by Frank Morin
After several minutes of hearing nothing but the gentle sounds of the forest, Connor heard a small branch crack in the distance. It would have been beyond the ears of anyone not tapping quartzite, but he picked up on it and focused on that area, just downhill of his position, screened by a dense stand of evergreen.
Connor listened harder. In the Carraig, sounds crashed in like a great torrent, but in that dark wood, the flow was more like a gentle stream, so he plunged his mind into it and focused on everything he could hear. The creaking of trees and rustling of leaves sounded loud, as did the occasional scurry of small animals. He could almost understand the whispers of the wind as it whistled down from the majestic heights of Mount Murdo, lost in the darkness to even his enhanced vision. He heard tiny pinch-nippers leaping between stalks of grass, while the buzzing of flying insects sounded so loud, he could pinpoint the location of every moth, mosquito, and gnat nearby.
Then he heard the breathing.
They were coming.
Connor spoke loudly into the quiet, but did not enhance his voice. "Took you long enough."
Ilse and Margrit, her Longseer, rounded the stand of evergreen slightly to his right and stepped into the clearing, about forty feet away. Margrit's eyes glowed bright in his Pathfinder vision, and she gave him a tiny nod of acknowledgement.
The rest of the team didn't appear, and he couldn't pinpoint their breathing. The sibling Rumblers had a knack for showing up unexpectedly, but he didn't sense them sneaking up behind his pile of rocks.
Ilse regarded him for a moment. "You lied to me." Her voice was calm, but still chilling.
"You lied to me first," he retorted.
"We've been over that before. I do not lie to you, boy."
"Let's call it creative massaging of the truth, then."
"Tell me about Hector."
Of course she'd know about that. The truth about what happened to Hector was a closely guarded secret. Few at the Carraig even knew he was a Guardian. Fewer still knew anything about his connection with High Lord Dougal, and only a handful knew the truth about his turning unclaimed.
"He tried to kill Ailsa. When we confronted him, Lord Dail pronounced him unclaimed." Connor rose from his seat. "He turned immediately."
She frowned. "I didn't think it worked that way. We've never actually recorded a live witness of anyone turning unclaimed. I was convinced that it was all an elaborate lie."
"Well, I saw it. He transformed into some kind of raging monster. Possessed greater strength than a max-tapped Boulder, and the speed of a running Strider. His jaws changed." Connor raised his hands, trying to show the size of Hector's enormous jaws. "Could have snapped off someone's head. His claws were like daggers. You can't imagine what it was like without seeing it."
In the moment Hector had transformed, Connor had realized their carefully-crafted plan to escape into Granadure had been but a delicious lie.
"Your excuses are getting better," Ilse said with a hint of a smile.
Connor groaned. "I couldn't risk leaving. Even with Captain Rory's help, I just barely defeated that monster."
"The capitain is strong hands." The shapely Anika rounded the opposite side of the concealing trees, which placed her a little closer to Connor. Erich followed, looking disgusted that she'd given away their position.
At least they were across the clearing and not somehow sneaking up behind him, preparing to knock him on the head with stone-hard fists. Connor focused on Ilse. She needed to understand. "I had to stop him or he would have killed Ailsa and rampaged through the school."
Ilse actually looked troubled at the thought of so much death. That was one of the things that Connor liked about her and her team. They were enemies of Obrion, but they did not harbor the intense hatred that he had witnessed on both sides of conflict around Alasdair. He might not exactly get along with Ilse, but somehow they managed to find common ground.
"I had no way to find you," Connor said. "And I have to be more careful than ever. If Shona suspects I still want to leave with you, she's vowed to cancel my patronage and to enslave my entire village. If I lose patronage, I'll turn unclaimed before we escape the mountains. I'd kill you all."
Erich leaned forward, grinning. "Someone die if try rage kill. Maybe bring you head to home."
"You have no idea how dangerous that thing was," Connor insisted.
"Then tell me," Ilse said. "I must pass this information on to Kilian."
That was exactly what he wanted. As terrifying as Kilian could be, he seemed to know more about the deeper truths of Petralist powers than just about anyone. So Connor told them what happened, how it happened, and what he and Rory had to do to defeat Hector.
"The number of people who know your secret is growing," Ilse said when he finished.
"That's all you have to say?" he exclaimed. He was confirming the unclaimed were real, and that he had battled to the death with it. She didn't even look impressed.
Anika looked impressed, probably just because she was thinking about Rory. It was more than a little sickening to see how infatuated she had become with the captain. The fact that they were sworn to kill each other pretty much guaranteed that budding romance was going to end painfully, but they didn't seem to care.
"I point out that fact because that is the truth that will most likely affect your destiny and your freedom."
"I'm aware of it," Connor said. "Ailsa won't talk, and neither will Gisela. And Jok owes me a life debt."
"When more than one person knows a secret, it is no longer a secret."
"Well, the truth about me hasn't been a secret for months," Connor retorted.
"Be that as it may, we need a new plan."
"I'm open to suggestions, but I can't see how to make it work. Maybe you should get out of here before Rory finds you."
