“Does it even have eyes?” I muttered.
“It doesn’t need eyes,” Warner answered.
“Better question,” Kett said. “What is it guarding? A door? Do we have to vanquish the creature for it to open?”
“And is it the only one?” I added, eyeing a second set of boulders to the right. “I triggered it when I touched the cliff face.”
“So it sees or feels magic,” Warner said. He glanced over at Kett, who nodded.
Both of them pulled all their tasty magic tightly inside themselves. Dampening it as much as they could. It was a technique they both excelled at. They couldn’t completely hide from me — I knew their magic too well — but I still felt suddenly alone, left with only a metallic stain on my tongue. I took it to be the taste of metallurgy, though neither the dragonfly nor the pen had tasted so nasty.
“Don’t let it hit you,” Warner growled at me.
“Yeah, figured that out already, sixteenth century,” I said with a smile.
Warner huffed. Then he and Kett stepped in separate directions into the shadows of the cliff face that the morning sun had yet to illuminate.
So, yeah. Leaving me alone under the gaze of the boulder creature. If I was going to be bait — again — I might as well own it.
I pumped my alchemist magic into my knife as I twirled it in my hand. Boulder guy’s head shifted. If I wasn’t accustomed to hanging out with a vampire who appeared to be carved out of ice, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the subtle movement.
So Warner was right about it sensing magic.
I threaded my fingers through my necklace and called up all the different magic I’d recently stored in it. Even diminished, I was hoping it would create quite a glow.
The boulder creature shifted its shoulders and stepped toward me — almost involuntarily, it seemed. This placed it slightly away from the cliff at its back, in a more accessible position.
Kett dropped down from the shadows of the cliff face where he must have scaled quickly upward. He slammed his feet into the boulder creature’s left shoulder, though I think the vampire had been aiming for its head.
The resulting boom from the two-footed slam-kick hurt my ears. The creature dipped to one side as a crack formed across its shoulder.
Warner took advantage of the creature being off-balance, pushing out from the cliff on its right to slam both his feet into the side of its head.
It stumbled closer to Kett, who’d been trying to get a grip on its head. Failing that, the vampire had wrapped himself around the creature’s cracked arm instead.
I reached for its magic again and again as it struggled, trying to figure out what fueled it and how it had been created. However, I couldn’t grab at anything beyond the creature’s metallic taste. I briefly thought about darting into the fray and stabbing it with my knife, but I was worried about all that silver breaking the jade blade like it had broken Warner’s arm.
Kett and Warner continued to wrestle and pummel the stone creature. More hairline fractures formed in its boulders, but the attacks barely managed to shift the creature more than a few feet away from the sheer rock wall behind it. Then the boulder creature abruptly spun to slam Kett back against the cliff face. This stunned the vampire enough that he fell limply to the ground.
The creature swiveled the lower section of its body and raised a thick stone leg over Kett’s head — completely ignoring Warner’s attempt to rip off its arm. The sentinel had twisted the granite limb up over the creature’s shoulder while perched on its back.
I darted around Warner, who reacted to my proximity with a vicious rolling growl filled with what sounded like German curses. Then I attempted to drag Kett out from underneath the creature. Problem was, I didn’t exactly have any place to move to quickly.
I got my hands underneath Kett’s shoulders and shifted him a couple of feet out of the way. But now we were both trapped between the cliff face and the creature.
It slammed its foot down where Kett’s head had just been, and the resulting earthquake knocked me on my ass.
Warner bellowed, then ripped its arm off.
Kett closed his hand around my wrist, dragging me underneath the opening created when the creature stumbled. We sprinted by Warner as he twisted to throw the creature’s arm away as if it were a Frisbee.
The sentinel stumbled back to join Kett and me a few feet away. As we watched, panting — or in Kett’s case, just shaking his head to clear it — the creature stepped back. Two steps was all it took to close the gap behind it, and it was hunkered down like a one-armed hockey goalie in net again.
