Shadowbound

by Gage Lee

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  I explained my plan to Baylo and Ylor, and their eyes got wider with every sentence that fell out of my mouth. By the time I’d finished outlining my scheme, both of them stared at me like I’d grown a second head that had promptly eaten its own face.

  “That is utterly insane,” the eldwyr said. “If anything goes wrong, and I do mean anything, you will almost certainly die.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I don’t think we have a choice here. We can’t risk mining ghostlight with a few hundred bad guys parked on our doorstep. And once they get their hands on whatever they came for, I’m pretty sure that whole mob will come straight at the Academy. I’m open to saner ideas, if you’ve got any.”

  The eldwyr and varm glared at one another, then at me. They knew our backs were against the wall, but they didn’t want to risk losing the only person who could rebuild the Academy. I hoped their worry didn’t end there. I’d started to think of them as friends, not just allies, and hoped they felt the same.

  “He’s right,” Reesa said. “This is the only way. He has to try.”

  And, with that, it was decided.

  I was about to attempt something that Baylo and a whole army had been unable to do.

  Lucky me.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  WITH MY NEW PLAN DECIDED, I headed downstairs for another boring dinner of too many ham and turkey sandwiches. I tried imagining every bite was something different: pizza, tacos, Mongolian beef with rice noodles, sweet potato fries drenched in ketchup, even asparagus, which I didn’t normally like but had a strong enough flavor I hoped my taste buds could be tricked into remembering it. Unfortunately, none of it worked. I bit off hunks of my meal, chewed them, and washed them down with flavorless water that did nothing to distract me from my concerns over what would happen the next morning. When my stomach was full and my mouth was well and truly over the whole boring process of eating, I dumped my plate back in the food services area, where some magic would clean it, and headed back to the room that I shared with my sister.

  Biz was already asleep, her eyes shifting fitfully beneath their lids. The fuzzball was curled up on her pillow, its wide eyes fixed on her motionless face. The little guy stroked her hair gently and murmured into her ear. I didn’t know what he was up to, but I was glad someone was keeping Biz company while I worked to save her life.

  Reesa was alone in the great hall when I woke early in the morning. She smiled when she saw me and held up a single sutra inscribed on silver cloth. It gleamed like metal between her fingers as she slithered around the broken table to deliver it to me.

  “I made this for you,” she said. “You deserve better than those rags you have been wearing. This is more suiting for a man of your station.”

  I had to laugh at that. A man of my station? I was still a kid. Narsk Alaush had made me an engineer without even asking if I wanted the job. I felt like a little boy playing dress-up in his dad’s office. For a moment, I considered rejecting the worm woman’s offer. But Reesa wanted me to have this, and I’d be a jerk to look a gift worm in the mouth. I gave the scribe a short bow and a smile.

  “You didn’t need to do this,” I said. “But thank you. I appreciate it.”

  “Let me put this on you,” she said, fussing like a mother hen over one of her chicks. She pulled my right arm out from my body and wrapped the silver cloth around the bicep. The strip of ribbon squeezed my arm with the slow insistence of a blood pressure cuff. There was a faint hiss from the ribbon, and I saw that it had fused its ends together, securing itself. “There we go. Now, feed it just a little ghostlight. One blade will do it.”

  I concentrated on doing as Reesa had asked. One of the seven blades my core contained wormed its way down my arm’s meridian and oozed through my skin in golden beads. The celestial energy soaked into the ribbon, flowing along its fibers and settling around the ink that formed the sutra. A tingle like static electricity raced over me, and I felt a sudden chill as my clothes came apart. With a yelp, I tried to cover the more sensitive parts of my anatomy, only to find that I was already fully dressed. Reesa’s sutra had wrapped me head to toe in new gear, all of it rugged enough to stand up to the ridiculous messes I kept getting myself into.

