“Rias?” she whispered.
He had disappeared in the fog. She walked in the direction she had last seen him, but tripped over one of the marines. Her reaction was too slow and, almost as if she floated in water, she toppled face-first to land on the man. He grunted but did not wake.
Confused at the heaviness of her limbs, she pushed herself up. It felt as if a hundred pound rucksack burdened her. The cloth covering her face might delay the fog’s effects, but she would be snoring alongside the marines soon if she did not get away from it.
“Rias?” she called a little louder.
“Tikaya?”
She nearly tripped again. That wasn’t Rias. That wasn’t any Turgonian. It sounded like...
She put a hand to her chest. It couldn’t be.
“Tikaya?” the voice came again. “Are you here?”
She closed her eyes. The voice, so familiar, was speaking in her language.
“Over here,” she said. She did not say his name. She still did not believe it could be him. How could it be? He was dead, his ship sunk over a year before.
She held her breath as the fog stirred. A shape coalesced.
“Parkonis,” she croaked, lifting a hand.
He was a slight figure in comparison with the Turgonians, and he looked even thinner than she remembered. His curly red-blond hair, always a mess, had grown and stuck out in every direction, much like the beard hiding his chin and neck. Anxious blue eyes looked her up and down. He was the one who had watched from the opposite side as the marines entered. Oh, Akahe, if she had been close enough to identify him earlier, would she have...
She glanced behind her shoulder. Where had Rias gone?
Parkonis started toward her, arms wide, a white toothy grin escaping the beard. But his toe bumped against the fallen green-clad man.
His smile faltered. “Tatkar, no.” His gaze darted a dozen directions. “One of them escaped the gas. We have to—”
A dark shape slipped out of the fog behind him.
“No!” Tikaya shouted before she even saw the bloody dagger.
She lunged forward, knowing she could never stop the assassin in time. He, too, wore a cloth across his face, but it did not hide the intent in his cold, dark eyes.
Rias stepped out of the fog behind Sicarius and dropped a hand on the assassin’s shoulder. The dagger froze.
Parkonis whirled, took in the tableau, and stumbled back. Eyes still fixed on the assassin, Tikaya stepped forward and gripped Parkonis’s hand.
“I have no idea how he’s here,” she said, talking to Sicarius who seemed to be deciding whether to finish what he had started or not, “but this man is a gifted archaeologist, and if anyone can help you get your weapons, he can.”
Parkonis’s Turgonian was as good as hers, and she had no trouble reading the incredulous look he gave her—helping the empire was the last thing he wanted to do. She squeezed his hand, hoping he would recognize the don’t-say-anything signal. Rias’s gaze fell to the hand hold, and guilt washed over her at his pained wince. He closed his eyes for a long moment.
Tikaya lifted her free hand and spoke as much for him as for the assassin. “Let’s figure out what’s going on before we do anything else.”
Rias pulled a mask over his face, but instead of responding he released Sicarius and disappeared into the fog.
“Brace yourself,” Parkonis whispered in Kyattese.
Tikaya opened her mouth to warn him the assassin understood their language, but the hairs on the back of her neck leaped to attention. A heartbeat later, blinding whiteness engulfed the cavern, and a thousand cannons roared in her ear. Her feet floated from the floor, and someone—Parkonis?—wrapped his arms around her. She had the impression of weightlessness, of her body moving toward the chasm.
“What’s going on?” she yelled, but she could not hear herself over the clamor in her ears.
With her senses overloaded, it took a moment to realize what was happening: Parkonis was rescuing her. And she did not want to be rescued, not if it left Rias to wonder if she had scurried off with her old lover.
She thrashed. She had to escape before they reached the chasm. Her elbow caught Parkonis in the gut, and she felt rather than heard his pained exhalation. Regret mingled with desperation—she did not want to hurt him.
Parkonis shouted in her ear, but she could not hear words above the roar. She squirmed again, determined to free herself. He let go with one arm, and she thought she had her chance, but something cold and coin-sized pressed against her temple. The world blinked out, and she knew nothing more.
