by Spurrier, Jo
Sierra bit her lip. ‘You think he’s lost?’
Rasten opened his mouth and closed it again. ‘I … Sirri, I should have known it would happen like this. I didn’t think … oh, by all the hells, I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Sierra said.
‘I wouldn’t lie to you!’
‘Enough! I’m going to find him, Rasten. I won’t give up on him, not after all he’s done for me.’
She turned, fending his hands off again as she took a step forward. The trip-lines around her feet tore just as she felt Rasten reach for her with cords of power, and then the blast of energy that scorched through the tunnel swept them away.
Sierra shaped her shield into a wedge and pushed through it, surrounded by a seething torrent of flame. Rasten followed in her wake. ‘Sierra, you wretched little fool, you’ll walk right into his hands!’
‘I’d rather that than skulk around in the dark while a good man dies!’ Sierra shouted. ‘Do you have a better plan?’
‘Little Crow, how do you know there’s enough left of him to save?’
She stopped dead while an inferno roared around them. What if he was right? If Kell thought Isidro dangerous enough to be a threat, he wouldn’t hesitate to cripple him further. Isidro had proven one ruined hand was not enough to keep him out of a fight, and she dreaded to think what Kell might do to remove him as a threat.
Sierra closed her eyes against the flame, and reached for the place where she and Isidro were bound together. She’d done this hundreds of times since Kell had cut them off hours ago, and the impenetrable wall between them was unchanged.
Sierra drew a deep breath, steeling herself. There was one other avenue open to her, if she could find the courage to use it. She reached for Kell.
The image hit her like a blow to the face — a naked man kneeling on bare stone, suspended from arms wrenched back from the shoulders and his back awash in blood. Sierra wrenched her mind away before she could take in anything more, but not before she heard Kell laughing, a low cackle of gloating mirth.
‘Sirri —’
She whirled to face him. ‘No! I will not leave him to die! Kell’s taken enough from him, I won’t let him take any more!’
With another step the trip-wire broke again. Sierra had her shield up and ready to take another onslaught of flame, but too late, she registered that the power flaring around her did not feel the same. There was no burst of heat, no fire boiling out of the air — instead she felt a shock beneath her, a percussive blast that sent vibrations through the soles of her feet.
Then the floor crumbled away, and she fell into absolute darkness.
Isidro found a trickle of water flowing from a font in the wall and collecting in a tiny basin, incongruously carved with reeds and waterfowl. Nothing had ever tasted as fine as that cool, sweet water.
When the first blast sent an echoing roar through the cavern’s dark passages, Isidro tore himself away from the basin and reached for his connection with Sierra. He still couldn’t contact her — he couldn’t feel a thing from her or Rasten. He did not attempt his connection with Kell; the last thing he needed was for the old man to realise he’d escaped. The link with Sierra was blocked so thoroughly that Isidro had no idea how he could ever bridge the gap.
At the first blast Isidro just stood and listened, but the second brought him to a decision. He laid his good hand against the contraption of metal that was slung across his chest, tied fore and aft to a strip of torn cloth to keep his hand free, and set out to follow the sound.
Sierra hit a body of water with a tremendous splash. It knocked the breath from her in a whoosh of air, and she sank. The water was chill — not as cold as a Ricalani lake, but cold enough to make her shiver as she straightened and kicked to the surface, spluttering and gasping for air.
A shaft of light gleamed down from above, a red-hued beam cast from Rasten’s mage-light, so faint that Sierra could see nothing but the black surface of the water around her.
She knew how to tread water from swimming in the summertime, but for a moment she lay on her back and floated so she could make another globe of light and toss it into the air.
‘Sirri!’ Rasten called down from above just as another scream cut through the gloom. If anything, the sound seemed louder and more clear.
Rasten’s face appeared above the hole, and as he leant down he dislodged some loose stones that tumbled towards her. She hastily cast a shield to deflect them, but it set off another trap — she felt the power twang and spurt, and with one quick-snatched breath she ducked under the water as a great wave of fire blossomed overhead.