“Jesus,” I said.
Warner let loose with another long string of vicious-sounding German. I assumed he was swearing, but all German tended to sound a bit brutal to my ear. He could have been saying anything, but just really fiercely.
Kett nodded and said something back in German, then switched to English. “We will eventually tear it to pieces.”
“This is silly,” I said. “It’s magic. There must be a magical means to disable it.”
“Magic none of us wields,” Kett said, his cool tone as close to testy as it ever got. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like being called silly, or feeling stupid, or unskilled.
I looked over to Warner. He was battered around the edges — ruffled hair, a red bruise on his cheek that was slowly fading, torn jacket and jeans — and sexier for it. He smiled at me in response to my ogling him, but then shook his head sternly. “No, Jade,” he said. “It punches like a fucking mountain.”
My smile widened at his impassioned profanity, in English this time.
“What is your suggestion, dowser?” Kett asked, calling me back to the present predicament.
“We could try to find a silversmith. You said way back that you thought Hoyt or Blackwell must employ one to get Hoyt’s curse in his silver ball bearings. But I doubt a silversmith’s magic would hold much sway here, and I loathe the idea of going to an evil sorcerer for help. A second time, I mean.”
“I doubt such sorcery would work here,” Warner said. “Unless the silversmith was exceptionally talented. Skilled enough to pull every bit of metal from the creature.”
“Enchanted metal,” I murmured. Something clicked in my mind suddenly. “I spell metal.”
“You combine vessels already containing magic together to make a new whole,” Kett said, reprimanding me lightly but pointedly.
Ignoring him, I took a step toward the boulder creature, which shifted its head to track me. Warner reached out as if to stop me, but when the creature didn’t move farther, he let me kneel on the ground.
“Some space?” I asked, probably far too snarkily for someone attempting to do something she wasn’t actually capable of doing.
Warner and Kett backed off to either side of me and dampened their magic again.
I crossed my legs, which forced my satchel to sling across my lap. Denying the cold that began to immediately seep through my jeans, I closed my eyes and let my dowser senses reach out for magic. Again, the metallic taste flooded my mouth, but I couldn’t grab or channel it. I was a witch and a dragon. Witches pulled their magic from the earth. I was sitting on an entire freaking mountain and getting nothing. Dragons were magic personified, but based on Warner’s earlier observation about feeling rejected by the earth, that must be the ultimate source of their power as well. At least in part. Guardians had something else going on — a secret rite of passage, an ascension of some sort — but that didn’t matter right now.
I opened my eyes to stare at the boulder creature, then scanned the rock all around it.
“No hidden marks,” I said. “No runes or keyholes.”
“No,” Kett said. “I see nothing like that.”
How did magical beings who weren’t witches or dragons access magic? Well, runes were important for sorcerers. They had to physically create spells to call magic, but I couldn’t write runes …
“Jesus Christ on a cupcake!” I cried, thrusting my hand
into my satchel. I didn’t have to look back to feel Warner glance at Kett behind me, or the vampire shrug in response.
From the satchel, I pulled the pen that Pulou had given back to me. The pen I’d collected in Tel Aviv months ago. The pen I had assumed was simply a sorcerer-charmed gold Cartier ballpoint. But now — based on its ability to annoy the treasure keeper — I thought it might be something more. Perhaps even a form of metallurgy.
The pen that wrote runes.
Of course, I didn’t have any paper.
I uncrossed my legs and scrubbed my feet against the moss and dirt that covered the somewhat flat granite in front of me, digging up and clearing it all away until I had a fairly smooth surface about a foot and a half square.
Kneeling before this cleared space, I placed the pen in the center and pulled out my knife.
Now … what were the magic words?
“Open sesame,” I said.
Kett snorted behind me, but his disbelief didn’t shake my conviction.
Magic was about intention.
I ran the fingers of my left hand down the pen and whispered to it again. “Open sesame.”
