Tricky dick, he mentally berated himself. What is wrong with me? At least he had impending death to focus on—it helped stave off unhinged thoughts, probably influenced by sexual frustration. Then again, he should feel lucky the issue was even a problem for him. The other slaves had definitely had…relations from time to time, but usually not for long after getting to the mining camp, and definitely not the slaves that worked in the mines. The hard labor wore everyone down, made them tired and caused their bodies to not work right.
Trav had been one of the only exceptions until he’d met Beth, then she’d gotten more resources so she could be healthy-ish too. The other slaves had tried to give them what happiness they could. It had been a way for them to show their thanks for everything Trav did to help them—at least that was what Beth had always said. Just thinking about it usually made Trav tear up a little bit. People, humans, were usually basically good, and when worn down to their basest parts, the true nature of a person always shined through.
Humans were not Kin.
Trav’s stress-fueled thoughts were cut to a halt when he reached his destination. Disjointed thoughts about Kin atrocities and Narn’s heart-shaped ass could no longer replace the horror and fear that had settled in with the cave-in and had only gotten stronger over time. However, like before, Trav replaced the fear with anger, drawing on all the hatred that he’d carried around the mines.
Centered and steeled again, he stared at the fissure in the wall. This is really a long shot, he thought. Then he turned and said, “Both of you, come here. This is the spot.”
Asta meekly scurried over, not meeting his eyes. Then she stood placidly, no doubt waiting for more instructions. She’d accepted Trav as an authority figure and now obeyed immediately and without question. Being regarded and treated this way made Trav a bit uncomfortable. This close to the girl, he could see she was only a bit underfed. She must not have been in the slave camp for long—all the other places that slaves came from usually treated them better than the red ore mine, which said something.
Narnaste moved in a measured way, studying the crack in the wall and looking searchingly at Trav. She opened her mouth to say something, but shut it instead and stood with her hands on her hips.
If Trav’s plan didn’t work, they were all going to die in minutes. He could feel the stress too, and the intermittent rumbling didn’t help. Trav was thankful that Narnaste had the presence of mind to keep her mouth shut. She was Kin, and Trav hated her on principle, at least what she represented, but he appreciated that she wasn’t wasting their time.
With a bit of rage still simmering in his chest, what Trav said next probably sounded harsher than he’d intended. He looked Narnaste in the eyes and growled, “Show me your chest.”
The canine Kin woman narrowed her eyes at him and said, “Even if there was time to mate, I would not sully myself with a slave, slave.”
Trav snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself, Clifford the Little Red Dog girl. I don’t care about your tits; I need to see your chest—like I said.”
“Why?”
“I am going to do magic.”
“What kind?”
Trav scratched his head in annoyance. His appreciation for the monster woman’s sense of urgency was evaporating, so he told the truth. What did he have to lose? “I’m going to attempt rune magic. I am going to carve a rune into your body and then into mine.”
“What then?” The Kin woman’s tone was cool.
“We are going to escape through this crack.”
Narnaste lifted an eyebrow. “And you think this can save our lives.”
“I think there is a good chance it will. Now if you want to live, take your fucking shirt off.” Trav scowled at the woman. Her only reaction for five endless heartbeats was to stand very still and clench her jaw. Finally, without further expression, she shrugged out of her vest and lifted off her blouse.
Underneath her top, Narn had a linen undershirt with small straps that functioned like a bra. Trav began opening his mouth to tell her she could probably keep the bra on, but she took it off before he could say anything, and he shut his mouth with a click. It seemed wiser to hold his tongue now.
The Kin woman had amazing, shapely breasts. They were human in appearance. In fact, her entire torso was. Her surprisingly full breasts gently swayed as Trav watched. Each nipple was inverted but didn’t detract from the overall fetching appearance. Narnaste growled, and Trav said, “Be quiet. I’m sorry this hurts your pride or your modesty, but we don’t have much time, and I’m trying to figure out where to work.” He briefly glanced up to meet her eyes—she glared at him but turned her head.
