Everyone was in a hurry, walking with purpose, their faces showing mixed emotions of fear and excitement.
Bradley felt the vibrations rattling the very floor on which he stood, and he saw that all of the building’s windows had been covered with the emergency plastic shielding. The place had been locked down, which meant there was an imminent threat—most likely from the Wind Family.
Bradley knew he had to get back to his lab and gather up any weapons that were usable to arm the employees, but first he had to get in touch with the Queen. The lobby had been designed on purpose to be as open as possible, but he needed privacy. He made a dash for the men’s bathroom and locked himself in one of the stalls.
He pulled out the divinium shard and tried again to contact the Queen. This time, the Earth Dragon’s words worked, and the metal of the stall door began to ripple in a circle about six inches in diameter.
When he spoke into the fluctuating metal surface, it acted like a magical microphone, reverberating with each word he spoke.
“My Queen,” Bradley said. “Rune Corp is under attack. I don’t have confirmation, but it must be the Emperor.”
“Where is Merrick?” the Queen’s voice boomed as it leapt forth from the rippling metal.
“He didn’t come back with us...when we left, he was on his way to Annoon. He was trying to find something called the lost forest of Abred.”
“Do you mean the Forgotten Forest? Arden?” the Queen said, her voice slightly louder.
Bradley nodded, then realized that she couldn’t see him.
“Yes, my Queen. That’s what he said. He took Jonathan with him as well.”
There was a pause even as the lights hanging from the restroom ceiling swayed back and forth with the increasingly strong rumbling.
“What does he hope to find there?” the Queen said finally.
“My Queen!” Bradley said. “I have to go. The entire building is shaking apart around us!”
“That is of no concern to me,” the Queen said. “Answer my question.”
“He’s looking for the source of the divinium we use here at Rune Corp,” Bradley said. “Ohman never told Cara where it was when he was alive, and Merrick thinks he can find it there.”
Silence.
“And the Keepers?” she said finally. “What did they want with Cara?”
“They told her that Merrick should be the Ard Righ of the Earth Clan.”
Again silence.
Bradley waited for the Queen to speak again, but she did not, and within a few seconds, the metal door of the bathroom stall stopped rippling. The Queen had terminated their connection and left Bradley alone amidst the chaos of his current situation, with no promise of help—no talk of joining her. Nothing.
Silently, Bradley cursed himself for being used by the Queen and for so easily turning on Merrick and his own people just because of his leg.
He looked down at his new limb and laughed ruefully when he thought about how the Queen had used his desire to be accepted by the Drayoom against him. He now understood that he would never be one of them, even though he was no longer completely human either.
He was ashamed and vowed to make up for his transgressions by helping to defeat the Emperor’s armies.
Bradley slammed open the stall door and ran as fast as he could, back to his lab.
He would start by arming as many of the Rune Corp employees as he could with his divinium weapons, and then he would arm himself as well.
He would no longer hide inside his lab or behind his lies.
And if he survived, he would remain loyal to Cara, Merrick, and even Oodrosil in the future, especially if doing so meant helping to depose the Queen.
CHAPTER 72
RARELY IN ALL THE YEARS the great yew had been alive had it faced such indecision. Its power was diverse and spread throughout thousands and thousands of its branched roots, and by Terrada’s grace, those branches connected to countless other trees to form a network that spread across the Earth, even under its oceans.
And yet, even Oodrosil’s power had its limitations.
Here at Rune Corp, the yew had invested a small amount of its lifespan, but a large quantity of its energy working with Ohman, Cara, and most recently, Merrick. Oodrosil was bound by its word to help protect this place and the humans inside its walls.
And from the growing intensity of the vibrations barreling ever closer, the building was going to need all of the help it could get.
At the same time, Oodrosil was concerned about Merrick’s actions on Annoon. The yew had not expected him to even make it to Annoon, and had been shamefully surprised when it had discovered that one of its own brother yew trees had given its life for Merrick.
Despite this, Oodrosil could not be angry. The young yew had taken on the role as Merrick’s guardian, protecting his house in much the same way that Oodrosil protected Rune Corp.
Still, because of Merrick’s perseverance and his intention, Oodrosil was presented with a distraction when all of its power needed to be placed firmly here at Rune Corp.
As important as Merrick might be to the future of the Drayoom species and to the Earth itself, he was not yet ready to possess the secret of the stone. Ohman had known the secret—had discovered it on his own—and had used that knowledge to accept the quest that Terrada had given him.
But Merrick was not yet the equal of Ohman, and just because the young Drayoom thought he should take on Ohman’s quest did not mean that Terrada or Oodrosil agreed.
The great tree hoped that a solution would present itself, but the tree was old and wise enough to know that hope alone was not a method.
Even though Merrick did not know it for sure, he was indeed fast approaching the Forgotten Forest, in the land of Annoon, a place that was both of this world and not of this world.
For now, Oodrosil would have to divide its attention between Rune Corp and the Forgotten Forest and hope that half of its magic was enough for each of the situations.
