by Amanda Twigg
She’d made a good stab of choosing a direction, and after a short skirt of the boundary wall, the exit came into view. Her ice-white breath of satisfaction plumed into the air. The hole was the same shape, and it had the same twisted root tendril on the wall above. She hadn’t thought the perimeter could be colder than on her last visit, but frozen spears pointed down from the ceiling, seeming to extend invisible tendrils of cold through her clothes. The gap she’d squirmed through was there, unrepaired. It rested beneath her boot, dark, beckoning, and completely filled with mud-shaded ice.
Chapter 46
Landra stooped to study her escape route. Blocked.
“Lan?” Jex said.
“Shush. I’m thinking.”
“Lan,” he insisted. “What’s wrong with your back? Your robe’s spotting red.”
She resisted the urge to reach behind and investigate. Earlier probing had discovered bubbling flesh, and she wasn’t certain that her skin was entirely whole. Pain from the site had faded beneath her other aches, so she’d put the injury out of mind. “I’m probably bleeding.” She turned to face him, expecting to see worry on his face, but only pity twisted through his young features. That’s how it is in the underlevel. Beyond fear. Beyond panic.
“Snap out of it, Jex. I have no energy for despair” She stamped on the ice block. “We need to smash this.”
Jex nipped his lips, as if containing an opinion. They had no tools for digging, and Landra had sworn off magic again, so she wasn’t sure how to open the route. She wondered if Jex’s temple lessons had given him skills she could use. Her powers were limited to unnatural sight, unnatural connections with dead people, and blowing things up. She knew that Jex’s magic was more refined and that he was capable of spell-casting.
“Can you do a melting spell?” she asked.
Hope sparked in the engineer’s dark eyes. “No, and I wouldn’t manage it without my staff anyway, but if we find a rocky area, I might be able to warm us with a flame.”
“You can make fire?”
“I learned it in Engagement class. Didn’t you?”
“I must have missed that lesson, but I don’t understand. If you can make fire, what’s stopping you from melting the ice?”
“Not enough power. My one energy spark will barely pit the surface, and there’s no fuel down here to get a real blaze going.”
For all Landra knew, the ice beneath her boots might stretch all the way to the clearing. How much energy would it take to melt that volume with a blast? She couldn’t abandon the hope of safety, warmth, and food—not without trying to reach it first.
Slapping her hands together for warmth, she scowled at her palms. Magic rode in those hidden veins, and a lack of study hadn’t prevented her from having ungodly aura surges. Chanda had said that her power differed in scale. Hadn’t it smashed tables apart and broken holes in walls? Maybe she could do this.
So much for swearing off magic. It was the story of Landra’s recent years. Every time she vowed to refuse her power, dire need pressed her back to its path. “Stand back. I’m going to blast it.”
Jex scowled. “No, Lan, you can’t. Even if you have enough power, an explosion that big might strip the Soul from your bones.”
She silenced him with a grim look and then turned to her task. Darkness and pain—both were her familiar companions. Just as well because she needed overwhelming grief and suffering to trigger her power. Of all the dire life events she could choose, Dannet’s overwhelming look of love came to mind. Her brother’s warmth had been more than she deserved, following her murder of Preston.
The memory hurt in a different way from her nightmares of pain and abuse, yet the anguish burned hotter inside her heart. It reminded her of the joys of her childhood and the love she’d forfeited. If she saw her brother tomorrow, what would he say? She recalled his stricken look, and it crumbled her tempered armor to dust. Harsh tears forged tracks down her cold cheeks.
The elba awoke first. Landra saw its response through closed eyes. The plant hung on her hip, an autumn-red energy sphere blooming around its pot. The frost-tinged leaves unfurled enough to display crimson veins, making it look hot with power. She accepted the strength the plant brought and didn’t struggle when it leaked red tendrils of crimson power into her blue aura. As stronger azure shades billowed through her Soul, her growing power pushed her boundaries ever wider.
