by Frank Morin
"And you must know," she added intensely. "I'll be there for you. Trust in the purity of my purpose and the rightness of our cause, Connor. Trust in me."
He nodded, but thought that was as likely as Shona starting to suck on rocks like Hamish.
She smiled that radiant smile that still tugged at his heart strings despite everything he knew about her. And she leaned closer and pressed her full lips to his. Shona took her time with the kiss, starting gentle, then pressing harder, letting him feel her passion.
The first time he had kissed Shona, he'd been overwhelmed that such a beautiful, powerful woman would show him such attention. She was a very good kisser, and he'd have to be max-tapping granite to not be affected by it, or by the feel of her body pressed against his.
So he kissed her back, tried to feel as awestruck as he had before he knew her so well. She must have felt some hesitation though, because she withdrew and sighed again.
She sat up and took his hand in hers. "Oh, Connor. We'll figure things out. I promise we'll find a way to make this work."
He didn't see how, but part of him hoped she was right. He had to learn to embrace this life she was thrusting upon him, or he'd never bear it.
"Now," she said, her tone again crisp. "You have work to do. Train hard, Connor."
"Thank you for getting me some teachers." He desperately needed to learn how to master his tertiary affinities if he wanted any chance of winning.
"We look after each other," she said, her gaze intent, as if trying to force him to accept that. She rose. "Send Jean to me."
Maybe he should tell her about Jean's absence, but he didn't dare. What if Jean was meeting with Ilse? He doubted it, but he couldn't trust Shona, couldn't draw upon her resources to help search for Jean until he had exhausted other avenues.
On his way back, a Strider wearing a full-face helmet skidded to a halt beside him on the path and handed him a rolled parchment.
"You're insane, you know that?" Connor asked Dietmar, recognizing Ilse's Wingrunner despite the disguise.
Dietmar threw a cocky salute. "They haven't caught me yet."
He leaped away before Connor could reply. Again Ilse showed incredible boldness sending the man into the Carraig during the daytime. Connor moved to a concealed corner behind a nearby barn before unrolling the parchment. Part of him was relieved to know Ilse was still in the area and that Dietmar had come with a note instead of a dagger. As usual, the message was short.
We need to talk. Tonight at the north sally port.
Come alone this time.
Chapter 9
The evening meeting with Ilse would require careful planning, but Connor couldn't worry about it yet. He needed to find Jean.
In the weeks leading up to nomination day, he'd often not seen Jean for days at a time, but during those times, Ailsa or Shona had been in regular contact with her. This time, no one knew where she was. Why had Jean looked worried the last time Ailsa saw her? She had managed the difficult days leading up to their failed attempt to escape with Ilse with calm composure, so what had rattled her?
As he rushed back to the Sculpture House, worries spawned in Connor's mind like consumed corn cobs around Hamish' plate during the Sogail feast. He stuck his head into Ailsa's office where she was reading a scroll.
"You haven't seen Jean since I left earlier?"
"No, why?"
"Contact me if she shows up. I'm going to search for her."
Ailsa rose, looking worried. "I thought she was with Shona."
"Shona thought she was with one of us."
"So no one knows where she's been?"
"Apparently not. I'm heading for the inner library."
"Good idea," Ailsa said. "I will begin inquiries through other channels."
"Thanks." Connor rushed for the stairs to the lower level while Ailsa called for Gisela, her voice crisp.
Ailsa's concern reinforced Connor's, and he tapped basalt when he reached the long stair, sprinting at a dead run down into the undercity. There, he forced himself to slow to apply quartzite to his ears.
The sparsely traveled undercity offered far fewer sounds for his enhanced ears to snatch up. Occasional footsteps sounded loud in the quiet realm, otherwise broken only by the creaking of doors, spitting of lonely torches, or the soft breath of cool air creeping toward the surface. Connor focused on each set of footsteps in turn, but none of them matched Jean's graceful tread.
The grid-like pattern of the corridors was still confusing to him, so he also applied quartzite to his nose. The scent of old stone wafted through the dim passages, layered with creeping mold, patches of stale water, and the dusty smell of tired doors, closed perhaps for years. As he trotted along, he caught whiffs of rotting furniture and wooden boxes cankered with age.
Behind all that, he identified the dry scent of old leather, ink, and parchment. He followed those scents like a bloodhound down one dark passage after another. Most were square tunnels boring through the undercity's heart, utilitarian and efficient, but still somehow mysterious. It took only a few minutes to track the scents to the inner library.
With eager haste, Connor shoved open the door and rushed inside. The library was empty, and had that lonely feel of a room long abandoned. The tables were bare, the fireplaces cold, and the overstuffed chairs seemed to beg him to pause for a visit.
Connor wasn't sure what to do, so he paced the library, looking into every corner, hoping Jean might be curled up and napping in one of the hidden nooks. He'd been foolish to search there. Jean loved to read, but not even she could ignore the passage of days, lost in a fascinating tome.
That meant he had to face the uglier possibilities. Had Jok finally tracked her down? He shuddered to consider it, but couldn't block the images that formed in his mind. The powerful and proud Jok could have been driven to recklessness by his obsession with her. Jean would have fought back, flinging foul herbs into his face, making a desperate bid for freedom.
