Allik seemed befuddled. “How … how did you figure that—”
“He does this all the time,” Wayne said. “Best not to encourage him.”
“Just a theory,” Wax said. “One supported by the evidence though. Steris, Telsin. I want you to stay behind while—”
“I’m going with you,” Telsin snapped. She walked forward, cold as the dead blokes on the floor. “I won’t be shoved aside, Waxillium. I won’t be left for our uncle to catch up to us and take me again.”
Wax sighed, looking toward Steris and Marasi.
“I’ll stay,” Steris said. “Someone needs to watch the entrance for Suit and his people.”
Wax nodded, glancing at Wayne. “You keep an eye on her.” Then he looked to Marasi. “You keep an eye on him. We’ll come get you if we find anything.”
Marasi nodded. Wayne sighed.
“You intend to go forward?” Allik said, standing up, eyes bulging. “O Great Impetuous One, far be it from me—a lowly pilot—to question your ridiculous intentions, but … seriously? Didn’t you see the corpses?”
“I saw them,” Wax said. “MeLaan?”
“On it,” she said, striding forward.
“Great One,” Allik said, “I cannot but think they have traps designed to kill your kind. If they thought of all this, they will have prepared for one such as you.”
“Yes,” Wax said. “That spike was all wood.”
Allik grew more frantic. “Then why would you—”
MeLaan stepped on a pressure plate, causing a spear to launch out of one of the many small holes in the wall. It moved jarringly fast, piercing right through MeLaan’s torso, coming out the other side.
She sighed, looking down. “This is going to absolutely ruin my wardrobe.”
Allik gawked, then lifted his hand as if to raise his mask, only it was already up. He fumbled, unable to take his eyes off MeLaan, who yanked the spear out with a casual gesture.
“Traps,” Wax said, “are somewhat less threatening when you have an immortal along.”
“Unless they have explosives,” MeLaan said. “If I lose a spike, you’d better be ready to stick it right back in. And I was serious—this is going to be awful for my clothing.”
“You could do it without,” Wayne said hopefully.
She thought for a moment, then shrugged, reaching to grab her top.
“I’ll buy you new clothing, MeLaan,” Wax said, interrupting her. “We don’t want to make poor Allik fall over dead.”
“Actually,” Allik said, “I don’t think I’d mind.”
“Good man,” Wayne said. “Knew I liked you.”
“Ignore them,” Wax said. “Wayne, help guard the door. Allik, I need you with me, in case something is written in your language.”
The man nodded, then put back down his mask. Made sense why he wore one now. Wayne couldn’t grow a proper beard either, but at least he had the sense to shave.
MeLaan strolled down the hallway. “Telsin, stay behind me,” Wax said, “and step exactly where I step. Same for you, Allik.”
They left Wayne and the two ladies behind. Ahead, a large spiked log swung out of a hidden compartment and crushed MeLaan against the wall. She shook it off like a champ, stumbling on down the hallway while her leg re-formed.
“You know,” Wayne said, looking toward Steris and Marasi, “she might be even better at the Blackwatch Doublestomp than I am.”
24
Marasi settled in beside Wayne and Steris, watching the approach to the temple. Distant lanternlight showed Suit’s group. But they were getting closer.
What would they do if the man got here? Fight? For how long? Eventually their medallions would run out of heat, and they had almost nothing in the way of supplies.
They’d simply have to count on Waxillium finding the Bands quickly; then they could escape on the skimmer and be away before Suit could do anything. The idea of that infuriating man stuck up here in the snows—having slogged miles and miles to find an empty temple—appealed to her.
At the very least, imagining his reaction distracted her from her own annoyance.
Sit here, Marasi. Stay out of trouble. Babysit Wayne. She knew that wasn’t what he meant, but it was still galling.