19
Tikaya woke slowly, mind groggy. She lay on her back, her head in someone’s lap. Rias? No, concerned blue eyes peered down at her. Parkonis.
She struggled to sit up. A woman and a man in marine blacks stood above her. Colonel Lancecrest had not bothered removing the name tag from his wrinkled jacket, though she would have guessed his identity without it. Greasy salt-and-pepper hair stuck up in spicules, bags haunted his dark eyes, and furrows creased his weathered face. He looked like a man with nothing left to lose.
The woman had straight blonde hair and pale skin, so she might be Kyattese. Crow’s feet lined her cold green eyes, and her thin lips flattened further under Tikaya’s scrutiny.
“Where are Tatkar and my men?” Lancecrest asked.
“Dead or captured,” Parkonis said. “Sorry, we—”
“Idiots.” The colonel clenched a fist and stalked away, back rigid.
“Hate that man,” Parkonis muttered.
Tikaya rubbed her face and tried to clear the wooziness from her brain. Another cavern stretched around them, this one with cracks and buckles marring a floor decorated with bat guano. Its pungent smell tainted the air. Stalactites hung from a ceiling far overhead. No sign of a camp or recent habitation marked the cavern, but her spine tingled with the telltale sense of nearby practitioner work.
A fifty-foot-high butte rose in the center, a natural formation with a steep, jagged face. A single chamber with transparent walls took up the space on top. Lit from within, the bright interior revealed dozens, maybe hundreds, of bristling rockets. Similar to the one in the fort, they stood upright, their outsides loaded with dense strings of colored cubes. Larger black cylinders stood in the middle, and Tikaya had no idea what they might do, but she doubted anything up there existed for a purpose other than devastation.
There was no obvious way to get to the chamber. Two broken pillars and the remains of a ramp had crumbled and collapsed. A cool draft whispered against her cheek. If bats were living in the cave, there must be access to the outside nearby. Several tunnels led from the cavern.
“Thank you for your help, Gali,” Parkonis said, addressing the woman. “I thought that sleeping gas would be enough, but you were right: one of their guards was too alert.”
“Tatkar was my colleague for years.” Gali turned icy green eyes on Tikaya. “You better be worth it.”
How nice. Tikaya had found people as amiable as Bocrest to be her new captors.
“She is.” Parkonis rested a hand on her shoulder.
A thousand questions for him burbled in her mind, chief among them how he was alive and what he was doing with relic raiders, but she would wait until she could get him alone to ask. As long as he was here to vouch for her, she might have the freedom she needed to investigate those weapons and plot their demise. Maybe she could even destroy them before the marines showed up.
Colonel Lancecrest returned, his face composed, though frustration still tensed his body. “You Starcrest’s ally or his prisoner?”
“She’d never ally with that monster,” Parkonis said.
Tikaya climbed to her feet, pushing back dizziness. She touched her temple. Whatever Parkonis had used to render her unconscious was gone.
“Captain Bocrest is in charge.” She decided to give them information that didn’t matter. Maybe she could gain their trust if she seemed to hold nothing back. “He kidnapped me from my paren
ts’ plantation and threatened to kill my family if I didn’t translate these runes for him. I have no loyalty to him.”
“And can you?” Lancecrest asked. “Translate this gibberish?”
Parkonis turned curious eyes toward her.
“Some,” she said. “I’m learning more every day.”
Lancecrest jerked his chin at Gali. “Test her, witch. See if she’s telling the truth.”
Gali scowled but stepped forward. She cracked her knuckles and flexed her fingers. Lancecrest closed in on Tikaya.
“Test?” she asked.
She had never failed an academic test in her life, but somehow she doubted these people wanted to assess her ability to categorize vowels. Lancecrest stepped behind her, reinforcing her supposition by taking her arms in a viselike grip. An inkling of what they meant to do stirred in Tikaya’s gut, and she tried to pull away from him. He held her firmly.
“Telepath?” Tikaya asked Gali.
