Sandis brushed dust from her face. “Do you need help?”
The driver waved her inquiry away and disappeared around the second wagon.
“Wonderful,” Rone grumbled.
Sandis peered toward the wall. They’d come decently far—she couldn’t see the Lily Tower anymore. They were somewhere along the northeastern portion of the great wall. The road branched off ahead of them, leading to one of the many tunnels that burrowed through the wall, granting entrance to the city.
It wasn’t hard to enter or leave Dresberg. Just the country itself.
Rone sat on the edge of the wagon bed and shook out the front of his shirt. “Might as well take a nap.”
Sandis slid from the wagon and tested her new shoes against the road. She peered toward the rear wagon. Nearly all the adults in the group had huddled around its back wheel, arguing with each other and shooing away children. Their driver, the one who’d allowed them passage, stood by with the replacement wheel, drumming his fingers against it. The priest who’d accompanied them waited to one side. A soft breeze blew at the white flaps of his hat, giving Sandis a glimpse of his face. He was a stout man, perhaps a few years shy of forty. He leaned back, watching, and—
Sandis gasped and ducked behind the second car, her heart tumbling in her chest, her stomach squeezing, threatening to lose its meager contents. Cool sweat dappled her skin.
A trap. It was a trap. It was—
“Sandis?” Rone pushed himself off the wagon lip. “What’s wrong?”
She grabbed the front of his shirt and pushed him around to the opposite corner of the second wagon, the one farthest from the families. “The priest.” The word choked in her dry throat. “It’s Galt.”
“Who?”
“Galt,” she hissed. She hadn’t realized her fingernails were digging into Rone’s chest until he winced and wrestled out of her hold. Sandis hugged herself, shivering, trying to think. But Rone . . . Rone would know what to do. “Kazen’s right-hand man. He was there, with the steam . . .”
Understanding dawned on Rone’s face, and he spat out two curses, one harder than the other. He rubbed a hand down his face, turned around, then turned back and tried to peek around the wagon—
Sandis grabbed his arm and yanked him back. “Don’t! He’ll see!”
“He obviously knows we’re here,” he snapped back. Curses danced around him like moths. “Just him?”
She nodded. “The wheel . . . He was on the rear wagon. He must have broken it—”
“—so the others would have time to catch up,” Rone finished for her. He paled. “Smart sons of whores.”
“Rone,” she pleaded.
He bit his lip. Grabbed his hair and looked around.
Sandis danced from foot to foot. “We could hide behind . . . No, they’ll search everything. And they’ll hurt these people. We have to run for the city.”
They were still close to the wall. It wouldn’t be too far to the tunnels. One didn’t need papers to get in, just to get out. The guards wouldn’t stop them.
Rone snapped his fingers. “There are horses on this wagon. We can take one and get a head start.”
Sandis’s heart lodged in her throat. “We can’t steal their horse!” The rushed whisper escaped her like pressurized steam.
Rone looked at her like she was insane. “Do you want to die instead?”
“We’ll strand them—”
“They can dump a few things and make it back fine. They’ll be in more danger if we stay. Let’s go, while they’re distracted! Before the grafters come!”
Sandis shushed him, though his voice was no louder than hers had been. She gritted her teeth. She felt sick. She was going to throw up . . .
“Fine. Are any saddled?”
Rone glanced back at the third wagon before heading around the opposite side of the first one. “No. We’ll manage.”
“Can you ride?”
Rone blinked. “No . . . and I’m guessing you can’t, either.”
Sandis’s heart inched toward her navel. Oh Celestial, we’re going to die. I’m so sorry for entering your tower. I won’t do it again. Please save us. Please, please—
“Sandis!” Rone waved his hand in front of her face, demanding her attention.
She shook her head. “We have to run. Now.”
He retreated to the back of the wagon and peered toward the wall. “If they’ve been following us . . . if they have horses . . .”
Tears burned her eyes. “Now, Rone!”
His hands formed fists. He growled deep in his throat. Nodded. “Keep up.”
He offered his hand. Sandis took it.