Rather than sit and simmer in her own petulance, Marasi dug in her purse, pulling out the little spike that belonged to ReLuur. Such a small thing, and so clean—a shining sliver of … pewter, was it? Staring at it in the light of Steris’s lantern, she wished she didn’t know its history. A person had been killed to make this, their soul ripped apart so a piece could be used to make a kandra.
Even though it had been done long ago, to someone who would have been centuries dead by now anyway, she felt as if there should be blood beneath her fingers, making the spike slippery. It should not be so clean.
Yet, she thought, where would mankind be without the kandra, acting as Harmony’s hands—guiding and protecting us? Such good to come of something so awful. Indeed, according to the Historica, without the work the kandra had done through the ages collecting atium, mankind would likely have been destroyed.
The Lord Ruler is the same, Marasi thought. He was a monster. He created this spike by killing someone. And yet he somehow managed to get to Allik’s people and save their entire civilization.
Waxillium sought justice. He had an open heart—he’d spared Wayne’s life all those years ago, after all—but in the end, he sought to uphold the law. That was shortsighted. Marasi wanted to create a world where law enforcement wouldn’t be needed. Was that why she was so annoyed with him lately?
“You bein’ careful with that?” Wayne asked, nodding toward the spike. “You don’t want to prick yourself and turn into a kandra.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works,” Marasi said, tucking it back into her purse.
“Never can tell,” Wayne said. “I think I should carry it. Just in case.”
“You’d swap it for the first trinket we passed, Wayne.”
“No I wouldn’t.” He paused. “Why? You see somethin’ good back there?”
Marasi rose and walked to Steris, who had settled primly on a stone shelf along the wall of the temple’s vestibule. She sat in a ladylike posture, knees forward, back straight, writing carefully on a notebook by lanternlight.
“Steris?” Marasi asked.
The woman looked up and blinked. “Ah. Marasi. Perhaps you can help me with a topic. How useless am I?”
“Excuse me?”
“Useless,” Steris said, holding her notebook. Not her little pocket one; her larger one, full-sized, which she’d brought in her pack. She used it for brainstorming lists.
Today, she’d been writing on the back of it. “I’ve been trying to quantify it, for reference purposes,” Steris said. “I am under no illusions as to my position in this group. I am the baggage, the accident. The person who needs to be left with the horses, or sent to stay away from traps. If Lord Waxillium could have sequestered me somewhere safe along the way and left me, he certainly would have.”
Marasi sighed, slumping down on the shelf beside her sister. Was this actually something the two of them could relate on? “I know how you feel,” she said. “I spent the first year around him feeling unwelcome, as if Waxillium considered me some little puppy nipping at his heels. And now, when he finally does seem to have accepted me, he treats me as merely a tool to be used or put back on the shelf as required.”
Steris cocked her head at Marasi. “I think you mistake me.”
Of course I do, Marasi thought with resignation. “How?”
“I did not mean to say I minded being treated this way,” Steris said. “I was merely stating facts. I am quite useless on this expedition, and I think that is only fair, considering my personal life experience. However, if I wish to improve, I need to know how far I have to go. Here.”
She turned her notebook to show Marasi the back, where she’d been writing. Why use the back? Either way, she’d drawn a small graph with p
oints plotted on it. Usefulness was listed on one axis, and it had names up the other. Rusts—she’d assigned a number to everyone’s level of worth on the mission. Waxillium was a hundred, as was MeLaan. Wayne was a seventy-five.
Marasi was an eighty-three. She hadn’t expected that.
“I would say that ten is the threshold below which one’s uselessness outweighs the little one does add to the project. I’m thinking I might be a seven, as there are instances where it is better to have me along, though they are few. What do you think?”
“Steris,” Marasi said, pushing the notebook aside. “Why do you care about being useful here in the first place?”
“Well, why do you?”
“Because this is who I am,” Marasi said. “Who I want to be. But not you—you’re perfectly happy sitting in a parlor digging through ledgers. Yet here you are, on the top of a mountain in a blizzard, waiting for a gunfight.”
