“This is as far as I go.”
“We’re not even to the base of the ridge,” Marcus said.
Gus spat over the side of the sled. “This is as far as I go,” he repeated.
7
“I hired you to get us to Reaper’s Ridge,” Marcus said, his voice a menacing rumble as he loomed over the wrinkled old man.
Gus clicked his tongue, and all the cerberi turned toward us, eighteen throats growling in unison. My skin tried to crawl. Oliver stood on his hind legs to see over the driver’s bench seat, wings flared in alarm. The cerberi raised their hackles and inched back toward the sled. Gus had dropped an anchor, and we remained in place as they stalked closer.
“Really?” Marcus let out an exasperated breath. “Don’t threaten me, old man. I’m not in the mood. If you don’t want to go any farther, how much to borrow your team and sled?”
Gus shook his head. “I wouldn’t send my least favorite hound to Reaper’s Ridge.”
“Fine. How much to buy the whole pack?”
“Not for sale.”
“Not even one?”
“Nope.”
Marcus’s profile tightened, his standard scowl becoming threatening.
“Get out or I’ll dump you out,” Gus said. He used a trickle of air to activate a spell woven into the sled, and it began to tilt to the right.
Marcus smacked the spell with a whip of air and the cart righted itself. Gus’s gnarled fingers tightened on the reins and his eyes darted across the canyon to the riotous magic. A band of fire and air quested toward us, crackling into fiery lightning before it stretched across the canyon.
“Suit yourself. We’re heading back,” Gus said.
Marcus clapped a hand over the driver’s mouth before he could signal his cerberi.
“How much for the sled?”
When Marcus removed his hand, Gus’s grin revealed a few missing teeth. He named an exorbitant price. My heart dropped. I didn’t have any more money, let alone the small fortune Gus demanded. Maybe if we carried the gargoyles one at a time, we could make it work. We’d have to move them in stages, making sure we did enough magic around them to keep them alive without doing so much magic as to attract a wild storm.
I eyed the wolf gargoyle. He weighed more than Marcus and me combined. Without using the elements, I wouldn’t be able to move him. We needed the sled.
Marcus had already reached the same conclusion, because he was haggling. “Tell you what: I’ll accept your price, but only if you agree to pay me half again as much when I sell it back to you.”
Gus’s eyes shone as he shook Marcus’s hand enthusiastically. He snatched up the wad of bills Marcus pulled from his pocket and leapt agilely from the seat to the ground. After unhooking a slender board from the front of the sled, he unhitched the towline from the sled and attached it to the board. When he activated the board’s spell, it floated a foot or so off the ground. Gus stepped on, grabbed the reins, and signaled the cerberi with a sharp whistle. They folded back down the line in the direction we’d come. By the time the last cerberus squeezed past the cart, they were galloping. Gus rode the floating board like he’d been air surfing his whole life, and he and his cerberi disappeared back into the forest. In less than a minute, the sound of the cerberi’s enormous paws faded and an unnatural silence settled around us, broken only by the rumble of rockslides and thunder across the canyon.
“I don’t think he expects you to live long enough to return his sled,” I said.
“Easiest money I ever made.” Marcus jumped from the driver’s seat.
I tried to match his nonchalance as I scrambled to the ground. No birds chirped or called, no squirrels jumped through the branches above us, no lizards scurried through the fallen leaves. If any animals lived this close to Reaper’s Ridge, they stayed hidden.
An eagle’s shriek echoed off the hills, chased by a clap of thunder. Celeste dove through the trees to land next to me, folding her wings to her black sides as she trotted the last few steps.
“Where is the driver going?” she demanded.
“It doesn’t matter. We need to move the sled ourselves,” Marcus said. “Mika, set us a new towline.”
Gus had taken the original towline with him, but a spare coil of rope was clipped to the underside of the sled. I tied the ends to the eye hooks in the front of the sled, creating a loop of rope.
“Can you pull it?” Marcus asked. He never ceased scanning the surroundings, crossbow and null trap at the ready.