He hated to suggest it, but needed to. Ilse was his last link to Granadure, and to Verena. When she left, she would take with her the last slim chance he could escape the life Shona was planning for him.
Of course, before she left, her mission required her to kill him.
He wasn't looking forward to that part.
Ilse actually considered the suggestion, and Connor prepared to flee if she decided the time had come to embrace her secondary objective. Anika looked thrilled with the idea of getting her hands on Rory again. Erich looked more than eager for a bash fight with Rory's Fast Rollers.
They were both insane.
"Leaving is not yet an option," Ilse said. "I will report to Kilian and see what he suggests."
That gave him a little time before the final death battle. Until Ilse was a sworn enemy, he needed to leverage her position as a cautious ally.
"Before you go, I need some help."
"What kind of help?" she asked.
"I'm one of the champion contenders for the Tir-raon now."
Ilse frowned, "Why by the Tallan's glory did you choose the name you did?"
He had hoped she hadn't heard about that.
"I figured you would appreciate it."
"It does have certain poetic appeal," she admitted. "However it only increases the chance that you are going to generate additional enemies."
Connor shrugged. "I have plenty of enemies."
"What do you need from me then?"
"I need you to teach me slate."
Ilse smiled. "You have a lot of nerve, boy."
"I've been saving up. Besides, if you get orders to assassinate me, wouldn't you prefer it be a bit of a challenge?"
Eric laughed and clapped his hands together. "Many like talk. Will make many good fight."
Ilse smiled, a genuine smile. "All right. I will train you so that you can stand against those pampered Petralists."
He breathed a sigh of relief. She was his only possible teacher.
"Know this," she said, her tone turning hard. "When I come to kill you, I will do it quickly so you don't suffer."
The strange thing was, she looked like she meant it as a gesture of kindnes
s, and he felt the honesty of the offer. "Ah, thanks, but I don't plan to go down that easy."
"Then we shall see if that day comes, but I still hold to hope that somehow we will find a way."
"So how do we begin?" Connor asked, wanting to change the topic from his looming assassination.
"Like this."
The earth beside Connor burst upward like a cresting wave and tumbled him and the pile of rocks he'd been sitting on away like flotsam in a raging tide.
Connor spun in the earth, wanting to scream, but not daring to open his mouth. His quartzite senses were useless. There was nothing to see but blackness, nothing to hear but the strangely peaceful hiss of tossed earth, nothing to smell but the dirt shoved up his nose.
He tapped slate and felt for the gateway of earth as the ground stopped tumbling, but did not release him. He was trapped underground, not even sure which way was up. Was Ilse trying to kill him after all?
He couldn't move, couldn't breathe, and didn't have nearly enough breath to survive more than a few seconds. He focused on slate, but the cursed little stone didn't open to his mind.
Connor raged silently, imagining the little stone chiding him for trying to walk with earth while so riled up. If Gregor was nearby, he'd probably say something annoyingly useless like, "The seed of the flower must first be sundered before the flower rises to brighten the world."
Actually, that wasn't half bad. Maybe near-death experiences were good for his Sentry speak.
As he struggled to establish a connection with earth, the ground buckled, tossing him up into blessed air. Connor gasped in a mouthful of dirt that tasted like that moment right after waking from a nightmare. Coughing and snorting out the dirt plugging his nose, he levered himself to a sitting position.
Ilse stood a dozen feet away, frowning at him. "Well?" she asked. "You did think to bring slate for training, didn't you?"
"It's being difficult."
"In a fight, your opponent won't give you time to set yourself," she said.
"I know. I wasn't ready."
She smiled. "You're ready now."
"No wait!"
The ground opened beneath him and he fell back into the pit, which closed over him again. That look in her eye made it clear she wasn't planning to rescue him again. It was up to him to get out.
He almost took a calming breath before remembering that would only kill him faster. Fighting back a growing panic, he focused on the slate again. Allowing the desperate need to fill him, he tried to touch the stone with a calm thought. It was like facing a friend's door at midnight with a charging torc bearing down on him, but needing to knock politely.
This time slate opened to his mind and he drove eager earth senses through. The ground became an extension of his limbs. Ilse was there, touching him with soft, ethereal fingers, but not actively blocking his connection with the earth.
So he seized the ground and lifted himself back to the surface on a wide pedestal, the earth above his head shifting aside to allow him to pass. He rose to the surface and drove the pedestal higher, forming a short tower, feeling a sense of pride at having accomplished the feat.
Ilse knocked him off his tower with a giant fist of earth, and when he struck, the ground swallowed him again.
After that, the training got really hard.
Ilse took the direct approach. As Connor spit dirt for the tenth time, he decided she must be a believer in the mantra that if the training didn't kill him, he might just survive the real thing.
That only left surviving the training, which he wasn't sure he'd manage. She struck over and over, each assault different, from nearly drowning him to dropping him into holes, then clobbering him with spears of earth. Maybe asking her to train him hadn't been such a good idea. She was more deadly as a friend than almost any other enemy.
She did start pausing between attempts to kill him, explaining what she had done and ways he could have blocked it. The fact that she assumed the split second warning before waves of earth overwhelmed him might be enough made him feel pretty good. She didn't need to know that he hadn't felt anything before getting clobbered.