  My new gray shirt had two columns of symbols that ran down either side of my chest. The legs of the dark pants held deep pockets with heavy flaps to hold in all my gear, and a broad belt held them up. I even had a new pair of thick-soled hiking boots that looked sturdy enough to kick straight through a door if I ever needed to do so. Surprisingly, the hilt of the Blade of Burning Shadows had found a home dangling from a metal hook on my belt. Even better, the new clothes were clean and didn’t smell like sweat, rock dust, and old ham sandwiches. I would’ve killed for a shower about then, but I didn’t think it was in the cards.

  That was all right. If everything went the way I’d planned, Biz and I would be home in a few hours. This whole ordeal was almost over.

  “Thank you,” I said. I reached out to hug Reesa, and this time she let me. Her arms were like wet noodles at her sides, but at least she didn’t run away. Progress at last.

  “Try not to get blood on it,” she whispered. “We still need you to help us rebuild the school.”

  “Look at that,” Xin called out as she entered the great hall, her torso and legs wrapped in flexible leather armor. Her black boots made hardly a sound as she crossed the floor. “I turn my back for one minute and you’re hugging all over Reesa. How do you think that makes a girlfriend feel?”

  Mortified, the scribe slithered out of my grip and quickly made an exit from the hall. She gave Xin a wide berth, even though the horned girl had a broad smile on her face.

  “Still not letting that go, I see,” I said. “Is Baylo rousing the others?”

  Xin grabbed the chair next to me, spun it around, and took a seat. She rested her chin on its back and batted her eyelashes at me. She really was pretty, horns and all. But if Biz looked feral, Xin was positively rabid. Even now, when she was trying to be silly, a dark hunger stirred in the deep, dark pools of her eyes.

  “Yep,” she said. “I hear you’ve got something exciting planned for us today.”

  “I do. But, first, there’s something I want to ask you,” I said quietly. “You don’t have to answer, but I’d rest a lot easier if you did.”

  Xin raised her arms over her head and stretched like a cat.

  “Ask away. I’ll only kill you if I’m offended,” she said with a wink.

  “I was looking at the manifest for the shadow vault,” I said. “The one we broke you out of. Do you remember anything before they put you under?”

  The horned girl’s eyebrows raised, just a hair, before her expression froze into an emotionless mask. Her pupils dilated, like a hunting panther sizing up a target in the instant before it pounced. For a single heartbeat, I was sure Xin would come over that chair and wrap her hands around my throat.

  And then it passed, and a smile broke across her face like a sunbeam through a storm cloud.

  “You know,” she said. “And you haven’t—”

  The rest of the students I’d asked Baylo to round up for me that morning came crashing into the great hall in a boisterous mob. They’d all geared up in the armory and looked every bit as impressive as they were noisy. Ring mail and metal helmets covered all four of the varm, making them virtually indistinguishable from each other. The green-skinned students had all selected heavy axes that were so big I had no doubt they could cut a scrat clean in half with one blow. A pair of drem, dressed up like ninjas in their new armor, scampered in right behind them. They each had one of the shardthrowers strapped to their backs and short swords in the sheathes on their belts. I really hoped that Baylo had showed them the proper way to use those bows. Getting my head blown off wasn’t how I wanted to start this day.

  “That’s it,” Baylo said. “Just the eight of you?”

  “Yep,” I said. “
Quiet is better for this one. Now gather around and pay very close attention to everything I’m about to say.”

  To their credit, my hand-picked team did exactly that. The drem didn’t play with their weapons or fiddle with their masks. The varm stopped sharpening their axes and adjusting the straps on their harnesses. And Xin let her normally mischievous grin fade as she focused all her attention on the very serious business at hand. When I asked them if they understood what we were about to do, they all gave me solemn nods.

  “I know this sounds insane,” I said. “And it is. But that’s why it will work. Taking this chance with me is a lot to ask. The fact that you all stepped up means more to me than I can say. This is how we beat the Fell Lord. By sticking together, and doing the impossible.”

