Shadowbound

by Gage Lee

  There were so many unknowns to deal with. If the scrats were stupid, they’d follow us when we went to mine. That would give us a chance to lure them into an ambush. If we tricked our enemies into following us underground, they’d be as good as dead. One shot from my harvester would collapse the mining tunnel on top of them. Boom, splat, no more scrats.

  Something told me they weren’t that dumb, though. The smarter move was to park their hooded tails in that house across the street. They could set up an ambush on the trail we took to go mining, alert their forces, and box us in when we came back loaded down with ghostlight. That wouldn’t just wipe out the Academy’s defenders in one fell swoop; it would net a bunch of ghostlight ore for Inphyr. I didn’t know what he’d do with it, but I was sure it would be bad for the home team.

  The other puzzle was why he’d pulled his forces back to his tower. Maybe he wanted to get them geared up. It still would have made more sense for him to fill the streets around the Academy with scrat snipers and hold us down until he was ready to squash us like bugs. There had to be a reason he hadn’t done that.

  But I had no idea what that reason could be.

  The unanswered questions bothered me all night and into the next day. Baylo assured me the scrats hadn’t moved from their perch, so we didn’t go out mining that day. No matter how badly I wanted to gather ore and get out of here, I held my temper in check and waited. Our nightly meeting didn’t shed any more light on the problem, and a second sleepless night didn’t get me any closer to solving it, either. While the students went to classes with Reesa and Baylo, and Biz trained with the fighters, I turned into a ghost that haunted the Academy’s halls. I roamed day and night, trying to come up with a plan to save the school before it was too late.

  Finally, on the fifth day after Biz was shot, I made a decision. We couldn’t wait any longer; if I didn’t do something I’d go insane. I slept like a baby that night, even knowing that my plan was dangerous and could cost us dearly if I was wrong.

  After a quick breakfast the next morning, I summoned Monitor to the great hall and explained my plan to him. The soulforged was highly unamused by the scheme I’d hatched.

  “This puts you in very grave danger.” His amber eyes flickered with annoyance. “Are you certain it is worth the risk?”

  “I’m not certain of anything,” I admitted. “But we can’t stay cooped up in here any longer. Every day we’re not mining ore is a day closer to getting our butts kicked by Inphyr. This may not seem like it, but it’s the safest plan we’ve got.”

  “Very well,” Monitor said. “I will gather the students on your list, as well as your sister. Do you wish for me to summon the rest of the Tribunal?”

  “No,” I sighed. “They’ll try to talk me out of this, and I don’t need the aggravation.”

  While Monitor gathered up my team, I used the alone time to get my nerves under control. A long, soothing round of meditation and circulated breathing was just what the doctor ordered. By the time my team was ready, so was I.

  “Xin, you’re in charge today,” I said. “Here’s the plan.”

  The ten students—Xin, the varm, the drem, and a pair of human females named Debor and Cair—who looked so much alike I was pretty sure they were twins—gathered around the table where I’d laid out my map. I showed them the seam they were to mine, and the route I wanted them to take. They’d go east, cut through a tangle of small houses, then push north into the ruins of a tower that Ylor had told me was once home to a cult of powerful seers. I didn’t care about its history, just that it held a significant ghostlight deposit.

  “If you run into any scrats, lose them in the rubble. If you can’t shake them, head back to the Academy.” I looked at each of them in turn, making sure they understood their role in my plan.

  “Those gates won’t open if scrats are near,” Xin said. She didn’t sound worried about it, just stating the facts.

  “We’ll have watchers in the tower,” I said. “If you’re in trouble on your way back, make a lot of noise. The rest of the students will meet you outside and fight them together.”

  “Sounds like it’s time to start kicking some butt,” Darok said with a toothy grin. It was a huge relief that the Academy had finally decided to let us all understand each other. “It’s about time.”

