Yet Ramper just laughed and ran after Bree and Gil. After a split second of hesitation, Myreon followed. The seekwand the Defenders were using would work particularly well down here, which meant they would catch Ramper, Gil, and Bree’s trail easily—it’s what brought them down on the cistern in the first place. Myreon might have escaped if she didn’t go with them, but she couldn’t bring herself to sacrifice those children to the Defenders for her own safety.
Head low, she ran for all she was worth, working a slight Lumenal enchantment over her eyes to allow her to see more clearly in the pitch-darkness. Light poured from her gaze and she could see the shadowy labyrinth of the sewers in stark, black-and-white relief. Ahead of her, Ramper glowed bright with a little shard of illumite in his hand, and Gil and Bree were starkly visible in its pool of light. The Defenders, of course, would be using the same basic enchantments she was—enchanted into the visors on their helmets.
“Ramper!” she shouted, “ditch the light!”
Ramper pocketed the illumite, but the damage was done. A tattler, bright and happy, zoomed past Myreon and affixed itself to Ramper. He swatted at it, but it dodged clear. A few more showed up, too, attaching themselves to Gil and Bree. The one that came for Myreon she quickly dispelled, but she couldn’t afford to pause long enough to dispel the others. By Defender regulations, set out by the Gray Tower itself, tattlers preceded Defenders into unsecured locations by only twelve paces. She pushed the others forward, knowing the firepikes weren’t far behind.
“Keep running!”
Her heart pounded. Routes through the labyrinth of sewers blossomed in her mind as she planned their potential escape.
Was this what it was like, Tyvian? she wondered, as she ducked around a corner to dodge a squad of mirror-helmed men who were trying to cut them off. Is this what I put you through for all those years?
She nearly ran into Gilvey and Bree as they had come up short at a dead end. “Kroth! Where’s Ramper?”
Bree looked pale, her hands on her knees. “Don’t . . . don’t know . . . lost him . . . somewhere . . .”
Myreon heard the shouts of the mirror-men as they searched. Glancing behind, she caught sight of the glow of their firepikes, lighting their way in the dark. The tattlers were giving them away—they glowed like fireflies.
Gil batted at his. “Can’t you get rid of these things?”
Myreon waved a hand, spoke a few words, and dispelled Bree’s, but, again, time was against her. “Come on!”
They doubled back, coming so close to the Defenders that they were able to squeeze off a few firepike shots. Myreon found herself realizing just how terrifying those weapons were when aimed at you, and how thankful she was for their sheer inaccuracy.
Unfamiliar with this part of the sewers, Myreon started guiding them through turns at random, hoping to lose the mirror-men in the labyrinth, possibly even shake the damned tattler that circled around Gil’s head like a halo. She had Bree by the hand, dragging her at double speed into the dark.
Rounding a corner, the height of the tunnel dropped suddenly and Myreon struck her head on a stone crossbeam. Sparks danced in her vision from the impact and she fell backward into the shallow, slimy water that pooled at the base of the tunnel. The Lumenal sight spell dropped away and the darkness closed in.
“Magus!” Bree shouted.
The sewer demons immediately attached to Myreon’s arms and legs, sucking on this or that patch of foulness with their circular, cilia-lined mouths. Myreon instinctively brushed them off, a shudder running up her spine. She swayed a bit as she rose, slapping away any other of the semisolid beasts that sought to feed. To her hands, they felt like little rolling blobs of rotting fruit.
They were at a T-shaped intersection, but Myreon wasn’t really sure which way she had intended to go—both directions had low ceilings. Behind them, the echoes of the Defenders still chased them, but more distantly.
Gilvey had his shirt off and was trying to catch the tattler with it, but the nimble little Lumenal construct was far too quick. “Damn . . . this stupid . . . thing!”
Myreon dispelled it. “We’ve only got to get onto the street and lie low for a few days. I know some safe houses. We’re going to make it.”
“Can’t you . . . can’t you fight them?” Bree asked, as she clutched her skirts and shuffled around to stay away from the little piles of sewer demons wordlessly sucking at her bare toes.