Steris pursed her lips. “I assumed,” she eventually said, “that I would be of help to Lord Waxillium at the party, and I was. It was my original understanding that this would be primarily a political enterprise.”
Of course. So analytical in everything. Marasi settled back, glancing out the doorway at those approaching lights. Wayne, fortunately, was watching carefully. He acted the fool sometimes, but he took his duties seriously.
“And then,” Steris said softly, “perhaps I came along because of the way it feels.…”
Marasi looked sharply back at her sister.
“Like the whole world has been upended,” Steris said, looking toward the ceiling. “Like the laws of nature and man no longer hold sway. They’re suddenly flexible, like a string given slack. We’re the spheres.… I love the idea that I can break out of it all—the expectations, the way I’m regarded, the way I regard myself—and soar.
“I saw it in his eyes, first. That hunger, that fire. And then I found it in myself. He’s a flame, Waxillium is, and fire can be shared. When I’m out here, when I’m with him, I burn, Marasi. It’s wonderful.”
Marasi’s jaw dropped, and she gawked at her sister. Had those words left Steris’s mouth? Careful, monotonous, boring Steris? She glanced toward Marasi and blushed.
“You actually love him, don’t you?” Marasi asked.
“Well, love is a strong emotion, one that requires careful deliberation to—”
“Steris.”
“Yes.” She looked down at her notebook. “It’s foolish, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is,” Marasi said. “Love is always a foolish emotion. That’s what makes it work.” She found herself reaching over and pulling Steris into a hug with one arm. “I’m happy for you, Steris.”
“And you?” Steris asked. “When will you find someone to make you happy?”
“It’s not about finding someone, Steris. Not for me.”
But what was it about? She gave Steris another hug and, distracted by her own jumble of thoughts, went to check on Wayne.
“What’cha thinkin’ about?” Wayne asked as she joined him beside the outer doorway.
“I just had my long-held assumptions about someone shattered in a brief moment. I’m wondering if every person I pass has similar depths, and if there’s any way to avoid the mistake of judging them so shallowly that I’m rocked when they show their true complexity. You?”
“I was lookin’ at you two,” Wayne said, contemplative as he regarded the snowy landscape outside rather than her, “and wondering. Do sisters ever really get sexy with one another for a fellow to watch, or does that only happen in pub songs?”
Marasi let out a long breath. “Thank you for restoring my ability to trust my judgment, Wayne.”
“Anytime.”
“Those lights are still distant,” Marasi said. “You think they got trapped in the snows?”
Wayne shook his head.
Marasi frowned, noting his posture—seeming relaxed, but he’d gotten out one of his dueling canes and rested it across his knees.
“What?” she asked.
“I figure,” Wayne said, “that if I knew I’d been spotted, the best way to sneak up would be to leave my lights behind and make it seem like I’m goin’ slowly.”
Marasi looked again. She ignored the lights this time, scanning a nearer darkness full of shifting snow. And there, almost to the windswept patch of rock before the temple, she caught movement. Shadows in the shadows.
“Time to call for Waxillium?” Marasi asked.
“I think…” He trailed off, and Marasi pulled her rifle up, nervous.
“What?” she asked.
Wayne pointed to an approaching shadow. It bore a little flag, crossed with an X. The symbol for parley.
* * *
Wax pulled on the rope, helping MeLaan climb from the pit. She crawled over the edge, then flopped down. She’d been right about her clothing—it was ragged, pierced in several dozen places, her left trouser leg ripped completely at the thigh.
She’d compacted her body, somehow. Most of her fatty curves had become taut muscles instead, and she’d taken off her hair, storing it in the pack Allik carried, leaving her bald.
Wax knelt beside her, glancing down the hallway with its spikes, pits, poison darts, and other strange mechanisms. The entire temple seemed to be one long passage, intended to be as hard to move through as possible.
Something about this is wrong, Wax thought. But what?