  “We’re not looking for a fight here,” I cautioned the varm. “Avoid them whenever you can. When the Fell Lord makes his move, there’ll be more than enough fighting to go around. I want everyone healthy when that time comes. Now, grab your gear and wait by the front door. Xin, count to thirty and then move out.”

  The miners left the great hall, both excited and worried about what lay ahead of them.

  Biz met me by the Academy’s back door with a grin plastered across her face and the little blue fuzzball perched on her shoulder.

  “You’re releasing me from bed rest?” Biz asked. “I’m so privileged.”

  “Lucky you, I need back up and Reesa says you’re cleared to do some fighting. Just don’t overdo it,” I said. “Can you keep the fuzzball quiet or do we need to leave him here?”

  The blue guy scowled at me and pressed a finger to his lips.

  “Good enough.” I chuckled and led the way outside.

  Biz and I circled around the western side of the Academy, our eyes on the rooftops of the buildings across the streets. Our watchers in the towers hadn’t spotted any other scrat scouts, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Those hooded monsters were good at hiding. They could be tucked away in any shadow. When we reached the southwestern corner of the building, I motioned for Biz to hang back and peeked out at the street.

  The Academy’s front door rattled open a second later, and the miners left the building’s safety. I held my breath until they reached the gate, which popped open. This was the risky part of the plan. If the scrats decided not to wait for the students to come back and opened fire on them as they marched away, we were in big trouble. My people wouldn’t have any cover to protect them, and I wasn’t sure the gate would let them back into the Academy once the scrats had revealed themselves. Biz and I weren’t close enough to provide any support, either.

  I didn’t take another breath until Xin and the rest of the students reached the end of the street. When they disappeared into the ruin’s shadow, I finally relaxed. We were in the clear for the next few minutes. I hoped.

  “Now,” I whispered to Biz. We scrambled through the western gate, ducked low, and sprinted across the street. The path I’d chosen hid us from the scouts we knew about, and no new monsters raised an alarm. We were good to go.

  For the moment.

  Hidden amongst the ruins, Biz and I hurried toward the target. We slipped through the shadows like ghosts, scrambling over fallen stones and around collapsed buildings. Finally, we reached our destination.

  The building was three stories tall with no back wall to speak of. The first and second floors were burned-out shells, and the third was only sheltered by a pair of low, crumbled walls on the north and east sides of the ruin. From our position behind them, we saw three of the hooded figures crouched up there, their weapons poking through cracks in the walls that still remained standing on that floor. None of them were looking in our direction.

  That was good. The whole point of this mission was to catch the scouts by surprise and wipe them out before they could call for reinforcements. I wished I’d been able to handle this on my own, but there was no way I’d be able to wipe out all three before they knew I was there. I needed Biz with me to help finish the fight before the scrats knew it had started.

  “I’ll take the two on the left,” Biz said. Her eyes glowed with ghostlight, though she hadn’t lit up her hands yet. “I’m right behind you.”

  I crept into the ruin, careful not to step on a rock or piece of broken pottery that would make a noise and alert our targets. The stairs from the first floor to the second floor were all the way across the room. I activated my Material Gaze of Discernment disci
pline to check for weak points in the floor, walls, or ceiling above us. A single red mark appeared in the center of the second floor, and another use of the discipline showed me a spot on the left wall that would bring the whole building down on top of us. I’d be very careful to avoid both of those.

  We reached the stairs and climbed to the second floor without raising an alarm. The scrats were so focused on the Academy they had no idea their enemies had sneaked up behind them.

  Of course, there was a new problem I hadn’t counted on. The floor above us was riddled with weak spots. There might be room for Biz to go up without bringing the whole thing down on our heads, but there was no way it would support both of us. I motioned for Biz to hold her ground and examined the ceiling above us very, very carefully. Then I took a deep breath and gestured to my sister that she was to go up the stairs and stick close to the wall. She could reach two of the scrats from there. I had another plan for the third one. Carefully and quietly, I moved under one of the critical weak points my discipline had marked.

