Both men nodded, and the Wolves led them back the way they’d come, tongues lolling out of their mouths. They’d been traipsing through tunnels for hours.
The new tunnel ran parallel to the geyser, neither heading toward it, nor farther away. As soon as they stepped into it, Kara noticed ley coursed through it, but it was weak enough that it couldn’t be seen. It merely prickled her skin, the fine hairs on her arms stirring. The Wolves protested slightly, until Grant uttered an impatient bark.
Twenty minutes later, Allan held his torch higher and said, “There’s something ahead.”
They slowed, the object emerging from the darkness as Allan pressed forward. It hung from a wide crack in the ceiling, stone and a heap of sand littering the floor of the tunnel, obviously a cave-in from the many quakes that had shaken Erenthrall both before and after the Shattering. Allan stepped toward it, then reached out and touched it, setting it swinging slightly.
“It’s a ladder.”
Kara joined Allan, the rope ladder clearer once she stepped to one side. The wooden rungs looked well used. She stared up into the shadows of the fissure above. It reminded her of the short time she’d spent with the Tunnelers, who’d used ladders such as this throughout their warren. “I wonder where it leads?”
“Should we find out?”
“No. We don’t want to go up, we want to get to the Nexus.”
Neither Grant nor Allan disagreed with her, but when they continued, Grant ordered one of the Wolves to watch their backs.
The tunnel continued for another few thousand feet, then ended in a much more significant cave-in. Stone and dirt filled its entire width. Allan climbed the debris, scanning the top with his torch.
“It’s completely blocked.” He faced them both, the flames of the torch casting his features in feral yellow light. “Either we check out that ladder, or we backtrack further and try to find another junction leading toward Grass.”
“I think you’ll do neither.”
The new voice echoed down the tunnel from behind them. Kara and Grant spun, the two Wolves leaping to join the third, all of them breaking into low, menacing growls. Allan hopped down from the debris, coming to Kara’s side. Kara couldn’t see anything, even when Allan shifted forward, bringing the light with him, but Grant lifted his head and sniffed the air, nose wrinkling in distaste.
“Rabbits,” he huffed.
Footsteps approached, causing the fur on the three Wolves to bristle. They didn’t charge, though, Grant keeping them in check.
Four figures appeared, swords drawn and leveled. They halted just within the reach of the torch, the leader dressed in scratched armor with a dented helm, the others in tattered clothes.
“I think,” the leader said, “you’ll be coming with us.”
Kara tensed, and then Allan said incredulously, “Cason?”
The leader hesitated, eyes squinting. “Allan?” She swore and reached to pull the helm from her head, tucking it under her arm. She didn’t lower her sword, and her expression wasn’t welcoming. “And Kara. What in hells are you doing here? And why do you have Wolves? Have you finally come to kill us for trading you to the White Cloaks?”
One of the Wolves lunged forward with a snarl, the three younger men with Cason scrambling backward. Cason didn’t move, and a sharp word from Grant brought the Wolf up short, just out of Cason’s reach. The Wolf continued to growl, saliva dripping from its jaws, then began to pace back and forth across the width of the tunnel.
Cason kept her eyes on it. “I see you’ve got them trained now.”
“Not trained,” Kara said. “They’re allies.”
Cason glanced toward her. “So I’ve heard. I thought it merely rumor. I’ve heard many things about you and the White Cloaks and what you’ve done at the Needle. I’ve heard that you purposely destroyed Tumbor by collapsing the distortion, that you’ve set the ley here in Erenthrall out of control in order to destroy us all so you can take the city. Or what’s left of it.”
“That isn’t true! Tumbor was an accident. The ley geyser here was a direct result of that. I’m here to fix it.”
Cason’s eyes narrowed. “Why should I believe you?”
“You don’t need to believe us,” Allan answered. His hand rested on the hilt of his own sword. “Just stay out of our way.”
“And let you cause another ‘accident’? I don’t think so.”