The moment their fingers touched, Rone jerked her toward the wall.
Chapter 14
Dresberg had become a maze.
Panic distorted everything. Turned buildings into walls, shadows into monsters. Nothing was familiar. Sandis didn’t see people, only obstacles. Each hard footfall radiated up into her skull.
It was sheer luck they had gotten this far.
She didn’t look behind her—she never looked behind her—but Rone did, and his foul words told Sandis all she needed to know. Their mad sprint for the city hadn’t gone unnoticed. The grafters were too fast—though they would have needed to ditch their mounts outside the wall. The ways were too narrow and the crowds too thick for a man on horseback to keep up with someone on foot during the day.
A clock tower rang the hour, the echoing chimes pressing against Sandis’s skin like dull needles. Sweat threatened to break the grip she had on Rone’s hand.
A bullet whizzed by her forehead before it exploded against the brick corner of the bookstore behind her.
Rone jerked her down a skinny space between buildings. “Are you sure they don’t want to shoot you?”
Sandis’s breaths burned up and down her throat. She pushed herself faster through the maze. Had that bullet been meant for her? Did this mean Kazen had determined she was disposable, and only sought to take back Ireth?
Sandis hadn’t simply run away. She’d stolen from one of the most powerful men in Kolingrad.
Ireth was worth more than gold.
They reached a busier street. Rone jerked to a stop before barreling into a cart full of potatoes. Sandis turned around, but two people were running toward them, and there was nowhere else to go. She pushed Rone into the mass.
He didn’t complain. He simply tightened his grip on her fingers as they pushed through people, earning inquisitive looks and hard words as they went. “They’ll bring the police down on all of us at this rate.” Rone’s voice was hoarse and broken by heavy breaths. The race to the wall had not been a short one.
The police. They were just as dangerous to Sandis as the priests.
She’d take either of them over the grafters.
Shouts sounded behind them, angry and confused. The grafters pushed through the crowd. Marek using his bulk to knock down men and women alike. Staps toting a pistol in either hand. Another gunshot went off, and the crowd scattered. Rone jerked Sandis down a winding sideway crammed between a shuttle station and a metalworks. The heat from the working bellows steamed the tears from her eyes.
“Can you . . . fight them?” Sandis pushed the words out between labored breaths. “The . . . amarinth—”
“No.” They ducked under a clothesline and darted to the left. Sandis thought she heard a police whistle in the background, but she wasn’t sure. “You have to wait”—sharp turn to the right—“for the critical moment. Only one spin. I have”—he huffed—“a sense for this.”
He glanced up, perhaps trying to determine if they could get up onto the roofs before the grafters caught them. Shaking his head, he instead pulled them to a main street.
Sandis had been wrong. The grafters hadn’t entirely given up on horses.
A steed black as coal—an animal Sandis recognized immediately—pulled up in front of them, its nostrils wide and panting, its rider garbed darkly, albeit without his usual hat.
/> Sandis’s legs became dead weight as she and Rone skidded to a stop on slick cobblestones. Kazen. And behind him, Rist.
The sight of Rist slammed into her like winter wind. It felt as if years had passed since their last encounter instead of days. Her gut rolled with the knowledge of what he could be. A weapon. Kuracean.
Did Rist want to fight her? Did he hate her for leaving? She tried to read his wide eyes, but found no answers.
Kazen wouldn’t summon in the city in the middle of the afternoon, would he? With so many people nearby? Isepia he could hide, but Kuracean—
Rone was already pulling her back. Sandis nearly rolled her ankles as she stumbled after him. Another police whistle ripped through the air, closer.
Kazen pulled a gun from a holster at his hip. “Enough of this,” Sandis thought she heard him say, his tone bored but laced with that subtle anger it had taken her years to pick up on. And his eyes . . . his eyes burned like two smog-choked suns.
Rone jerked Sandis’s arm, forcing her face forward. Why she felt the need to say it, she didn’t know. Rist could no more control the numen chained to him than she could summon Ireth at will. Still, she cried out, “He killed Heath! He killed him!”
Her friend’s name ripped from her throat like the cry of a dying animal.
