Shadowbound

by Gage Lee

  The doors swung open to reveal a long, wide chamber. The tang of iron hung in the air, along with the rich scents of oil and polished wood. Thick carpets covered the floor, martial patterns of swords, spears, and shields woven into their fabrics. Floor-to-ceiling display cases showed off all manner of weapons, from simple hatchets to bizarre-looking crossbows covered in gears and glowing crystal hemispheres. Crude mannequins formed twin columns that flanked the center of the room. The larger figures closest to the door bore heavy metal helmets with spiked crowns and suits of thick ring mail belted by heavy straps of studded leather. The majority of the remaining mannequins were average size and wore a mix of leather and metal armor types, with helmets that ranged from leather caps to elaborate steel helms with demonic faceplates. The final group of display figures were drem-sized, and these were clad in black leather from the top of their heads to their pointed boots.

  Baylo rushed into the room, and the students followed her. I had to stifle a chuckle at their eagerness to get their hands on this new equipment. We all knew what was coming, and the tools in this room would immeasurably increase our odds of surviving it. I stayed in the doorway and watched them try on armor and brandish weapons at one another, and listened as Baylo explained the ins and outs of the gear they’d be using in the battle to come.

  “You were going to let me sleep through this?” Biz asked. “Rude.”

  My sister had a new set of clothes. Her gi had been replaced by a short tunic over a long-sleeved black shirt and matching pants. Her shoes were gone, too, in favor of soft boots and white leg wraps. She’d pulled her dark hair back, and for the first time since we arrived, I really saw how much Biz had changed. She was stronger than any of us had ever thought possible. Her eyes gleamed with an inner fire that had nothing to do with ghostlight and everything to do with her fierce will to survive. There was darkness in her, too, a weariness that pulled at her spirit with an irritating insistence. When had my baby sister grown up so much?

  “Nice clothes.” I ran a finger along the symbols stitched into the left shoulder of her shirt. “Speaking of rude, why didn’t you tell me there was a tailor handing out new duds?”

  “Reesa just finished working on them.” Biz stuck her tongue out at me. “I guess she did mine first because you’ve been such a jerk to her.”

  One of the drem cried out in surprise, jewel-toned eyes open wide as he crashed into a display case with a fancy crossbow clutched in his hands. Two varm glanced from the hole in the wall between their heads, then at the drem, like they couldn’t decide whether to laugh or beat the tar out of the guy who’d nearly shot them.

  “You don’t play with that inside,” Baylo barked. She stormed across the armory, snatched the weapon out of the drem’s hands, and dragged the little guy to his feet by his collar. “No live fire in here, got it? Sit in the corner until I have time to show you how to use this thing properly, you little lunatic.”

  I squinted at the drem’s weapon, and the interface showed me just how close the varm had come to death.

  >>>Shardthrower, two-handed missile weapon

  Serious physical damage, minor stamina damage, five-foot blast radius

  The shardthrower fires quarrels of crystalized ghostlight shards and was designed to inflict maximum casualties on massed troops. While the burst radius damage deals only minor damage, a volley from shardthrower squads can quickly devastate an opposing force with overlapping area effects.

  The shardthrower’s power crystal can hold enough ghostlight for ten shots. The crystal can be recharged from the user’s core at a rate of one shard per second.

  Value: Fifty blades

  Rarity: Rare<<<

  Biz’s cough dragged my attention away from the new gear. She’d only done it once, a little thing, really. But the way she ducked her head away from me and pressed her palm to her lips was far, far too familiar. Another dry, rattling hack shook her shoulders, and she thrust her free hand back, palm facing me. She recovered quickly, wiped her hand against the dark cloth of her pants, then took a deep breath.

  “Don’t say it.” There was a faint tremble in her voice and rage in her eyes. “Just...Don’t.”

  No one in the armory had noticed my sister’s cough. Even if they had, they wouldn’t know what it meant. It hadn’t sounded any worse than a tickle in her throat.

