Chapter 5
Left alone in the colonel’s office, Sardelle debated whether to race outside after him or to take the moment to study the map further, in private. A glance had told her that the tunnels were several hundred meters from Jaxi’s location—it was only dumb luck that those miners had stumbled upon her. The mage shelters had been located in the deepest part of her people’s complex, farthest into the mountain core. A mistake, it had turned out, because so few had made it down there in time.
Only you.
I know. Sardelle touched the map, tracing the lower level tunnels with her fingers. I think this is about where I was discovered, though this doesn’t look like it’s been updated to include the passage Tace and his cohort were working on.
Thinking of them again made her wince. She had agreed to help Zirkander with his investigation on a whim, because she saw her opportunity to barter for a look at the map. She hadn’t expected to find out Tace was the murderer… or that Bretta was someone who had denied him sex in the past—and used her brawn to protect the other women from him as well. She certainly couldn’t have foreseen the chain of events that would lead him to accuse Bretta of giving him his new and persistent rash. Sardelle might not regret defending herself, but she now wished she had found another way. At the least, she should have later sought the man out—from a distance—and healed what she had inflicted.
Unforeseen consequences. The elders had understood them well. That was why the Circle had never acted as judges over others and had insisted the Referatu be held accountable to the same laws as the people in the rest of the country. Until that handful of sorcerers had gone rogue, believing themselves above the law. They were the ones who had established the fear of magic in the population, a fear that had resulted in… Sardelle gazed out the window toward the mountain, her chest tightening with emotion she had been trying hard to distract herself from. But talking to Zirkander and realizing that no one even remembered the Referatu had been here… A few unforeseen consequences, and I’m the last of my people.
Perhaps noticing Sardelle wasn’t thinking of anything constructive, Jaxi directed her back to their current consideration. If you were to convince the miners to extend that shaft and angle downward approximately fourteen degrees, you would eventually reach my location.
And how do I convince them of that?
Keep working on the colonel.
The colonel is busy with—
A boom sounded in the distance.
“I thought he wasn’t going to use the cannons.” But even as she spoke, Sardelle swept her senses out, along the walls and confirmed what her ears should have told her. The explosion had come from farther away. The airship, what else?
Leaving the map on the desk, Sardelle ran through the building and outside. Daylight had come to the mountains, but the heavy clouds and the continuing snow made it feel like perpetual twilight. She struggled to spot the airship and wouldn’t have found it at all had she not seen a harpoon—no, Zirkander had called it a rocket—streak away from the rampart. It disappeared into the white sky, but by following its trajectory, she located the intruders. The enemy airship was up near the top of a snow-covered ridge, dropping explosives into the cornice she had noted the day before. Yesterday’s fear returned in a surge.
The rocket exploded in the sky below the craft’s wooden hull. Whatever force or shrapnel it hurled made the ship rock, tilting on its side for a moment, but the massive oblong balloon stabilized it. The captain must have had a good idea as to the rockets’ range and was staying out of it.
Well, he didn’t know her range.
Sardelle stepped into the shadows of a building and checked around to make sure nobody was watching her. The miners were down in the mountain, and all of the soldiers in the fort were busy grabbing weapons from the armory and running up to the wall to fight. This battle wouldn’t be won with firearms though.
Hating that she had to think of herself first, that she dared not be discovered, Sardelle waited long painful seconds so she could time her attack with the soldiers’ next one. While a second rocket was loaded and aimed, the airship dropped another bomb.
“Hurry,” she whispered.
Finally, the rocket flew away. Sardelle forced herself to wait until it exploded, to see if it might be near enough that shrapnel would account for…
There. Orange light burst against the gray sky, the weapon exploding even closer to the airship than the first. Shrapnel reached the hull, though not enough to give it more than a few dents and dings.
“Good enough,” she muttered. Sardelle drew energy from within and cut a long slash in that balloon.
The envelope was thicker than she realized—it might have held up to shrapnel even if the rockets had struck closer—but it wasn’t a match for her power. She wasn’t sure how long it would take to deflate, so she cut more holes, little snips and pricks that would appear as shrapnel damage later. With more time, she could have made sure the craft went down, but an ominous rumbling started up. It wasn’t coming from the airship but from the mountain behind it. From the snow.
A buzzing wail erupted from a horn at the corner of the fort.
“Avalanche!” someone cried.
I was afraid of that.
Don’t get caught, Jaxi warned. Snow is just as impossible to dig out from under as rock.
I know. I grew up around here, remember?
