's earth powers would take too long, as would circumventing the vast expanse of the Rhidorroch.
So why not run right over the top?
With a burst of flames to give him lift, Connor soared in a flaming arc over the earthen barrier, reached the base of the ice dome, and ran.
With the fire providing a boost, he tapped soapstone again. This time, walking with two elements felt like riding two unruly horses at the same time, and Connor wasn't much of a horseman.
Today he needed those wild horses, so he managed to connect with soapstone and the entire glittering expanse of the dome came alive in his water senses. With a touch of his mind, the surface of the dome in front of him rippled into little ridges that gave better purchase.
That was enough, and he accelerated up the side of the great dome. Even though those streamers of fire must look amazing, setting the bluish-white of the dome flickering with crimson and pink, he no longer needed the boost from behind. So he released marble, strengthening his connection with water, which allowed him to grab the ridged ice along his path up the dome and make it flow upward, nearly doubling his speed.
As he neared the peak, he gained a panoramic view of gawking students streaming past the Sculpture House. The entire landscape of the outer Carraig complex spread around him, from the inner wall ringing the close-packed spires and towers of the palace-city to the huge outer wall running a couple miles away, beyond the plain. He should have maintained his connection with marble. A spray of blue-white fire would add to his reputation.
Padraigin had rounded the earthen wall that had blocked him instead of dropping it. Didn't make sense, but she was a foreigner and a girl, so he'd never pretend to understand her.
At the very top of the dome, a small section of the center was missing. He'd melted it into a mini waterfall during his nomination challenge. Even better than that memory was the moment when the Spitters, led by Ivor, had helped Connor shore up the shaky dome and complete the master work, even though by all rights they should have let him fail.
Trust people, give them a chance to shine, and they just might.
Or not.
The earthen walls holding up the dome shook like a cake taken too early from the oven, and the dome vibrated. Connor slid to a stop right at the edge of the apex hole. Deep cracks sundered through the sides of the dome, booming like thunderclaps and weakening the construct.
What was Padraigin thinking? He glanced toward her, but she had also stopped, and was staring up at him like he was crazy. Well sure, but not crazy with slate. Not so anyone would know anyway.
She didn't look like someone trying to destroy a wonder of the world. The earth rumbled again and the dome shook with it, ice groaning and cracking. Up at the top, the swaying was magnified and the air was filled with a mist of little stinging particles of ice that smelled like impending doom.
Padraigin threw out her hand, and the shaking stopped, but Connor felt a growing chill that had nothing to do with the fact that he was standing atop thousands of tons of ice. Down inside the Rhidorroch, dozens of overall-clad workers had been busy at work repairing the shattered obstacle course. Repairs had progressed more than Connor had realized. The workers were finishing the new false ground, so repairs of the underground levels must have already been completed.
Everyone was looking up at him, and they weren't waving. Connor could feel the cracks and critical flaws spreading through the gigantic structure. Definitely time for an early lunch break.
"Get out of there!" he shouted, wishing he could enhance his voice like the Pathfinders did. His words echoed through the huge space, taken up a second later by Frazier, the maze lord.
"Move!" his shout reached Connor as a distant whisper. "Get out!"
As Connor bent his will to shoring up the cracking dome, Frazier shouted, "Don't you dare break anything, Kilian!"
"It's not my fault!" Connor shouted back.
The earth under the dome shook for a third time, despite Padraigin's apparent efforts to stabilize it. The cracking accelerated, reaching a crescendo. With his mind tightly linked to the dome, Connor felt the thousands of cracks multiplying and reaching a point where not even he could avert disaster.
He didn't have time to worry about who was responsible or why. If the dome collapsed, Frazier and his workers would be splattered.
Connor abandoned thoughts of winning the race. Those lives were in his hands. He scanned the dome again with soapstone senses, feeling the ice breaking i
nto gigantic blocks on the verge of falling.
He couldn't stop them all.
So he pushed one.
The best way to survive an avalanche was to ride it. Frazier and his men would need the proper seats. A block of ice weighing eight tons slipped free of the dome and fell with ponderous inevitability toward the ground below. Some workers screamed, and their flight became a panicked scramble away from the approaching disaster.
