She paused and gave me a funny look. “But you have to split them open to know which one’s good.”
“You poor kid, has no one taught you how to thump a watermelon? Seriously?”
“Wait, thump? Why would you hit it?”
“To hear it, of course.” I could tell from her expression she didn’t understand what I meant at all. “Wait, is this a cultural thing? No one knocks on watermelon to hear if they’re good or not? Really? My mind’s blown over here, you mean to tell me that every time you go to pick a watermelon, you have the merchant split it open for you?”
“It’s either that or take my chances it’s a good one,” she defended herself. “And how in heaven are you supposed to know if a watermelon is good or not by the sound of it?”
“It has a certain tone to it, deep but hollow,” I tried to explain only to realize that trying to describe a sound was like trying to describe a color. “You know what? I’ll show you. Let’s get the watermelon first—”
It wasn’t anything overt, but it didn’t take flashy moves in order to get my attention. I’d been fighting since I was knee high, on guard duty since the age of thirteen, and over the last two weeks my nerves had been stretched so thin that anything would set them off. As Rena discovered.
So I took notice of a number of men all around the same age, in similar clothes, plain and somber, the cut not fine but better than workmen, all of them carefully not looking at me but also keeping their profiles toward me. They tried not to make it obvious they were watching but they failed. Miserably.
“Rena, we have a slight problem.” I tucked her in a little closer to my side, arm at her back, making it look like I was being affectionate when in fact I was preparing to throw her into the first corner possible so they couldn’t attack her from behind. The bond flared unhappily as I felt the threat start to close in around us.
She turned to me, not seeing what I saw, but then she still remained sweet and innocent in these matters. I preferred to keep it that way. “What’s the problem?” she asked, putting a hand to her chest, trying to keep the bond from acting unruly.
I kept my voice low, casual, so that even if they overheard me they’d only catch the tone. “We’re about to get jumped.”
Her eyes went wide and she squeaked, “That’s a slight problem?!”
“Well, no, that’s not really the problem,” I denied and despite the situation I could feel the adrenaline kicking in, an old friend that sent my nerves singing. “The problem is that we’re in an enclosed space that restricts me to hand-to-hand combat and that limits how many people I can take on at once.”
Rena looked frantically around her, although she limited it to just her eyes moving; she was smart enough to not move her head around and telegraph that we knew. “So what’s your max in this situation?”
“Five.”
“How many do you think will attack us?”
“Six.” I gave her a gamine smile. “That’s the problem.”
“I don’t think I like being outnumbered,” Rena managed, mouth still going, but I could tell this situation scared her badly.
“Don’t worry, you get used to it.” There, that corner would do. I couldn’t get us out of this narrow street, it went on for some time, and I wasn’t about to try a building. I didn’t know which one would be safe and the narrow conditions wouldn’t improve any. But that recess between two buildings, that looked like it could act as a funnel and barrier long enough. “There, go!”
Rena sprinted for where I pointed; I kept up until she was safely in place.
The blow came from behind, hard and fast, but I’d been in more fights than I could remember. I was more than a little pissed, too. “You know what?” I asked as I caught the hand and rolled my weight forward, throwing my attacker into a wall with a bone-shattering thud. The bond now snarled like a predator, demanding that I protect Rena, and my protective instincts kicked into overdrive. I slipped around into a block and twist, one ear on Rena, hearing her chant her spells. “I’m seriously annoyed at you fopdoodles.”
There, there, and there—it wasn’t just the six. They had three mages with them, I could see them flinging up a multitude of spells. I could only guess the purpose, but I knew what I would want my mage partner to do in a situation like this. Spells to block her from calling for help, spells to cage us in, other spells to do damage to us. I had to blink, to focus, before the bond could turn my vision into a field of red. I couldn’t afford tunnel vision, not now.
I blocked a punch, body rocking with the force of it as these men weren’t wimps—definitely pros—and retaliated with a brutal swing of my elbow. It connected with the man’s nose and I felt and heard something break. Grinning with feral intent, I pivoted on a foot, snapping a leg out to connect with a knee, tossing another attacker into his buddies. “You really don’t have to traumatize my mage. You want a piece of me, fine, you wait until I’m alone. There’s a cardinal rule here, you cretins, some things are just common sense, and one of them is that you never—” I lashed out with a right fist, took one in an uppercut, coupling it with a foot sweep that sent him straight down, “ever, terrify cute girls!”
I swung around, looking for a way out, because winning in this situation wasn’t possible. I wasn’t fast enough or strong enough to deal with six pros plus three mages, even with Rena as my backup. The numbers and odds and probabilities rolled through my head and I knew, just knew, that we had to either find a way to take those mages down all at once or we would go down. We would go down and wouldn’t get back up again.
I ducked under a blow, dodging a kick, then a hit glanced off my shoulder and I rolled with it, falling back so that I didn’t absorb the blow. I had three throwing daggers within reach, and I used them, cutting two of them down. Even as one of them grabbed me, I connected with his groin, throwing a knee upwards hard and fast, breaking completely free of his hold.
Four, four men, I could deal with four men, and if Rena could deal with the three mages—I spared a glance and found her sweating, face white and taut with strain, and that expression told me everything I needed to know.