She had not escaped, or they would have seen her. What might Jok had done? Had he hurt her or, driven to fury by her resistance, struck her with granite-enhanced strength? He owed Connor a life debt, but that would only mean he'd attempt to conceal the crime.
The more Connor thought about it, the more he worked himself into a vengeful rage. He needed to hunt down Jok and beat a confession out of him.
On the verge of storming out of the inner library, Connor's eyes fell on a leather notebook lying atop one of the shelves, filled with loose sheaves of paper. He flipped it open and recognized Jean's tidy script. The pages were covered with notes from her weeks of research.
She had treated that notebook like a treasure. Would she have left it behind?
Connor scanned the pages and noticed a handwritten map. That's how Jean knew the undercity so well. She'd explored it and, with her usual thoroughness, had taken the time to map out her findings.
The undercity stretched farther than Connor had realized. He noted passages with annotations about where they terminated at various buildings throughout the greater Carraig complex, including the one that led to his Kilian suite. Another led to a residence hall for teachers. Other notes described stairs descending into the darkness of even lower levels, but he saw nothing of any exploration she might have made down there.
A long passage that extended alone to the east drew his gaze. Jean had noted that it appeared to run under the open plain, and had mentioned a great longing to explore that area if they only had time before leaving with Ilse.
They hadn't left. Had she decided to venture into that unknown area under the plain? Had she gotten lost?
Possible disasters sprang to mind faster than Verena could have punched him in the face. What if Jean had dropped her lantern? Or fallen and injured herself?
If anything like that had happened, she might be stranded there in the darkness. The thought horrified him. She would never have found her way back, lost and alone out there, starving or dying of thirst. He and the students had crisscrossed
those plains many times in recent days. He shivered to think of Jean terrified and dying alone in the darkness underground while they passed so close by overhead.
As bad as that might be, it was still better than the Jok alternative. So Connor snatched up the map and bolted from the inner library. This time he didn't bother with stealth. If Jean was hurt, she needed to know he was coming, needed to see the welcome relief of light.
So he tapped marble and ringed his shoulders with flames. As he ran, he pulsed jets of flame around himself, lighting long stretches of square, stone corridors, their stones taking on a crimson hue. He tried tapping quartzite at the same time, but the balancing act proved so tricky he nearly collided with a wall as he ran with basalt speed around a tight corner.
He'd been practicing with water and fire together, but hadn't found much time to try including the other tertiary stones. He needed to find time. Earth and air might not be part of his Dawnus arsenal, but when he needed them, he could not afford any hesitation.
Connor didn't need quartzite to find the long passage leading out into the plain, so he fracked and tore along the desolate stretch, with fire blazing in front of him to light the way.
He easily imagined Jean dirty and hungry, perhaps injured, but teary-eyed with relief that someone had finally come. Instead, he discovered one more of the unending mysteries of the Carraig.
The passage terminated in a long, low cave, covered with odd piles of rubble, interspersed with flat, clear sections. He slowed to stare, tapping more marble and extending wisps of fire like floating lanterns in every direction. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at, and only when he picked out irregular walls rising from the rubble did the scene click into place.
He was looking at a sunken city concealed under the plain. The rubble had been buildings, the flatter areas the streets, once paved, now cracked and buckled. With a growing sense of wonder, Connor explored deeper into the ruin.
Thicker walls ringed the original open space, unbroken walls that thrust up into the low-hanging ceiling, which was paved in stone. He selected one promising street and discovered block after block of ruins in various states of disrepair. Some buildings had collapsed entirely, with little more than irregular mounds remaining. He sifted through one, letting the grainy sand of broken stones slip through his fingers.
The air was thick and musty, as if any currents that reached the ancient city got stuck and never found their way out. There was not as much dust as he would have expected, and when he sniffed with quartzite, he found little else. The only wood remaining had mostly rotted away, and the stones smelled exhausted, as if holding on to their ancient secrets through sheer stubbornness. There was water down there, but he smelled no plants, no living things.
The city was dead, a tomb dating back to an unknown age. Why had it been concealed like that? The rolling plain that had always seemed such an odd part of the outer Carraig was nothing but a thin burial shroud.
How had it been formed? How did Petralists fashion the long walls, heavy columns, and ceiling to hold fast for so long? If Jean had stumbled into there and gotten into trouble, she could wander for years without finding her way out.
Connor drew deeper from marble until it seared his mouth and the intense heat nearly gagged him. Its deadly thrill made him grin, with flames skipping across his teeth. Fire always triggered wild thoughts of inferno, but there was nothing left to burn in that broken relic. Instead, he sent streamers of fire snaking along the darkened roof of packed earth and long, stone pavers.
By the light of that living fire, he explored deeper, shouting Jean's name with a quartzite-enhanced voice. It felt like the ruin grew older, the deeper he traveled, but many of the buildings were in better repair. Fewer were blasted to complete ruin, and he discovered vast caverns, paved streets, and elegant palaces. In places, the ceiling of the plain barely allowed him to stand upright, while at other times it reared more than twenty feet. Even the lake above was part of the deception. Thick walls of jade crystal held the waters in place. He discovered several other small lochs lurking dark and still in the ruins.