Sardelle ignored Jaxi’s snarky retort. She took several deep breaths and flexed her hands, like an athlete getting ready for a race. Cutting a hole in a balloon was easy, but this?
With a soulblade in her hand, her power combined with Jaxi’s, she might have handled it, but even then, she would have needed time to plan an attack. The snow was already falling, gathering speed, gathering more material as it tumbled down the steep slope. That high up, there were no trees to slow its momentum. Sardelle tried to create invisible barriers to slow it down, but it was like sticking her fingers into a dam to plug up holes as more and more burst open. Then that shelf of snow collapsed completely, rushing down too fast, too powerfully. All she could do was partially divert it away from the fortress, to angle it off to the side, but the installation was at the lowest point in the valley, and even a sorcerer couldn’t defy gravity for long.
The tail end of it crushed into the east wall, knocking men down, devouring them. The rocket launcher disappeared, too, and—Sardelle gulped, and whispered a plaintive, “Noooo…”—Zirkander, who had been trying to shove other men away, to push them toward the back side of the fort, was swallowed too. The wave of snow crested the towers and crashed halfway across the courtyard, burying that eastern wall and two of the tram entrances, before tumbling to a stop.
Only vaguely aware that the wounded airship was limping away—and losing altitude as it did so—Sardelle raced for the mountain of snow.
A shovel, Jaxi warned.
What?
You need a tool. Don’t do anything—anything else—that could get you noticed.
It was good advice, even if she didn’t want to heed it. Already she had hesitated, protecting herself instead of simply attacking. If she hadn’t, she might have stopped that ship before it dropped that last explosive.
“Shovels,” someone yelled. “Get those men out of there!”
Sardelle clambered up the slope with a surge of soldiers, all of them slipping on the ice and snow but desperate to save the men. “The colonel went down here,” she yelled. “I was watching, I saw.”
She didn’t expect anyone to listen to her—Zirkander was the only one who treated her as anything other than a prisoner—but maybe the confidence in her voice convinced them. Three soldiers scrambled over to join her. She pointed, then grabbed a shovel from someone who had brought extras. She had seen Zirkander go down, the wave sweeping him from the wall, but she could also sense him beneath several feet of snow. He was alive and not badly hurt, but confused, trying to figure out which way was up, and how much air he had.
/> Sardelle dug. She had never been caught in an avalanche but had heard from others who had survived. The snow became like cement once it compacted above a person, impossible to dig through. A man had to be dug out by others. She flung snow to the side, planning to do just that.
“You’re sure it was here?” one of the soldiers asked.
“Yes,” Sardelle said without looking up from her task. They had only gone down two feet. They needed to descend at least four more, but she kept herself from explaining that. Someone would later remember such unlikely precision.
“Because the snow would have moved him,” the soldier said.
“I know that. I’ve already factored it in. There’s a… mathematical model that I’ve studied.” There. That sounded plausible, didn’t it? For all she knew, there truly was such a thing.
“Just keep digging, Bragt,” another soldier said.
Sardelle’s hands were already growing raw from the shoveling, but she didn’t slow down. Two more feet. They ought to be close, ought to hear something soon. Zirkander should hear them soon and cry out, let them know they were close.
“Stay below,” someone’s voice came from across the fort. “Just stay down there. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.”
The soldier next to Sardelle grumbled, “If those prisoners get out and try to use this to their advantage… ”
“I’ll shoot them, no questions asked,” another responded. “Sir! Are you down there? Can you hear us?”
A faint muffled groan came from within the jumbled slope of snow.
“I heard him,” the soldier cried.
“He’s here!”
Soon there were so many shovels digging in, that Sardelle could barely see the snow. Someone grabbed her from behind and pushed her out of the way.
“We’ll handle it, woman.”
She stumbled and almost fell. She hadn’t been digging slowly—there had been no reason to move her.
And you wanted him to see your face first? Jaxi raised a mental eyebrow. To know you were responsible for pulling him out?
No. That doesn’t matter. Sardelle scowled at the back of the soldier who had replaced her. She was done delivering rashes, but he might look good with his belt unbuckled and his trousers around his ankles. Maybe a little, she admitted to Jaxi.
Better he not have reason to later dwell on your uncanny ability to find him.
A collective gasp sounded, then a sigh as a hand reached out.
“It is the colonel.”
Everyone had joined in to dig him out. Though she hadn’t been here for long—and he hadn’t been here for… even longer—Sardelle thought she knew Zirkander well enough to guess that he would be annoyed when he realized they had stopped searching for everyone else to focus on him.
