Then her shirt fell away to her waist, leaving her torso bare. Cool air caressed her skin, and the floor spun crazily. She closed her eyes, staggering against the hold of her captors. Distantly she heard Rhona screeching and fighting; Sanych could barely contemplate conscious movement. Her body seemed to be turning to ice.
~~~
Bailik watched as the Enforcers draped the blonde girl forward across the stone mound, securing her hands and feet to iron rings set in the floor. The redhead was a handful, but eventually the two men finished with the blonde and lent a hand strapping her down as well.
He stepped to the side of his three kneeling prisoners and slowly drew his dagger from its sheath. He tucked his baton into its place on his belt and slowly turned its black blade against his fingertip in the warm light of the braziers.
Keeping his eyes on its gleaming surfaces, he said, “There is a magic that sleeps in the blood of mortals. Untold hundreds of villagers have given their lifeblood so that we might expand our reach and draw the Great Tome’s key to us. Once we have freed the book from its prison, we can restore magic to its rightful place in the world.” He looked over at them as he turned toward the ramp into the pit. “Perhaps you’ll even live to see that.”
~~~
Sanych figured she should be feeling some sort of mortal terror, but she wasn’t. Geret was shouting something at the top of his lungs, and Salvor was arguing with him just as loudly. Or maybe agreeing with him; it was hard to tell over the thrumming in her ears. Ruel was shaking his head and staring at Rhona, who had upped her threats to a series of rampant, if muffled, shrieks.
The thrumming: such a comforting sound. Like a mother’s heartbeat. Sanych lay her ear against the stone and found it warm. But the sound she sensed within it wasn’t a human heartbeat. It was far more ancient. Far more familiar; she smiled in sudden recollection.
The heartbeat of the planet thrummed low and long, a gentle pressure that spun and swirled, filling her with its existence, overwhelming her tiny, subjective mind with its eternal, life-sustaining magnificence. All her strivings were motes in a sunset breeze. Her mortal fear was a lightning strike, come and gone. Her tears, the flash flood of a moment. But this new force—caressing her soul, mesmerizing her mind like a glorious vision of paradise at the end of a barren, dusty journey—this would be hers forever.
Sanych’s eyes snapped open. Her lungs inhaled of their own accord, and every nerve in her body tingled. The visions that swam past her eyes might have dizzied a lesser mind, but to her they sang of light and heat. They sang of power.
The force of the earth built up within her, reaching every fiber of her being. The pressure of the visions and ideas in her head became too much to bear. Sanych opened her mouth and shrieked, a long, high note that climbed even higher, surprising everyone else in the room.
Especially the man who had cast a spell of silence on her. “Hold her! Something’s not right!” he shouted.
“Sanych! Sanych!” Voices called to her, but she did not, could not, heed them.
Many hands pressed her down against the rock. It seemed to absorb her being, to throb in time with her own heartbeat. She clenched her fists and laughed with sheer ecstasy. All pain was gone, replaced with a throbbing confidence. She was light and power, brilliance, earth and grace, and nothing could impede her will.
Her ropes fell away, mere charred bits of ash. The guards’ voices mumbled in dull surprise.
Stop touching me.
A brilliant flash blazed somewhere above her, and the hands left her skin and clothing. She tumbled from the stone mound and got to her feet, still feeling the slow throb of the earth. The sensation it created in her mind was not unlike the way Meena’s shielding had affected her. With a relaxed smile, she looked around the room, seeing Rhona’s shocked stare echoed on the other captives’ faces. The bald man gaped at her from behind her shackled friends.
Oh, and nearby there were some men with serrated swords who seemed eager to kill her.
She threw her hands forward to ward off their approach. A vast wave of white light flashed from her hands, washing over them, knocking them to the floor. The all-pervasive feeling of relaxation receded as she gasped in wonder and stared at her hands, which appeared perfectly normal.
There was a commotion at the stone door; Sanych couldn’t see it from in the pit, but the clashing of swords was unmistakable.
It’s Meena, she thought, smiling through the power of her throbbing magic. Just like she said.
