“Come on.” Blazer shoved Kaika’s pack at her—her own was already on her back. “I don’t like the way that sounds like an alarm. We’re getting out of here.”
Trip shifted uneasily. If the noise was floating back to the entrance, it might be floating deeper into the cave system too. Was it possible that was intentional? That the plants functioned as some kind of natural alarm system? Or was their existence here merely a coincidence?
Leftie had packed Trip’s gear, and he tossed the bedroll and rucksack to him.
“Thank you,” Trip said, keeping the barrier up while he shrugged on his belongings.
While the rest of the team shouldered their own gear, he eyed the plants again, wondering if he could coerce them somehow to fall silent. Without killing them. Dragons and sorcerers had the power to manipulate human beings and animals. Couldn’t that extend to the plant kingdom?
But they had no minds to manipulate, no thoughts with which he could tinker. Still, he gazed toward the swaying flowers and imagined them furling their petals and sinking back below the water. As agitated as they were, he had the sense that they were running low on energy, that they couldn’t keep up the display indefinitely.
Rest, he told them. Return to your warm watery sanctuary and rest.
Are you talking to the plants? Jaxi asked.
I’m trying to, yes.
That’s odd.
Odder than talking to a sword?
Definitely.
Weren’t there ever any sorcerers that specialized in magic related to plants? Trip sent his silent suggestion to the plants again because it had seemed to help. Their keening wasn’t quite as loud, and a couple in the back slipped below the surface.
Yes, and they were odd. One of my handlers was like that. He thought plants were superior lifeforms, and he only ate meat and fish because he didn’t want to harm the divinely blessed trees, bushes, and flowers providing oxygen for humans to breathe.
You’re lucky Sardelle came along.
This is true. Even if she doesn’t let me incinerate things as often as I’d wish. I do hope she’ll return to adventuring once the children are old enough to support themselves.
Considering her newest child was only a few days old—and more might come along—Trip couldn’t imagine that being any time soon. In twenty years?
Twenty? I was thinking more like five.
I don’t think children can support themselves at age five.
Marinka is learning how to make cookies. What more do humans need to know?
“Trip, are you coming?” Rysha called, waving a pouch in the air. Her samples?
Blazer, Leftie, Kaika, and Duck had already disappeared into the passage leading deeper into the cave system.
“Yes,” he said and strode toward her.
As he walked out of the cavern, the keening stopped and the rest of the plants disappeared beneath the surface. He didn’t know if he had been responsible or if they were simply done fighting now that the intruders had left their place. He also didn’t know if they had silenced the alarm soon enough or if every creature that made the system its home was now alert and ready for Trip’s team.
23
After more than an hour of walking, Rysha began to believe that they might have escaped the plant pool without repercussions. She’d been feeling like a fool for giving Kaika the idea that she wanted a sample. She should have known that nothing good would come from cutting down plants with that much awareness.
“We’re getting close,” Trip said quietly, his eyes toward the dark passage ahead, a passage that had grown surprisingly wide, straight, and clear of debris shortly after they’d left the pool. The remains of old rusty ore cart tracks ran down the center of the tunnel. In spots, they disappeared, then started up again with no apparent reason for the gaps.
Rysha couldn’t see anything in the darkness ahead, but was sure Trip was looking with more than his eyes.
“To the dragon?” Blazer asked.
She walked at the front with Trip and Rysha. Kaika, Leftie, and Duck walked behind, glancing backward often. Kaika, in particular, seemed to believe some pursuit would find them in the aftermath of the plant incident. Rysha also glanced back often, for the same reason. She wondered if Jaxi’s words about badger creatures had been true, or if the soulblade had been trying to cover for Trip and Rysha and their unexplained absence. Technically, Rysha hadn’t been on watch, and Trip’s watch period should have ended by the time she went out looking for him, so their only error had been in not waking up the next person. Though she supposed wandering off to have sex wasn’t typically approved of on military missions.
“Perhaps,” Trip replied to Blazer.
“Perhaps? I thought you sorcerers could feel dragons from a dozen miles away.”