Then they ran. Ran. Ran. The buildings grew darker and closer together. The air became colder as they jumped a fence and wove through flats. Sandis’s chest and legs felt like they were being eaten by acid by the time she realized this particular cluster of flats was abandoned.
She pulled back on Rone’s hand, though it merely slowed him. Sweat ran down the sides of his face like rain. “Rone, stop!” she croaked. Oh Celestial, that’s why Kazen didn’t chase us, just blocked us—
She dug her heels into the broken cobbles of the ill-kept street.
Rone stopped and whipped around, his eyes mad, the amarinth clenched in his fingers. “Sandis! We have to—”
“They’re corralling us!” New tears burned in the corners of her eyes. “We’re so close . . . God’s tower, we’re so close, Rone . . .”
She spun around, searching. Pulled him down a passageway barely wide enough for him.
“Close to what?”
“The grafters.” The words came out on a whisper. They reached a dead end. Sandis spun, frantic. Jerked Rone in another direction. “This is their territory. We’re practically walking over it.”
Her entire body was cold. Her joints felt rusted. Her muscles ran on embers.
Footsteps thundered behind them.
Rone yanked Sandis down another path, one she didn’t recognize. “Look for a ladder,” he sputtered. “A rain pipe. Anything. We need to get up.”
They rounded a corner and faced another dead end. Turned back.
Three grafters, including Galt in his white-and-silver priest’s robes and Ravis in all black, blocked the way out.
Rone’s hand, the one holding the amarinth, snaked behind him as he stepped in front of Sandis. Her entire body went numb, save for her desperate, starving lungs, but she retreated when he did. Her foot landed in something foul and sticky; her back hit brick.
Nowhere else to go. No fence to climb, door to open, crevice to hide in. They stood at the end of a brick box. Even sunlight couldn’t worm its way in.
“I can take them,” Rone whispered, readying his amarinth even as three separate firearms trained on him. Sandis believed him—she’d seen him take out five people at the tavern. But as Rone went to spin the golden loops of the artifact, four more people appeared behind the original three. Marek and three men Sandis didn’t recognize, short of the neckerchief poking up from one man’s collar. She knew those colors.
Straight Ace’s mobsmen. Kazen had a mob searching for her now. What bribery had he used to earn their cooperation? How many more did he have under his sleeve? At least he hadn’t allied with one of the other grafter gangs. At least they didn’t have an army of numina—
The base of her skull tingled until ice shot down her script. She felt the color drain from her skin. Her fingers trembled. She was not reacting to the mob, however, but to the numen coming toward them.
“Kuracean,” she whispered, hairs standing on end. “He’s summoned him.”
Rone glanced back at her, still clutching the amarinth. It wouldn’t be enough. One minute wouldn’t be nearly enough . . . and it would only protect him, not her. She didn’t even have a garbage bin to hide behind! Where were the police? The border patrol? Had they not seen the chase? Had Kazen paid them off?
Did they even care?
She heard the heavy click, drag of armor against cobbles before the numen’s bulbous head hovered over the seven men poised to attack her and Rone. Though it crouched to fit in the small space, it was still nine feet tall. Half of Kuracean’s head was a toothless mouth, but Sandis had seen it take off heads in a single chomp. Just once, when a mob that no longer existed had made a foolish attempt to take over Kazen’s territory. Kuracean’s massive front legs, ending in great pincers, one larger than the other, slid behind the mobsmen. The rest of its spidery body was hidden by the crumbling building that acted as half of Sandis’s cage.
Rone didn’t even swear when he saw it. He almost dropped the amarinth, but it dangled from his index finger by a single golden loop. He looked like a ghost beneath his dark hair. Sandis could see the blue veins in his neck.
Trapped. They were trapped.
Kazen, now with his hat firmly tipped over his forehead, walked out from beneath Kuracean as though the great monster were merely a startling sculpture. The numen growled softly in its armored throat but didn’t move. Not without its master’s order.