~~~
“Enforcers! Detain her, but do not kill her!” Bailik shouted, having decided to avoid a frontal attack on the new spellcaster. A dozen black-clad men ran past him into the pit.
The short girl flung her hands out at them as well. This time a solid beam of white light pierced a hole through one man’s chest, killing him instantly.
The other guards hesitated, swords in hand, as the girl again stared at her hands.
Now. Bailik stretched his hand toward her.
~~~
A heavy weight dragged Sanych to the floor; she could not resist the urge to crumple to the floor next to the stone mound that supported Rhona. The bald man stood at the lip of the pit again, arm extended at her in a determined gesture of control.
“Your blood will not be wasted on spilling secrets now, little spellcaster,” he called to her. “I’ll partake of it myself, and make your gift mine!”
A thunderous roar boomed through the enclosed cavern, and a flying green vine wriggled through the air, slapping the baton-wielding cultist on the arm and staggering him.
Sanych felt the crushing pressure let up. She reached for Rhona’s ropes, hoping to get one untied before the man applied his spell again. To her horror, a burst of bright heat blasted out from her hand, burning the rope instantly, along with Rhona’s wrist. The pirate cried out in pain.
“I’m sorry,” Sanych blurted. “It’s so powerful…”
“No need to show me twice,” Rhona blurted, eyes wide.
Despite the pirate’s protests, Sanych aimed a single finger at the ropes binding Rhona’s feet, but before she could release her magic, the dozen approaching guards were upon her. Panicking, she flared her fingers at them all, and they staggered back from the brightness she manifested. The smell of charred flesh nearly made her gag.
“Stop, girl!” their captor called down to her. “Your magic is new and wild. You cannot hope to control it. Surrender now, and I’ll spare your fr—”
A burst of blue fire exploded against his back. He staggered, nearly falling into the pit, before collapsing to the stone floor. Sanych rolled to her feet, grabbing a loose dagger and cutting through the ropes that held Rhona.
“Sanych!? What’s going on?” Salvor shouted.
She turned to see her three friends still shackled, struggling to break their chains. Other figures ran into the room behind them, dressed in what passed for everyday work clothes in Shanal: knee-length belted tunics and baggy pants. Some of them wielded magic as they fought off the cult guards, shoving them away with blasts of water or flame. One directed focused sounds that made the guards clap their ears in agony and fall to the floor. Another began controlling the fire in the braziers, directing it to flare out and attack the guards.
More Enforcers ran down the ramp toward Sanych and Rhona. A couple of them stopped to check on their leader, but most, enraged and howling, pounded toward the women.
Geret flung himself headfirst off the edge into the pit. His chains were just long enough to reach over the lip of the wall, where they pulled his arms up short. Geret somersaulted, ending up dangling against the face of the wall by his wrists.
“Climb me, hurry!” he shouted. Above him, their invading rescuers began to free Ruel and Salvor’s wrists with a combination of icy magic and large mallets.
“Sanych, now!” Rhona said, taking the Archivist’s hand as she started to raise her palm to the oncoming guards.
Sanych ran with her to Geret and scrambled up his per
son, ignoring his grunts of discomfort and the fact that her shirt was impersonating a sash. Several helpful hands aided them to the top of the pit and pulled Geret up afterward. Arrows, blue bolts of magic fire and cones of invisible force peppered the enemies in the pit and near the doorway. One of the rescuers touched Geret’s chains with a finger that froze the links to an icy white, and a woman slammed her mallet on them, shattering the metal into tiny shards.
“We’ll get the bracelets off later,” she said to the freed prisoners. “We need to get out now, or we’ll get trapped and overwhelmed by Enforcers from the warrens below.”
Urgent hands pushed them toward the bronze doors. Sanych nearly tripped over the bodies of several unconscious or dead Enforcers as she hurried with the others into the wide stone hallway. In the frenzied jumble of bodies, someone thrust an inside-out shirt into her arms, and she pulled it on with gratitude. She glanced over at Rhona and saw her pulling on Ruel’s shirt.
There were so many bodies, Sanych couldn’t see which one was Meena.