Trav moved closer and said, “I need to touch you, and I need to hurt you, not bad, though. Stay still.”
“This is necessary?”
“Yes.”
“Be quick.”
Trav nodded and touched the inhuman woman on her stomach, then he activated his emberstone eye. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he hoped he’d find it quickly. It could have been his imagination that the glyphs on the walls had started to flicker—he hoped so.
As he tracked a line of Narn’s natural magical power over her stomach, she shivered and seemed to catch herself, putting her arms behind her back and turning her head even more. Trav didn’t bother keeping his makeshift rock weapon at hand. If Narnaste attacked now, they were all dead anyway. The constant, low level of anger he held helped him stay focused on the task at hand.
Normally, seeing a woman naked would not be enough to make Trav lose his cool, especially while the seconds were ticking toward certain death. On top of that, he’d been enslaved on a hell world for years and married before. But something about Narnaste was magnetic, like a song he couldn’t get out of his head.
Trav traced the lines of magical power across the Kin woman’s torso, lost in the wonder of what he could see with his emberstone eye. A spiderweb of blue lines showed him the power thrumming through the woman’s body. It was beautiful.
Asta gasped from where she crouched on the floor. Trav’s glance showed the girl was wide-eyed, staring. When Trav turned back he could figure out why—he’d been tracing the lines over Narnaste’s breasts, and even across her throat and down to the top of her shorts. The Kin woman quivered, her teeth bared, and Trav had been completely oblivious. After noticing, he mentally shrugged. She would either endure, or they would all die. There was no longer enough time to kill her and try this magic with her corpse.
Finally, Trav found what he was looking for. He pushed in on Narnaste’s skin to hold the point and said, “Here. I found it!” Then he drew the shiv from his pocket that he’d taken earlier, and gently touched it to the point he’d found under Narn’s left breast. “I am going to cut you,” he said.
“Hurry!” hissed Narn. She briefly swiveled her eyes to meet his before angrily turning away again. “I do not wish to die.”
“Alright,” muttered Trav, trying to sound confident. The anger wasn’t helping much anymore. It was one thing to stew on dark memories, but quite another to attempt new, unfamiliar magic on an angry Kin woman while facing impending death.
Trav was nervous, but he couldn’t help but be a bit excited. This would be the first actual rune he’d ever drawn. He moved in with his crude shiv, but paused, suddenly realizing that he’d almost missed something crucial. “Shit,” he hissed. “Narn, put your finger where mine is and hold it there. I need to take my hand off you.”
The canine woman did as she was told, and Trav lifted the rags that formed his shirt. Asta stared, her jaw dropping, and Trav understood why. The other slave men were skinny, emaciated, but Trav looked healthier than he ever had in his life before coming to Asgard.
He found the right place on his body much faster than he had on Narnaste—he knew what to look for now. This part was crucial to the magic. Trav was afraid to ask how long they had left before the mines blew; the Kin woman might just be guessing anyway. The fact they were running out of time was obvio
us.
Finally, he lowered the shiv and began making quick, shallow cuts. The blade was dull, and he had to drag the point through his skin more than actually cut himself, but it worked.
By the time he finished, his stomach was a bloody mess, and his handiwork stood red and sullen above the general location of his heart. He hadn’t just drawn a rune; he’d made a rune equation—a three leaf clover symbol stood above a large “T” for his name. Then the downward chevron at the bottom of the rune, part of the T extended upwards to connect with the clover symbol. A triangle closed off the whole design.
The cuts and scrapes stung, but Trav breathed a sigh of relief. If he’d forgotten to do this part first and this crazy idea had otherwise worked, he might have killed Narnaste, or himself, or both. The symbol he’d just drawn was a way of establishing his mystical identity and preparing himself to receive power...he hoped.
“Okay, now you,” he muttered. Trav moved forward and grabbed the Kin woman’s bare hip to steady her body, but he soon realized that wouldn’t work. “Put your back against the wall,” he commanded.