The light let her see just what she had fallen into. It was a massive pool, nearly a lake, but the walls were as regular as the rest of the passages. A cistern, she thought, as her memory dredged up the unfamiliar word.
Then she saw what lay beneath her. Bones carpeted the floor of the pool. At a glance they all seemed human, some nothing more than a jumble of limbs and ribs, but some were still articulated and wrapped with chains that tethered them to chunks of rubble. Weapons, too, glinted with the firelight unfolding above, and Sierra idly wondered why the steel hadn’t rusted.
It took a great deal of effort to keep herself beneath the surface until the wave of fire died, and when she broke through she was desperate for air.
‘Sierra!’ Rasten shouted down again.
‘I’m alright,’ she called back. The fire had consumed her light, so she cast another and looked around for an exit. The entire chamber was as large as a Ricalani house, all three storeys including the barn, and was full two-thirds of the way to the vaulted roof. Three of the four walls were sheer, but one of the short sides rose less than a man’s height above the surface of the water and seemed to form a platform that led back into the earth.
‘Sirri, come back up,’ Rasten called down.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Sierra said. ‘Come down and join me. I think Issey’s down here somewhere, I can hear him more clearly.’
Still leaning over the hole, Rasten suddenly went still and turned his head, listening. ‘Sirri, do you hear that?’
She scowled at him, and then realised that the screams had fallen silent. ‘It’s stopped!’
‘No, not that,’ Rasten snapped. ‘I can hear … footsteps. Get back up here!’
‘I can’t! Come down here!’
‘Hush! Hold your wretched tongue, I’m trying to listen.’ Looking worried, he frowned and pulled away from the hole and out of her sight. ‘Stay where you are. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.’
She heard nothing more, not even footsteps as he walked away. The only sound was the splash and gurgle as she held her position in the water, echoing off the cistern walls.
After a moment she heard a low, racking cough, and then a voice calling her name. ‘Sirri?’
The voice was weak and ragged, but it was Isidro’s. She hadn’t heard him in so long … As much as she wanted to reply, Sierra bit her lip and remained silent. She’d made a mistake in allowing herself to be separated from Rasten. Apart, they were far more vulnerable than they were together.
‘Sirri, are you there? If you can hear me, get out of here! Kell can’t be far away.’
His voice came from the platform at the narrow end of the cistern. It was the only way out.
Even if it was a trap, Sierra reasoned, Isidro would be able to feed her power no matter what barrier Kell had contrived to keep her from feeding from a distance. Her touch would overcome whatever working he had constructed. Diving beneath the water to cover the sound of her movement, Sierra kicked towards the edge of the pool.
The milk-white stone was affixed to the wall with a band of sculpted rock. It served as an anchor for this part of the net of trip-wires, and Isidro had to contort himself awkwardly to reach it without brushing against the threads of power. His head still swimming, he gingerly touched his right arm against the stone to balance himself, but even that little bit of pressure set the bo
nes aching, which in turn fed more power to Kell.
Isidro had never been so thankful Delphine had taught him the Akharian technique of seeing power as glowing lines of force. It was hard to hold onto the trance-state through the searing pain from the device. The trip-lines that criss-crossed the passages wavered in and out of his sight like a guttering candle flame, but so long as he moved carefully he could avoid setting them off. Isidro knew he did not have the power to shield against the blast they would unleash.
There was a feel to the energy bound within the milk-white stone that made Isidro suspect that he was partially fuelling the structure through Kell’s device. There were dozens of the stones scattered throughout the ruins — Isidro had no idea Kell possessed so many. Once one was drained of power and the lines of force flickered out, it was a simple matter to break open the collar of rock and remove it. Isidro dropped this one into his bag. Perhaps he was weighing himself down unnecessarily, but it felt wrong to leave the stones where Kell might reclaim them. It would have taken him far too long to remove every one he passed, so Isidro just concentrated on removing the most important ones, so instead of the dense maze of trip-wires only the most basic structure remained, far more easily navigable than what had laced the corridors before.