“A breath of patience, outlanders,” said a wiry man with a bright shock of silver hair, “we’ll be free of this place soon.”
More than twenty people surrounded them and herded them up the sloping corridor. Their hands held swords or aimed empty palms, ready to defend their desire to exit. They took a left and ran up a wide stone staircase, then entered a series of dark stone corridors before bursting out through an old wooden door and into the crisp air of early morning.
A cool mist lay thick across the ground, partially obscuring a large garden thick with new spring shoots. A well sat nearby, its rope askew. Sanych breathed in the strange scents of the Shanallese countryside as the group dashed across the garden and into a copse of newly-leafed trees.
As they reached the shaded copse, over twenty horses appeared out of thin air, standing calmly before them, and a young man stepped forward and greeted the rescuers and their charges.
“Nohm, any problems?” the silver-haired man asked.
“No, Ahm. No one here but us forest mice.” He mimed a nibbling mouse. “No one’s paid us any mind at all.”
“Perfect.”
“Meena’s not here,” Sanych commented in Versal. The thrumming that had begun in the chamber below was still echoing within her. It had faded somewhat, but she couldn’t muster much concern over the Shanallar’s absence.
One of the men handed Geret a long vest, and Sanych realized belatedly that she was wearing her prince’s shirt—and that he’d discarded all of Rhona’s swag sometime before getting captured. The Kazhbor medallion no longer graced his chest.
“Don’t worry,” Ruel replied, also in Vinten. He held a cloth to his head wound; apparently the bald cultist had reopened the injury the pirate had received in the night. “She’ll be joining us soon, full of her next plan. You just wait.”
“I don’t know about that,” Salvor added. “These people weren’t in her last plan.”
“Not in the version you heard, anyway,” Rhona said, shooting a glance at Sanych.
“We’ll get you to safety,” Ahm said. Several Shanallese brought sleek, long-legged horses forward, and the prisoners mounted up, each with an escort riding beside them. “But first we need to lose our pursuers; they’ll be along momentarily, and they’ll soon realize that illusory mice don’t wear boots or horseshoes.”
As if on cue, the old wooden door burst open, and a score of black-clad men and women darted out. Nohm’s enchantment must still have been in place, because the pursuers didn’t seem to see their quarry standing in full view directly ahead of them. As they were distracted by prints in the garden’s soil, they became easy prey for the numerous magical and mundane attacks that shot their way, dropping every last one of them to the ground.
Before the last body had stopped twitching, all the horses had scattered across the slope of the forested hill at full gallop, leaving trails behind them in a dozen directions. Just as Sanych glanced back in concern, a spell sparkled into existence in the copse they’d recently occupied. Its greenish-blue twirl evanesced in midair, rotated once, and then burst into a thousand little flashes that whirled away, tracking her and her escort’s fleeing horses and erasing every single hoof print a moment after it was created.
This is going to take some getting used to, she thought.
Sanych and the woman with her rode down the steep slope toward the city. At the foot of the wide, rolling hill, Cish’s enameled-tile roofs gleamed like a scattering of turquoise stones, and the broad Emerald flowed through its center, splitting it into two roughly equal sections. The splendor of the view and the speed of the ride took Sanych’s breath away nearly as completely as the realization that she was now, for better or worse, a spellcaster. She looked over at the woman who rode pell-mell beside her, a light brown braid bouncing off her back with every stride of her horse. Her features reminded Sanych of the Shanallar, and she wondered if Meena had a typical Shanallese face.
When they’d ridden several miles with no sign of pursuit, Sanych called, “So, where are we meeting up with Meena?”
The woman looked over, frowning. “Who’s Meena?”
Chapter Nineteen
A hard winter rain slashed against the mullioned windows behind Anjoya’s chair. She was wearing another of the Kirthan gowns she’d received in Yaren Fel, and the slit let in the draft. Sitting near the hearth made up for it, though she would have preferred one in a room that wasn’t currently hosting a political crisis whose details were unfamiliar.