We weren’t winning.
A sharp whistle pierced the air and my attackers suddenly backed off. That was a terrible sign, one that made me want to run, but of course they had cut off every escape route, burn their hides.
Rena grabbed me from behind, fingers in a vice like grip around my arm. “Whatever happens, do not leave my side,” she commanded, voice strained and hoarse.
“Now why would I do that?” I answered, being smart more out of habit than anything else. “You know I’m more faithful than your shadow.”
“I know,” she responded with a ghost of a smile. “Stick close.”
One of the mages threw up a portal, and yelled something in Swallin. I didn’t have to speak the language to know what he said. He wanted the muscle to grab us and throw us in through the portal.
No way could I let that happen. If we were portaled now, it would be to a place I absolutely did not want to be.
“Buy me twenty seconds,” she pleaded and then started speaking rapidly.
I had no idea what Rena planned, but she had obviously thought of something, so I was more than willing to buy her the time she asked for. I spun, threw kicks, punched one man in the sternum, knocking the breath out of him, and garnered us a little breathing room. Rena spoke faster than I had ever heard her, the incantation nearly tripping over itself to escape her mouth. Seriously, what was she planning to do?
She latched onto me again, but this time, she shoved me ahead. Straight for the portal.
“Wait, what?” I demanded, not at all inclined to go toward that thing.
“Go!” she shouted at me, still pushing.
I started running, trusting her, but still confused. Why the portal? Then I saw the three mages panic, they started shouting at the muscle to stop us, and that’s when it clicked. Rena had done something to the portal.
It was a cardinal rule of mine
that if the enemy didn’t want you to do something, that was precisely what you needed to do. With glee in my heart, I sped up to a sprint, or as fast of a sprint as I dared with Rena in tow.
The assassins were not about to let us pass by them without a fight. They dove for me, and I was hard pressed to keep them off Rena’s back. They were more determined this time, the attacks coming harder and faster than before, and it took every ounce of skill I had to stay on my feet and just defend the both of us. Unfortunately I took more than one hit during this. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t just dive through the portal and think us safe, I had to buy us enough room for her to close the portal behind us.
That in mind, I ignored the way that my ribs screamed, the burning gash in my thigh, and I kicked one of them back, sending him flying into his compatriot. Two down, and then—I dropped low, leg sweeping out, knocking the other one off his feet completely. Without getting up, I lowered my torso, leg chambering in and then snapping out, hitting the last of them squarely in the balls. He folded over with a gasp, tears springing up from the pain.
Good. “Rena, go!”
She huffed for breath at my side, but didn’t even pause as we reached the portal’s edge. A hand on my arm, she drew me up and dove through, pulling me with her.
I could hear her speaking as we went, and I had a feeling she was destroying the portal so that no one could follow us through. My last thought as I left the street behind was that I hoped my mage knew what she was doing. I absolutely did not want to be stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Darkness.
That was all I could see and for a moment I was afraid there was something wrong with my eyes, that I couldn’t open them. But that wasn’t it, it was just so completely black that there wasn’t any light to see. The bond tremored like a bottled earthquake, shaken by what had happened and the possibility of more danger. I wanted to throttle it. The only reason I felt grateful for it at the moment was that I knew precisely where Rena stood, and that kept me from sarding losing it on the spot.
“Rena.” I had my heart in my throat but I tried to keep my building panic out of my voice. “Where are we?”
“I really hate to say this but I have no idea.”
“Sards. That’s not in the least bit comforting. What did you do to that portal?”
“Well, there’s…it’s complicated.” She huffed out a breath, a sound I knew well for when she struggled to make something simple enough for me to understand. “Basically, portal spells have more than simple directions. It doesn’t give you a name for a destination, but something like coordinates; make sense?”
I almost nodded then realized she couldn’t see it in the dark. “Sure, I follow. And?”
“I erased one of the coordinates. By doing that, I changed the location, but that means we can literally be anywhere on this horizontal line. Anywhere.”
The question popped out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Isn’t that incredibly dangerous?”
“What part of me erasing any part of a portal spell sounds safe to you?” she snarked back.
“Okay, you got me there. And that was snarky, incredibly snarky, I think you’ve been around me for too long. I’m a bad influence.”
“Can’t disagree there.” She might have been laughing, her voice wavering, or she was like me and fighting the urge to panic and using banter to cover it up.
I couldn’t detect a trace of light anywhere. I could feel the ground below me, and it wasn’t level, and the air had this smell of dampness and earth and moving water. I knew these scents well, thanks to an interesting upbringing. Mostly cousins taking me places that as a kid I had no business being in. “We’re in a cave.”
“That would be my guess,” she agreed. “Deep.”
Very deep. The way that our voices echoed back toward us told me that much. That and the complete lack of air movement. There was literally no trace of wind and the air felt stuffy, stifling so. “Rena, I have the feeling that this is a stupid question, but because I’m me, I’m going to throw it out there anyway—how close to creation magic is a flame? Light of any sort?”
“It’s not ‘close to’ it IS creation magic.”