Behind her, one of the others whispered something, but Cason held up a hand to silence him.
“How did you get here?” she asked.
Even Kara heard the desperation beneath the too casual tone of the question. “Why do you want to know?”
Cason shifted her gaze from Allan to Kara. Another of her followers hissed a warning. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. You’ll have to come with us. Your Wolves will stay here.”
She turned her back on the still growling Wolf a few paces in front of her and headed back toward the ladder. The three with her retreated as well with a sharp word of command. Two of them kept Allan, Grant, Kara, and the Wolves in sight, weapons still drawn, faces twisted with suspicion.
Kara stepped up to Allan’s side. “Should we go with them? We could simply backtrack. She doesn’t seem intent on capturing us.”
“Not right now, but that’s because we have the Wolves. They’d never be able to take us. She’s probably headed back to the ladder to get reinforcements.”
“Then we’d better decide fast,” Grant rumbled, his voice deeper than normal. “My Wolves can take them before they reach the ladder.”
Kara hesitated.
“Remember,” Allan said, “they traded us away last time for food and supplies.”
“But they may know of a way to get into Grass.”
Kara started forward, bypassing the Wolves. Allan and Grant conversed briefly, then Grant growled low in his throat. One of the Wolves whined in protest, but they all quieted.
Allan and Grant caught up to her before she reached the ladder, where Cason and her escort of three had been joined by seven others. Kara recognized Sorelle and Jaimes, the two of them looking more strained and haggard than before. Sorelle glared at the three of them, but Jaimes actually smiled. Kara remembered the young man trying to warn her as they were being led to the meeting with the White Cloaks, heard again his mouthed “Run!” moments before the White Cloaks first appeared.
“Up,” Cason commanded, one hand holding the side of the makeshift ladder. Those around her bristled.
Kara went first, then Allan and Grant. Cason came up behind them. The ladder was difficult to climb, since it wasn’t anchored at its base, but Kara managed. She passed into the crevice in the tunnel’s roof, its sides scraping her shoulders and back, a jagged rift lit above by torchlight. Dirt and stones dislodged by her movement rained down on those below. When she reached the top, hands grabbed her by the shirt and underneath the shoulders and hauled her up into a shallow room with an arched ceiling, all built with river stone. It smelled of dry earth with a faint hint of ancient spices. Ten more of Cason’s Tunnelers watched her warily. Kara dusted herself off as Allan and Grant emerged from the rift, the ladder tied off to one side of the room to metal rings that studded one wall.
Cason followed Grant, then the ten Tunnelers below scrambled up after her. Without a word, Cason led them all out of the low-ceilinged room into a corridor, similar rooms opening off to either side, all of them empty. Sounds echoed strangely in the hollow spaces, the scrapes and clanks of their feet and clothing and armor amplified until they hit a steep stairwell that spiraled up to a heavy wooden door with a massive iron lock that looked like it hadn’t been used in decades. The door’s hinges squealed as Cason pulled it open and passed through.
Kara gasped as she emerged into a familiar hallway with a series of doors on either side. “This is the University! We’re in the corridor of practice rooms!”
“What do you mean?” Allan asked.
Cason considered him for a moment, then spun and continued moving forward as she spoke.
“After we traded you to the White Cloaks—or attempted to trade you to the White Cloaks—we had a few weeks of peace before the Rats decided they’d had enough. They invaded the tunnels from every direction, intent on finding our base camp. We were fighting them on all fronts, collapsing tunnels to cut them off, slaughtering them in junctions, doing everything we could to keep them at bay. They were losing three people for every one of us, but we were still in retreat. They’d nearly made it to our main camp when the earthquakes began.”