As Oodrosil turned its attention to its two tasks, it noticed one of the human employees wearing a headset and one of the human enunciation collars moving cautiously through the lobby. This would not seem so unusual except for the fact that everyone else around him was moving frenetically and with purpose, responding to the impending attack.
The man was also holding a piece of divinium from the Earth Clan that smelled very much of its Queen—a scent that Oodrosil both knew and loathed.
CHAPTER 73
JOANNA HAD BEEN investigating Rune Corp and casing its building for weeks now, and all she had uncovered were more and more mysteries.
She started with a general Internet search, which of course came up with the company’s web site. It was a standard corporate site that talked about the usual boring things like mission statements, vision statements, and the company’s culture. There were slick graphics with backgrounds that artfully arranged such words as creativity, innovation, agility, and other phrases meant to distinguish their company when, humorously enough, almost the exact same words were used by every other large corporation in America to do the same thing.
Joanna tried to figure out what the company actually did, and as best as she could conclude after wading through all the corporate-speak, the place was a knowledge management consulting firm that invested heavily in research and development. Unlike most corporate web sites, however, the Rune Corp site didn’t list any customers explicitly, and Joanna knew what that usually meant right away.
In the Northern Virginia area, located only miles from the nation’s capital, not listing specific customers meant that the company did a lot of black, or classified, work. That in itself was not unusual for Tysons Corner, but usually a company had a mix of unclassified and classified work in its portfolio of clients, although that did not appear to be the case with Rune Corp.
All Joanna could figure was that Rune Corp was into some seriously hush-hush stuff, which, of course, set off her reporter’s instinct even more.
She had tried very casually to flirt with some of the male employees who looked as if they had never had an attractive woman even look at them much less approach them in a bar. Either their operational security was incredibly good, or the employees she talked to weren’t privy to what the company really did. Joanna had not gone so far as to take one of the nerds to bed or anything, but she had exerted enough of her female charm that at least one of them should have cracked.
Instead, despite all her research and her fieldwork, she had learned exactly nothing that would connect Rune Corp to the disappearance of Officer Diggs.
At the same time, Officer Diggs had not yet resurfaced, and her police brethren were in full search mode for any clue that might let them know what had become of her.
From her contact in the police department, Joanna had learned that they had discovered signs of a struggle and of shots being fired at Diggs’ condo unit.
Neighbors had been able to corroborate that the fight had occurred on the same morning as when the tornado had touched down. But strangely enough, even though the forensics team was able to find four bullets from Diggs’ Glock, the neighbors only remembered hearing a single shot that was fired. Most of them knew that Diggs was a police officer, and they had minded their own business and not reported it.
The police had, of course, confiscated Joanna’s footage of Officer Diggs and her struggle with the man in white, and had put it through all sorts of forensics and specialist testing, she was sure. Other than being able to agree that the shape of the woman did indeed look very much like Officer Diggs, they had not learned anything new.
The good news was this meant the cops weren’t looking at Rune Corp at all, and that Joanna had the company all to herself to investigate. The bad news was that she had found absolutely nothing, even though her instincts kept telling her that there was some connection there to be found between the disappearance of Officer Diggs and the mysterious company.
Joanna sat in her car across the street from the shining corporate building with its huge glass windows and its red logo five stories above the ground. Over the last few days, something seemed to be going on behind the Rune Corp walls as fewer and fewer employees left at the regular end of the day.
When the dark funnel clouds gathered almost directly above Rune Corp, and the first twister set down just a few hundred yards away from her car, Joanna jumped.
When the company’s external blast shields dropped down to cover all of its exposed glass, Joanna slapped her dashboard—not because she was mad, but because she had finally realized the one thing that both the disappearance of Officer Diggs and Rune Corp had in common.
It made no sense to her, but they both involved intense, extreme, bad weather.
CHAPTER 74
THE BOAT THAT MERRICK and Jonathan made was simple but its keel line was straight and true, and it passed the most crucial test of all—it floated.
They had opted to make the most basic of sail boats with only a single sail attached to a yard arm and a boom that they could raise or lower with relative ease and manipulate to catch the wind through a cable system with a rope rigged from braided, softened bamboo and several very cooperative tree roots. Between the sail that was filled with air and the rudder they had sliced off from a fallen tree, they had been able to pick up some speed and keep their stern pointed away from Annoon for the last several hours.
Because the sea remained almost unnaturally still, they glided across the immense body of water like an ice skater across an endless rink.
“This is harder to steer than anything I grew up with,” Jonathan said.
“We don’t need to steer,” Merrick said, taking a break from his chanting. “Let go of the tiller.”
Jonathan did as Merrick asked, and the boat made a slight adjustment on its own.
As Merrick started to repeat the word for Arden again, he was intensely aware of the way the word scraped against his pallet over and over again. He realized that, although different, the word for Arden felt similar in some ways to the word for Annoon. He had always assumed that the word for Annoon, first given to him by the Earth Clan’s former Master Keeper, was from Terrada’s tongue. But now that he could compare it to the word for Arden, he began to think that they might both be from a completely different language—one that was even more ancient than the dragon tongues.
