“Watch for Sliding,” he said.
“You?” Jessa asked.
He glanced over at her. Of them all, she might be the most able to See what was taking place.
“Not me.”
Shimmering came from behind Jessa.
That was what he’d been looking for. That same shimmering he saw when someone was Sliding. That had to be it.
He turned his attention off to the side, not wanting to reveal that he might have detected what was taking place, and watched the shimmering as it moved around the inside of the chamber. In the faint light, it was easier to track, and he was thankful they were here rather than out in the tunnel. In the darkness of the tunnel, Daniel wasn’t sure he would have picked up on anything.
As it was, if he turned his head the wrong way, the shimmering would disappear. He was cautious, hating that were he to look the wrong way, he would lose the attacker.
Shifting his sword, he prepared to Slide, and as he did, he realized his mistake.
There was another in the room.
Which one should he go after first?
The other one was on the far side of the room and didn’t seem to be moving, just flickering, shimmering in and out. Daniel suspected that the person was simply Sliding and then emerging in the same place over and over again. The level of control—and the strength—involved in doing that was incredible.
That was the kind of fighting he needed to learn. It was a kind of fighting the people of Elaeavn should have mastered before now. Any more attackers would be more than he could track. As it was, following the two of them was almost too much.
He had to do something quickly.
He thought about it in terms of a game, trying to imagine this as some sort of Tsatsun board. It was a little cruel doing that, viewing these people and their lives as nothing more than a game, but that was the way Carth had been instructing him, training him, preparing him for moments just like this.
What did he know?
One Ai’thol was down, a sacrificial piece. Two more remained, but could that be the only move?
He thought about the way the game would play out, silently chiding himself for referring to it as a game in his mind. The first move involved attacking one of the Ai’thol, but if he attacked the one nearest the others, the other would Slide, reaching them and possibly intervening before he had a chance to do anything.
He thought about what he would do if he went after that one. The other would be able to attack, already close enough to those he’d come with.
Either move ended up with something happening that he wanted to avoid, and so he had to figure out an alternative.
First, he had come up with which piece represented the Stone—what was the objective?
The objective was to stop them and figure out what they were doing down here.
One of the things Carth had always remarked upon was that there were often many ways to win. Sometimes the way you won wasn’t the most obvious.
In this case, winning might not be destroying the enemy.
There was an alternative for him. He could Slide away, taking his friends with him, and return, but if they did, so could the Ai’thol, and they would bring reinforcements.
If they were somehow siphoning power off the Elder Trees, he didn’t want to abandon this place now that he’d found it. Doing so would be allowing the Ai’thol to realize what he knew.
One of Carth’s lessons filtered into the back of his mind.
“What do you think you can do?” she had asked him.
The game board set between them, and he had managed to remove a considerable number of her pieces, enough that he had allowed himself to believe he might finally win.
Still, there was a moment of doubt in the back of his mind, a reminder that he was playing Carth, and no one had beaten her.
“I have you outnumbered. Outmatched.”
She had smiled at him. “There is a big difference between outnumbered and outmatched.”
All it had taken was a series of moves, and in that short series of plays, few enough that he could scarcely believe how easy it had been for her, she had reversed the game.
“How do you turn it?”
“You have to find a way to turn their strength into a weakness,” she said.
“But you didn’t turn my strength into weakness.”
“Didn’t I? You believed you had the numbers, and you moved accordingly, rather than playing the same game you had been.”
It was then he realized how thoroughly she had gamed him. She had known all along what he was doing, and she had allowed him to take the position that he had, making him think he would be successful.
All along, there had been no chance at success.
“How do you find it?”
“You have to find it for yourself. Every game is a little bit different, much like every player is a little bit different. Prepare, but focus on the game that you’re playing, and always remember the move you’re making will likely be anticipated by your opponent. Find the move they don’t think you’ll make.”
What could he do that would counter the type of moves the Ai’thol were making?
There was one tactic he could try. It was similar to what he had done when he had managed to cut down the first of the Ai’thol. If he could somehow pause in the middle of his Slide, then maybe…
Daniel Slid.
He paused in the middle of it.
It was a strange sensation, and nothing like any sort of Slide he had ever attempted before, but as he did, he found that he was able to hesitate. He saw the first of the Ai’thol, flickering in and out.
When the man flickered into existence, Daniel brought his sword around.
The sword connected, the man not expecting it, and he carved through him.
Staying in this place, that space between the Slides, he headed toward the next and stabbed his sword through him in the middle of his flickering movement.
Daniel emerged. Everything was dark.
He focused on the sounds around him. Darkness began to clear, and he saw Rayen and realized she had been using her shadows to wrap around the others, concealing them.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I got to them,” he said.