Despite worry for Jean driving him on, Connor slowed to drink in the silent beauty of the secret landscape. Creeping fungus spread across some of the ruined walls like a living stain that reflected the light of his fires with dazzling colors.
So he tried burning some of it.
It ignited like it was soaked in oil, and it was easier to manage that burn than generate his own flames.
He sensed that he could spend weeks exploring the underground wonder, but he lacked time. So he allowed himself to penetrate only eight long blocks, until all of the surrounding buildings were mostly intact. At every intersection, he paused to shout Jean's name, then search the area with quartzite senses. Each time, he found no sign of life, no sign that life had passed by in living memory.
Selecting one building at random, he climbed a crumbling stair and entered a long cavern that was mostly clear of rubble. It might have once been a great hall or cathedral. The roof was gone, as were most of the walls. The skeletal remains of the gigantic stone ribs that had held up the huge structure were all that remained, stabbing into the high ceiling.
Connor allowed the fires to spread across the cathedral, and tethered flames in a massive, cracked fountain that still somewhat resembled a stone tree with eighteen spreading branches. He set fires pulsing along its length, lighting the room with flickering shadows, and wondered what the hall might have looked like when it was whole.
His mouth burned from the prolonged use of marble, and he was tempted to return to one of those hidden lakes and dunk his face in. The first time he'd used marble, he hadn't known how to extinguish it, and he'd burned down much of Lord Gavin's manor house. He'd had to dive into Loch Sholto to put the flames out.
The brightly colored burning fungus cast a multitude of shifting colored lights across the ruined hall, but shadows fought for lordship of the corners, overlaying the ancient structure with soft mystery.
He called for Jean again, his voice booming so loud it rattled loose stones and reverberated from the earthen ceiling. If anyone was standing above, they might have heard a distant echo, like a voice calling from the grave.
The thought made him strangely lonely, and he longed for Verena by his side, snuggled under his arm.
As the echoes of his call faded, he applied quartzite to his ears and listened, straining for any sign that Jean might have passed nearby. He listened so hard, he could have heard her heartbeat in the unending silence.
He heard nothing from Jean, but he did hear a single, heavy footstep right behind him.
Chapter 10
Verena didn't bother to look up from her project when she heard the door to her workroom open.
"Hamish, get out," she called. "I'm testing something so I don't have time to come see your new suit, and I don't have any sweetbreads you can borrow."
Instead of Hamish, she was startled to hear Kilian speak.
"It's good to see you hard at work, and I really wish you did have some sweetbreads."
Verena rushed to the lanky Water Moccasin and gave him a fierce hug. He looked tired, his face lined, his hair unkempt. He still managed a warm smile, his blue eyes twinkling as bright as ever.
"I actually do have some sweetbreads," she admitted, opening a drawer in a cluttered desk nearby. "I just can't let Hamish know where I keep them."
Kilian held up a mesh bag he had concealed behind his back. Verena squealed with delight and eagerly accepted the five ripe peaches. "Don't tell Hamish about these."
"They're our little secret," Kilian assured her as he selected a long breadstick from her secret stash and took a huge bite.
"How are things at the front?" she asked.
"Worsening." Kilian frowned while he chewed. "But no major skirmishes so far."
"Production is accelerating," she assured him. "We've got stacks of speedslings, but the hardened granite projectiles take more time, and we need
so many."
"How many can we have in a week?"
"We've had some issues with supply lines," she admitted. "We're competing with the Rumblers, but they take priority. The quarries are promising increased production, but it'll take a few weeks to get everything straightened out. Dierk is overseeing the manufacturing teams, and we've got every Builder working on filling orders."
"By next week, we could field threescore speedslings. They hold five thousand projectiles each. We're calling those Hornets. That means we need three hundred thousand hornets for a single arming. They can burn through an entire drum in about a minute. Our goal is to provide enough hornets for three full rearmings, so we've set the target for a million projectiles."
Kilian grimaced. "The speedslings worked extremely well in Alasdair, but what a colossal amount of power stone."
"Those were early prototypes. The new models are even deadlier."
She shivered at the memory of the front lines of Carbrey's army disintegrating under the destructive rain of the speedslings. The little projectiles had cut through shields and armor as easily as they had flesh and bone. They just flew so fast. Even the Boulders had struggled to withstand the onslaught.
"When we deploy them," Kilian said. "Make sure there are teams ready to comb the battlefield afterward to recover as many as possible."
"Already planning on that."
"And windriders?"
"Those are actually pretty easy to produce. We've got half a dozen already assigned to Wolfram's army, flying supplies and scouting parties all along the border."
The recently-invented flying wagons had played a critical role in the battles of Alasdair, and they held a special place in Verena's heart. "The truth is, we can build more than we have Builders to fly them. I'm working on a design that might allow non-Builders to operate the controls."
"How is that possible?"
"At the moment, it's only plausible," she admitted. "But I think I'm on to something. We'll still need some Builders to oversee the squadron and initiate the power to each windrider, but if I can get it to work, that will remove the personnel constraint."