"No!" Frazier's voice echoed up from below. "Not again!"
Again? Breaking the dome was completely different.
Connor seized that falling block of ice as it fell and, melding water and fire, he heated it, transforming it in a heartbeat into a cascading waterfall.
"Hold your breath!" he shouted.
The water thundered into the false ground where the obstacle course would rise from the vast cavern beneath. It drove through to the underground levels and Connor scattered the water everywhere, sending it cascading through every level.
He made sure to hit Frazier with a mouthful. Hadn't the man's mother taught him not to swear like that?
As the dome sagged, on the verge of a general collapse, Connor pushed two more blocks out and melted them too, sending waves of water barreling through the Rhidorroch, using them like distant eyes to find every last living soul, then sweeping them off their feet. They'd never get out by running, but the churning waters he controlled could move far faster. He only needed twenty seconds to sweep everyone clear of the impending disaster.
He didn't have that much time.
The northern section of the dome gave way with a roar that reverberated inside and echoed across the entire Carraig complex, the death knell of the giant dome. As the collapse spread across the dome, Connor drove the waters harder, carrying the workers like flotsam on a wild river through the Rhidorroch and piling them up near the western exit.
With a surprisingly musical final sigh, the rest of the dome imploded. Slow at first, but gathering speed, the entire construct collapsed, dragging Connor down with it. His stomach did that fantastic flip-lurch, but he was too busy to enjoy it.
While the sopping-wet workers fled through the exit, Connor seized all the loose water and formed it into a rounded protective barrier to give them precious extra seconds. As ice crashed into the ground of the Rhidorroch, shattering the partially-rebuilt compound, Connor seized more and more water, reinforcing the barrier around Frazier and his workers until it could withstand even the onslaught of the collapsing dome. Then he focused on the tons of ice falling toward them and drained away as much of it as he could, lessening the impact on that area.
Wielding all that water was amazing, and in the moment of the death of the great dome, he became one with the element the same way he had the day he had created the dome. For a split second, as he max-tapped soapstone, he felt a hint of even greater power just out of reach, like the sunrise beyond the next ridge, sensed but not yet accessible. If he could only touch it, he could avert the disaster, but the moment passed, and the ice thundered into the ground and shattered everything.
All that remained was not dying. With a mental tug, he geysered the ice under him, throwing himself into the air. There, he released water and tapped marble, again forming burning wings of fire that caught the air. He got the perfect view of the disaster as thousands of tons of ice blasted the compound into shards.
Breaking the Rhidorroch once had been necessary, but the new disaster was a shameful waste. He loved the Rhidorroch, and had been eager to again see it completed, to run it with the other students and test his abilities against the devious constructs created by the maze lord.
Now it was gone. Again.
The rush of air from the imploding ice blasted Connor another three hundred feet higher. He nearly lost control, but eventually managed to stabilize his flight. As he banked around the shattered Rhidorroch, looking for Padraigin, he swore to find the one responsible for the disaster and make them pay.
He landed with a flourish beside Padraigin, who was white with shock. Before either of them could speak, Frazier rushed out a sagging doorway, with his men spilling out behind.
"You're going to pay for this, Kilian!"
Chapter 4
Frazier looked angry enough to kill, and he was clearly tapping obsidian. He barely limped, and he moved with the deadly grace that only Blades could manage.
Connor really needed to get his hands on some obsidian and try it for himself. It was the one igneous stone he hadn't yet had a chance to establish affinity with. In the meantime, he purged the last of his basalt and slipped a finger into the pouch of granite at his belt, absorbing a hefty portion. He didn't want to fight Frazier, but he wouldn't allow the angry man to murder him for someone else's crime.
"How are your men?" Connor called, hating that his mask would conceal his genuine concern.
"They would have been better if you hadn't brought that dome crashing down on them," Frazier snapped.
"Come on," Connor said. "You're smarter than that, especially tapping obsidian."
Frazier slowed, and although he looked like he wanted to strike out with the stick he carried like a sword, he hesitated. "Are you claiming you had nothing to do with what just happened?"