I stepped into the circle of rope and leaned my weight into it. The sled shifted a few inches. Oliver loped to my side and reared to grab the line with his front paws, but his sinuous shape prevented him from getting any leverage and the sled didn’t budge. We all turned to Celeste.
“Well?” Marcus asked.
She gave him a hard stare. “I am no animal of burden.”
“It’s you or me, and I think we’d both prefer me standing guard.”
“This is debasing,” Celeste grumbled, but she allowed me settle the rope around her broad chest for the same reason she’d trusted me with the secret of baetyls: love. She would do anything to save her mate. With Celeste pulling and me leaning against the back of the sled, we got the platform in motion.
The road switchbacked down into the canyon, and the slant helped us keep momentum through the increasingly dense undergrowth choking the unused path. After flying across the countryside behind the cerberi, our walking pace chafed. It also gave me too much time to think, and a snarl of doubt twisted my thoughts into knots. What if I couldn’t repair the baetyl? What if we couldn’t find it? How would we feed the gargoyles magic without attracting the storms? What good was my paltry magic against the massive collections of wild, raw elements? Every storm I’d caught a glimpse of could overwhelm me on sheer power alone. What had ever made me think I could do this?
Concussive explosions echoed through the narrowing canyon, the source hidden in the crevices of the mountainside. Every so often, wind howled through the trees, a different temperature every time. I twitched and jumped as I walked, trying to suppress my growing nerves, but the ridge never gave me a quiet moment to gather my wits.
By the time we reached the base of the canyon, I’d switched from cursing Gus for leaving and Captain Monaghan and the rest of the squad for being on vacation when I needed them to counting my blessings. I had Marcus with me, an air sled to move the gargoyles, and Oliver at my side. I wasn’t alone. It would be so much worse to face this by myself.
A solid granite bridge arched above the shallow river at the base of the gorge, and Marcus made us wait while he examined it before he allowed us to cross. I would have preferred to test it with earth, but since we didn’t want to attract storms, Marcus’s visual inspection had to suffice.
I stood at Celeste’s shoulder while we waited, studying the thick foliage overgrowing the road on the opposite side.
“You know the way, right?” I asked.
Celeste nodded, and when Marcus gave the go-ahead, she surged up the bank on the other side. I threw my weight against the back of the sled, scrambling after her. After a few dozen feet, she found a marginally clearer path through the dense undergrowth. Another hundred feet up the mountain, it revealed itself to be a real road, widening and clearing as it curved in a switchback.
My footsteps faltered when a wave of dizziness shoved through me. I glanced around, looking for a source. Beside me, Oliver whined.
“It’s the ridge,” Marcus said. He’d stopped up the trail to let us catch up.
“It feels . . .” I tried to put a term to the irritation grating against my elemental senses. My head felt like I’d been gritting my teeth for hours, the ache at my temples faint but grinding.
“Like a warning against trespassers?” he suggested.
Exactly. The entire mountain hummed with menace.
“We could turn around.”
I ran my eyes over the comatose gargoyles. “No. We have to keep going.” I stiffened my rubbery knees a
nd pushed back into motion.
No one spoke again, as if being silent could keep us safe. The farther we climbed, the more bizarre and twisted the landscape became until the forest bore no resemblance to the hill across the canyon. Barren patches of scorched earth butted up to sections of woodland so overgrown the trunks of the oaks were bloated and cracked and the underbrush was impenetrable to anything larger than a mouse. Rows of pine trees lying as flat as plowed oat stalks and numerous rockslides only added to the difficulty of traversing the increasingly indiscernible road. Above us, clouds formed, rained, and dissipated in minutes instead of hours or days, often interspersed with lightning and fire. Through it all, the grumbling, cracking, grating sounds of shifting rocks and thunder never let up. I walked on nerves strung so tight I quivered inside my own skin, and when Marcus called a halt, I bounced on my toes.
