School of Swords and Serpents Boxset: Books 1 - 3 (Hollow Core, Eclipse Core, Chaos Core)

by Gage Lee

  “It’s best we leave from inside the cottage, anyway,” Hagar agreed. “I don’t want to leave the port stone outside where someone could stumble across it.”

  “No one’s going to stumble across anything in here,” I said. “These are my private quarters. The door’s locked.”

  “Because the Locust Court or heretics care about locks,” Hagar said, rolling her eyes.

  I didn’t have an answer for that, so I just shrugged and led her down the path, across the bridge, and into the cottage. I dropped my books on the coffee table, rolled my head on my neck, and crossed my arms over my chest.

  “What’s going on?”

  Hagar held up her index finger, fished out a thin crystal rod from her belt, and raised it over her head. A thin trickle of jinsei leaked from her core, ran up her spine, then went through her arm and into the crystal. The rod lit up with the pale green radiance, shifting slightly to blue, before it faded to white.

  “Good, we can talk without anyone hearing us,” Hagar said. “Today is your first mission.”

  Well, if I’d wanted any further confirmation from the elders that they’d accepted me, I guess this was it. There’d been a month of silence and Hagar hiding from me, and I’d been sure the elders had decided they didn’t need me.

  Guess I was wrong.

  “This is happening really fast,” I said. “I was supposed to meet Clem and those guys for dinner—”

  “Sorry to disrupt your plans, but this can’t wait. You’ll be back before morning, but I’m afraid dinner is off the books,” Hagar said. “Control can have something sent over when you get back.”

  “Back from where?” I asked.

  With a flick of her wrist, Hagar made the crystal rod disappear, and a thin piece of pale white stone appeared in her palm. She crouched down and placed the disk on top of my books, twisting it this way and that until she was satisfied with its position. Then she stood up, snapped her fingers, and pointed at the stone.

  A beam of light speared from the stone into the air over the coffee table. It unfolded in beams of light until a three-dimensional wireframe model of an office building hovered in front of me.

  “This is a storage facility,” Hagar explained. “We have reason to believe it is being used by a cell of anti-Flame heretics.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “And you want me to do what?”

  “Break in, use an eye-snapper to take some pictures, and then get out,” Hagar said as if all of that was the simplest thing in the world.

  “By myself?” I asked. “I don’t have any experience breaking and entering. And whatever an eye-snapper is, it sounds painful. Maybe you should find someone with more, I don’t know, thievery skills to do this.”

  “Jace,” Hagar said with a faint smile on her lips. She reached out, took my hands, and squeezed them. “You’ll be fine. And let’s not pretend that you don’t have experience taking things that don’t belong to you.”

  That jab stung a little harder than I would’ve liked after what I’d gone through last year. She was right, though. I’d stolen things, sneaked all over the campus, and even fought a messenger from the Locust Court. I probably could get into a storage facility without too much trouble.

  “Anything in particular I’m looking for?” I asked.

  “I’m your handler on this one,” she said. “I’ll be right there with you in the eye-snapper. Just look for papers, computers, anything with information. When you find it, look at as much as you can without making a mess.”

  “All right.” I squared my shoulders and stiffened my spine. I’d volunteered to be a hero. It was time to get to work. “Let’s get on with it.”

  “Perfect,” Hagar purred. She pulled two more small items from her belt, and I wondered how she’d managed to hide so many things inside the thin strip of cloth around her waist.

  The first item she retrieved was a small black half sphere. She handed it to me, and I found it smooth and cool to the touch, though the flat side was a bit sticky.

  “That’s the eye-snapper,” she said. “Press it to your right temple, just below your hairline. I need to calibrate this before you can leave.”

  A faint rush of disorientation staggered me when I adhered the device to the side of my head. My vision blurred, doubled, then righted itself. The first faint throbbing pain of a headache sprouted behind my left eye. The pain was tolerable, though if it got any worse I’d be in trouble.

