Shield (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #2): Bridge & Sword World

by JC Andrijeski

  Balidor gave him an odd look. “Yes.”

  “Can you show me?”

  Balidor motioned for Revik to follow him, stepping back from the crater’s rim. He led them across the broken field, picking his way through more cracked stones, ripped up earth and body parts, bone fragments and parts of skulls. Most of these last were small enough that Revik didn’t let himself focus on them too closely.

  He kept his eyes focused forward instead, on the furthest of the three stone towers that remained standing after the attack.

  Balidor pointed to the other two towers, in turn.

  “Training cells. A few of the older kids survived in there. Standard protocol was to move them inside once they were clearly salable. Meaning, old enough to pass for human, making progress in their studies, talented enough to effect at least a mid-range sale. It protected then from being stolen by local bandits. It’s also where they brought high-end customers… those with enough connections to skip the auctions and buy wholesale.”

  Revik nodded, gesturing that he was familiar with such things.

  Balidor pointed to the other tower. “Quarters, for the staff.”

  Revik continued to focus on the third tower, where Balidor’s feet aimed in a nearly straight line.

  It looked dead compared to the other two. The windows had no glass, and Revik could see no light inside, no sense that it had been updated since whatever warlord had built it several hundred years earlier. The heavy wood and iron door looked almost like it could be original to the structure. It came with a lock, now broken, that looked like something from a lower-level exhibit in the Tower of London.

  Revik found his steps slowing as they got nearer to the entrance.

  Balidor noticed, and slowed to pace him.

  “Yes,” he said grimly. “You feel it, too.”

  He gestured at the broken door.

  “We thought this area had been abandoned at first. An old disciplinary center. Possibly even a torture chamber, left over from some particularly despotic human monarch. The imprints there are intense… but almost impossible to nail down. We next thought whoever did this had perhaps put up some kind of Barrier field. To obscure themselves, obliterate evidence and so forth. But the construct we found woven there was much older. Close to a hundred years.”

  Balidor gestured again towards the gaping maw of a door.

  “Two of my people went inside,” he said. “They said it’s worse in there. The imprints are older still. As is the construct… or what remains of it. They were able to determine this was the primary blast site, as you said. But not much else.”

  He glanced at Revik, and a flicker of surprise touched his eyes.

  He caught the younger man’s arm, staring into his face.

  “Are you all right?”

  Revik shook his head slightly. “I want to go inside.”

  “Are you sure, brother? You’re white as a ghost.”

  “I’ll be all right.” Revik extricated his arm, and once more began picking his way across the courtyard, until he was nearly at the tower’s door.

  “Be careful,” Balidor called after him. “There’s not much warning before the drop.”

  Glancing back, Revik saw that the Adhipan leader had remained where he was. Raising a hand in acknowledgment, he hesitated only a second longer, then grabbed one of the torches burning outside the broken doorway.

  Taking a breath and instinctively shielding his light, he walked inside to the stone foyer.

  Stepping carefully across the broken flagstones, he started down the only available route, a staircase cut directly into the fire-blackened rock. Holding the torch out in front of him, he descended one step at a time, fighting the gradual closing around his chest and throat.

  He’d always been a little claustrophobic.

  The pitch black of the corridor combined with the imprints still emanating off the walls, making it difficult to breathe. He tried to get a lock on the imprints, to understand their source… but all he got was more of the feeling. A throbbing, sick pain, it resembled the worst kind of separation sickness… so warped and broken by deprivation that it had turned into something else entirely.

  He might not even have recognized it, if he hadn’t been buried in separation pain himself for over a year. It combined with his own problems, twisting his need into something that made him want to die––literally.

  He found himself reaching for Allie…

  He stopped it.

  Taking another breath, he forced his light closer to his body.

  The pain worsened. Out of nowhere, anger suffused his light, intense enough to blank his mind. Feelings rose, and thoughts. Things he’d been suppressing for days, ever since that morning he’d returned from Cairo.

  He should have told her. He should have told her the second they left the construct.

  Hell, he should have taken her with him right then, found a place in town, torn her goddamned clothes off.

  He fought that out of his light, as well.

  Why hadn’t anyone explained the marriage rites to her? Chandre? Yerin? Vash? He’d been gone for months… and hadn’t exactly been in a position to explain anything to her in the period before he left. He’d nearly blown everything, just because he’d assumed she understood the basics of their condition.

  Gods, even before she’d asked him, her light pulling on him was enough to change his mind about waiting. She’d probably been pulling on every seer in a five-mile radius––likely for months, the whole time he’d been gone. Before that, when he’d been with Terian.

  They’d been watching her masturbate.

  Pain turned liquid in his light, ratcheting the intensity of emotion.

  She’d agreed to engage in a full contact sport with a rival seer who wanted to bed her––assuming he wasn’t bedding her already. Why? Why would she do that, unless she wanted to hurt him? Had she lied to him? Was she still angry with him for what he’d done?

  The pain cut his breath, a helplessness he briefly couldn’t control.