She revelled in the sensation of well-being before turning her attention to the ice. Caution urged her to investigate first. Jex wasn’t wrong. Unleashing her power posed unfathomable risks, so she extended a sliver of blue light from her aura and pressed it against the glassy surface. This wasn’t a loosed bolt of energy, but a reaching with a connected strand of her Soul. Her magical sight ranged ahead of the protuberance, imparting knowledge as an additional sense.
She recognized the ice as a collection of crystals rather than a single block. Instead of revelling in their individual beauty, she felt for imperfections in the structure and probed her aura into the cracks. Burrowing widened one fissure, so she wormed into the fault, her consciousness riding the twisting strand of blue. She pushed in one direction, turned off down another fault, and then… Obstruction. Packed ice. Old ice.
The focus of Landra’s Soul resided in her aura thread and was stuck, but her Soul sight stretched farther. She viewed the immense glacier and knew it reached all the way to the ranger hut and beyond. Inside the ice, orange aura bubbles caught her attention—remnants of creatures that had succumbed to the ice’s embrace. The deceased animals were unaware, but Landra homed in on a single blue aura that pulsed with a Jethran soldier’s signature.
Could a city guard have died out here? Vague impressions of the dead Soul came to her thoughts. Rebellious, strong, a fighter. Soldier. Oh no. Could it be Thisk?
If Landra’s body had been in the ice, she might have smashed her head with shock. Her aura thread just twitched in the confined space. She couldn’t identify the ranger’s Soul for certain, but who else would be out in the wilds? They’d not always agreed, but he was her mentor. Her rock. She couldn’t bear the thought that he might be gone. Rather than submit to panic, she forced herself to calm down.
Don’t do anything silly. Don’t make this a tomb for my Soul too. She collected all that she was into one retreating thread and made a slow withdrawal. A tug here and a pull there extricated her from the frozen expanse until her aura finally emerged into the underlevel.
As the protruding thread sucked back into her aura, her bodily senses awoke. It’s cold. I stink. Ouch, my back. She must have slumped during her out-of-body experience because now she was on the muddy floor with her head cradled in Jex’s lap. His concern rolled over her in disruptive aura waves, so she sealed her consciousness behind solid aura edges to keep him out. She cracked her lids to view the underlevel with her eyes rather than her Soul and stared up into the engineer’s face. White breath puffed through his lips.
“What happened, Lanya? Did you melt a glacier?”
“What?” That wasn’t what she’d done at all. She struggled to sit up and glanced at the hole in the fence. Rippling water filled the space now, and the entire area around it had warmed, but she recognized the effect as superficial. Crystalline sheets of ice must have lurked below the pool.
Could have thrown all my magic at that job and failed. Lots of ice. Lots of connections, lots of… Thisk. Were you trapped in the glacier, my friend? Are you dead? Gods, I’m exhausted.
She pushed sleep aside and moved her cracked lips, twisting them to form words.
“You were right, Jex. There’s no way out here. Help me up. I have to go home.”
Chapter 47
All shaft areas were similar—tree trunk, surrounding root island, and a framed ladder. Landra had chosen the nearest one, thinking a quiet entry to the city might be best. A map pinned to the tree trunk positioned it near the perimeter below a residential ring.
She set a foot on the bottom rung, her stomach fluttering. What
ever waited above would not be her old life. It occurred to her that Hux Hall might offer a better way in because the guards would know her at once. Reporting would be easier, but she couldn’t rule out that they might kill her instead. For all she knew, the hall was still abandoned and inaccessible. No. This is simpler. Time to get on with it. Time for courage.
“You’re not really going up, are you, Lanya?” Jex asked.
She ground her teeth. He’d followed her here despite the lack of an invitation, and his negativity was starting to annoy her. He looked uncomfortable on the root island, perched between a sprawling wretch and the lapping mud. Slugs bobbed to the surface in anticipation of the swamper’s death, so Jex scuttled inside the ladder frame and clung to the tree. At his intensified shivering, Landra removed her robe and offered it over.