  But the pain I saw on Biz’s face told me she wouldn’t talk here where someone might see or hear us. She was too proud for that. I couldn’t blame her. Everyone in this place looked up to her, and even the Tribunal was cowed by her fierce temper. She didn’t want anyone to think less of her because she was getting sick again.

  I led her down the hall, out of sight of the boisterous students.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Is it—”

  Biz put a finger to my lips and shook her head.

  “Don’t say it, okay?” She waited for me to nod, then dropped her hand back to her side. “I can’t hold both the poison and the sickness at bay. I have to pick one or the other, so I spend most of my time fighting the poison because that will kill me faster than the other thing. But I’m so tired, Kai.”

  A single tear slithered free of Biz’s eyes and trickled down her cheek. She caught it with an angry swipe of her left index finger and flung it away. She held her head high, defiant, but even her strength and attitude couldn’t hide the faint, bruise-colored lines that had begun to crawl up above the high neck of her black shirt. I didn’t need to talk to Reesa or Ylor about what was happening. I’d seen it all before.

  My sister was dying.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I TOOK MY SISTER’S hands in my own and held on tight. She was so cold I was surprised she wasn’t shivering. Black memories of waiting rooms with the AC turned so low my lips felt numb flooded back from the dark times before we’d come to the Academy.

  “Hang in there, sis,” I said. “I’ll fix this.”

  For once, Biz didn’t argue with me. She bit her lip and nodded, her eyes wide and trusting. It had been a long time since she’d looked her age, and now she seemed even younger than her thirteen years.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m just...I need to lie down.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said. My sister still looked strong, but I’d never forgive myself if she had an episode and fell down the stairs, or collapsed somewhere and lay on the cold stone floor for hours before someone found her. Things were about to get hot, and it would do us both a world of good if I saw her safely to her bed before I kicked off my next plan.

  A plan, by the way, which I didn’t have yet. I struggled with all the pieces of the puzzle scattered through my thoughts. There were quests left undone, monsters on the horizon, and a serious lack of ghostlight ore in our reserves. I tried not to let the concern I felt show on my face; Biz had enough to worry about without adding me to her list.

  “You can do this,” Biz said as I gave her a last hug before leaving our shared room. “Whatever happened before right this minute doesn’t matter. You’re the smartest, toughest guy I know. You’ve got this, bro.”

  I didn’t have any words to respond to my sister’s assurances. I wanted to believe she was right. But I’d spent the last five years of my life trying to outrun the mistake I’d made, and it always managed to catch up to me. I gave Biz one last squeeze, kissed her on the forehead, and retrieved the broken handle of the Blade of Burning Shadows I’d picked up on my first ghostlight mining expedition from where I’d hidden it under my pillow. Something told me I’d need it.

  “I’ll be back,” I said. “With enough ghostlight to send us back home. Bet on it.”

  “Monitor,” I called to the soulforged through the interface, “drag the Tribunal up to the watchtower. We need to get our ducks in a row.”

  >>>Message delivered. Monitor has acknowledged your request.<<<

  Cold fingers dragged across the back of my neck as I rode the lift. I didn’t need a premonition to tell me that there was danger headed my way
. The Academy was directly in the path of a category five monster storm, and I wasn’t sure we’d have time to get to the basement before it hit.

  The students in the watchtower jumped to attention when I arrived. They didn’t relax until I laughed and shook my head.

  “This isn’t the military, and I’m not your boss.” I walked to the low wall that surrounded the open space and leaned against it. “Somebody show me where the scrats have set up camp.”

  “Over here.” A tall, thin kid with a mop of red hair and more freckles than pale skin motioned for me to join him on the west side of the tower. “I don’t know how they got so close without us seeing them. We’ve got eyes up here all day and night. A mob that size should have been easy to pick out. But, one minute there was nothing, and the next...”

  He pointed out a tower in the distance. It was the same one that Ylor had marked on my map as a rich ghostlight deposit. Its shattered top stabbed at the sky like a zombie’s cracked fingernail clawing its way up from the grave. Shadows clung to its crown, a halo of darkness that spread for hundreds of feet in every direction. Black lights shone from windows on every floor, an unwholesome radiance that turned my stomach. I swear I smelled sulfur and rot emanating from that place even at this distance.