He raised his crossbow, eyes on the sky and the wild snarl of energy ghosting closer. I jerked around, looking for cover, but we were caught in the middle of a meadow. The safety the trees might have provided was illusory, but being in the open felt foolishly vulnerable.
“What do we do?”
“Nothing. Just be quiet.”
Comforting.
The storm was composed of fire wrapped in swirls of air and wood. In other words, it was a perfect firestorm in the making. Flames licked from the raw elemental tangle as if testing the air with a dozen blistering tongues as it swept above the tree line. The pine boughs swayed in its wake, the rustle of needles lost beneath the crackle of the uncontrolled elements.
Holding my breath, I cowered next to the air sled, useless. I couldn’t pull magic to protect us without attracting the storm. I didn’t have a single nonmagical weapon. I was supposed to be a gargoyle guardian, but I had no way to defend the helpless dormant gargoyles.
“Nobody move,” Marcus said, his voice soft. “We might get lucky.”
The magic storm slid past us on the outer rim of the meadow. At its current trajectory, it would pass us by without—
The storm kinked on itself, changing course and spearing directly toward us.
“Damn it!” Marcus shot a null trap into the wild energy. It should have neutralized all active magic in the vicinity, but the magic storm swallowed the trap with an infinitesimal hiccup. “Mika, to me!”
I lurched to his side, tripping over my own feet in my rush. Marcus had planted himself between the cart and the storm, and he shoved the anchoring rod into the ground in front of us.
“Link with me,” he ordered.
The storm had us in its indifferent sights; hiding our magic had become moot. “With gargoyle help?”
“No gargoyles.”
I drew as much as I could hold of water and air, my two weakest elements, then added a balanced amount of earth, fire, and wood and shoved the bundle to Marcus. If I hadn’t been so scared, I might have been self-conscious about the pathetic level of magic I offered him.
The link between us snapped into place and Marcus’s magic roared through me, so much more powerful than my own. The rush of power tipped my internal awareness into the link, pulling me into the slurry of elements. If I allowed it, the link would consume me, and I’d be as helpless as a dormant gargoyle, just a vessel to pull magic through.
“Relax. You’ve got this,” Marcus said.
I teetered on the precipice of control, then fell back into my body. Magic still flowed between us, but I could separate my core self from the magic.
I opened eyes I hadn’t realized I’d closed. Marcus leaned close enough to fill my vision.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
Not a moment too soon. Marcus threw our combined might into a huge shield of water and earth, wrapping it around the sled, the dormant gargoyles, Oliver, and Celeste and tethering it to the elemental anchor he’d pounded into the ground. The magic storm slammed the shield a second later. The impact would have thrown me from my feet, but Marcus grabbed my arm without even looking at me, holding me up.
Water countered fire; earth countered air. The wild magic folded back on itself before twisting for a second attack. Fire and air pounded the shield and burst, unraveling with a thunderous boom. The remaining snarl of wood flared across the shield, feeding from the water, devouring the earth. Fast as thought, Marcus wrapped the wood magic in fire and squeezed. The elements canceled each other out with a clap I barely registered over the ringing in my ears.
Marcus released the link, and I sagged to the ground, drained. He stalked across the quiet meadow and picked up the null trap with a pinch of air. The brass basket was blackened, the previously round shape melted and disfigured. Shaking his head, Marcus tossed the deformed mess into the back of the air sled.
Oliver loped under the sled to my side, rubbing against my forearm with a whine.
“I’m okay. Just catching my breath,” I assured him. That hadn’t even been a big storm. I tilted my head to peer up the mountain. “Are we close, Celeste?”
“No.”
My heart sank.
“That’s not going to work many more times,” Marcus said, yanking the anchor from the ground and shaking the dirt from it before sliding it back into its loop at his waist.
“We can help,” Oliver said, including Celeste in the offer.
“It might be dangerous if the magic backlashes to you,” Marcus said before I could.