The pen perked up. I pushed my magic and my intention toward it.
It started to write. Its ink didn’t make a terribly strong impression on the granite, but that was okay — because I just needed to see and copy its strokes.
It drew a line. I slashed a line after it with my knife. It drew a curve. So I slashed a curve.
It drew and I carved until five runes, each three inches tall and a quarter inch deep, were scribed in front of me.
The pen paused, waiting for more instructions.
“Thank you,” I said as I slipped it back into my satchel. Then I placed my hands over the runes, calling up the metallic taste of a magic I couldn’t actually manipulate. “Open sesame.”
“Thrice said,” Warner murmured behind me.
“Thrice meant,” Kett added.
“So heeded,” Warner said.
I’d never heard that invocation before — if that was what it was — but I could feel the power behind the words as Warner and Kett uttered them.
My magic filled the runes in a way I could feel rather than see. Then liquid silver rose out of the stone to smooth out all the gouges I’d carved.
The stone creature shifted to the side, then once more became a pile of benign boulders.
More silver runes appeared at the bottom edge of the cliff face, then those symbols slowly began to glow and spread upward to form an archway. The stone wall in the middle of this arch faded away to reveal an opening in the side of the mountain.
Kett and Warner stepped up beside me.
“Impressive, dowser,” the vampire said. Then he moved forward, immediately crushing my sense of accomplishment by adding, “Keep the pen handy.”
Warner laughed. When I glared up at him — more than a little hurt — he shook his head and nodded toward Kett’s retreating back. “The cold bastard is amusing. I thought you were brilliant.”
I snorted, pretending to reject the compliment even as it thrilled me.
Quickly sobering, I nodded toward the open doorway. “The rabid koala will follow.”
“Let her come,” Warner growled. “I’m tired of Shailaja’s games. We’ll draw her out, collect the instrument as the treasure keeper demands, then let the guardians sort it out. She alone is no match for us three.”
“There will be other traps inside.”
“Even then, she cannot possibly prevail.”
I reached over and squeezed his warm hand. That was all I could do in the face of his simmering anger. He placed a kiss on my palm.
Then we followed Kett into the side of a mountain.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Stairs carved out of the solid stone of the mountain led steeply down into the darkness. They seemed to widen as they did so. Heading downward was odd, because I would have expected to climb in the interior of a mountain.
Both Kett in front of me and Warner behind were dampening their magic like hot fudge smothered vanilla ice cream — though, sadly, the effect was nowhere near as tasty. So it was my first footfall that triggered tiny magical silver lights on either side of the third stair. Helpful, but not totally illuminating as we descended into the yawning, vast pit of darkness I could practically feel breathing beneath me.
Something dwelled deep in that darkness, but I couldn’t taste, see, or feel it. Still, I knew it was there. Because that’s how these sorts of things went, wasn’t it?
When the first sliver of silver glowed about five feet away from me, I paused, waiting for another attack.
Nothing else moved.
The silver lights continued to trigger one by one, on every third stair as I passed.
“It would be more helpful if they lit up ahead of us instead of beside me,” I muttered.
“You’ll want to find your way out,” Kett said, his voice disembodied in the dark. He was being helpful as always. Calming, even. Or not.
I stopped to examine the lights more closely. I hunched down to touch one. Warner hissed his disapproval behind me, even as the glowing light unfurled silver wings, which it flapped lazily as if just waking.
“It’s a lightning bug,” I said. “You know, a beetle. A firefly made of silver.”
I brushed my fingers across the back of the insect’s silver glow-bulb body. It appeared to be entirely constructed or cast out of silver. The design was simple — a beetle-shaped body that appeared to glow like molten silver, until I looked closer and could see actual liquid silver encased within it. Add a tiny head with tinier antenna, and gossamer strands of silver to form wings. Deceptively simple, but channeling complex, detailed magic. Or, more specifically, metallurgy.