An idea awakened in Merrick’s head as he wondered if combining the four languages into a unified language might result in much more than just the sum of their parts. Maybe trying to figure out how words from the Earth Dragon and the Wind Dragon lexicons could fit together, for instance, wasn’t the right approach. That was the way Ohman had been trying, but it was possible that even the great Ohman had been wrong at least once or twice in his lifetime.
As Merrick continued his chanting, the boat turned its course again, and the seas started to become choppy.
Within minutes, the ocean around them rolled with endless swells that lifted their small craft up into the air and dropped it back down into trough after trough between the waves. Even the wind joined in as Araki seemed to suddenly become aware of their existence as they drew nearer to the magical forest they sought.
Despite all of his magical power, Merrick’s stomach quickly grew queasy from the extreme motion, and he found it more and more difficult to continue his chanting.
Jonathan lowered the sail, then ran back to keep his hand on the tiller, although Merrick was sure that his friend knew that he was not actually steering the boat. Merrick took a break from his chanting to speak words of calming to lessen the force of the wind, but the farther the craft sailed, the stronger and more merciless the weather became.
He went back to chanting the word for Arden in the hopes that their course would stay true through the storm.
Salt water doused them, and Merrick wished many times that they had taken the extra time to construct a more substantial boat that was better able to protect them from the rage of the elements.
After one particularly steep ascent up the front of a wave, the boat was thrown down hard into the trough, and Jonathan was thrown out of the boat.
Merrick jumped to the edge of the deck and threw his hand out for Jonathan to grab. Jonathan made a grab for Merrick and touched his fingertips, but he wasn’t able to get a firm hold.
Merrick shouted the word for float in Araki’s own language, his mouth emitting a sound like the wind screaming through a desolate and dry valley. He was rewarded when he saw Jonathan’s body rise from the waves and move back toward him and the troubled boat.
As soon as Jonathan was within reach, Merrick grabbed him and pulled him in. Once they were both safely on the deck again, they lashed themselves to the mast and held on to the soaked wooden post.
They were at the mercy of Araki and Lagu as they clung to the mast and braced themselves against the roaring wind, pelting rain, and surging waves. Their desire to reach Arden quickly turned to hoping only for their craft to stay afloat.
Ever so slowly, the weather lessened in severity, and they found themselves eventually on smooth seas again. Merrick was relieved, hopeful that they had weathered the worst the two dragons could send their way but fearing that this was not the case.
“I’ve completely lost my bearing,” Merrick said, and Jonathan nodded in agreement.
“Looks like we made it through the worst of things,” Jonathan said.
They untied themselves from the mast, and Jonathan took his place at the rudder once again. Their ship was a simple one, but it was rugged enough that it had withstood the harsh weather, and for that Merrick thanked Terrada.
Merrick hoisted the sail and took joy in the sound of the snap of the material as it once again filled with a gentle breeze.
“I’m going to start the chant again,” Merrick said, “and see if we can get back on course.”
Once again, Jonathan released the rudder as Merrick began repeating the word for Arden that the branch-shaped piece of divinium had taught him.
&n
bsp; Slowly but noticeably, the boat began to turn until the boat’s stern was facing the opposite direction it had been pointing when they had come out of the storm.
Merrick stopped his chanting with a sense of dread as he realized that they had not passed through the storm at all but instead had been turned completely around and spit back out.
Araki and Lagu had successfully stopped Merrick from reaching the Forgotten Forest.
“Before I start chanting again, we need a plan,” Merrick said. “If we go back the same way, we’re just going to have to deal with the storm again, only the next time we might not be so lucky.”
“How are we going to get to the forest if the dragons don’t want us there?” Jonathan said. “I can’t believe Ohman used to go through this every time he brought back more divinium. That wouldn’t make any sense.”
Merrick understood Jonathan’s point. Maybe the forest was a dead end. But if the forest wasn’t the answer, then there must have been some other reason Terrada gave him the divinium branch and the word for Arden.
“What if Araki and Lagu don’t want us making it to the forest,” Merrick said, “but Terrada, and maybe even Sigela, do?”
“Could you call the lightning for us to travel on?” Jonathan said.
“I’m not sure Sigela’s power is that strong here,” Merrick said. “Especially when there’s no sun overhead. But I can try.”
Merrick spoke the calling words for lightning, his voice crackling like fire, but Sigela did not answer. Behind them in the distance across the sea, Merrick heard the far-way rumblings of what he imagined was Annoon’s volcano.
Traveling on the back of the lightning was not going to work in this land.
“I could raise the ocean floor again,” Merrick said, “but if we tried to walk through that kind of storm, there’s no way we’d make it through alive.”
Merrick took down the sail, and the two of them floated peacefully for what might have been hours, while Merrick tried to think of a plan.
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