"Of course not. I absolutely just saved you and your men from whoever was trying to kill us."
"He's telling the truth," Padraigin offered. "Someone shook the ground. That's Sentry work."
"Who?" Frazier demanded.
"I don't know."
Captain Rory arrived, flanked by his senior men. Students pressed in after, clamoring for details, but Tomas and Cameron organized their Boulders to keep the onlookers back.
"What were you doing up there?" Frazier demanded.
"I had to go over the dome because Padraigin was blocking my path. Besides, since we can't run the maze, running the dome was the next best thing. Did you get my time?
Rory interrupted. "What happened? Is everyone all right?"
Padraigin spoke up. "I didn't raise that wall blocking Connor. I assumed Redmund or someone else did."
Redmund arrived with Ivor, already shaking his head. "The earth cares not what flight the fox takes."
"So are you the fox, or did you scare it?" Connor asked.
Ivor interrupted Redmund's roundabout, angry retort. "I questioned Mactail about what was going on when we lost sight of the runners behind the Sculpture House. He mentioned that someone shook the Rhidorroch, but they were well shielded."
Rory turned to the teacher of the Sentry class. "Did you feel it too?"
"The smallest rock sends ripples across the face of the waters."
Rory groaned. "Speak plain, man. People could have died."
The Sentry looked pained and spoke slowly, as if normal sentence structure was alien to him. "I felt something. Like Mactail said, obscurity shielded the intent and the identity of the attacker, but the curtain of my will held sway upon the width of the plain and any attempting to walk with the earth from our company would have traveled by my side."
"So you don't know who it was, but you don't think it was Redmund," Rory muttered.
"Thus light reaches even the dimmest corners of the darkened canyon at the rising of the noonday sun," the Sentry said with a nod.
"Someone did it!" Frazier cried, pointing at the shattered Rhidorroch. Ragged piles of ice peeked up over the dark walls.
"Wasn't us," Connor said. "We were having a friendly competition."
"We'll make whoever is responsible pay eleven ways to Dagmanson," Padraigin promised. "They could have killed people, they destroyed the beloved Rhidorroch, and they interrupted my victory."
That wasn't exactly right, but Connor didn't feel like arguing about it. Almost-mass-murder events had a way of sucking the fun right out of everything.
Frazier looked from her to Redmund to the Sentry teacher. "You're all saying none of you had a hand in this." He turned to glare at Connor. "And yet the fact remains that you climbed that dome and brought it down on our he
ads."
"Next you're going to claim I shook the earth." The fact that he could have didn't matter. They didn't know it, and he couldn't allow them to follow that train of thought. The best way to kill the idea before they could dwell on it was to scorn it publicly.
Frazier faced Padraigin, his stick twitching. "You were the closest Sentry."
"I already told you, it was not my doing."
"And the word of a foreigner should so easily be accepted?" Redmund asked.
"The word of a confirmed champion should be," Padraigin snapped.
Connor said, "You instigated the contest, Redmund. Was it just jealousy that motivated you, or did you want us running this way for other reasons?"
As Redmund sputtered with rage, Ivor said, "Redmund did not suggest the race. That was Captain Rory's doing."
Rory only grunted, and no one dared suggest Rory had anything to do with it. Connor nearly laughed at the suggestion. Ivor loved to find leverage against everyone, but he'd have to work a lot harder to find something on Rory. Unless he met Anika.
"Were there no other Sentries in the area?" Rory asked.
Frazier shrugged. "I have no idea."
"Well, all the Sentry students were accounted for," Connor said. "How many other Sentries are at the Carraig?"
"There are a few," Frazier admitted. "Lord Dail has two in his employ that coordinate the outer watch, and a couple of the high lord representatives have Sentries in their personal guard."
Rory turned to Grahame, his senior Pathfinder, whose eyes perpetually glowed, even when he did not appear to be tapping quartzite. "I want a full accounting of all slate affinities on my desk by dinnertime. Every name, and where they were today during this disaster." Then he asked Frazier, "Are there casualties?"
"I saw some injuries," Frazier admitted, which finally seemed to diffuse the last of his anger. "But it'll take some time to check everyone."