  “Go,” I mouthed.

  Biz rushed up the stone staircase. At the top of the steps her fists exploded with golden light, and her left hand shot forward. The Spear Fist of Light sank into the closest scrat with a sickening squelch. Her right hand lashed out a split second later, and a scrat I couldn’t see let out a gurgling scream.

  I swung my harvesting tool up into the marker above me. The floor exploded and showered me with chunks of rock and grit. The third scrat screeched as it fell through the formerly solid floor and landed next to the wall in front of me with a meaty thud.

  The creature tried to scramble to his feet, and I stomped down on his chest to keep him from getting away. He unleashed a horrible string of squeaky syllables and garbled consonants that made zero sense to me.

  I held my harvester at the ready but didn’t kill the monster. I intended to keep him prisoner for Monitor to interrogate. If the soulforged spoke this monster’s language, we might learn something useful.

  “Knife!” Biz shouted.

  The scrat’s weapon had appeared in his hand as if by magic, and he swiped it at my leg. The attack missed my leg when I jerked it off his chest. With a screech, the creature rolled away from me and bounded to its feet.

  Biz stepped into the creature’s path, hands raised in front of her. The scrat responded with a vicious swipe that was so fast and unexpected I knew my sister had no chance to defend against it.

  I acted without thought. Blood splashed into my eyes and mouth, a blinding spray of hot and red.

  “Nice shot,” Biz said. “I think I could have taken him, though.”

  I kicked the dead scrat off the end of the harvester I’d buried in the back of his skull. He collapsed onto the floor, hood falling away from his repulsive face.

  This was the first good look we’d gotten of one of the creatures. Its face was covered in a sparse coat of wiry gray hairs that glistened with stinking oils. Its rodent-like snout bristled with coarse whiskers that surrounded pink nostrils crusted with dried snot. The creature’s enormous buck teeth were stained yellow, and its pointed ears were caked with plugs of old wax. It was no wonder the scrats hadn’t heard us sneaking up on them.

  “Gross,” Biz said. “Looks like a diseased rat.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty gnarly,” I agreed. “I’ll search this guy. Head up and grab whatever gear you can find. Might be something useful.”

  In the end, we recovered three hexcasters, six ghostblades, and a trio of satchels filled with strips of raw meat dotted with green mold folded up inside biscuits so dry and hard I was afraid I’d break a tooth if I tried to take a bite. The strangest piece of gear was a crystalline slate the same general size and shape as an iPad Mini. That was wrapped in a copper frame and had been hung carefully on the house’s front wall.

  I focused my attention on the items in turn to see what the interface could tell me about them.

  >>>Ghostblade, one-handed melee weapon

  Minor physical damage, moderate stamina damage

  This small knife can be infused with ghostlight to increase physical damage to moderate and provide armor-penetrating qualities. A single blade of ghostlight charges the blade for one attack.

  Note that inflicting a wound on a living target with this weapon will increase your corruption level.

  Value: Twenty-five blades

  Rarity: Uncommon<<<

  >>>Hexcaster, one-handed ranged weapon

  Moderate physical damage, minor stamina damage, moderate object damage

  This weapon fires bolts of corrupted ghostlight, with a cycling time of three seconds. It is favored by minions of the Fell Lord for the destruction it wreaks on physical objects.

  Additional modifiers may be applied to this weapon’s attacks, including, but not limited to, concussive, envenomed, shadow, and elemental.

  This weapon’s power crystal has a maximum capacity of fifteen blades, which can be recharged by the wielder’s core at the rate of one blade per second.

  This weapon’s power crystal is fully charged.

  Value: Fifty blades

  Rarity: Uncommon<<<

  >>>Unidentified crystalline tablet

  Purpose unknown. No further information is available at this interface level.<<<

  Well, that was interesting. The ghostblades seemed useful, but the idea of corrupting myself did not.

