The Rising Stones (Ihale Book 1)

by A. Lawrence

  She finally pulled it out. Communication crystals only had to be vaguely diamond shaped, but usually they were embellished. Bel's was big and chunky, the wrist strap way too wide to be fashionable.

  "It was a gift. From my grandma." She glared at Rhyss like she dared her to say anything, but she just shrugged. Bel sighed and strapped it on, the leather fitting too loosely on her wrist. She tapped the middle of it, and it glowed faintly. It blinked a few times, then went steady again. "Hmmm. I don't think I can reach anyone from down here. What about your wrist plate?"

  "Keep trying, and I don't know." Rhyss tapped out a message, letting anyone who was close enough know that she was deeper in the tunnels and would continue on. Hopefully someone felt it. If they did, she got no reply, but hers was linked to Vin's. It was possible no one would get the message until he got back to the main Guard station. Which he would, she had to have absolute faith.

  "All right, let's go."

  They walked for a long time. At least it felt that way. It was hard to tell down in the depths. Rhyss let Bel take the lead without much protest. If there were more clay constructs behind them, then she would be the one to take them out.

  Besides, if she'd put Bel in the back, she would have thrown a fit and Rhyss didn't have the energy to deal with it.

  That left Heln in the middle, and she really had no idea what to say to him.

  "So, what was behind the moss?" he asked.

  "It felt like a wall," she told him. "Like someone built this place."

  "They probably did, as an escape route to the Temple," Heln reasoned. "Or from. I guess the first cave was supposed to look unassuming just in case. It might have even been above ground at one point."

  "I suppose." Rhyss shrugged. She doubted this place had ever been above ground. The ceiling was higher than it had been at the entrance and mostly lost in shadows, roots twisting through the rock and snaking down the walls. The air smelled damp and far too still. "We'll find a good, defensible place to camp for the rest of the night and then go back tomorrow. By then there should be a full rescue team and we can get you home."

  "Yes, Captain." Bel looked over her shoulder. Her little quip didn't have quite enough bite for it to be mocking.

  "Oh, I will be, someday."

  Since neither of them responded it was clear that they didn't doubt her.

  Good.

  The only sounds for a long time were the scuffing of their boots on smooth floors. When Rhyss heard water ahead of them she almost cried from relief. Her entire life had been spent with wind whistling around her old house and leaves whispering to each other, both in her mother's garden and in the Grove. Any noise made the buzzing in her head subside.

  The water ended up being a trickle from the wall, sliding down the tunnel through thick moss and tree roots into the dark. She filled up her canteen as best as she could. It had been scripted to keep the water cold, fresh, and pure, no matter the source. Some of the sources she had heard of previous Trainees using were a lot more suspect than the wall of a cave.

  "I thought this was more of an in and out sort of deal." Bel said after a few moments of waiting for canteen to fill.

  "I would rather be prepared. Besides. I'm thirsty." Rhyss took a swig from the canteen and tried to not make a face. There were Ihalins that would pay quite a bit to drink mineral water that potent. "I'm sure you are, too."

  Bel made a noncommittal sound.

  "And your brother."

  "Half—"

  "You already said that." Heln interrupted her. The noise Bel made at that was decidedly less noncommittal.

  "Be quiet, we don't know what's down here." Rhyss tried to keep her voice low. It was becoming more and more of a challenge as time went on. She just wanted to shake Bel until she stopped being an idiot. She breathed in, counted to five because she wasn't sure she would make it to ten, and reminded herself that they didn't have the same training that she did. It didn't really help.

  "Well, I have an idea," Bel said. "Heln would probably know more."

  "I'm keeping my shields up; I'm not stupid," Heln said.

  Rhyss straightened, slipping the canteen into her satchel and counting again. This time she made it to seven before speaking. He must have meant his magical sensing abilities, which made her frown. "You should leave them down, in case more of those things show up. You're the only warning system we have."

  She couldn't forget how silent the enormous construct had been. She wondered if Heln would have sensed it if he'd had his shields down then.