“Look what you’ve made me do, Sandis.” Kazen’s voice was that of a tired mother. He held his arms out, gesturing to his armed men and his mighty monster, so much stronger than Isepia. His face was unreadable, like always, but his hat could not hide the glimmer in his eyes. It was a subtle, swirling shine that raised gooseflesh on her arms.
She’d never seen him so angry.
“I have such a mess to clean up,” he continued. “You’ve riled the city folk this time. Their little police force won’t be happy.”
Rone shook his head. “I can’t . . . ,” he whispered.
Sandis tried to swallow but found she couldn’t.
“And you.” Kazen’s silvery gaze fell upon Rone. “I think we need to have a nice long chat. After I see what you’re hiding behind your back.” He smiled. “Foolish boy. You have no idea what trouble you’ve gotten yourself into.”
They were going to kill Rone. Maybe kill her . . . but no, that would be too easy for Kazen, wouldn’t it? Sandis’s mind couldn’t even fathom what would happen after this. Her imagination didn’t stretch that wide.
Her eyes shifted to Kuracean’s turtle-like face. To that hard, pointed lip. She still remembered the sound the mobsman’s neck had made when Kuracean severed his head from his body. Still remembered the spurting fountain of blood. It was the last thing she’d seen before Kazen had summoned Ireth to join the battle.
Ireth.
She felt pressure in her head even as she thought the name. She couldn’t fight these men. Rone couldn’t fight these men, even with the amarinth. They especially didn’t stand a chance against Kuracean. But Ireth could. Surely Ireth could.
But Ireth needed to be brought into the world by a summoner. Sandis was only the vessel . . . and Rone couldn’t summon him. He didn’t know how, for one, and he didn’t meet the qualifications of a summoner. He didn’t even come close.
Kazen gestured to Marek and two of the bulky Aces behind him and sent them forward. “Knock out the man, but keep him alive for now. Don’t hurt the girl. I need her restrained.” Kazen pulled from his pocket a needle, tube, and vial. So the power of her blood had faded, and he needed to renew his control.
Twenty feet separated Sandis and Rone from the mobsmen. Nineteen, eighteen—
“Come, Sandis. I’ll give you a chance
to explain, once you’re home.” Kazen’s voice was so soothing. Hushed, yet it carried over the distance. If Sandis hadn’t spent the last four years of her life with him . . . if she hadn’t seen him turn on friends as frequently as he did enemies, she might have been fooled into thinking that he cared about her. That he wanted the best for her. That he provided safety, home, family.
Sandis’s family was dead. All except one. One she still had to find.
She shook her head.
The slightest twitch of Kazen’s eye betrayed his rage.
Rone backed into her, pressing her to the brick wall. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, not looking at her. His wide eyes focused on the approaching men. Marek’s eyes narrowed in his wide face, his stride sure. “I can try . . . maybe you can escape . . .”
She needed Ireth.
She needed Ireth now.
It struck her like cold rain. Every summoner had to serve as a vessel at least once. That meant she met the qualifications of a summoner, didn’t it? The ones she knew . . . and she thought she knew them all.
Seventeen feet. Sixteen. Fifteen.
But a vessel couldn’t summon into herself!
And yet Sandis knew she wasn’t an ordinary vessel. Ireth had tried to communicate with her on multiple occasions. She’d felt his presence. Could swear she felt it even now. She remembered things she shouldn’t. And then there was her strange reaction to the Noscon writing at the records center . . .
Had Ireth been urging her to take matters into her own hands? To act? And if she was wrong, what would it cost her? Embarrassment? What a small price to pay.
Fourteen feet. Thirteen. Twelve.
She knew this. She knew this.
Fear curled around her limbs like smoke.
Kazen’s men continued their approach, Kuracean and Kazen’s small army looming behind them. Kazen was so sure. Sandis was so unsure.
Eleven. Ten.
Keeping her eyes on Kazen, Sandis pressed her palm against her head. Muttered under her breath, “Vre en nestu a carnath.” Words she’d heard so many times. Words she didn’t understand. “Ii mem entre I amar.” Her hand grew hot. Burning.
Smoke and Summons (Numina Book 1) Page 17