She’d reached the end of the corridor of practice rooms and ascended another set of stairs to a set of double doors that opened onto one of the University’s main halls. The entire room had been converted into living quarters. Pallets covered the floor, most of them occupied by men and women and children either sleeping or sitting, working on mending clothing, repairing weapons, cutting up carrots, or peeling potatoes. It reminded Kara of the tent city outside the ring of buildings surrounding the temple at the Needle, except here there were no tents, no privacy at all. The Tunnelers were tattered and worn, their clothes in worse shape than when Kara had seen them before, their faces more gaunt and creased, hollowed and dulled somehow. A fire roared in the massive hearth on the far side of the room and a cluster of men and women worked around it, mostly dealing with the pots that hung on hooks over the flames. Kara scanned the people and estimated there were only a third of those she’d seen at their previous base camp.
“Except for those keeping guard on the walls and at the gates of the University, these are the only ones of my group left,” Cason said, her tone harsh and bitter. “The quakes killed many of them, the tunnels collapsing as the shaking escalated and we attempted to flee to the surface. Many more were lost as we ran, carrying whatever we could with us. Not because of the Rats—they were scrambling to save themselves—but because of the ley. Tunnels that had always been safe were suddenly flooded with it, cutting off our routes. A few flooded even as we were using them. A little less than half of us made it out of the tunnels alive.
“Once we were free, we discovered the entire city of Erenthrall was coming apart, and we could see why. The distortion was collapsing. The sound of the earth grinding together, of the distortion chewing it up as it imploded, was deafening. Most of us cowered on the flagstones of the ley barge station where we’d emerged, or simply stood and waited for it to end us. But then a spear of light shot up through the core of the distortion from the earth and struck its center. It flared so bright that those who didn’t turn away were blinded, some of them permanently. When it ended, when my vision returned, the distortion had vanished, and the first thing I saw were the walls of the University. We needed a place of refuge. We needed a place we could defend. Without giving anyone a chance to recover, I got my people onto their feet and moving. The city was shockingly quiet after the quakes. No one on the streets. No one moving except us. We managed to seize control of the University before anyone could react.
“Then, of course, the city sank into the plains.” She motioned toward one of the narrow windows, the glass long shattered. As they approached, a throbbing background noise that Kara couldn’t place grew in intensity, but she couldn’t see what caused it. Beyond the window, the University commons was filled with rubble. “I lost more of my people when some of the University buildings we were living in collapsed. I thought we’d seen the worst of it after that. For months, we held the walls and slipped out into the city to scavenge through the tunnels beneath us, accessed through that crack in the cellar’s floor. We watched as that damn Baron convinced the Rats and the Butcher and all of the others to join him. We watched as the Gorrani became more violent, killing everyone who wasn’t Gorrani that they encountered. We watched as the Baron attacked the Temerite enclave, and then watched as the Gorrani attacked them. It would have been a bloodbath if the auroral storm hadn’t come. That storm allowed the Temerites to escape, cut the fight between the Baron and the Gorrani short. And even then, the Gorrani didn’t escape. They were caught in the middle of the storm as they fled and it changed them.”
“We saw,” Kara said. “We ran into some of them on our way here.”
Cason stared at her, then continued without responding, heading toward another doorway, to stairs leading upward through one of the mansion’s small towers. Sorelle, Jaimes, and some of the others trailed behind them. “The Gorrani have surrounded our walls ever since. They’ve kept us caged in here, or so they thought. We could get out through the tunnels. As long as they couldn’t breach our walls, we were safe, and we always had a way out if they did.
“Until Tumbor collapsed. Until the geyser of ley erupted from the center of Grass and the tunnels beneath us—tunnels that had once been free—were flooded with ley again.”
She thrust through another door onto the roof of the mansion, the dull roar that Kara had heard since they’d entered the mansion now a throb of thunder, like a thousand waterfalls all cascading down a thousand-foot fall into a pool of water. Except as the group spread out on the roof, their gazes moving inexorably toward the north, toward Grass, Kara realized it wasn’t water. It was the ley of the geyser, shooting far above their heads in the near distance, where the shorn-off towers of Grass ringed the building that had once been the Nexus. Kara drifted toward the edge of the roof, eyes locked on the geyser, her skin prickling with the intensity of the ley now that they were this close. She wanted to reach out and join with it, knew that she could, but that it would sweep her away.