The hand was followed by an arm, with no less than four people grasping it. They pulled, and Zirkander’s head came next, snow sticking in his hair and frosting his eyebrows. With their help, he clawed himself out of the hole, then collapsed on the slope a few feet away from Sardelle. He dug something out of his pocket, a little wooden carving, and kissed it before returning it to its home.
“Are you all right, sir?” one soldier asked.
“Do you need to see the medic?”
“That was a brilliant shot with the rocket launcher, sir! Did you see? Their balloon was struck, and they were going down.”
“Uh, yeah.” Zirkander looked dazed, but he pushed the snow out of his hair and recovered enough to point at the slide area. “We have more men under there?”
“Yes, sir. Several others were up on the wall with you and—”
“Then don’t stop digging, man. Get them out!”
“Yes, sir!”
The soldiers turned to consider the wide expanse of snow… and hesitated. One spun back toward Sardelle. “She knew where the colonel went down.”
“That’s right. Did you see any others?”
This drew Zirkander’s attention to Sardelle for the first time. She considered how helpful she dared be—how far would they believe her mathematical model? But then she shook her head. People’s lives were at stake. To put her own safety ahead of theirs would be cowardly. She already had Bretta’s death on her conscience.
Sardelle closed her eyes, seeing beneath the snow with her other senses, judging who had the least air and needed to be dug out soonest.
“One went down over in that area.” She walked over and scraped an X in the snow, then backed away, happy to let them shovel. She glanced down at one of her palms. She would have a few blisters to heal when nobody was looking.
A hand reached out and caught her wrist before she could drop it. Zirkander had climbed to his feet, and he stood next to her. He arched his eyebrows at her raw palms. Ah, the wounds were worth it if they meant he knew she had helped dig.
“Nobody else knows about the days off I’m due,” Sardelle said. “I had to make sure you got out.”
“Of course. Very wise of you.”
She eyed his pocket. “You have a lucky charm?”
Zirkander lifted his chin. “Yes, I do. Good thing too. I needed luck today.”
Sardelle raised an eyebrow. She wouldn’t have taken him for the superstitious sort.
He gave her a sidelong look. “It’s not uncommon among pilots. We risk our lives every time we go out. When you’ve survived as many near misses as I have, you develop your rituals and beliefs, anything that might help things go right. You know it’s illogical, but you don’t want to tempt fate.” He shrugged. “One of the kids in my squad kisses each of his flier’s six guns before climbing into the cockpit, even if we’re actively being fired upon at the time. Another sniffs spearmint oil because he claims it clears his head. I have a little carving my dad made for me. That’s nothing crazy.”
“I wasn’t judging you, Colonel.”
“You raised your eyebrow in that way of yours. I know what that look means by now.”
Er, she hadn’t realized it was such a signature expression for her. “Actually I think it’s sweet that you have a keepsake that your father gave you.”
“Uh huh.”
“Sir,” someone called from behind, his voice turning the word into a couple of extra syllables as he slipped trying to climb.
“Yes, Captain?” Zirkander released Sardelle’s wrist.
The officer carried a leather bag. “Were you injured? Do you need treatment?”
“I’m fine. I wasn’t down there long, but stay close. Others might not be so lucky.” Zirkander pointed at Sardelle’s shovel. “May I?”
The captain—the medic, she presumed—frowned. Sardelle wanted to tell him to lie down and relax as well, but he took her shovel and climbed up the slope to join the others.
A gun fired nearby, and Sardelle jumped. Smoke wafted from a rifle held by a soldier guarding one of the two mine shaft entrances that hadn’t been buried by the snow.
“You will remain inside until the area out here is safe,” he growled.
Zirkander looked back thoughtfully, then called a lieutenant over. “Tell any of those miners who want to come out and help dig that they can have the rest of the day off once we recover all of our people.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You, woman!” a soldier called from the snow pile. “Did you see where any others went under?”
Sardelle climbed onto the slope and looked around thoughtfully. She knew exactly where the rest of the people were and how many feet of snow was mounded on them, but she didn’t want to appear too certain, on the off chance she could yet pass this off as keen observational skills and an understanding of mathematics.
She was in the process of marking another spot when a chill washed over her that had nothing to do with the falling snow. A presence swept down from the mountains, something she recognized but had not expected to feel here. She paused to gaze in the direction the airship had disappeared. She couldn’t see anything except falling snow and the vague outline of the closest mou
ntain, but she was certain… she wasn’t the only sorcerer out here.
Balanced on the Blade's Edge (Dragon Blood, Book 1) Page 9