Thankfully, she taught him the basics of shielding.
As he was gasping for breath, exhausted from freeing himself from an underground prison lined with the same stones he'd been sitting on only moments before, she said, "To remain unseen, one must embody what is not there."
"That's the first almost Sentry-worthy sentence I've heard out of you," Connor grinned.
She opened a hole directly under him, plunging him ten feet into the ground. When she let him ascend again she said, "The moth is consumed by the flame, no matter its intent to seek but the comfort of warmth or light."
So Connor threw a fireball at her face.
Apparently that wasn't the lesson she had been trying to teach. She held him underground for nearly a minute before allowing him to rise. Eventually he learned that the trick to a good shield was to pretend to be a hole in the ground, a weight with no weight as Ilse called it. With practice, he started getting a sense for how to create eddies in the earth around himself that would gently divert the senses of probing Sentries without alerting them to the deception.
"Blocking a direct incursion while remaining unseen is more challenging," Ilse warned. "We'll work on that next time."
Connor was surprised to feel a sense of loss that she had switched back to plain speech. It must be a terrible burden for a Sentry to speak normally so often.
By the time the brutal training ended, he was more than exhausted. If not for the replenishing strength of the earth, he would have slept on the mountain. He somehow managed to sneak back over the wall and find the Sculpture House in the darkness and climb to his own little room where he gratefully toppled into bed.
Chapter 16
It seemed only a second later when heavy pounding on the door dragged him awake.
"Leave me alone until morning," he groaned, turning over and burying his head in his pillow.
"Is morning," Gisela said, pushing the door open and poking her head in the room. "Connor, what are doing? Will be late!"
"Late?" His thoughts were as fractured as if his father had been beating them with his hammer all night in the Powder House.
"What is being the matter?" Gisela asked, stepping farther into the room, looking concerned. "Today is assigning armies."
"Oh, that." Connor stumbled out of bed, grateful that he hadn't bothered to undress.
"What have being doing?" she asked, frowning at his dirt-matted hair.
"Secret general training," he said, pushing her out of the room. "I'll be right down."
He gripped sandstone, drawing upon its welcome healing powers as he stripped off his old shirt. Dirt rained out of it, and he took a moment to beat the worst of the dust off his clothes before donning a spare shirt. Then he rushed downstairs where Aunt Ailsa was waiting for him.
"Do you have no concept of time?" She gave him one of those long-suffering looks like his mother often did.
"I've been busy."
"Busyness is more than filling time."
"Time flies on wings of fire while we labor in chains of darkness," he offered.
She gave him a stern look. "I'd tell you to be yourself, but I don't recommend any new disasters today."
Then she pressed a little pouch of rocks and powders into his hand. "You're late. The classes are already gathering. You were supposed to be on the stage by now."
"Arriving fashionably late will add to the legend."
"Hurry," she urged.
He waved and rushed toward the basement to race back to his Kilian suite to change. Gisela gave him a biscuit and a piece of sausage. He thanked her around a mouthful and raced into the undercity. As Connor tore through the now-familiar route to his suite, he thought back to the meeting with Evander the day before. He really hoped Jean appeared, because he didn't want to have to make good his threat.
Connor changed fast and burst out of his bedroom wearing his K
ilian outfit just as Tomas began pounding on the door.
"You're late," Tomas said.
"So get me there fast."
They reached the grand assembly hall in record time with Tomas and Cameron leading the way at a pounding run. They weren't Striders, but they could move when they wanted to. Cameron in particular looked disappointed that other pedestrians were smart enough to scatter when they saw the two Fast Rollers charging down the street bellowing, "Make way for General Kilian!"
They finally slowed at the wide entrance, which was crammed with curious onlookers, trying to hear the announcements of the armies. Connor endured the many derogatory shouts and appreciated the few loud supporters that chanted his name.
Just before entering the giant hall, he paused to down a vial of soapstone mixture and to make sure the little piece of slate was in place in his boot. Using slate would risk revealing the truth of his curse, but he couldn't afford to not be prepared. The Tir-raon was about to commence its most important phase, and he was walking into a room full of enemies. The Fast Rollers took him around to the entrance reserved for faculty and champions.
"Try not to make too much of a mess," Tomas said as he pulled the door open for Connor.
"No promises," Connor said, stepping through.
He forced a casual stride as he climbed the four stairs up to a stage at the front of the gigantic room. Every eye was turned his way, so he waved, extending his fingers with streamers of fire.
All of the classes were already standing at attention, with the four Boulder classes at the front, followed by the Striders, then the tertiary affinity students. The long lines of Petralists was an impressive sight, but they barely filled half the hall. Massive stone walls rose over a hundred feet, supporting a vast dome that rose even higher. Tiny windows were set far up the dome, and Connor caught sight of birds flitting between the giant ribs holding up that dome. It was perhaps the biggest space he'd ever seen indoors.
Most of those assembled on the dais at the head of the hall gave him dirty looks, particularly Lord Kane. The hulking representative of High Lord Feichin was Redmund's uncle, and he looked personally insulted that Connor had dared attend.