  “One moment,” Hagar said.

  She closed her eyes, and when she opened them they were covered with a faint oily sheen. She held very still, as if she didn’t trust herself not to fall over if she moved.

  “Turn your head to the left,” she instructed. “Now to the right. Now face away from me. Hold out one or more fingers in your line of sight. Oh, that finger?”

  “You saw that?” I asked.

  “The eye-snapper sees all,” she said in an ominous tone. “Or at least everything that you see. And while it’s operational, I see everything through your eyes. Now, time is running short, we need to get moving.”

  By the time I turned around, Hagar had banished the shine from her eyes and held what looked like a fancy laser pointer in her right hand. The slender silver tube was covered in tiny dials, screws, and buttons. Its tip glowed ruby red, growing brighter and dimmer in regular pulses.

  “This is a key wand,” she explained. “Very rare, very expensive. No touchy. Like the eye-snapper, this is Shadow Phoenix jintech. None of the other clans know about this, and we’d like to keep it that way. Our little toys give us the edge we need to keep an eye on the heretics. Consider all these gadgets to be part of your geas. Don’t breathe a word about them. We don’t want the traitors to the Grand Design to know our capabilities.”

  “You keep saying that,” I said. “What does it mean?”

  “There’s no time for a full explanation. The short version is that the Empyrean Flame has a great design,” she said. “It gives each of us a purpose and protects us from the dangers that lie outside our society.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about all that. The idea of some mysterious entity laying out a long-term plan for my life without my input didn’t really appeal to me. Mostly because it hadn’t really worked out very well for me, so far.

  Then again, being eaten by the Locust Court’s hungry spirits wasn’t very enticing, either.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s next?”

  Hagar fiddled with her key wand for a moment. She pressed a button, and a beam of scarlet light lanced out from the wand’s tip onto the wall between the sitting room and the kitchen. She sketched a narrow archway on the wall in crimson light.

  My heart caught in my throat when she completed her drawing.

  There was a hole in the wall.

  As strange as that was, what lay beyond the hole was even stranger. The sounds of city traffic reached my ears, and the faint soothing scent of a recent rainfall teased my nostrils. The side of a building, its damp concrete surface glistening with the green glow of a reflected stoplight, blocked my view of anything else through the arch. A rat, as big as my foot, peered back at me, then scurried off into the darkness.

  “That building’s your target,” Hagar said. “I have to close the portal behind you for security, but I’ll be watching the whole way. As soon as you find what we need, I’ll open another portal to bring you back.”

  “How am I supposed to get into the building?” I asked.

  “The storage facility is technologically inert. The heretics use a lot of jinsei tricks that don’t work well with modern gear,” Hagar said. “There’s no standard alarm system, no closed circuit television, nothing like that. Find a fire escape, break out a window, and slip right in.”

  “There are no defenses on this building at all?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” Hagar said. “But this is why we brought you in, Jace. The spirit guardians who watch over this place use supernatural senses to find intruders. You shouldn’t have any trou
ble slipping by them with that veil around your core.”

  “If I get killed,” I said to Hagar, “I’ll haunt you forever.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Get moving. You only have a window of twenty minutes or so before the human security guard makes the rounds. You need to be gone before then. Your target’s on the eleventh floor, unit one one one five. This will be a piece of cake for you, Jace.”

  “Wish me luck.” I hoped Hagar was right.

  I stepped through the portal and across a few thousand miles. An illuminated billboard written in Spanish glowed from the sky on the left end of the alley I’d landed in. Puddles in the street reflected the advertisement’s brilliant light. The opposite street was darker, lit only by the sullen red glow of traffic lights I couldn’t see from my position.

  Wherever I’d landed, it was darker than it had been back at the School. That told me I’d traveled east, but that wasn’t much use to me. I stood still for a few seconds, fully expecting someone to show up and ask me what I was doing in the alley.

  The portal vanished with a faint pop.