MeLaan stirred on the ground.
“Rest a moment,” Wax said, hand on her shoulder.
“I don’t know if we have a moment, Ladrian,” she said, sitting up and accepting a canteen of water from the nervous Allik. Telsin stood nearby with arms folded, obviously annoyed at how long this was taking. She kept glancing over her shoulder, as if at any moment she expected to find Suit there to take her again.
“How are your bones?” Wax asked MeLaan.
She held up her left arm—or tried to. It had snapped at the middle of the humerus, and the rest of her arm dangled.
Wax breathed out. “You’re sure that doesn’t hurt?”
“Turned off the nerves that cause pain,” she said. “A trick we’ve learned over the last centuries. And since my bones are crystal, they can’t feel.” She grimaced as the arm straightened, the break seeming to heal. But it hadn’t, Wax knew—she couldn’t make bone, or heal it. “Another patch?”
She nodded. She had stretched ligament along the sides of the break to hold it tight. She’d done that with many of her bones already.
MeLaan moved to rise.
“We can find another way,” Wax said, standing. “Break in through one of the walls up ahead, or the roof maybe.”
“And how long will that take?”
“Depends on how much we care about what’s inside.”
“And wouldn’t it be silly to come all this way, then ruin the Bands of Mourning because of our impatience?”
Wax looked down the hallway. They were most of the way through it, so he put off pushing her further. He could see a door ahead.
“You might not have to do much more anyway,” Wax said. “I think I have the pattern figured out.”
“What pattern?” MeLaan asked.
“Pressure plate under the second stone to your right,” Wax said. “Shoots darts.”
She glanced at him, then stepped forward and tapped it with her toe. Darts spat from the wall, passed before her, and bounced against the opposite wall.
“Next one is two stones ahead,” Wax said. “There’s a hint of a metal line leading underneath it. So far, those have been wall traps.”
Another toe press. A portion of the wall opened, dropping a very large spiked log.
“Nice,” MeLaan said.
“Last one should be a pit trap,” Wax said, joining her in walking around the fallen log. “Check your rope. The stones those are under are raised slightly.”
She tugged on it, using her right hand because the fingers of her left had been crushed. The crystal had broken beyond repair, and she n
ow walked with the hand permanently shut, splinters of bones fused together by tendons.
“I hate the pit ones,” she said. “They just keep going down. Makes me afraid of what might be at the bottom.”
She stepped on the section of floor he indicated, and Wax held tightly to his side of the rope, which was tied about his waist. But instead of a pit trap, the ceiling opened, dropping a block of something. MeLaan jumped back, and the block of strangely colored ice banged to the stones beneath. It was wet, its surface oddly oily-looking.
“What in Harmony’s Rings—” MeLaan said, squatting to inspect the ice.
“Acid, maybe?” Wax said. “It looks like whatever they stored up there was a liquid, but it separated over time, and half froze.”
MeLaan stared at it a long time.
“What?” Wax asked.
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “So that’s it?”
“Best as I can tell.” Together, they stepped up before the end of the hallway, at a door made of stone. But there was no handle. The rest of the wall was thick stone as well.
There were some markings carved into the door, if indeed that was what it was. Circles, with symbols in them, inlaid in silver. Wax looked to Allik.
“I don’t recognize any of those,” the pilot said after swapping his metalminds. “If they’re writing, it’s not a language I understand.”
“What do you want to do?” MeLaan asked.
“Let’s get the others,” Wax said, thoughtful. “More brains to solve this will be helpful, and Marasi might recognize those from ReLuur’s notes.”
They started back, letting MeLaan go first again—though Wax kept his eyes open for any indicators of traps. It was still slow going, as she wanted to be careful they’d caught everything.
Telsin fell in beside Wax, glancing once over her shoulder at the door, arms wrapped around herself, though with the medallion she couldn’t be cold. Allik trailed behind them, wearing his warming medallion.
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