  The son of a bitch had touched her. He’d touched her in places Revik hadn’t touched her. Places he’d restrained himself from touching her for over a year. He’d gotten into her light. He’d had his goddamned fingers in her. He’d also scared the hell out of her. Revik felt it through those other seers. He felt her terror. He’d seen it in her eyes.

  Her face had been bloody.

  She’d been screaming.

  Gripping the rough stone, he forced his mind to shut down. It was something he would normally only do if he were being attacked.

  He forced himself to breathe…

  Until, slowly, slowly, the feelings unwound.

  He remembered where he was; he could feel the tower as something outside of himself again. It still reeked of suicide, slow madness, the kind of prolonged powerlessness that he’d never coped with well… but he could distinguish those feelings from his own light.

  He made himself walk.

  He moved one foot, then the next.

  He was still struggling with his light when he reached the third corridor landing, after two flights of steep stairs winding through those smoke and mold-blackened walls. Turning the corner carefully at the bottom of the second staircase, he walked through an arch and then the length of the flagstone corridor.

  He rounded another turn, expecting another set of stairs.

  Instead, a sheer drop greeted him.

  There’d been no warning, not even a change in the quality of light. Whatever occurred there had happened far enough below ground that the aboveground structure remained intact.

  A deep blackness stretched beneath Revik’s feet. He felt space in front of him for at least ten to fifteen yards.

  Waving the torch over the chasm, he tried to get a sense of the depth and width of the space. He was unwilling to relinquish his torch to satisfy his curiosity––especially since Balidor’s men likely already mapped out the physical disposition of the scene. He turned the torch to either side of th
e hole, and saw burn marks flaring around the mouth.

  He began walking back up the corridor, sweeping with the torch, scanning the floors and walls. He saw shoe marks scuffling the dirty floor, and what looked like bare feet, too small to be anything but a child.

  Wedged in a crack between flagstones, something reflected back light from the torch’s flame. Sweeping the fire back and forth again, he located the exact spot and bent down to pick the object up.

  It was a key. It had an organic coating on it, but the skin was so old and hard that Revik barely recognized it as an organic at all.

  It looked like it could be World War II. Maybe even earlier.

  Holding it up under the torch, the sick feeling came back, this time stronger. He found he didn’t want to hold the key with his bare skin.

  Covering his hand with his sleeve, he stuffed it in a pocket.

  He made his way slowly back up to the surface.

  When he reached the doorway and outside, he walked away from the tower at about twice the speed he’d walked towards it. He climbed over broken stone and debris to where Balidor stood, smoking a hiri.

  After being crammed inside that black hole, Revik found the air outside smelled almost fresh, despite the still-strong odor of burnt hair and skin and decaying flesh from the crater a few hundred yards in front of him.

  He waited until he stood alongside Balidor, then reached into his pocket for the key, using his sleeve again and holding out his hand for Balidor to take it. He didn’t say anything while the other seer examined the organic metal. He just stood there, taking deep breaths of the cold air, trying to get his equilibrium back.

  “Where did you find this?”

  “Third landing,” Revik said.

  “Do you know what this is?” he said. When Revik glanced over, the gray eyes looked hard again, the color of steel. “It looks exactly like the keys we used on the early restraint collars. The ones the Germans used in World War II.”

  Revik nodded, gazing out over the courtyard. “That’s what I thought, too.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know,” Revik said, his voice close to normal again. “But I know what crossed my mind.” He gave Balidor a grim look. “Whoever they were holding down there was stuck in that pit for about seventy years. Maybe longer.”

  Balidor continued to study Revik’s face for a moment.

  Then he sighed. “That’s what I thought too, brother.”

  Touching Revik’s arm, Balidor gestured towards the desolate tower.

  “They weren’t able to determine what caused the first blast,” he said. “No residual powder. The only incendiary is natural gas present in deposits in the mountain bedrock itself… but there’s no way that could have been ignited without some way to pierce the stone. There’s no sign of drilling. Surveys show it would have been trapped behind several feet of solid granite. Something natural could have caused a fissure to form, of course, but there would have been some sign. We checked for seismic activity and found none.”

  Revik looked up at the sky. It stretched blue overhead, despite dark clouds pooling over the mountains.

  He glanced back at Balidor.

  “Could we be talking about a seer?” he said.

  Balidor didn’t move for a moment.

  Then he whistled softly, giving him a sideways smile. “Brother, I am impressed. My own people haven’t come up with that yet, and many of them have been here for several days. As unlikely as it seems, yes, I believe that is a possibility. One we should explore, at any rate, given the evidence.”

  “A manipulator?” Revik said in Prexci. “Telekinetic?” he added in English.

  “Possibly, yes. It would explain a number of factors.”

  Revik felt himself fighting to breathe again.

  After a moment, he shook his head. “Someone would have felt them behind the Barrier.” He looked at Balidor, fighting the remnants of pain lingering after his stint in the chamber of horrors. “There was a child down there. After the blast. Could someone be breeding manipulators?” He frowned. “Terian’s always had that thing with genetics.”