“Yes,” Gil panted, “rain fire on them. Turn them to stone or something.”
Myreon took a deep breath at the thought and tried not to shudder. “Hush. We might be able to escape without violence. Stealth over speed now. Follow me.”
Myreon picked a direction and went, but more cautiously than before. She fumbled forward in the dark, tapping with her feet ahead of her, in case of a sudden drop.
“Can’t you make light?” Bree asked, clutching at Myreon’s robe. Her hands were trembling.
Myreon hushed her quiet and added in a whisper, “Sometimes the wisest sorcery is no sorcery at all.”
They soon heard the faint sound of rushing water—near an aqueduct, then, or perhaps near or beneath one of the many public fountains Eretheria was famous for. The sound might muffle the sounds of their pursuers but would also muffle the sound of their own footsteps. Then it would be only the seekwand drawing the Defenders close. Myreon turned toward the sound . . .
. . . only to find herself at another dead end, an ancient iron grate blocking their path. She enchanted a bit of light onto the end of her staff. On the other side of the grate there was a large chamber where water fell from drains in the ceiling and into an aqueduct elevated above the floor of the sewer tunnels. This was the overflow of a fountain at street level—if they could get through the grate, they might find some way out.
But the grate was bolted into the stone with ancient and rusty iron screws that she could not hope to break. The grate itself was too heavy and too dense to be easily blown apart by the Shattering, and even if it were, the noise would be deafening—the Defenders would be drawn right to them.
They couldn’t go back either—any attempt to retrace their steps might bring them in contact with the Defenders, and then they were done for. She knew she couldn’t bring herself to seriously harm a Defender-at-arms just doing his duty. She took hold of the bars and shook, rather lamely. This didn’t do much more than stain her hands orange with rust flakes.
“Kroth.”
She groaned.
“We’ve got to get out,” Gilvey said, facing back where they had come from. There was light approaching—flickering, orange light. Firepikes.
They had perhaps a minute . . .
“Doth the lady require assistance?”
The voice—that raspy whisper—was so unexpected that Myreon jumped back from the grating. There—beyond it, lying on its side in a little gully. A human skull, its sockets glowing with that faint, green light. Myreon looked over her shoulder—Bree and Gil hadn’t heard it. Is it even real?
“An accord must be struck. The help I offer, and in exchange . . . my due.”
Myreon scowled. She didn’t have time for this. “I’m not haggling with you, dammit. Either help or get out of the way.”
Bree’s eyes were wide. “Who . . . who are you talking to?”
Myreon glared at the skull. It had gone dark. “No one. Don’t worry about it.” Myreon grimaced. There was one way she could do this herself, maybe. She didn’t like it, though. “Stand back, both of you.”
The two teenagers drew back from the rusty old grating. “What are you going to do?” Bree asked. In the dim light, her face looked . . . eager. She wants to see what I can do.
“This grate, this tunnel—they’re corroded already. If I can corrode them a bit more, maybe we can kick the grating out.”
“What kind of spell is that?” Bree asked.
“Hurry!” Gil whispered. The pikes were coming closer. They could hear distant voices, the scrape of boots on stone.
Bree clung to Myreon’s cloak. “Isn’t that black magic?”
Myreon reconjured the light—it was very difficult, even for such a small bit. There was hardly any Lumen left here. She grimaced. “There’s no such thing.” She braced herself and gave the grate a good, firm kick. It budged a bit, its rusty edges crumbling away. She took up her staff. “I’m going to pry at it. Gil—go keep a lookout. Let me know if they get too close.”
“How close is too close?” Gilvey asked.
Myreon slid her staff into the space between the wall and the grate. “If they start shooting at you or giving you orders.” She looked at Bree. “Help me with this—we’re going to pry it off. On three?”
Bree grabbed the end of the staff. “Okay.”
“One . . . two . . . three!” Myreon and Bree both put all their weight onto the staff. The thick wood bent at a frightening angle, but it didn’t break. Then, with a sudden groan, the ancient iron grate snapped free from its moorings and fell to the floor below.