  Heln was staring at her again, and she really wished he would stop; it was unnerving.

  "I guess," he said, finally. "But only if you promise to carry me if I do sense anything and it knocks me out."

  Rhyss breathed in, looking him up and down. He was taller than her, just barely, but he was skinny. If she had to she could carry him, as long as she didn't need to run. "Fine."

  "Seriously?"

  "I doubt you're much heavier than a backpack full of rocks, and I carried one of those up a fifty-foot tree, so yes. Seriously."

  "You kind of scare me, and I'm not ashamed to admit that." There was no outward indication that he had followed her orders, but at least his eyes weren't noticeably glowing. She adjusted the strap of her satchel and lead the way before Bel could protest.

  The trickle of water was joined by others, until a fast-flowing stream ran down the center of the cave floor, glowing moss streamers being pulled by the current. The tunnel floor was dyed rich blues and greens from the mineral deposits.

  She would need a new canteen after this.

  Bel broke the silence. "Has anyone else realized that since the water is going this way we're actually going down?"

  "It did cross my mind." Rhyss hated to admit that it really hadn't. She'd been too focused on finding a place they could stay that would be safe.

  "So maybe we should turn back? Or just stay here. Isn't that what you're supposed to do when you're lost?" Bel asked.

  "Maybe if we were lost. The tunnel goes straight down so I don't think that's going to happen." Heln didn't sound too concerned about their current predicament. When Rhyss glanced back she saw he was hunched in on himself, his hands in the pockets of his dark green jacket. "It hasn't even been that long. Do you want to go back to the entrance? Because I don't without knowing there's a full rescue team waiting for us."

  At least he was backing her up. "Just a little further then we can call it quits no matter what it looks like."

  "Now is as good as ten minutes from now. It's just a tunnel." A whine had crept into Bel's voice. She must have been tired, the poor, pampered baby.

  Bel was wrong, as it turned out. Not even five minutes later they passed through an archway into a much larger space. The stream led into a pool in the center, glowing aquamarine in the light from Rhyss's bubble and ringed with pale, drooping plants. It wasn't very deep, the water continuing on down another tunnel. She pushed more magic into the script, and it lit up the room.

  It was roughly circular, cloaked in moss and interrupted by tree roots. Two tunnels stretched on either side of them, a third across the room continued down. The one on the right was blocked, as far as she could tell, tree roots had grown thickly over its entrance, but she could see the darkness beyond.

  Rhyss took a step in. Even the floor was carpeted in moss. "Here looks good, I think. We can set up a barrier. I believe someone bragged for hours about how strong their barriers were in class last year. I wonder who that could have been."

  "It was maybe five minutes." Bel grumbled. "Your memory is flawed, clearly, which is alarming considering you think you're leading this little expedition. If you aren't feeling up to the task then I suppose I can take it upon myself to blow you both away with my expertise."

  "Good luck with that." Heln was more interested in the pool than in what Bel was doing. He crouched at the edge, his fingers nearly brushing the surface.

  "No luck necessary at all, but I do appreciate the sentime
nt. Your knife, Rhyss?"

  "It's a dagger." Rhyss unsheathed her second blade and handed it to her, grip first. Bel took it from her like it was going to bite her. Honestly, Rhyss sort of wanted to stab her with it, so it was probably a good reaction for Bel to have.

  Watching Bel scratch magic script into moss was more engaging than she would like and, as much as she hated to admit it, she wasn't bad enough to need supervision. They were constantly competing for top of the class for a reason. Bel knew her script probably better than Rhyss did, if she was being honest.

  Rhyss really didn't feel like being honest or watching Bel's stupid, perfect ponytail sway a little with each motion. The other DoVan sibling was probably the safer one to interact with, anyway. She walked over to crouch next to Heln at the edge of the pool. "See something interesting?"

  It was just a pond, but the minerals made the water appear to be a vibrant turquoise. It looked like the hot springs that the Guard Trainees were sometimes taken to after a hard day, but no steam wafted up from it and she wasn't sure if what they were seeing was the bottom, or if it just got too cloudy to tell.