Isidro picked his way across the weakening web to the next nexus of lines. He winced as another echoing scream rang out, reverberating along the halls, but otherwise ignored it as he bowed his head to the task.
The sound was faint but Rasten couldn’t ignore it — a rustle of cloth and a laboured breath. He heard it only for a moment before another ringing scream drowned out the noise.
As he retraced their steps, the lines of force re-formed around his feet — they weren’t yet strong enough to trigger another blast, but it wouldn’t be long.
That half-heard ragged breath haunted him. How often had he heard Kell’s breath grow short with anticipation and lust? The old man played up the injury to his leg, and Rasten never knew how much it truly hindered him. His master always kept his power too impenetrable to let Rasten or Sierra sense the pain of the old wound.
Had he truly heard it? Rasten glanced back at the hole, where he could faintly hear Sierra splashing in the water below. He should go back and join her — they were foolish to let themselves be separated. But if he had heard what he’d heard, and someone was stalking them through these halls, then it could only be Kell, and Rasten would not turn tail and run. He would not hide behind a woman, little more than a child, a brash and inexperienced young girl. He had given in to cowardice once, had frozen up when a golden opportunity had fallen into his lap. It would not happen again.
And besides, if Sierra heard and felt him engage with Kell, she’d take enough power from Rasten in the first onslaught of the fight to push through the fireball and come to his aid.
Rasten felt the first full-strength thread tighten around his leg just as his eye found the crouching figure shrouded in the darkness. He had his back to Rasten, and Rasten gathered his power and charged him before it registered that this man was dark-haired, not grey like his master, and was tall and lean where Kell was stocky.
As the trip-wire snapped, flame boiled out of the air. Rasten cast a shield and otherwise ignored it, but the expected jet of flame never materialised. Instead, the pulse of energy hissed and dwindled, like a spark landing in damp kindling. The figure ducked away and turned to face him, but in that instant Rasten reached him — he shoved the man against the wall with one arm pinned across his throat. With the other Rasten immobilised his right hand, and it was only at the feel of those rough and misshapen bones and the man’s grunt of pain that the red haze in Rasten’s mind lifted enough for him to realise just who it was.
Sierra hauled herself out of the water slowly, letting it drain away before standing up on the platform in a spluttering rain of droplets.
Isidro had fallen silent, but Sierra could still hear his laboured breathing. Power was prickling against her senses, as though the wall Kell had built between them was beginning to break down. She desperately wanted to call out to him, but she knew that nothing could be more foolish, and so she held her tongue and strained with all her senses.
One passage opened from the platform, leading deeper into the rock with a lone, guttering candle lighting the way. It was the only route away from the cistern with its carpet of corpses. Sierra gathered her power, holding it tightly furled and ready to strike, and started down the path.
Once she’d passed the candle, Kell extinguished his camouflage enchantment with a touch, and set out on silent feet to follow her.
Rasten stepped back swiftly, releasing Isidro as though the touch scorched his skin. Isidro slumped against the wall, gasping for breath. His eyes were sunken and heavy, and every movement seemed to cost him enormous effort.
‘What in the hells are you doing here?’ Rasten asked.
Isidro coughed. ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ He bent down and pulled a milk-white stone out of its socket on the wall.
‘You must have passed the place where we came in. You should have got out of here when you had the chance.’
Isidro shook his head. ‘I didn’t see any way out. Perhaps … Kell must have camouflaged it.’
As he spoke, another scream rang out, a raw, animal sound. Isidro winced to hear it.
‘We thought that was you,’ Rasten said.
‘It was, just … a little while ago. Where’s Sierra?’
Rasten glanced back, but said nothing.
Isidro frowned. ‘You left her alone?’