  My team threw high-fives to one another and cheered. I wasn’t much of a speaker, but I hoped that gave them the confidence we needed for this scheme.

  Baylo stopped me on our way out the door. She held out a two-handed hammer with a thick wooden haft and a head fashioned into a leering, demonic face.

  “What you’re doing is nuts.” She flashed a toothy grin that said she wholeheartedly approved of this kind of crazy. “Take my hammer. Use it to show those animals they’ve made a terrible mistake coming after us.”

  I took the weapon from the warrior and marveled at its balance. Despite its size, it was easy to handle, and I imagined it would deal extraordinary damage to anything that got in its way.

  “They’re not getting away this time,” I said. “I’ll finish what you started.”

  The emerald warrior thrust her hand out, and I grabbed it. She turned our shake into a full hug.

  “Kill them all,” she said seriously. “It’s the only way.”

  Debris whirled through the purple sky as we left the Academy. There was something chaotic in the air, a wild and frenzied energy just waiting to burst free, as if the city knew what was coming.

  The strike team moved in silence through the ruins. We chose our path with care, sticking to the most congested, claustrophobic alleyways, and streets with the most concealment from any watchers in Hokendai Tower. Our best and only hope of succeeding in this mission was stealth. If the scrats knew we were coming, we were already dead. That thought hung heavy above me as I led the rest of the kids on the longest hike of my life. Our excessive caution and the difficult terrain stretched what I thought would be an hour’s journey into half a day. By the time we found ourselves in Hokendai Tower’s shadow, my stomach was more than happy to let me know that it was lunchtime.

  The city was in much better repair near the tower than the other areas I’d explored. Most of the structures still had their pagoda-like roofs, and though the glass was long gone from the windows, the shutters still remained. I spotted a building that had survived the years remarkably intact and led my team to its back door. We needed a chance to catch our breath before the next phase. I tapped the drem on their shoulders once we were safely inside, and they scrambled upstairs in search of any enemies who might be hiding in the building. I’d picked the little guys specifically for their stealth, and they seemed to relish their role as scouts.

  The rest of our team hunkered down in an interior room with no clear lines of sight to the outside. Just because we hadn’t seen any scrats didn’t mean we were safe. If one of the hooded monsters inside Hokendai Tower came outside to take a leak and happened to see us through a window, we were doomed.

  “It’s almost done,” Xin said softly. She took a seat on the floor beside me and bumped my knee with hers. “I wanted you to know I’m not keeping any secrets. When we’re out of here, I’ll answer all your questions.”

  I nodded, and that was the end of the conversation. There wasn’t room in my head for any more confusion or conflicted conversations. My best chance of getting out of this in one piece was to focus on exactly what I had to do, and nothing else. So, while I wanted to know everything about Xin and how she’d ended up in that shadow vault, this wasn’t the time or the place. We sat in silence, all of us alone together, preparing ourselves for what came next.

  The drem returned from their scouting fifteen minutes after I’d sent them out. Their eyes sparkled like gemstones as they flashed me the hand signs we’d learned during our few short days together. We were clear for two blocks to the west. No scrats outside, no watchers in the tower’s windows that they could see. Whatever the monsters were up to in that twisted old ruin had their complete attention. I crossed my fingers and hoped that our luck would hold, and the scrats wouldn’t know what was happening until it was far too late to stop it.

  “It’s time,” I said quietly. “Everyone’s clear on what we do next?”

  Xin nodded, as did the varm and the drem. The little guys loosed their shardthrowers from the straps on their backs, while the green-skinned fighters unlimbered their axes. Xin winked at me and twirled a matching set of knives around her fingers. The blades danced as merrily as the light in her eyes, then vanished back into their sheathes.

  “Good luck.” I thrust my hand out in front of me, and the others piled theirs on top of mine. We held them there for a long moment, then split the party. I went west, the rest of them went north.