With a whoop of joy, Bree leapt into the chamber beyond and Myreon quickly followed. “Gil, come on! Let’s go!”
Gil rose from a crouch, slipping on the loose mortar covering the ground. “Coming! I . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence. There was a crack and a rumble and then, all at once, the walls of the tunnel, weakened by the disintegration spell, collapsed on Gil as he was halfway through the door.
Bree screamed. Myreon grabbed the boy by his one free hand and tried to pull, but the weight of centuries of ancient construction was crushing his body from his chest down. He lost consciousness almost immediately, his chest unable to expand, unable to breathe. He had to have broken all his ribs, his hips, his legs . . .
“Gil!” Bree patted his cheeks. “Gilvey!”
The voice came drifting in from the darkness, the barest whisper in her ear. “Such a pity. But for thy pride, I might have rescued thee. This is, after all, my realm.”
The accusation stung. Myreon felt suddenly ill, but there was no time.
Bree was clinging to Gil’s head. “No!”
Myreon reached forward and guided Bree back. “We’ve got to go.”
“Go? You’ve got to get him out! Hurry!”
Myreon looked down at the girl and felt her own breath stolen away. “I . . . I can’t. Not without killing him anyway.”
Bree’s mouth fell open as it all hit her. “But you can heal him! You can heal him like you healed me!”
“There is . . . there’s not enough Lumenal energy here to do that, even if I could get him out. Bree, we have to go.”
“No!” Gil’s head lolled down, limp and covered in ancient dust.
Myreon felt tears welling in the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry, Bree.”
“But I love him!” Bree screamed, patting at Gilvey’s cheeks. Tugging at his hair. “No!”
Myreon closed her eyes. It wouldn’t take the mirror-men that long to find another way around . . . probably. Gods help them if a Mage Defender was on the scene by now. They would have little trouble blasting this passage open with concentrated barrages of the Shattering, cooper’s boy or no cooper’s boy.
“Gil,” Bree cried, “wake up! Gil, it’s Bree! You can’t . . . you can’t go!”
But we have to. “We’ve got to go, Bree.” Myreon put a hand on her shoulder. “Cry later. Live now.”
“He didn’t deserve this,” Bree sobbed.
“Nobody deserves this,” Myreon said, her face bitter. “Come on, now. Say good-bye.”
Bree stood up and laid a soft kiss on the back of Gilvey’s head. Her body still shook with sobs. “You should have been able to save him. It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
Myreon took the girl by the wrist and guided her slowly away, her own steps blinded by tears. You could have helped, she thought to herself, you could have, but you didn’t.
“I’ll find you,” Myreon whispered. “When all this is over, you and I will have words over this.” But the threat had no teeth, and Myreon knew it. For all her anger, the only person she could find energy to blame was herself.
Chapter 13
Family Business
Lyrelle Reldamar stood in the gardens of Glamourvine—the ancestral Reldamar estate in Saldor—peering down into the perfectly circular pool of water that rested at the center of a hedge maze. To the outside observer, she appeared to be a striking woman in her late forties, hair like liquid gold, dressed in a gown of ivory and violet, a delicate mageglass wand in one hand—a sorceress from a fairy story.
But she was old. And she felt it. For all the power she wielded, for all the wealth she possessed, time—that old killer—was catching up with her. Too quickly.
And there was still so much to do.
There, by the side of the garden pool, she did not feel as old as she might have. The pool, of course, was no mere pool in the same way that Lyrelle was no mere sorceress. It was a power sink—a bottomless well built along a ley line that siphoned the energies of the world into it and stored them, like a kind of bank. It had been collecting power now for many centuries, and Lyrelle found herself drawing on it more and more of late. Because of this, the garden around the pool existed in a kind of bubble in time—apart from the flow of the world around it, quiet and permanent, and yet immovably powerful. Lyrelle, if pressed, might have admitted a certain envy of it.