The firefly took flight, hovering at my eye level as I straightened up. I lifted my palm to see if it wanted to land in my hand, but it flitted playfully away from me. I took a few more steps down, passing another stationary firefly that lit up as all the others had.
The first firefly moved closer, flitting up and around me. I laughed, delighted by its antics.
“Don’t play with unknown magic, dowser,” Kett said.
I stuck my tongue out in the general direction of his voice. Then I continued to descend, stone stair by stone stair, into the dark core of the mountain.
The stairs widened as we continued, the firefly lights spreading farther and farther away, until they eventually gave shape to high, rough-hewn cave walls.
I slammed into Kett, smashing my nose into the back of his head. He didn’t move an inch.
“Some warning would have been nice,” I growled, holding my nose. My nasal tone was annoying even to my ears.
Kett indicated ahead of himself with the barest of nods. I followed his gesture, and as if responding to me, the firefly flitted ahead, then cut right to illuminate a stone wall that stood about twenty-five feet ahead of us. It dipped up and down as it flew away, kissing or tickling each firefly light it flew over. Each of them glowed in turn, a line of silver lights forming along the edge of a walkway that appeared to branch off before us and run alongside the stone wall. The increased lighting slowly revealed the inverted dome of the massive cavern we’d descended into.
“Impressive,” Warner said as he stepped up beside me. He’d unsheathed his knife, and I could taste the darkly tinged magic of the blade.
“Obviously a natural formation,” Kett said, coolly dismissive of the grand scale of the cavern. “Simply and crudely adapted by its founders.”
The vampire glanced down at Warner’s knife. The sentinel noticed and sheathed the blade. I almost opened my mouth, then stifled my apology. Kett didn’t constantly need to know how sorry I was for killing him. And hopefully it would be just that one time.
The firefly reappeared on our left, still triggering other stationary fireflies as it flew toward us. The lights now appeared to form a massive ring around the stone wall, which curved off to either side of us before disappearing into the darkne
ss. The wall was maybe fifty feet tall, if what I could see was actually its top edge.
That was odd, wasn’t it? A walled-off circular section deep within a cavern?
Wanting to get a closer look at the wall and perhaps spy a possible doorway, I started to step around Kett only to slam into his outstretched arm. He’d held it up so quickly I hadn’t registered it. It was like being punched in the gut, but with a steel pole. A thick, icy steel pole.
I exhaled every available molecule of oxygen available to me, then doubled over momentarily, unable to breathe back in.
“Really, vampire?” Warner asked.
“My apologies,” Kett said. “I’m still growing accustomed to … myself.”
“How long are you going to blame me for London?” I gasped.
“Would you prefer I let you walk off the cliff, dowser? I can’t see the bottom, but it must end somewhere.”
A wash of darkness that I assumed was just a deeply cast shadow sat between me and the wall. You know what happens when you assume, right? You look like a freaking idiot in front of your self-appointed mentor and new boyfriend.
The firefly zoomed back to me, illuminating enough of the walkway I was standing on that I could see the crevasse that began about a foot away. Reacting to my look, the firefly helpfully darted over the crevasse, but couldn’t penetrate the darkness that fell away from the sharp edge.
“I imagine what we’re looking for is on the other side of this wall,” Warner said, glossing over my almost foolish misstep and keeping Kett and me on task, rather than bickering over who hurt who more and when.
Kett nodded curtly and cut right to follow the curve of lights along the edge of the walkway. The lights would have been much more helpful on the edge of the crevasse, but apparently whoever built the cavern hadn’t been terribly safety conscious.
Warner pressed a hand to the small of my back and murmured into my curls, “Perhaps best to let the vampire lead? Since he can see in the darkness much better than you or I?”
I sighed. “Got it.”
The firefly continued to beckon us forward, but I saw nothing other than stone, stone, and more stone as we traversed the edge of the dark fissure.
Maps, Artifacts, and Other Arcane Magic (Dowser Series Book 5) Page 18