  I moved as quickly as I could without making any noise. My path carried me over fallen plinths and through shattered doors. I scrambled over rubble, dropped down into open trenches left over from the siege of Hokendai Tower, and stayed in the shadows of the buildings that shielded me from sight. If a single scrat saw me before I reached my goal, my plan would come crashing down around my ears. I banished that terrible thought and focused on my goal. I memorized the feel of the hammer’s haft and visualized how I’d swing it harder than I’d ever struck a blow before. In my mind’s eye, the task was completed before it even began. My body knew exactly what would happen when the time came to act.

  I stopped at the edge of the open courtyard that surrounded the tower and craned my neck back to see the building’s fractured crown piercing the sky above. Power throbbed from that structure like the ache of a rotten tooth. Whatever the scrats were doing, they were almost finished. It wouldn’t be long before they poured out of the tower like a plague of rats to spread the disease of violence.

  “No,” I whispered. “That won’t happen.”

  I activated the Material Gaze of Discernment and focused on the base of the building ahead of me. It was easily a hundred feet around, and it took a few seconds for the discipline to find the weakest point on the side facing me. When the mark finally appeared, I prepared myself for the most dangerous thing I’d ever done.

  >>>Your infusion request of three blades in arm and leg meridians exceeds the safe capacity of those meridians. Proceeding with this infusion will inflict moderate physical damage for each meridian overloaded. This will cause serious physical damage, engineer. Do you wish to continue?<<<

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  >>>Infusing three blades of ghostlight into arm meridians. Your strength has increased three ranks from enhanced to superior. You have suffered moderate physical damage.

  Infusing three blades of ghostlight into leg meridians. Your agility has increased three ranks from neutral to excellent. You have suffered serious physical damage.

  Health reserves have been reduced to half, engineer.

  The infusion will last for three minutes.

  You currently have one blade of ghostlight remaining in your core.

  Proceed with caution.<<<

  Lightning filled my veins, and I gritted my teeth against the burning aches that surged through my arms and legs. My muscles swelled and writhed under my skin, pushed past their normal limits. I was stronger and faster than I’d ever been in my life.

  I had a handful of minutes to make the most of it.

  I charged out into the courtyard that surrounded my target. Crossing the fifty-yard wide open space was the most dangerous part of the whole mission.

  My heart pounded in my ears, every beat ticking away another eternity. I wa
s so slow, the scrats would have a million years to spot me coming. In the time it took me to take a single step, they could fire a hundred hexcaster bolts. There was no way I’d make it to the tower alive.

  Two steps, five steps, and still no cries of alarm or blasts of shrapnel as bolts slammed into the ground around me.

  Ten steps, twenty. The only sound was the rushing of wind past my ears and the relentless hammering of my pulse. The adrenaline in my veins seemed to multiply the effect of the ghostlight in my meridians. The hammer weighed nothing in my hands as I cocked it back over my shoulder and focused my eyes on my discipline’s blazing red target.

  Thirty steps, forty, and I swung with every fiber of my enhanced strength. There was no separation between my skin and the hammer’s wooden haft. The weapon was an extension of my burning desire to crush my enemies into dust. My arms and shoulders screamed as I planted my feet and twisted into the blow.

  The hammer landed on the stone with a thunder-crack blast. Shards of battered rock flew past me in every direction. Fractures as wide as my hand raced away from the massive hole I’d blasted deep in Hokendai Tower’s wall. The entire structure shuddered. An avalanche of wood and rock from its upper floors sloughed away and crashed to the ground. A deep groan rumbled through the building, and it was soon joined by cries of alarm and angry shouts from within.

  The scrats would be coming soon.

  And I still had work to do.

  I slung the hammer over my shoulder, raced to the rear side of the tower, and flattened my back against its wall. It would be a full minute before I could use my discipline again, and I really, really hoped the drem were in position to do their part. Because if they weren’t, I was never getting out of here.