  Balidor shrugged with one hand, his face unreadable.

  “Your observation about the child is troubling,” he said. “But a lot in this incident is troubling.” He gave Revik a thin-lipped smile. “I must remind myself that the Displacement is coming. That perhaps it is not so strange that more than one intermediary being might be on Earth at this time.”

  At Revik’s frown, his eyes grew thoughtful.

  “Do you still think Terian is connected to this somehow?”

  Revik glanced at the tower.

  He felt the nausea return, the feeling of despair. Brushing it out of his light as best he could, he rested his hands on his hips.

  Instead of answering Balidor’s question, he asked another.

  “Why children?” he said.

  Balidor shrugged again with one hand, his face impassive. “Perhaps the children were incidental. Or,” he said more gently. “Perhaps he thought he was helping them. Freeing them, perhaps?”

  Revik stared out over the broken courtyard. His eyes traveled back to the edge of the crater where members of the Adhipan could still be seen picking through body parts and rubble.

  Whoever the seer was, if there had been a manipulator locked down there––or any seer, for that amount of time––they would be insane.

  Seers didn’t do well alone.

  In fact, they usually died. Whoever that seer had been, if they’d been locked up alone for seventy-plus years, they should be dead.

  Yet, if it was a manipulator, and they’d been found in the forties, or even the thirties––after Syrimne, or even while Syrimne was still alive––it would explain why someone had hidden them away so thoroughly. Someone could have figured out a way to clone Syrimne. The child could be the product of that.

  Or perhaps it was just someone from the school who wandered down there after the blast, looking for a place to hide.

  He thought of Allie then, and for an instant, the separation pain grew debilitating.

  A manipulator. Whoever they were, they would be interested in her.

  He shook it off, clenching his jaw before he looked at Balidor.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “Maybe.”

  Taking another deep breath, he began walking back over the rubble to join the remainder of the search team. As he did, he felt the hunter’s mask fall back over his mind, stripping his thoughts almost entirely of emotion.

  That time, when Revik walked, Balidor followed him.

  21

  HELLO, LOVER

  REVIK LAY ON a single bed in the temporary barracks Balidor set up outside of Darjeeling.

  This would be the last night in these accommodations––for him, at least.

  He would be joining Balidor’s ground team for the next few days, which meant sleeping in tents on partially frozen ground, at least until the helicopter picked him up, which Balidor promised him would be within four days. Five at most.

  He’d still had no word from Allie.

  Staring up at a whitewashed ceiling, head resting on his arm, he found himself thinking about the last message from Balidor.

  Tarsi had extended her timeline. No reason given, not even a hello aimed in his direction, not from either of them.

  In any case, it spurred his offer to stay on with the Adhipan.

  He wondered now if that had been such a great idea. Despite Balidor’s assurances, he wanted to talk to Allie himself. Obviously, she wasn’t going to ask for him, so he needed to make it clear to her that he wanted to see her.

  He couldn’t leave India with her without breaking the law. Hell, he didn’t even know if he could take her from Tarsi’s legally, not without formal permission.

  He could probably convince Tarsi to let him talk to her, though.

  He’d shared all of his various imprints of Terian and Terian’s different bodies with the Adhipan already. No one knew
Terian’s light as well as he did, so they’d welcomed his offer to help, but they were all better trackers than he was.

  They didn’t really need him.

  It had been nine days since he’d reached Seertown from Egypt.

  He’d been delayed in Cairo, too.

  First by the paranoia of the infiltration team, then by Maygar and his ridiculous attempts to buy him off, then to piss him off. Since he’d left her in Gatwick, pretty much nothing had gone the way he’d planned. He’d thought he would be lying in a very different bed right now––not surrounded by half-clothed infiltrators, staring at a water-stained ceiling, wondering if he should take a shower just so he could jerk off without one of the other seers making a crack, or worse, offering to help.

  Because he’d focused on her and sex in the same breath, he felt her.

  She backed off the instant his light coiled into hers, but the pain lingered, making it impossible for him to disconnect. He stayed with her, like he did every time they bumped up against one another in that space, pulling at her for fleeting impressions, but they weren’t enough to calm his paranoia.

  She was busy. Working. Tarsi had her hard at work on something. It was stressing her out, whatever it was, upsetting her––

  Tarsi appeared.

  Unapologetic, she slammed him out of their Barrier space.

  Revik was left lying there, half-crippled as the connection severed.

  He lay there a few moments longer, fighting to slow his breathing as the pain gradually dissipated. When he recovered enough, he sat up, holding the blanket around his waist as his feet touched the floor.

  He found a female seer also awake, and watching him. She smiled when she caught his gaze, humor in her eyes.

  When he looked away, she laughed aloud.

  “Hey. Newlywed,” she said in Mandarin. “What the hell are you doing out here? Why aren’t you at home? I’d be pissed off, if I was your wife.”

  Without answering, Revik pushed the covers aside, getting to his feet.

  “Hey,” she said, laughing. “Can you walk?”