  Heln shrugged, not looking up at her. "It's pretty, I guess. I wonder what it was for."

  "It's a pond, it's for being pretty."

  "It's a perfect circle." He pulled the plants away to show her the edge. It did look almost like it had been cut into the ground instead of formed. "So it was probably used for something."

  "And tada!" Bel's exclamation made Rhyss nearly end up in the pond. She gestured to the script with the dagger. It all looked correctly done to her, and she'd made the space big enough for all three of them. "Just a little bit of magic and we are golden for getting some rest."

  "Are you waiting for a drum roll?" Rhyss stared at her.

  "Maybe." She pressed a hand against the circle and it lit up, the light forming a dome. "There! It will let us in, but nothing else. Perfect as always. Well. I'm starving, so I hope you still have some of those meal bars in your bag, Heln."

  Chapter Four

  Rhyss stared at the barrier. It might have been a trick of the blue color of the pond, but she swore it seemed brighter than it had a few hours before. At least, she assumed it was a few hours. Her wrist guard was supposed to tap out the time to her, but it hadn't for long enough that she was certain it was malfunction rather than her sense of time being skewed.

  Bel had sprawled out on the moss and Heln had curled up into a ball, using his satchel as a pillow. At least it wasn't too cold with her cloak draped over her and the barrier dampening the worst of the chill. Bel had been surprised that, as a Guard Trainee, Rhyss didn't know any warming scripts. She pointed out that Bel didn't know them, either. That had started a new round of bickering that had been interrupted by Heln calmly saying that if anything didn't know they were in the tunnels, it probably would if they kept fighting.

  Still, despite the soft moss underneath her and the quiet sounds of water that sounded like her listening crystal at home, sleep wouldn't come for her, not even after she ran through her breathing exercises for the fourth time. Vin's face, the monstrous construct and the way Heln's eyes had glowed kept flashing through her mind, yanking her out of dozing every time sleep nearly became a reality.

  It felt like hours before she gave up, pulling her armor back on. The snaps pulled together by magic, locking securely into place. Even if it was bare minimum armor, made from scripted willow, it still made her feel more secure. Rhyss stood, stretched carefully, and stepped out of the barrier.

  It was always a strange feeling, like a gentle humming at the back of her mind was silenced before she was even fully aware of it. Maybe that was a very watered-down version of how sensing magic felt for Heln. She'd never even given a thought to it.

  On the outside the barrier looked like a giant soap bubble. Heln and Bel were just barely visible inside of it, still asleep. She thought about leaving them a message, but she doubted they would wake up. She didn't plan to be gone for long.

  She started walking, picking the tunnel the stream continued into. The odds of her being so deep underground again were slim to none. Her odds of continuing her Guard training might be slim to none, too. Her mother would be disappointed.

  Her wife not quite as much. Rhyss's step-mother had always hated the Guard for how hard it had worked her mother and for taking her leg in an attack on the edge of the city, at one of the weaker points of the barrier. It had ended her career. She insisted that the magical replacement worked almost well enough for her to continue her duties as Captain, but she had settled in as Dean of the Eleti Academy of the Magical Arts like her grandmother had before her. She hadn't even tried to stop Rhyss from signing up to be a Trainee, saying her children could make their own decisions, but she'd seemed proud.

  Her injury hadn't stopped Rhyss, either. She respected her mother and her sacrifices. If Rhyss was injured or died protecting her city, then that was a burden she was willing to bear.

  Saying that and seeing Vin, bleeding and hurt trying to protect them felt like two very different things. Her stomach churned. She wasn't a coward, but seeing the violence of the construct up close and how it had taken down her mentor was a world away from stories around a campfire. Or having a bag of rocks strapped to her back and told to climb to the top of a tree.

  All of that training, talking, and polishing her armor seemed so useless when the reality was a few brutal moments.

  Her boot splashed down into a puddle, jerking her from her thoughts. At some point she had started jogging and stopping nearly sent her face first into mud.