“How?”
The man nearest them had fallen, two swords in hand, and he was near Jessa. Then there was the other, lying off along one wall, blood pooling around him. Neither man moved. “I paused in the middle of the Slide.”
Rayen frowned at him. “You paused? Is that possible?”
“Well I just did it, so it must be.”
“Rsiran could do that. He said it takes incredible control, strength.”
Daniel frowned. He had never felt that he was particularly strong, but there was no denying what he had managed to do. He had cut through the Ai’thol in the middle of the Slide—and he still didn’t feel tired.
Something had changed for him. There was no use denying it anymore.
The only thing that he could think of was visiting Ih. Maybe he had been touched by another Elder Stone. Strange, considering he hadn’t even been able to handle one of the Elder Stones from his homeland.
“We need to figure out what they were doing,” he said.
“They were guards,” Rayen said.
“Only three of them?”
“Only three that we know of, but what happens if the rest went away? Besides, three would be enough if they were invisible.”
Daniel made his way deeper into the cavern. The faint light had returned, having faded when Rayen had wrapped her shadows, but now that she had released them, that light came back, swirling around them with a certain hint of power.
“It doesn’t look as if they were guarding anything,” Neran said, making his way around the inside of the cavern. It was a confined space, and though the walls might have a faint glow to them, there was nothing else to it that seemed all that impressive.
Daniel couldn’t help but feel as if Neran were right
. They couldn’t have been guarding anything.
“Is this what you had detected?” Daniel asked.
Rayen stood in the middle of it, and shadows flowed outward from her, going up toward the ceiling, sweeping high overhead and then beyond. They froze there for a moment before descending once again. She turned to him and nodded. “This is the place, but I would have expected something to be here as well.”
“Like you said, they might have already escaped with it,” Jessa said, looking around her.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Daniel said.
“A distraction?” Jessa said.
That didn’t fit with what he knew of the Ai’thol. Everything they did had a purpose, each action setting up another action, each move triggering another move. He couldn’t help but think there was something that he didn’t quite grasp.
And he needed to.
Daniel Slid and then emerged, doing it over and again, replicating what the Ai’thol had done. As he did, he flickered, moving in and out of place, in and out of place, so quickly he could barely track it.
He paused. “Was it the same?”
“It was similar,” Rayen said. “You disappeared, but they were faster.”
“Let me try again.”
He started flickering again, phasing in and out, trying to figure out if there was any way for him to replicate what the Ai’thol had done, and as he did, he started to feel the shimmering around him coalesce, flowing toward him. He realized that not only was this similar to what the Ai’thol did, but they were forcing themselves in between the spaces of the Slide.
He paused in the middle of the Slide.
It was a strange sensation, the same strangeness he had detected when he had managed to do it before, and holding on to the pause in between Slides, he hesitated as he looked around, searching for signs of anything that might help him understand.
In his mind, he focused on what the Ai’thol had done. They had created a siphon, drawing power from the Elder Trees.
It had to be here.
What better place to hide it than in a space only a very few would be able to find?
But then, Rsiran would have been able to find it.
Only if he would have known where to look. The strange thing about Sliding was that when he paused in the middle of it, there was nothing else around, as if he were in some other world.
He moved around, spiraling out from the center of the room, before deciding that didn’t seem like it was going to work. Emerging briefly, he grabbed Rayen and paused. In the middle of the Slide, she gasped.
“What is this place?”
“It’s the place between. I can’t See anything, but maybe with your shadows you can discover what they were hiding.”
She pushed out with the shadows, and they swirled away from her, though not with nearly as much force as she normally managed. Rayen clenched her jaw, continuing to force them outward, and they slowly streamed. At one point they folded, slipping over something.
“That’s it,” he whispered and reached for what appeared to be emptiness, but his hand slammed into something hard and cold. He wrapped his arms around it, grabbing for Rayen, and Slid.
The sense was the same as when he had attempted to Slide with the strange metal they had used on the island. It felt as if he were trying to Slide a mountain, something impossible, and he continued to pull on it, tearing every bit of energy that he could muster, forcing it to comply, and brought himself—and whatever he held—out.
Staggering forward, the Slide fading, he looked at what he had brought.
It was metal. Slick and cold, the surface of it irregular, and it swirled with dozens of different colors.
Neran gasped. “What is that?”
“That, I think, is what they were using against us.”
“Where was it?”
“It was between,” Daniel said. For the first time after all of the Sliding that he’d been doing, fatigue washed over him. He sank down, looking at the ground, and stared at the strange item. It appeared to be a massive chalice, and he could imagine it filled with some powerful wine, but instead of wine, it seemed to contain power from the Elder Trees.
“We have to replace it,” Daniel said.