Beret Branbrey sat in a chair before the crackling fire and listened to Count Braal Runcan’s account of the deaths of Counts Sengril and Armala aboard the doomed Sea God Kazhak. Three other members of his Dictat sat with them: Halvor Thelios, Tomar Gerzan, and Alvar Rentos.
As she understood the situation, Sengril and Armala had conspired for years with two other Dictat members, absent from this meeting: Stam Aponden and Giril n’Hara. The Magister had known of their collusion before the expedition had left Vint for Shanal. However, it seemed that only Runcan had learned what they were actually conspiring about. The Magister did not take the news well.
“A Vinten empire? Are they mad?” he barked, rising from his chair and approaching a large map on the wall. “Whom, exactly, did they propose we subsume to create this Folly-ridden empire of theirs?”
Runcan approached the map as well. “We still aren’t clear who they’ve approached with this idea, Sire. It stands to reason that Kirth, with its massive sea trade, would be a prime target. The vast orchards of Hardyk are another asset that would prove useful. And,” he ran a finger upstream along the Shatterglass River, “if we could claim the Ribbon Mountains, we could control this river from glacier to sea. Fishing, irrigation, bridge tolls on caravans.”
Beret frowned at the shorter man. “You sound like you’re in favor of this nonsense.”
“Sire, I’m in favor of a stable Vint. Which I believe we have, at least at the moment.”
The Magister harrumphed. “Yes, all right. My apologies. One doesn’t hear every day that his most-trusted advisors are planning to depose him in favor of his nephew. Seems they hadn’t researched Geret very well yet, if they thought he’d be interested in ruling.”
“They had assigned Salvor the task of recruiting him, unaware that Halvor’s son was working for us.”
“My son takes his work a little too seriously,” Thelios commented from his spot by the fire.
“Where they’re going, Halvor, that might not be a bad thing,” Beret mused.
Count Gerzan spoke. “Regarding our issues here at home, Sire, we will want to garner confirmation of their intent before a trial can proceed, as per law.”
“Once they learn of their conspirators’ deaths, I believe they’ll refuse to speak,” said Rentos.
“That doesn’t give us much time. And they’ll certainly not speak of any plans to any of us.”
Just as Anjoya was wondering why she’d been invited here at all, everyone else tu
rned to look at her. Her eyes widened. “My lords?”
Beret spoke. “You arrived just last night. No one outside the palace has even seen you, nor knows who you are or where you’re from.” A small smile of satisfaction crossed his lips. “Yes, I believe you’ll do nicely. But our plan must be swift.”
Anjoya’s breath caught. She’d left Salience partly for professional reasons: the complex politics in Hynd had constantly been changing, and living in Lesser Salience had made it harder to keep abreast of broken alliances and useful rumors.
But here she was, sitting in the palace of the man who controlled all of Vint. If she could please him, her place in this new land would be secure, and she might have somewhere to truly call home.
She stood and dropped a low curtsey. “As my lord commands.”
~~~
Meena worked her way down the old rope, bracing her feet on the dank stone wall. Above her, Kemsil held on for dear life, descending in short slides every few seconds.
“Kemsil,” she said, her voice echoing within the reach of the Circuit’s translucent orange barrier. “Relax. It’s not that far down to the water cavern. If you do manage to fall, you’ll survive.”
“Ah, but how can you be sure?” he asked.
“Because you’ll land on me,” Meena said.
“…Um.”
Meena grinned in the dimness. “Once we’re at the bottom, we’ll use the water sluice to enter the tunnel system. Just remember to stay close to me, and behind me. Unless there’s someone attacking from behind. Then you should be somewhere else.”
“Your succinct plan leaves me in awe of your masterful grasp of tactics,” Kemsil commented.
“Just do as I—” Meena broke off, listening. The sound of a wooden door slamming open reached her ears from above, and she gestured for Kemsil to be silent.
“Climb back up,” she whispered. Kemsil, eyes wide, nodded assent.
A minute later, they reached the lip of the well. Kemsil grabbed the base of the well’s wooden arch, bracing his foot against a metal support strut, allowing Meena to climb higher up the rope. They raised their heads out of the well and looked around.
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