“I need to get there. I need to reach the Nexus.” Her gaze dropped from the tower of ley, to the streets outside the University lined with the Gorrani. “I need to get past the Gorrani.”
“And I and my people need to get out from behind these walls,” Cason said from behind her. “You got through the tunnels somehow. You managed to reach us. How?”
Kara turned her back on the Gorrani, on the geyser that was so close, yet still so distant. She caught Allan’s attention. He gave a subtle nod and she faced Cason, voice hardening.
“You like to trade, right? Use your fighters to get us through the Gorrani to the Nexus, and I’ll get you and your people out of the University.”
Behind her, Sorelle, Jaimes, and the others began to protest. Sorelle straightened and began, “Cason, you can’t—”
“Quiet,” the Tunneler leader said.
Sorelle clamped her mouth shut and crossed her arms over her chest.
Silence held on the roof, interrupted only by the thunderous roar of the geyser. The tension between the Tunnelers and Kara’s group was palpable.
Then Cason stirred. “No.” Those of her group on the roof relaxed as she continued. “No, I won’t risk what few people I have left. Not against the Gorrani. But I can get you to the Nexus, if you’re willing.”
Kara didn’t even hesitate. “How?”
Twenty
DRAYDEN LIFTED HIS HEAD to a sky covered with black storm clouds and flared his nostrils. “They’re still behind us. Closer now.”
Boskell swore. “How many? Can you tell?”
Drayden scented the air again, turning his head in different directions. Morrell watched intently, aware of the roiling clouds overhead, the prickling of the air against her skin, of the vibrant aurora that washed across the lands in nearly every direction here on what had once been the streets of Tumbor. The landscape was nightmarish, the earth splintered into mostly unrecognizable shards that jutted up from the ground at odd angles, some as large as the buildings she remembered in Erenthrall, others as tall as the trees in the Hollow. The ground beneath their feet crackled with every step, even the flat surfaces shattering like glass, the stone brittle. Scattered among the otherworldly shards
of stone and earth were shockingly recognizable glimpses of the old Tumbor—an arched stone doorway opening onto nothing; the head of a solemn-faced, bearded man from a statue; a rounded balcony half buried in the debris. All of it was lit by the coruscating auroral lights and erratic flashes of lightning from the storms. Sporadic gusts of wind picked up sand and grit and brought with it odd scents, fresh rain one moment, the sulfur smell of a spoiled egg the next. The horror of it all—the randomness, the strangeness—lay against Morrell’s skin like a cold, wet blanket, even days after entering the region.
Days in which they’d been dodging the auroral storms and the Gorrani who’d followed them into the wasteland.
Drayden huffed, blowing air out through his nose, then shook his head. “Hard to say. At least a dozen, maybe more.”
“It’s not a scouting party, then,” Okata said. “They’ve sent a yavun.”
“What’s a yavun?” Morrell asked. Lightning flared, not far distant, and a blast of wind sent her hair streaming out to one side. It smelled like dew on a spring morning.
“An elite warrior unit. It usually contains fifteen men, composed of our best fighters.”
Boskell stared off into the distance, as if he could see the men. “You said they were closer now. How close?”
“No more than a day.” Drayden faced Morrell. For a moment, his eyes glowed a feral yellow. “Let me hunt them as they approach. I will take care of them.”
Morrell shuddered at the intensity of his voice, the raw power rumbling beneath it, like the thunder rolling through the air.
“No,” Boskell said. “I want you to stay with Morrell.” Drayden’s lips parted in a silent snarl, his teeth gleaming white. Boskell didn’t see, his focus now on Morrell. “How close are we to Tumbor’s center? Can you tell?”
“We’re close. I think we’ll reach it today, maybe tomorrow.”
Boskell looked to the sky, then swore again. They hadn’t been able to see the sky for days. “Anyone know how much longer we have to get ready?”
Reaping the Aurora Page 41