“Replace it?” Jessa asked. “If they were using it to take our abilities—”
Daniel got to his feet, shaking his head. “What we need to do until we figure out another way is put something that can send power back, hopefully returning it to the surface.” He turned to Neran. “Do you think you can make something like that?”
Neran circled the chalice, and it came up to a little higher than his waist, large enough that while he could wrap his arms around the mouth of it, it would require him stretching. He held his hand just above the surface as he circled it. “It’s possible. I think that if Rsiran were here, he might be better equipped to do it, but…” He glanced over to Jessa. “I will have others within the guild work with me. It might take a few days, but we should be able to come up with something.”
Daniel breathed out. They would have to deal with it for a few days, which meant they would have to defend this space for that time, though perhaps that wasn’t so much of an issue. If the Ai’thol didn’t know they had been here and what they had done, it was possible they would be able to get away with leaving the other chalice out.
“We can bring this one to the surface for now,” Daniel said. “You can study it, see if there’s anything you can use from it.”
“We will need you to help us replace it,” Neran said.
Which meant that he would be staying. He had intended to come to Elaeavn for a little while, long enough to find help with metals, and instead he had been the one who had helped.
He glanced at Rayen. “Will you stay with me?”
“I haven’t spent time in Elaeavn. I suspect there are quite a few taverns I could visit here.”
“I don’t know how exciting our taverns will be.”
“You might be surprised.”
Daniel turned to Jessa. He realized the sadness on her face, and he thought that he recognized it. It was sadness that came from a sense of loss. He hated that they still had no idea what happened to Rsiran, but more than that, Haern still had not returned.
“Jessa?”
“He should have discovered this,” she whispered.
“Who?”
She tore her gaze away from the chalice, looking at Daniel. “Rsiran. He’s faced them enough that he should have been able to find this. If he would’ve found it, he never would have ended up—”
Daniel grabbed her hands, forcing her gaze up to his, and shook his head. “We can’t think like that. We don’t know what would’ve happened. He did what he thought was necessary.”
“And what if it wasn’t?” She turned to the chalice again, holding her hand over the surface of it. “All these years we have been dealing with the Forgers, and all these years he tells me that he’s been learning how they fight and how he can counter them, and all these years he’s not managed to stop them. He’s missed out on so much. We’ve missed out on so much.”
Neran stepped up to him, glancing over at Daniel. “Let me have a few words with her. I have a little experience with this.”
Daniel gave them some space, joining Rayen. “It is impressive, isn’t it?”
“No one has ever claimed the Ai’thol weren’t clever.”
“I don’t know if I would’ve been able to stop them were it not for Carth.”
“Carth?”
“Tsatsun. I thought about how she played Tsatsun, and the lessons she taught me. Had I not, I don’t know that I would have figured out a different way.”
“I’m sure you would have come up with something.”
Daniel glanced at the fallen bodies, and a troubling idea came to mind. What if this was all part of the game?
He turned his attention to the chalice. They would have to be careful. If this was one more move, an expected one at that, then he would have to be prepared f
or the next move, and then the next.
“I think your Elder Stone changed me,” he said.
“It took you long enough to come to that conclusion.”
“What?”
“You’ve been different ever since we were there. You shouldn’t be able to see the shadows. If nothing else, it is helpful. I don’t know what else it will do to you, but your ability to glimpse the shadows seems to have connected you to greater power.”
“You’re saying I’m augmented?”
“If you need to consider it the same.”
“And I’m going to gain powers like yours?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Daniel Elvraeth.”
“I just figured there would be some lessons you could teach me.”
Rayen started to grin. “Oh, Daniel Elvraeth, there are lessons I could teach you. A great many lessons. I wonder if you now have the stamina necessary to learn?”
He met her gaze and chuckled. “I would like to get out of here.”
“Are you ready for your first lesson?”
“Soon, but first I want to get out of these caves.”
“I don’t know. I kind of like the dark. And I think you will find you do as well.”
41
Ryn
Ryn was tired. The days spent traveling, visiting all of these strange locations, had grown wearisome. Olandar Fahr had continued to explore, taking her from place to place, and with the rapidity of their travels, she had a hard time remaining focused on everything she had encountered and no longer thought that it mattered. He had wanted her to know that they were visiting the same sort of place each time.
In each place, she noticed a strange odor in the air. At first, she believed it was that of an old fire, but the longer she had been around it, the less certain she was that was the case. Now she began to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t fire at all but something else.
In every place that they had visited, there was destruction. Olandar Fahr had made a point of showing it to her, and yet, he had never said anything, to the point where when they stopped in these places there was nothing for him to say.
The Elder Stones Saga Boxset: Books 1-3 Page 151