Sitting atop the surface of the pool was a frog on a lily pad. It was not, in fact, a real frog or a real lily pad. It was a demon—an imp—that had shrouded itself to appear as such. It was delivering its report. Its voice was in a sort of permanent half snicker, as though the world was a joke only it understood. “That is all that transpired, my queen.”
As usual, the thing was likely lying. That was the way with imps. Lyrelle fixed it with a dubious frown. “Really? Are you certain?”
The false frog blinked its bulbous eyes. “Of course, my queen. As ever, I live to serve!”
Lyrelle sighed. “Because when I sent your brother, Finerax the Fulminous, to observe the same meeting, Finerax told me something quite different. There was no Defender raid. No human girl was killed. The necromancer did not contact the Gray Lady at all, and certainly not for a long conversation in the midst of a harried escape.” She channeled a pure sphere of Lumenal energy to form at the tip of her wand—pure death to an Etheric creature like a demon—and pointed it toward the shrouded imp. “I wonder . . . whom should I believe?”
The frog transformed into a fuzzy kitten with big, innocent eyes. It still sat on the lily pad. “Me! Me, oh grand one! Finerax lies!”
Lyrelle extended the wand. “This is your last chance, Akta the Unspeakable. Out with it.”
The kitten shivered. “Very well! It was not the girl who died, but the boy! You should have seen the girl’s tears, my lady—so sweet, so numerous! Oh, and also the necromancer spoke to the Gray Lady for but a moment only. But the raid is true! I know it! Have mercy on me and fie unto my wretched brother for his lies to you!”
Lyrelle smiled, satisfied. That, then, was the truth. An imp could always be counted upon to tell the truth if, by doing so, it might do its own kind some disservice. “You are dismissed. Return to your surveillance. I expect updates every eight hours. Begone.”
Akta muttered some servile compliments and then vanished into a pool of shadow, leaving Lyrelle alone. At least for the moment. She sat down upon a stone bench and let the sphere of Lumenal energy at the tip of her wand dissipate harmlessly back into the power sink. She shook her head. So, Myreon has finally made her mistake.
Waving her wand over the power sink’s placid surface, she scryed visions
of the future. Many she had already seen—a city in flames, death in the streets, heads on pikes. Some were new: Tyvian at the head of an army of farmers, Delloran soldiers burning the Empty Tower. Visions of her own death.
She waved them away, resolving to ponder them later. Scrying the future at one point in time was unreliable. It was a statistical science—not individual visions, but aggregates of such, observed and noted and analyzed until a likely knowledge of what was to come could be gleaned. Lyrelle was particularly good at it, but it took time. Patience.
Eddereon, her ostensible gardener, but in reality so much more, emerged from the hedge maze. His broad shoulders and thick black beard made him look fearsome in the moonlight—shades of the highwayman he had been before the ring took its hold. He bowed. “Your elder son is here.”
Lyrelle nodded. This had been expected. Xahlven had need of the power sink, and so he had come to taunt and threaten his mother in hopes of distracting her as he used it. She only hoped she could play her part well. “Bring him to me, please.”
Xahlven was taller than Tyvian and more handsome, in a conventional way. He had Lyrelle’s golden hair and her piercing blue eyes. He had his late father’s chiseled features—the face of a storybook hero. He was wearing the black robes of his office—Archmage of the Ether, Chairman of the Black College of the Arcanostrum. His staff seemed to suck the very light from the air, dimming the glow of fireflies and even causing the moon to grow dull. Such a petty enchantment was a juvenile trick—something used to intimidate lesser magi and hedge wizards. It demonstrated just how little her eldest son thought of her. This was as it should be—it was just what Lyrelle wanted him to think.
She smiled warmly at him. “Good evening, Xahlven. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I just received word from Mage Defender Argus Androlli of Eretheria Tower. They detected an imp during a raid operation this very night. I assume it was yours.”
“Contrary to your extremely low opinion of my morals, I do not commonly traffic with demons, Xahlven. Unreliable creatures, so very prone to falsehood and deceit.”
Dead But Once Page 13