  “Are they all inside?” I asked the watchman.

  “Yep,” he said. “As soon as they reached the tower, they got under cover. It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I don’t think they’ve even got guards posted outside. Must be something awfully important in there.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present the members of the Tribunal,” Monitor started as he stepped off the newly arrived lift.

  “We don’t have time for that now,” I interrupted. “Everyone over here. I need your opinion on how we're going to crack this nut.”

  The red-headed watchman stepped aside to let Baylo and Ylor join me at the wall. He seemed strangely eager to avoid touching the Tribunal’s members, which was strange to me. Then again, the students might just want to stay out of Baylo’s way so she wouldn’t have an excuse to bust their heads during combat arts training.

  “I’ll just stay back here.” Reesa kept her distance from the edge of the platform. She wrung her hands in front of her and fidgeted her tail back and forth, clearly nervous. “I don’t like heights.”

  “That’s fine. I have some questions for you about those sutras we discussed earlier,” I said. “For now, though, I think we’re good. If you need to go back below—”

  “No, no,” the scribe said. “I’ll be fine as long as I don’t go near the wall.”

  I offered Reesa a smile, and she beamed right back at me. She was growing into her role, and her accomplishments had added not just to her confidence but to the way she carried herself. It was nice to see someone had benefited from all the chaos Biz and I had brought with us.

  “So tell me why they’ve camped out in that tower,” I said to Ylor. “It doesn’t look safe for a dozen people, much less the hundreds that Xin swears she saw.”

  From our vantage, I couldn’t see any other groups of scrats near the Academy. The shadows they carried with them everywhere should have been easily visible from this height, but the only clouds of haze I spotted were far to our west, where the Fell Lord had set up shop. He’d clearly gathered his army to march, but I didn’t understand why he’d send this large a group out ahead of the main body of his troops. Something was going on, and I didn’t like any of it.

  Ylor pursed his lips and studied the tower. Golden ghostlight circled his irises clockwise, then counterclockwise before fading away. I caught a whiff of something old and dry, like an ancient lizard sunning itself in the desert, or a mummy digging itself up out of a sandy tomb. As quickly as the scent reached me, though, it vanished.

  “That’s Hokendai Tower,” Ylor said. “During the first attack by the Fell Lords, a scrat war band infiltrated the city and took over the lower levels of that tower. It took us a long time to figure out where all the sneak attacks were coming from, and when we finally cornered them, it was almost too late. Even our greatest warriors—”

  While Ylor spoke, I dug through my quest logs in the interface until I found what I was looking for.

  “That’s where the Blade of Burning Shadows was lost,” I interrupted the eldwyr. “Boiltongue Vansinger killed its wielder and broke the weapon during the siege.”

  Both Baylo and Ylor raised their eyebrows at my interruption. The emerald warrior even dropped her hands to the scabbards on her hips as though she suspected some threat. Ylor’s reaction was more subdued, but for him, raised eyebrows were just one step short of a duel.

  “Where did you hear that foul name?” the eldwyr asked.

  I raised one hand to show Baylo I wasn’t up to anything and drew the Blade’s hilt from the pouch on my hip.

  “I found this the first time we went out hunting ghostlight,” I said. “I thought it was a cool souvenir at the time, but maybe it’s more than that.”

  Baylo licked her lips, and her hands trembled on her belt. The urge to reach out and touch the weapon was plain on her face. She scratched her chin and looked away.

  “You have no idea,” she whispered.

  “History lesson aside,” I said, “why would they go back to that tower?”

  “I do not know. The scrats broke through the siege and fled that place before the splintering,” Ylor explained. “We tried to chase them down, but we had lost a lot of men to their vile tactics. We no longer had the manpower to search for the escapees and defend ourselves against Inphyr’s attacks. Our forces killed as many of the enemy as we could, and for a while it seemed we might turn the tide of battle. In the end, though, we were forced to seal most of our allies away and splinter. After that, we had other concerns than what had happened with the scrats.”