  It was time to move.

  There was, indeed, a rickety fire escape near the end of the alley. Its rusted bars glowed purple and pink in the neon lights from businesses across the street, and I hoped no one would see me as I scrambled up its lowered ladder. My hands picked up dirt and grime from the rungs, and I wished I’d thought to bring some gloves. I’d have to be very careful not to leave fingerprints behind once I was inside. My core was veiled, but the rest of me wasn’t.

  The fire escape rattled and banged against the side of the building as I hurried around and around the flights of metal stairs leading from floor to floor. I hunched my shoulders and tried to quiet my steps, to no avail. I expected someone to stick their head out through one of the windows I’d passed and yell at me to knock it off or get lost, but it never happened. Maybe Hagar had planned this thing right after all.

  I peered through the window on the eleventh floor. The dirty glass and reflection of neon lights from surrounding businesses made it hard to see much. I could just make out an empty hallway on the other side of the glass. It was now or never.

  The window was locked, which was just my luck. I looked down at the sidewalk and didn’t see any passersby. Hopefully it was late enough no one would hear what came next.

  I grabbed my right fist in my left hand, turned my back to the window, and slammed my right elbow through the glass.

  It shattered, and chunks of square safety glass bounced away in every direction. The glittering greenish cubes cascaded down the fire escape like balls in a pachinko machine. Their echoes rattled through the alleyway for what felt like half an hour. I froze, sure that someone had to have heard that and would come investigate. I took a deep breath, then another. No one came.

  The window had broken cleanly from its frame, and I stepped over the wooden sill into the hallway. The carpet in the narrow passage was old and rubbed through to bare concrete in places. The dropped ceiling was splotched with brown water stains, and the paint on the walls had peeled like old scabs to reveal patches of rotting drywall. The stink of mildew filled my nostrils, and I fought it by taking slow, shallow breaths through my mouth.

  It only took me a few minutes to find the right unit. The heavy door that barred my way was held in place by a thick padlock. The numbers on its dial had been almost worn away by years of twisting and turning. Despite its obvious age, the lock’s U-shaped hasp still looked sturdy and unmarked by rust or wear.

  I gave it an experimental jerk. The lock scarcely rattled, much less opened.

  “Okay,” I said, “I guess we do this the hard way.”

  Like every building in every city, the storage facility was teeming with rats in its hidden spaces. It took no effort at all for me to forge connections to dozens of the hardy little creatures. I cycled my breathing and pulled their beast aspects into my aura, where I could put them to use.

  Individually, the rats weren’t terribly strong. Combined, though, and properly focused, the strength I had taken from them was more than enough to do the job at hand. My serpents flowed out of my core and hovered above my shoulders like hooded cobras. My thoughts refined their shapes, narrowing their tips until they were flattened wedges less than half an inch across.

  I pushed the heads of my serpents into the half-circle opening formed by the hasp. I closed my eyes, concentrated, and used them like a pair of crowbars. It wasn’t subtle, and I hope Hagar wouldn’t be angry with me for leaving a trace of my presence. On the other hand, she hadn’t given me the lock’s combination, and I didn’t have time to figure it out by trial and error. The heretics would just have to know someone had rifled through their stuff.

  The metal groaned, and the serpents pushed against one another and the metal in a frenzy of activity. Beads of sweat dotted my forehead, and the effort left my aura feeling bruised and battered. Finally, when I felt as if I couldn’t push any harder, the latch on the door gave way with a terrific squeal and the broken lock fell to the floor.

  “Okay, then.” I slipped inside the door and pulled it closed behind me. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  The darkness inside the cube made it impossible to see anything. A sliver of light leaked in under the door from the hallway. When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, I stumbled toward what looked like a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling in the center of the unit.

  And promptly barked my shins on something. I yelped in pained surprise, then clapped my hands over my mouth. I took a long, slow breath, then let it out, and the pain eased away. I reached up to the lightbulb and groped at its smooth surface. My fingers found the switch on its socket and turned it sharply to the right, careful to use my knuckles rather than my fingertips to avoid leaving prints.