Narnaste drew in air so loudly it almost sounded like a rattle or a wheeze. Maybe she growled too, but a sudden rumble through the stone surrounding them drowned it out. She moved back and hissed, “Hurry.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Trav moved his hand up, pressing under the woman’s opposite breast to steady her against the stone wall, then began carving like he had on himself. He hadn’t even had time to clean the blade first.
Narnaste winced a few times while he worked but held still. Trav was lost in the process, watching everything he did through his emberstone eye. Working on another like this, he could actually see the magical power in the inhuman woman’s body reacting to the lines he drew—his magic, such as it was, flowing down his arm and shiv to fill the shallow scrapes. Finally, he was done.
“Good girl,” he said absently, patted Narnaste’s shoulder, and surveyed his handiwork. The rune equation was simpler than his own but obviously related. A three leaf clover-looking rune stood over a “T”, and a few lines around it formed almost a pyramid over the whole thing. Trav made a face, then gasped as his body grew hot. The rune equation on his chest and on the Kin woman flared crimson and burned. As he watched through his emberstone eyes, lines of force, power, or magic jumped off Narnaste and latched onto the runes over Trav’s heart. He quivered from the force of it; the sensation was like drinking ten cups of coffee all at once.
This is how Kin feel all the time? he wondered. No, as he watched, he realized that this was just a fraction of the power Narnaste held. A minor noblewoman… Trav shook his head. No wonder the lowest-level Kin could tear a human to pieces.
Narnaste turned and studied him warily, touching the healed scars of her rune branding. “It is done? Can you save us? We are truly about to die, human. Perhaps I was foolish to hope.”
“It’s done,” Trav said, and Narnaste began dressing again. A sense of wonder that the magic had worked threatened to replace his anger, but he focused on the task at hand. Bloody shiv in hand, he approached the wall with the crevice and made quick, economical lines, building a sigil surrounded by glyphs, but this time, he also drew a rune, the same rune he’d used for his own identity. The rune equation was complex, and it basically meant, “widening,” and “stairway.”
As power began flowing out of him, leaving him cold, Trav focused his will and instructed the energy on what he wanted to accomplish. He wasn’t sure how he did it, but he strangely felt like he’d done this sort of thing many times before. The red lines on the wall glowed brighter before the solid rock wall flowed like water. Trav stumbled, his head spinning as the world took on a hazy look. Asta’s scream seemed to come from far away, but Trav realized the magic must be terrifying her.
When the hole widened enough, Trav mechanically followed the two women as they fled down the magic-formed tunnel, shaking his head and trying to remember what they’d been doing.
He found a thin thread of anger he still held and pulled on it, dragging himself back into full awareness. The rune spell had taken a lot out of him, almost everything he had had. He carefully held the wall while descending the steps he’d formed from solid rock. Above, the rumbling intensified and began to mix with cracking noises.
“Hurry!” he yelled, and fled with the two women, moving deeper into the unknown dark.
Chapter 5
The rumbling and noise above turned to deep cracking, and Trav wondered if instead of dying in the mine, he just would end up crushed to death in this smaller, darker tunnel. At least he’d been able to use rune magic before his end; the thought was cold comfort but genuine.
Luckily, the escape tunnel opened up into a larger chamber. There really was a cave or something down here! Trav’s thought was interrupted as he stumbled and fell to the rocky ground below, hissing as the unyielding stone bruised him all over. From above, the bedlam became a deep crashing, almost like explosions, and the world felt like it was being shaken by a giant. Sounds like pebbles rattling around the bottom of a bathtub made Trav’s heart drop. He yelled, “Get away from the tunnel!” and followed his own advice, scurrying to the side as best he could in the complete darkness.
From the noise, Trav would have guessed that the entirety of the destroyed mine above was pouring through the little tunnel he’d created. He felt tiny as he huddled in the dark, hoping he wouldn’t be crushed or killed by stray stones. Finally, the rumbling from above stopped, but earth fell, and stones bounced for quite a while. Trav stayed still, holding down the ground in his spot and protecting himself with an imaginary, invisible barrier. The fantasy protection was useless but made him feel better.