  Baylo cleared her throat and drummed her fingertips on the top of the wall. Her eyes were on the tower, but not as it was today. She saw something that happened long, long ago.

  “They left something there,” the warrior mused. “When they busted out of that tower and crashed through our lines, they were in a big, big hurry. Maybe there was something important they didn’t have time to pack up, something they were forced to leave behind. Like Ylor said, we lost so many men in the fighting, we never had a chance to search that place. Anything could be in there.”

  The warrior’s theory made perfect sense. If Hokendai Tower was the scrat base of operations during the original invasion of the city, they would’ve brought weapons with them. Maybe a stash of sutras they intended to use against their enemies. Whatever it was, they’d want it back, and it must’ve been important if Inphyr had risked exposing his attack plans by sending such a big force to retrieve it.

  “You were there,” I said to Baylo. “What was it like?”

  The warrior’s fingers tightened on the wall, her knuckles white against her green skin. Her jaw clenched, and her lips twitched as she remembered a day when she’d fought for her life. A day when she survived and many of her friends and allies had fallen. I gave her space and waited quietly for her to answer my question. I knew how badly it hurt to feel like you’d failed those who needed you most.

  “It was a nice place,” she said, “before the blood cult took over. After they moved in, though, they turned the lower floors into a death trap. Poisoned darts, pitfalls, and a bunch of other nastier ways to die. The first team we sent in got cut to ribbons. We never recovered their bodies. We sent another team into the subfloors, but the scrats sealed the stairwells and booby-trapped the lifts. The stone was too thick to breach from down there. Our scouts said even if you dropped the whole building on it, the basement wouldn’t crack. That’s when we settled in for a long, ugly siege.”

  Baylo’s words were music to my ears. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Inphyr’s monsters had already started work on traps that would keep us from entering from the ground floor. But traps could also keep people inside the building. The scrats would have
to dismantle their deadly obstacles if they wanted to escape, and that would take time. That would work in my favor.

  “How many scrats do you think are in there?” I asked the red-headed watchman.

  “Can’t say for sure,” he said, “but if I had to guess, two or three hundred. What’d you see, Roogs?”

  Another student turned from the eastern side of the tower and scratched the sparse hairs that sprouted from his chin. He pursed his lips, shrugged, and nodded.

  “Probably closer to three,” he said.

  “Let’s say three hundred,” I said to Ylor and Baylo. That matched up with what Xin had told me, and she’d been up close and personal with that force. “How much of Inphyr’s army would that account for?”

  “Maybe a quarter,” Baylo said. “Assuming he hasn’t brought in more troops from outside the shadowstream.”

  Ylor raised his hands and pressed his index fingers and thumbs together to form a triangle in front of his left eye. He squinted through the frame of his hands and muttered a series of words that crackled and popped like drops of water falling into a pan of hot grease. Ghostlight drooled from the corners of his lips in golden streams that dripped, sizzling, from the tip of his chin. A gust of dry, gritty wind blew across the platform and left behind the faint scent of incense and rivulets of black sand that slithered between the meditation cushions and vanished without leaving a trace.

  Ylor was certainly useful, but tricks like that one made him seem even creepier.

  “Baylo is correct,” Ylor said at last. His pale tongue darted out to flick away a bead of blood from the corner of his dark lips. “Hokendai Tower holds a significant number of Inphyr’s troops. And there is...something...in there with them. Whatever they’ve come to retrieve has great power.”

  It was hard to tear my eyes off the dark tower knowing just how many scrats it held. Hundreds of those foul monsters were scrambling around in that building right now. If my plan worked, we could knock out a fourth of Inphyr’s troops in one shot, and take down whatever super weapon they were trying to reclaim with them. It was a juicy target, made even more mouthwatering by the rich veins of ghostlight beneath the building. They’d be in its basement, a structure that Baylo had confirmed was reinforced enough to prevent an army from breaching its ceiling.