  The bulb turned on with a loud click and filled the cube with a warm glow. It was ten feet on a side, though most of that space was unused. The room’s only furnishings were the desk that had attacked my poor shins. It crouched in the center of the bare concrete floor, the lightbulb directly above it. The walls were naked cinder blocks streaked with glistening rivulets of rust-colored water that leaked through the dropped ceiling’s spongy tiles.

  “What’s in the desk?” Hagar’s voice crackled in my thoughts.

  I jumped at the unexpected question and got to work.

  To keep my fingerprints off anything in the room, I pulled the sleeves of my robe down to cover my hands. Being a little clumsier was a fine tradeoff for not making it obvious who’d been in here.

  The desk’s shallow sliding drawer held a pair of fountain pens that had leaked black ink from their exposed nibs onto a sheet of pink blotter paper. There was nothing else in the drawer, and its back seemed solid when I rapped against it looking for secret compartments.

  The file drawer to the right of the seat, though, was filled with hanging folders. I had no idea which of those held important information, so I took a seat in the chair and pulled half of them onto the desk in front of me. I made a neat stack at my left hand, took the top folder off it, and dropped it on the desk. It held a short stack of plain white paper covered in dense rows of handwritten block letters.

  “Look at a page, then blink to take a picture,” Hagar advised me. “I’ll store the pictures on my end.”

  A golden frame appeared around the page the instant my eyes focused on the text. When I blinked my eyes, the light stayed superimposed on the darkness behind them and flickered to green before returning to gold. I had no idea how Hagar could store the pages I sent to her, or what she’d do with the information. That was above my pay grade. I flipped through page after handwritten page, blinking at each one, taking time to skim only a few of them out of sheer curiosity.

  What I saw was confusing. I’d expected to see some mention of the Locust Court. After all, those were the biggest enemies of the Empyrean Flame and its Grand Design. If they were notes from a heretic cell, I’d assume t
hey would have reams of spirit propaganda. Instead, most of what I saw seemed to have something to do with a technical theory of something called the Machina. There were hand-drawn diagrams, too, of some sort of complex mechanism. None of it made any sense to me, and I wasn’t sure it would even if I took more time to read it.

  I’d gone through three-quarters of the stack from the file folder when I saw something that stopped me. A list of names in two columns. My eyes landed on three names in the left column: Grayson Bishop, Tycho Reyes, and Eve Warin. They were near the top of the page, surrounded by names I didn’t recognize. My interest piqued, I scanned the right column for any other familiar names.

  Hagar Inaloti.

  Elder Sanrin.

  Melody Hark.

  Jace Warin.

  My name was the last on the right-hand list, in black ink where the rest of the list was in blue. I’d been added to this page last. The implications of that whirled through my thoughts. The bad guys knew my name, and it was on the same side as Hagar and Sanrin. That could mean the right column was their enemies list. But Adjudicator Hark’s name was on that side of the list, too, and I wasn’t sure she was working with the Shadow Phoenix.

  And if the right side was the enemy list, then the left side would be friends. But that list had both Tycho’s and Grayson’s name, and they absolutely hated each other. It also had my mom’s name, and—

  A faint warbling sound from the hallway raised goose bumps on my arms and sent chills racing up my spine.

  “Guardian.” Hagar’s thoughts were a faint whisper in my head. “Get out of there.”

  I restacked the folders and replaced them in the file drawer, then stood carefully from my chair so as not to make any noise. The guardian might just be on the prowl. If it didn’t know I was in the storage unit, maybe it would move on by.

  The strange sound was closer, now. It had to be right outside the door.

  I reached up and covered the lightbulb with my hand to shield the light. Turning it off would have been better, if the switch hadn’t made so much noise when I turned it on.

  I held my breath, unsure what to do next.