  “Careful with those knives,” I warned my sister. “They’ll mess you up if you stick anyone with them.”

  “I don’t need no steenking knives,” Biz said. “Stabbing’s for punks when you’ve got fists like mine.”

  “I forgot, Rocky,” I said as I dumped the rancid food out of one of the satchels, put the slate and knives into it, and took one of the hexcasters from Biz.

  She slung the other two over her shoulders and grunted like they weighed a ton.

  “So heavy,” she groaned. “What kind of animal makes a poor, poisoned little girl carry so much weight?”

  “This kind,” I growled.

  We laughed as we left the building and headed back to the school. I couldn’t help but think it had been a good day. If I could string a few more of them together, maybe, just maybe, I’d get us out of here before someone got killed.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  AND THE NEXT DAY REALLY did start off amazingly well, even after Ylor explained that we couldn’t convert the items we’d looted into ghostlight because of a corruption issue. I shrugged it off and got back to work.

  I worked with Baylo to set up patrols to prevent new scrat scouts from sneaking back into our territory. Those of us who weren’t out on guard duty went back to mining, though the days of large groups going out were over. Stealth was our best weapon against the scrats, and twenty sets of hands couldn’t all wield it at the same time. Darok, Xin, and I led small teams, no more than five at a time, out in a rotating cycle of unpredictable expeditions. After a full day of that, and accounting for the rocks we had to cull because they were tainted by the shadowstream, we’d managed to pull in a solid one thousand blades of ghostlight, all without running into any trouble with scrats.

  Things were definitely looking up, even if we had lost more ore to corruption.

  “You have to explain this to me,” I’d said to Ylor during our evening meeting. “What is the shadowstream and how does it ruin all our ore?”

  “Do not exaggerate,” Ylor said. “The taint affects roughly half the ore you gather. The shadowstream is one of the many layers of reality. The splinter is surrounded and protected by its fluctuating energies. While we remain within its dark embrace, the Fell Lords have great difficulty finding us—”

  “Except for Inphyr, who had no trouble at all tracking us down,” Biz said with an exaggerated yawn. “What other awesome bennies do we get from hanging out in the purple sky?”

  Ylor’s scowl deepened as my sister spoke, and his dark skin paled. He pressed his lips into a tight line and held his tongue for a long, uncomfortable momen
t of silence before he spoke again.

  “If you are quite finished interrupting me, I will explain,” the eldwyr continued. “Fell Lord Inphyr was already in the city when we splintered. As to the other benefits of the shadowstream, the most important one is the ghostlight ore you have mined these past days. The crystallized form of the celestial energy exists only in isolated pockets outside this level of reality. The Akashik network is also far less effective in the baseline universe, where it functions as a useful communication system.”

  The kernel of an idea blossomed in my thoughts. I crossed my fingers and hoped it was right.

  “Like the internet,” I said. “Can you use the shadowstream to communicate here?”

  The question drew nervous looks from the Tribunal. Ylor gestured toward Reesa, who pursed her lips and gave a short, brisk nod that dislodged flakes of dried ink from the tips of her mane of hair.

  “Theoretically, there’s no reason we couldn’t use the shadowstream to communicate with one another over distances,” Reesa said. “Of course, no mortal can safely access the shadowstream directly.”

  “But it runs through those ghostlight veins, right?” I asked. “We could tap into it through the ore.”

  The Tribunal clearly didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. Ylor’s hands fidgeted in front of him, fingers lacing and unlacing in complex patterns. Baylo tried to pretend she wasn’t interested in the discussion at all but couldn’t keep her gold-ringed eyes off me.

  “There would be significant risks to whoever attempted such a thing.” Reesa smoothed her hair back and readjusted one of the pins that struggled valiantly to hold it in place. “The ghostlight harbors resonances that can be dangerous to mortals when they mingle with the shadowstream.”