“I was really afraid you were going to say that. So you’re saying that we’re stuck deep in a cave and you can’t create any kind of light for us to navigate by.”
“That’s the size of it. And not knowing where we are, I can’t portal us back, either. Worse, no one can track where we went. I made sure of that so the assassins couldn’t come after us, but….”
But it meant that allies couldn’t come after us either. Right. “This is seriously turning out to be a bad day.”
“You’re telling me.” There was a digestive silence. “Bannen. As I see it, we have one of two options. First is, we try to walk and find a way out.”
“I have to tell you, the idea of stumbling around in a pitch black cave, with no light or supplies, strangely holds no appeal to me.”
“Me neither, which leaves us with our second option: I tunnel our way out.”
I could feel the ache and stabbing pain in my ribs. I had a feeling they were cracked—if I was lucky only bruised. I felt pretty sure there was a long gash in my thigh that bled, too, although sluggishly. That wasn’t going to get better anytime soon and saying something to Rena would only worry her. She’d worked some magic this morning, but not a lot, and I hoped that if she was offering to do this it meant that she had enough magic for the job. “Do you have a sense of where to start digging? Cause honestly, that sounds like our best bet.”
“Not offhand, but if you give me a few minutes, I think I can figure it out.”
“Be my guest. I’ll just stand here and breathe.”
“You do that.”
I grinned even though she couldn’t see it. Snarky, snarky little mouth of hers. I was definitely ‘rubbing off’ on her, as she put it. I was very glad that Rena was not the type to panic during a crisis. She’d proven that earlier when tackling Toh’sellor, and here especially I couldn’t help her. She had to be the one that found a way out.
The silence dragged. As we waited, I dug a handkerchief out of my pocket and tied it around the gash, going by feel on where to tie it. It wasn’t ideal but there was little more that I could do about it in this situation. I tried to ignore my ribs, and the way my arm ached, and the sharp pain of my pinky toe. Pretty sure I stubbed it on something when tumbling through the portal. I hated breaking toes, they take for sarding ever to heal. Even with magic.
“I think,” she did not sound completely confident about this, “that we need to go through there. It seems to be the thinnest section of mountain.”
“Saying the ‘thinnest’ section of a mountain does not exactly bode well. As in, I feel a foreboding. How much are you going to need to literally dig our way out of here?”
“A lot.” She sounded grim but determined. Something small and warm, fingers I knew well, grabbed my hand. “Stay close, follow my lead.”
I held on because frankly I felt a little better with the contact. Not that the bond could be pacified just with physical contact right now, but it helped. I kept blinking even though I knew it wouldn’t help, but my mind didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t see. In this absolute darkness it was strangely like having an out of body experience except without the excuse of being dead drunk. “I know your eyes are good, but how well can you see right now?”
“Magically? Just fine. I can see the layout of the area so I can keep us from falling into any holes or off any ledges like that one, that one right there, let’s go a little left, perfect.”
“Rena, I’m suddenly glad that you’re strange and your magic works so differently. Not falling off cliffs in a random cave has given me a whole new appreciation for just how good your skills are.”
“Why thank you, Bannen. I think.” She stopped abruptly. “Alright, here’s the part that will drive you antsy. I’m going to start. I’ll basically carve out large, blocky stairs so that we can steadily
walk up and out. We’re pretty far down, so that’s going to take a while. Try not to openly fidget.”
“Right,” I agreed easily.
“I mean it,” she warned.
“Hey, I can behave.”
“Chance is a fine thing,” she groused. With a huff of breath, she started in on the rock in front of us. At least, I assumed it was in front of us.
I wasn’t about to tell her that it took all of my energy to stay standing and not curl into a ball and cry. I was tired from pulling an all-nighter, a senseless fight in an alleyway, and I hurt. Bad. The longer I stood there, the more convinced I became that my ribs were likely not bruised but cracked and nothing irritated me more than cracked ribs. They also took forever to heal and even breathing strained them. I tried to keep my breaths quick and light.
She started speaking, the incantations mercifully short, and then stepped forward and up. Because I couldn’t see anything like she did, I felt my way forward with my good foot, found the step up, and took it. Even as I stepped up onto the flat ledge she had made, Rena worked on the next one.
We inched our way up, slowly up, for what seemed like a decade. I could hear the strain in her voice as Rena worked, growing progressively hoarser, but I knew she wouldn’t stop and take a break. We had no water, no food, and aside from resting her voice, there was no point in stopping. Rena remained single-mindedly focused on getting us out of here as quickly as possible. Even if she wanted to pause and rest, I wasn’t sure if she could. The bond kept throwing out antsy jibes at us, not happy that we were technically still in danger. For that matter, neither was I.
Even if Rena could ignore the bond, we didn’t have any room to maneuver. As she’d said she would, she made the tunnel straight and narrow, barely wide enough for us to stand in. The air hung cold, too, cold in the way that only mountain stone could be. I ran warm most of the time, but without more than a thin shirt and a vest on, I didn’t have any barrier between me and this icy chill. That and the blood loss made me even colder. I had a feeling my teeth would start chattering soon.
The Human Familiar (Familiar and the Mage Book 1) Page 28