His hangdog countenance made her wince. It would have been hard for Jex to look any colder or more miserable. The ordered lines of his aura were breaking up, as if the engineer in him was falling apart. What remained looked pallid and thin. There wasn’t much she could do for him, except to leave him the robe. She waved it at him again, but he refused to move. “Please take it. I won’t need Templer clothes where I’m going.”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing for me here. If you’re going to the midlevel, I might as well head up too.”
“No.” Her tone was firm. She couldn’t know what reception awaited, and dragging Jex into more trouble was just… Shelk and damn. There couldn’t be more trouble. This wasn’t the time to admit how she’d arrived at this point or explain why he couldn’t come along, so she chose a firm approach. “We have different paths, Jex. Mine is above, and you should head for the temple. I’m sure they’ll take you back.”
His jaw slid off-center, making him look even more pathetic. “No, they won’t. Don’t you realize, Lanya? We’re both going to die.”
She sighed away the grief in her chest. “Maybe.”
The admission irked her because purpose still raged in her Soul. She had things to do and a future to reclaim. If her life were to mean anything, she had to report what she’d learned as a spy. Even better, if she could discover that Thisk was alive and deliver her news to him in person. Whatever the future held after that, she would have to face. This wasn’t the time to falter.
“I know the end might be close,” she said, “but there’s dignity in choosing how we die. My end is on the midlevel, doing my soldier duty. Yours…” She looked aside, knowing he must determine his own course. She just hoped that whatever path he chose, he wouldn’t get in her way.
She draped his robe over a rung and set her hands on the ladder. The climb chilled her more and stretched her skin’s fabric tight over her sore back, but she didn’t stop moving until her head brushed the trapdoor at the top.
Having broken her vow to refuse magic once today, she couldn’t see the harm of using a little more. She tipped her chin up to the panel and reached for the horrible events of her life. Names and places flipped through her head—Mendog, Preston, the cavern. Awful as they were, Landra’s capacity for wallowing in misery felt depleted, and she couldn’t raise the accompanying grief into her Soul. Numb as she was, her strength refused to regenerate.
Even her Soul sight failed. She could glimpse Jex’s moving colors below, but viewing what danger lay beyond the door proved impossible. Glaring only brought her a vision of knotty wood and a bitter taste of failure in her throat.
This was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way. She pushed on the trapdoor to confirm it was locked and then hammered her balled fist against the wood. “Help! Is anyone there?” It was pitiful, hopeless. It was her only course left.
A lack of response suggested that no sentry was posted, but she banged on anyway. This was the last action on her emergency list. If no one answered, she wasn’t sure what she would do. Try again? A different shaft? Nothing’s going to plan.
“Can you blast it open with magic?” Jex called from below.
She continued to bang. “Is anyone there?”
“Shelk off!” a deep voice answered.
The reply made her jump. The response hadn’t been good, but it was better than silence. She resumed her knocking with new vigor. “Open the trap and let me in. Are you still there? I need to come up.”
Silence echoed again, so she considered what might attract the sentry’s attention. “I’m a wanted criminal ready to surrender. You’ll get a commendation for taking me in.”
“Lanya,” Jex’s panicked voice hissed below. “What are you doing?”
The trap groaned as a bolt slid across. She dropped down a rung to wait, and rusty hinges screeched when the panel flipped back. Falling dust made her tuck her face beneath an arm, and when she looked back up, a sentry with hard eyes, scraggy beard, and jumpy aura filled the space. He pointed a sword tip at her face.
It was almost too much, seeing the mid-blue of a soldier uniform and the dim glow of a midlevel shaft—home. Don’t break up now. Don’t cry. “I—”
“Hold it right there.” The sentry leaned closer, pinched his wide nostrils together, and groaned. “Demons of the mist and shelking mud slugs. What do you smell like?”
The jibe was irrelevant. Landra knew she stank. She sucked in a breath that seemed to come up from her boots. “You have to help me. My name is Landra Hux, and I need to speak with my father, the chief.”