Finally, Trav cautiously stood. He slowly checked his body for serious injuries, afraid of what he’d find, but breathed a sigh of relief—he was bruised, but whole. Now that he had somehow escaped the mine collapsing, he needed to think of his next steps.
First things first, he needed light. Narnaste had to be somewhere close in the darkness, if she was still alive, and he wasn’t sure what she would do now. As Kin, she would be physically superior to humans in every way, and if she decided to tear him apart, Trav would like to at least see her coming. His emberstone eye could help him see in low light, but wherever he was standing at that moment was pitch black.
He felt around blindly, trying to be as quiet as he could. Finally, he managed to locate a wall. There would be no helping the brilliant red lines he was about to draw. At least he could use magic in the first place, otherwise, his options would be bleak, probably ending up trapped in the unknown darkness forever.
Trav fingered his shiv in the dark, thinking of the irony of the murder tool being so useful for magic. He drew a couple burning red lines on the wall. As he worked, a little puddle of light sprang up around him, and a muttered, “What are you doing, human?” almost made him jump out of his skin.
Narnaste stood directly behind him, holding aloft something glowing. Upon further inspection, he realized she had keys in her hand, and the glowing thing was...a key fob with a glyph on it. Trav wheezed a little chuckle at that. She almost looked like a human girl using a flashlight keychain or a cellphone as a flashlight.
“What are you doing?” the Kin woman repeated.
Trav briefly considered being evasive, but he’d realized by now that Narnaste could probably sense lies. He replied honestly, “I am drawing glyphs for light.”
The inhuman woman slightly narrowed her eyes at him, and her damaged ear twitched, but she nodded and turned. She held her little light higher, examining the stretch of wall nearby. Trav breathed a sigh of relief and got back to work.
Now that he was less worried about getting attacked in the dark by an angry Kin woman, Trav decided to take a little more time getting fancy with his runework. Instead of a single light equation, he would try making a tool. He’d gotten the idea ages ago from the glyph stampers used in the mines. Of course, he hadn’t known before that it was even possible th
e slaves could have also been planting explosives. He was curious about experimenting with this new information, but it would have to wait. Now was the time to use the hard-won knowledge he’d scraped together over the last couple years while alone in the mines.
The light-casting glyphs in the collapsed mine above had used the nearby emberstone as their energy source. The glyphs had not been directly linked, but the red ore was so mystically potent that it leaked power like radiation. In fact, Trav had always figured this was what made humans sick around it.
Trav wasn’t sure how far below the old mines they were now, but the little tunnel he’d made had descended quite a ways. In any event, there was no emberstone on the walls of the cave they were in now. Luckily, even with no emberstone nearby, Trav knew how to use the rock itself as an energy source.
Everything had magical energy—some just had more, and some materials were easier to work with than others. The Kin sigilcrafters did crude work, but Trav was a runecrafter, with endless knowledge inexplicably locked in his head. Frowning in concentration, he drew a complex pattern of glyphs, three circles of them with four glyphs each, all of them sharing one central glyph. Then he drew sigils inside each ring of glyphs, being extremely careful not to touch his lines or ruin the design.
After the last line was drawn, he could feel the sigils begin connecting with the stone it was inscribed on. Can’t have that, he thought. Now that he finally had a tiny bit of power of his own, he stopped the glyphs’ power flow and redirected it. Then he reversed the shiv and used the butt of the crude weapon to painstakingly trace over each line again, nudging the power from the stone to flow through the weapon into the red lines on the wall.
The shiv grew warm for a second as the glyphs and sigils flared to life before casting light like a 60-watt lamp. The light was still tinged a little red, but clear enough to see by.
Trav grinned. Now the shiv could quickly be used to make more light equations using only a simple shape and a minor effort of will. The actual energy powering the equation was coming from the stone. Each equation would only cast light for about an hour, but it sure beat fumbling around in the dark.
Asgard Awakening Page 4