“Yes.”
“Just in case the oath you took matters to you, I do not grant you permission to poke around in my thoughts.” Numerous people on the Kyatt Islands had a knack for telepathy, but it had never concerned Tikaya since back home there were strict laws against intruding without permission.
“We’re not on Kyatt,” Gali said. “No one here to enforce oaths.”
“That’s when they matter the most, then, isn’t it?”
The woman stepped forward without answering and raised her fingers. Tikaya tensed. Cursed sea, she did not want someone rooting around in her mind, reading her memories, maybe replacing them with more acceptable ones.
“I’m sorry, Tikaya,” Parkonis whispered behind her.
In other words, he was abandoning her. He must not have much power in the group. She could not help but think about how Rias had started out with no power amongst the marines and he had never failed to fight for her. She pushed thoughts of him from her mind. They could only get her in trouble here.
Gali’s cool fingers prodded Tikaya’s temple. Something itched inside her mind, like stitches being pulled out. Panic gripped her. These bastards had no right to her thoughts. She yanked her head back.
“Hold her still,” Gali growled and reached again.
Tikaya kicked her in the gut. The woman doubled over, clutching her stomach and gasping for air.
Lancecrest forced Tikaya to the ground, leaned a knee into her back, and shoved her face to the floor. She tried to twist free, but he wrenched her arms until she gasped with pain. Her cheek smashed against cold rock.
They were too strong. Her fate was unavoidable.
Gali’s hand came down on the back of her head, nails gouging skin. Tikaya felt the other woman’s annoyance, not just in those tense fingers but in her mind.
Images from the last month were dragged into her surface thoughts. Tikaya tried to fight it. She thought of cutting cane on the plantation, her family, school, childhood escapades, anything but—
Rias.
The foreign presence in her mind focused on him, tearing into any thought related to him. And there were a lot. Tears formed in Tikaya’s eyes at the pain the invasion brought, the disdain she felt through the woman’s link. The experience was bad, maybe worse than Ottotark’s attack back in Fort Deadend. For the first time in her life, she regretted not studying the mental sciences. A practitioner would have known how to block a telepath.
After minutes that felt like hours, the presence in her mind dissipated. The hand left Tikaya’s head.
Awareness of her surroundings returned. The weight on her back. Her labored breaths. Gali’s boots before her face. Parkonis’s silence. A hot tear ran down her cheek and splashed on the floor.
“Well?” Lancecrest asked.
“You can’t trust her. They’ve duped her into working for them.”
Tikaya focused on their words, groped for equilibrium. And she frowned. Duped? What in her thoughts had suggested that?
“They must have known she would never willingly help Turgonians, not after they decimated our islands in their war. Admiral Starcrest made her believe he was a prisoner, too, and gained her trust.” Gali snorted. “He tricked her into thinking he loves her, and—this is lush—that the two of them are going to destroy the weapons together. Dear Akahe, Tikaya, I’m embarrassed for you. I could see it if you were eighteen, but you’re not young enough to be that naive.”
Stunned, Tikaya said nothing. The woman had been in her head, read all her thoughts, and that was the conclusion she had come up with? How could she possibly think Rias’s friendship—his love—had been a ruse after all they had gone through?
The weight on Tikaya’s back lifted, and she pushed herself to her knees. Gali stood before her, arms across her chest, pity and annoyance wrestling for room her on face.
“Love?” Parkonis asked in a soft, stung tone.
Tikaya winced. She would have told him about Rias, but not like this. Maybe the woman would have the humanity not to share everything. But she was shaking her head.
“You would lecture me on my oath when you’re sleeping with that man?” Gali looked over Tikaya’s shoulder. “Sorry, Parkonis, but your faithful fiancée has been sheet wrestling with Fleet Admiral Starcrest.”
Tikaya remembered an earlier thought where she had lamented having no females to talk to out here. She decided to rescind it.
When Parkonis said nothing, she risked a glance at him. He was staring at her, mouth hanging open, eyes bulging. Not angry, not yet. Still in shock.