In her life, she’d endured derision, indifference, and hateful mocking, but the guffaw of utter contempt that ripped from the sentry’s throat near crushed her spirit.
“Hux,” he said. “I don’t think so. If you’re trying to get up here with that story, you should have dyed your hair a different color to shelk white.”
Landra wiped at the filth above her ear. “Look.” She’d not dyed her hair since her time in the cavern, so the gold flecks had to be showing through.
The sentry’s laugh came louder. “That’s not going to convince me you’re anything but a thieving, lying mud-dweller. I believed your first story about being a wanted criminal. Should’ve got your tale straight before you knocked.”
“But it’s true,” she said.
“Listen, mud slug, I can see why you’d want to come up here spinning tales, but a claim like that will see you dead. Is that what you want? Everyone knows the runaway Hux is the biggest lawbreaker this side of exile. Murderer, that one. Public spectacle and all. She did in the Third in front of everyone.”
That I did. Shelk. She was more bothered about being called a runaway. “What about the Warrior Fourth?” she asked.
“What about him?”
“Is he alive?”
“Course he is. Or did you think the chief’s bitch daughter did him in too?”
Landra clutched the ladder, shocked by the strength of her relief. Thisk was alive. The world felt more normal with him ranging the wilds. “Can you pass him message? Please. Tell him I’m in the underlevel and need to report.”
“I’ll do you one better and set up a meeting.” His scathing tone didn’t offer hope. “I’ll arrange tea and biscuits, and I’ll send a scribe in to take notes.”
She ground her teeth, infuriated that he could make this a joke. “I—”
“Enough,” the sentry growled, rattling his sword against the trapdoor. “Taking nonsense to my commander will see me laughed out of my bars. The only place the story’s going is to mess hall gossips. Times are hard, and we need a good laugh.”
Landra stiffened in the face of defeat, contemplating whether she could best him in a fight. Not even at my strongest.
“But there is hope,” he said. “If you’re really determined, come back tomorrow and all the traps will be open.”
“They will?” She didn’t believe him. “You’re offering amnesty, then?”
“Sort of. They call it the Run.”
Horrible bile rose in Landra’s throat.
“Oh, yes, you’re just in time for the Warrior’s Run,” he confirmed. “Come up tomorrow so our fighters can en
d your misery. Repent your evil ways and find honor in a soldier’s death.” He laughed louder than he had before and booted the trap shut in her face. Vibrations shuddered the ladder, shaking her grip loose. She tumbled toward the island of roots and landed on her back. Burning pain fired through her core, but it couldn’t overshadow the agony of failure. If her misdeeds were well-known, how could her reception be any better if she used a different shaft? This felt like defeat.
Jex stooped over her, a storm playing out behind his dark eyes and through his aura. Once he managed to make his mouth work, only two words came out. They were framed as a question.
“Landra Hux?”
Chapter 48
Being Landra Hux was hard. She wanted to shut out the world. A pariah above and a victim below, and the only choices left were to die in the mud or follow her mother into cowardly death. Where was her purpose now? Shelking great. Jex’s honest Soul bubbled beside her, like a reflection of the person she was supposed to be. Judgment glowed bright red along his blue shades. She climbed to her feet and headed in a straight line for the perimeter fence. At least it would be warm where she’d melted the ice. Shelk, shelk, and shelk.
The sound of sloshing footfalls made everything worse. Cruel to follow. Can’t you leave me alone? She was open now, raw. Jex had believed her claim to Hux lineage. She’d seen it in his resentful face. Now with her aura boundaries weakened to slackness, there was nothing to prevent him from raiding her Soul and knowing all that she was. He didn’t have the ability to read her aura, but anyone could sense the emotions of someone as vulnerable as she felt. She was ashamed of her life, her nature, and her deceptions. How had she come to this? Every honorable intention she’d entertained had resulted in disaster.
Was this how it had been for her mother, having no options left? Had she seen no other way than to perform one last soldier act? Surely, her world couldn’t have been as messed up as this.