“No more dangerous than if you burn out before we reach the baetyl,” Celeste said. “Rourke is getting weaker. We need to keep moving.” She leaned her chest into the rope and dug her back paws into the soil. Marcus pushed the sled until she got it in motion again. I braced my hands on the dirt and shoved to my feet. Another ten minutes’ rest would have been preferable. Marcus picked up his crossbow and notched another null trap—whatever good it would do us.
“If we use the dormant gargoyles, it’d help them at least,” I said, falling into step with him. “The anchor worked, right?”
Everything had happened so fast, I had only an impression of the anchor funneling some of the wild magic harmlessly into the soil.
“More than the trap.”
“What about the sword? Does it have any special properties?”
“Against raw elements, no. But if we encounter something with a body, it might come in handy.”
“Do you really think anything could live here among the storms?”
He shrugged. “I’ve seen stranger things.”
We climbed the switchbacks as fast as Celeste could pull the sled. My thighs ached and my stomach sat heavy with fear and doubt. Marcus sent Oliver to scout the way in the air, and I bit my tongue to hold in my protests. Oliver was smart and fast; he wouldn’t put himself in danger. Even so, after he flew off, I spent so much time looking at the sky that my neck knotted and my toes bruised inside my boots from tripping over unnoticed rocks.
Our luck held for almost a half hour, until a small storm of raw water and air spinning as tight as a tornado veered off its previously straight course and whirled toward us. It switched directions so rapidly, we didn’t have time to move from where we were pinned between a steep outcrop of ragged milky quartz and a washout. Already past the storm, Oliver circled back, wings beating so fast they blurred in his effort to reach us.
“No, don’t let him—”
Marcus formed an air message and curved it around the storm. I half expected the wild magic to snatch it out of the air or change course in attraction to the magic, but it didn’t alter its headlong rush for us.
I thrust my magic toward Marcus without taking my eyes from Oliver. Our linking was rough but fast, and in my worry for Oliver, it didn’t unseat my equilibrium. When the message reached Oliver, he pulled up, his long body sagging beneath his spread wings. I let out a shaky breath.
“Thank you.” Oliver was clear of the storm. He would be safe.
If Marcus replied, a gust of wind took his words. He formed another shield, this one fire and earth, and anchored it in the copper and quartz rod he s
tomped into the ground. I could feel the dormant gargoyles in our link this time, but Marcus didn’t include Celeste despite her silent offer of enhancement. I could have accepted her boost and pulled more magic into the link, but I trusted Marcus to have a plan.
The storm dipped, coating the ground beneath it in ice and lifting rocks and weeds into a funnel. Wide-eyed, I watched the frozen front race toward us. Marcus locked my wrist in his hand and drew a wallop of power from our link, altering the fire in the shield from the basic elemental form to the weaves for a white-hot heat. When the storm hit us, it melted into nothing with an anticlimactic shush of released air.
“That’s more like it,” Marcus said. He released me from the link at the same time he let go of my arm, and I sagged against the sled. My heavy breaths fogged the chilled air, and between ragged pants, I could hear the tinkle of the ice crystals melting in the sunlight. Marcus rolled a weak band of heat across the ground in front of Celeste, thawing it, and we pushed back into motion.
Before following the sled, Marcus stooped to pick up something from the icy ground. It wasn’t until he held it up that I recognized the frosted twist of metal as a null trap.
“How did that get there?”
“I tossed it. I hoped if it was grounded, it would work. I think it’s safe to say they’re useless.”
“That storm should have passed us by,” I said, pulling the grounding rod from the ground. It burned my palm, and I bounced it between my hands to cool it until Marcus took it.
“It’s as if someone is guiding these damn things toward anything living,” Marcus said.
I shuddered at the thought. “Not anything. It ignored Oliver.”
In unison, we glanced at the sled of dormant gargoyles.
“It’s them,” I said.
I couldn’t believe I’d missed it. It was so obvious. The mining explosion, the broken baetyl: They were the same thing.
“Because the gargoyles are basically leaking magic?” Marcus guessed.
I shook my head. “Celeste, why haven’t any of the other baetyls been accidentally discovered?”
“Baetyls protect themselves.”
Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) Page 7