‘You try making that woman do a cursed thing she doesn’t want to,’ Rasten snapped. He took a step back and studied Isidro with a narrow gaze. Rasten knew the look in his eyes, and that slump of his shoulders. He was drunk with pain, exhausted but unable to rest. And yet there were no visible wounds and, even if they were hidden, Rasten ought to be able to feel something of it at this range, due to the bond that linked them.
‘Where’s Kell?’ Rasten demanded.
‘I don’t know. Look, we should get back to Sierra. She’s vulnerable on her own.’
For a moment Rasten closed his eyes and reached for her in his mind. He was fully expecting to find her in the water, waiting as he’d told her. When he found her moving cautiously down a narrow stone passage, he nearly lost his wits.
Sierra! Gods take you, where are you going?
Issey’s down here somewhere, Rasten, I can feel him!
Curse you, get back here now! It’s a trap: Isidro’s here, I’m looking right at him!
What in the Black Sun’s name are you talking about? He could feel her presence in his mind, and yet somehow she couldn’t see the man standing before him.
Rasten clenched his fists until his knuckles ached. They’d walked right into Kell’s hands — he’d separated them without trouble and then lured Sierra away. She was still holding a good amount of power, but it was hardly a lot by her standards — if Kell cornered her now she’d burn through it in minutes.
Rasten grabbed Isidro by the collar and shoved him back against the wall. It made no difference that the other man was taller and heavier, he was so weak that Rasten could have done with him as he wished. ‘What enchantments are you carrying? What did Kell put on you?’
Without a word Isidro held out his left arm and the wire cuff that bound the stones. Beneath it, within easy reach of his good hand, was an odd contraption of metal, a tube as long as his forearm and as thick as the hilt of a knife, with a rough handle affixed to one end. Rasten had never seen anything like it — some Akharian invention, perhaps? It hardly seemed important now. Rasten seized Isidro’s wrist and examined Kell’s device. With a touch he could sense the power within the stones, and caught an inkling of their purpose; all were geared towards control in one way or another, but most important was the enchantment that stripped power from Isidro’s nerves and fed it to Kell, and the one that isolated him from Sierra, feeding from that same source so that the more pain he was in, the s
tronger the barrier between them became.
‘Don’t move,’ Rasten commanded him. He wrapped a shield around the stones to protect the arm from the backlash that would come. Then he cut the wires.
Isidro burst into Sierra’s mind with a flare of pain and power, striking so swiftly and so suddenly that energy flared across her skin and bolts of lightning swarmed at her fingertips. With a ragged gasp she froze in her tracks.
Sirri, where are you?
He was on his knees, breathing hard as the discharge of power sent aftershocks along his nerves. He’d been in great pain, but there was less now. Sierra had grown familiar with the peculiar rippling shudder that came with the abrupt cessation of pain. The power he sent her was dwindling fast.
She turned back the way she’d come just as a voice called out from deeper within the earth. Isidro’s voice. ‘Sirri, are you there? I think … I think I can get myself free, but I need your help. Sirri, please!’
Sierra clenched her teeth and gathered her power as Kell stepped into view. With one hand resting on the knob of his cane, he threw his head back and laughed, but the sound that reached her was Isidro’s voice and it came from the passage behind her.
‘You witless whore,’ he said. ‘Now you’re going to get what you deserve.’
Isidro was still slumped against the wall when the blast reverberated up from below. All he could see through Sierra’s eyes was a confusion of light and power, falling rubble and choking dust. The battle of power was so fierce that it melted the stone, and step by slow step, Kell was forced back. Sierra was burning through her reserves at a tremendous rate, and already Isidro could feel that they were waning.
There was one thing he could do about that, now that Rasten had cut his connection to Kell and Sirri’s access to him was restored. Isidro bunched his right hand into a fist and tried to flex his broken bones. It hurt, of course, but not as much as it had when he’d used this same trick months ago on the bank of a frozen river. His breaks had healed since then, thanks to Delphine, so Isidro wrapped his good hand around the lumpen bones of his right forearm, and squeezed with all his strength.