“Parkonis,” she said quietly, trying to ignore Gali’s cold stare. “As far as I’ve known, you’ve been dead for more than a year. The Eagle’s Spirit went down at the end of the war. You never wrote, never sent word. I had no idea I’d ever see you again.”
He closed his mouth, turned his back, and walked away.
“Leave us, Gali,” Lancecrest said.
The woman shrugged and headed for an empty stretch of cavern. Between one step and the next, she disappeared. An illusion shrouding a camp, Tikaya guessed.
“Come.” Lancecrest offered a hand.
Tikaya eyed him, surprised he had not simply grabbed her and yanked her to her feet. She got up on her own, but she did follow him as he walked away. He led her past bat guano piles and to a portion of wall engraved with a column of symbols.
“I’ve only been here a few days,” Lancecrest said, “but I gathered from my little brother that Parkonis wasn’t as good of a translator as he’d hoped. Atner actually wanted you on his team from the beginning. Can you tell me what this says?”
Tikaya hesitated, but it was such a basic sign that she saw little reason to withhold the information. “Lights.”
“What?”
“It’s a panel to control the lighting level.”
“The lighting? You’re sure? Parkonis thought these panels might have something to do with the web.”
Tikaya slid one of the symbols up, and the lighting level in the cavern increased. Down and it decreased.
“Damn,” Lancecrest said.
“What’s the web?”
Lancecrest turned toward the invisible camp. “Keeler, show her the web!”
A gaunt, wispy-haired man appeared. He lifted his gaze toward the ceiling, and Tikaya felt the tickle of the mental sciences being used. A bat flapped down from the shadowed stalactites and soared toward the weapons room. Before it flew anywhere near the glass, a small explosion lit the air like a miniature star exploding. The bat did not have time to squeal in pain. Its charred body fell, causing three more explosions on the way down. Nothing but ashes remained to trickle to the floor.
Tikaya stared at the fine pile.
“The kill zone starts about twenty feet up,” Lancecrest said, “and extends to the walls. You see that door in the chamber up there? And the symbols by it? My brother has—had—goggles that make it easy to see them. He got in once by randomly pressing them with that wizard shit he learned on your island.”
“Telekinetics?” Tikay
a suggested.
“Yes. He lowered a rocket out, but the code changed before he could get back in, and he wasn’t able to find another combination that worked.”
“How could you let him use that weapon on the men in your fort? The men who trusted you to command them?”
Lancecrest’s jaw clenched. “I didn’t know. Atner just sent a note to get out of the fort with my best men and meet him at the canyon. I still can’t believe he—I know why he did it, but I can’t believe he made that choice.”
“Why’d he do it?”
“Keeler.” Lancecrest waved toward the practitioner who had come out to bestir the bat. “Keeler can see what’s happening elsewhere. He found out Starcrest was coming and my brother panicked, figured he had to do anything to delay you all.”
“Rias isn’t even in charge.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s there. And the other man—a captain, isn’t he?—doubtlessly had orders to requisition half the fort to help flush the archaeologists out of the tunnels and get the weapons. Atner probably figured I wouldn’t disobey those orders, even for him.”
“Would you have?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. Come.” Lancecrest led her to another panel. “What’s this one say?”
“Temperature and...” Not water, but similar to water. “Humidity,” she realized. “Controls for modifying the cavern atmosphere.”
He sighed. “I was hoping for more from these panels.”
“I doubt the instructions for disabling the security system are going to be on the wall in the same room as the security system.”
Lancecrest grunted and strode to the last panel of symbols, this one on the backside of the butte and situated fifteen meters from a tunnel entrance. Tikaya did not have to ponder long, for she had translated these exact symbols just a couple days earlier. Her stomach clenched. Rias was not here with his acidic concoction this time.
“Don’t let your people touch anything on this one,” she said.
“Security?” Lancecrest perked up. “Weapons?”
Beginnings: Five Heroic Fantasy Adventure Novels Page 41