  The stream was backed up here. A swirl of silt and water became what looked like solid mud. Rhyss sent her illumination bubble forward. Farther down the tunnel a set of steps rose from the mud, rising sharply into more darkness. The mud leading up to them looked deep, especially with the way the tunnel was sloping towards the base of the stairs, but that had to be the stairs that led back out to the Temple.

  She didn't want to find out how much mud was there while she was by herself, even though it was killing her wondering if freedom was just at the top of a flight of stairs. She would get the siblings and drag them up there; no sense in wading through the muck twice. That decided, she turned back the way she had come, the bubble coming back to meet her, and the shadows moved strangely in the corner of her eye. She whipped back around, but the tunnel was just as empty as before.

  It took a moment for her heart to stop pounding. Once it had she began trekking back to where she'd left Bel and Heln, trying to ignore the mud sucking at the bottom of her boots.

  It didn't take long to get back to what counted as solid ground and she began scraping her boots uselessly against the moss. They were Trainee regulation and made to withstand a lot more than a little mud, but she'd kept them nice for so long.

  "Stupid Bel," she muttered, dragging her foot and probably actually making the mud worse. "Stupid shortcut. Stupid, stupid, stupid idiots."

  There was no way the two siblings could hear her from here but that didn't matter. She nearly fell over with how vehemently she moved her foot and saw what she had missed the first time she had gone down the tunnel. The muddier parts of the tunnel had been perforated with deep dents that dwarfed her own footprints.

  When she looked closer she realized what they were. Tracks, large ones, spaced nearly as wide as the tunnel itself. It hadn't been visible in the round chamber because of the moss, but something clearly was living down there, something wide and low enough to the ground that it had disturbed the stream banks very recently.

  She ran back to camp. She had gone a lot farther down the tunnel than she had thought. What kind of Guard was she? Bel and Heln were civilians and she shouldn't have left them, not even for a moment. Especially since she had seen no evidence of animal life in the tunnels despite all of the plant life. That had been one of the first things she learned — if the little things aren't there it's usually because something bigger was living off of them.

  The room
was exactly the same as she had left it and she felt relief burst like a balloon inside of her. Bel and Heln were still asleep when she charged into the barrier, nearly stepping on their faces.

  "Get up." She hissed, loudly. "We have to go. Now."

  "What happened to sleeping?" Bel opened one eye and glared at her. When she sat up she looked almost put together and Rhyss had to wonder if she had slept at all, because Heln's short red hair was standing on end when he sat up and blinked owlishly at her

  "You slept. Let's go." Rhyss was glad she had packed her own satchel, swinging it over her shoulder and shoving Bel's belongings into her own, throwing it at her. She made a noise of protest but Rhyss didn't bother to see if she'd hit her, concentrating on Heln. "Do you sense anything?"

  "The barrier script is sort of like… that cottony feeling you get with a cold." Heln was at least moving and gave a nudge to Bel, who was groaning piteously about how Rhyss had murdered her. Somehow Rhyss got her standing without too much fuss. "Why? Is something out there?"

  "I don't know, but I really don't want to find out," Rhyss admitted. Ice was in her veins and it made her numb to anything but fear. "Leave the barrier up, just in case."

  "Fine." Bel seemed to be taking things seriously enough. At the very least she didn't sound completely like a petulant child. "May I ask in case of what? More constructs?"

  Heln shook his head. "No. There's nothing here that I can sense."

  That didn't make Rhyss feel better, somehow. She drew her dagger, pressing her thumb against the script in the hilt and activating the magic in the blade before she stepped across the barrier line.

  Heln crossed it last and nothing disastrous happened. "I still don't sense any of those things, before you ask."

  "Fantastic." Bel smiled, but she must have seen something in her expression. "So… are we heading back or…?"

  She barely heard the noise over Bel talking, but it was there, like the soft hiss of a breath. She shoved Bel backwards just as something dropped heavily from the ceiling right where they had been standing.