“From forty or fifty miles away, typically. But the place we’re getting close to is shrouded by some kind of protective magic that makes it hard for Jaxi, Azarwrath, and me to detect what exactly is inside. If Agarrenon Shivar is in there, he may be in a stasis chamber.” He summed up some more thoughts on that, perhaps from discussions he’d had with the soulblades.
“If he’s sick and in a stasis chamber, how did he impregnate a bunch of bats?” Blazer asked.
Trip shrugged a shoulder. “A great mystery of the universe.”
“Technically, he may have only impregnated one bat,” Rysha said, “though now that I think about it, I seem to remember that bats aren’t particularly fecund and usually only have a single pup at a time.”
“So, he impregnated multiple bats. And a woman. While sick and dying. Trip, your story doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s not my story.”
Blazer removed her latest cigar and arched her eyebrows at him.
“I mean, it is, but I don’t know any more than you do.”
“Not any more at all? That’s alarming.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Trip looked glum.
Rysha wanted to hug him, but not with Blazer looking on.
To her surprise, Blazer offered her cigar to Trip. “You look like you could use something bracing. And it’ll sharpen your mind if we’re about to go into battle.”
Trip’s mouth dropped open.
“Don’t fall for it, Trip,” Rysha said, though she believed it was a peace offering or something similar rather than a trick. “Kaika gave me one to try in the Antarctic, and I left half a lung on the railing of the airship.”
“You inhaled, didn’t you?” Blazer asked.
“Not intentionally.”
“Just take a puff, hold it in your mouth, and let it trickle up into your sinuses. You can try blowing the smoke out through your nose.”
“And this will be bracing?” Trip asked dubiously, though he accepted the cigar.
Like Rysha, he probably felt it was the kind of thing comrades did, sharing cigars, and that Blazer’s offering meant something. It amused Rysha to know Trip probably felt even more of an outsider than she did and wanted his superior officers to think well of him.
“Not for your lungs,” Rysha said. “Or your nostrils. Or your mouth. It may clear your sinuses of odd alien plant pollen.”
“Only pollen?” Kaika asked from behind them. “I think I inhaled a flower petal and got it stuck up there.”
Blazer thumped Trip on the chest with the back of her hand. “Pass it back to Kaika after you take a puff. Clearly, she has an even greater need.”
Trip snorted and lifted the cigar to his lips. He barely seemed to inhale, but he did exhale a small amount of smoke through his nostrils. Rysha was a little disappointed that he didn’t cough and gag, but maybe his magic protected him.
Or he followed instructions better than you did, Jaxi spoke into her mind as he passed the cigar back to Kaika.
Are you sure? I know Trip pretty well now, and that seems unlikely.
This is true.
A hum reverberated from Dorfindral’s scabbard. Rysha thought it had to do with Jaxi’s contact, but the soulblade fell silent,
and the hum intensified as the group continued down the passage. Ahead, it bent slightly and a faint light grew discernible.
“That’s it,” Trip breathed, gripping Azarwrath’s hilt.
He didn’t warn them to get ready or brace themselves, but Rysha could see his tension in the set of his jaw and the way he carried his shoulders.
“What do you sense?” she whispered.
He shook his head. She couldn’t tell if it was because he had no words to articulate what he sensed or because he didn’t think there was time to talk.
On her other side, Blazer checked her rifle, making sure it was fully loaded. Kaika moved up to walk beside them, Eryndral drawn and glowing green in her hand. Wordlessly, she returned the cigar.
Blazer put it out and tucked it away.
“We’re going to try talking first, right?” Rysha whispered. “If he’s awake? Our whole mission is to get his assistance.”
“If he’s awake,” Trip said. “Yes. But I think that will have to wait.”
“Wait for what?”
Another tense head shake.
Rysha would have tried to draw more out of him, but a faint sound reached her ears, something between a scrape and a rumble. It reminded her of a train rolling along tracks, and she glanced at the twin iron rails they walked along. They were so rusty, the metal bulbous with the brownish stuff, that she couldn’t imagine wheels rolling along it without getting stuck.
The light ahead of them grew brighter. Rysha drew Dorfindral, and its light also grew brighter. Soon it and Eryndral glowed so intensely that she thought Blazer might complain. But the grating-rumbling had increased in volume, and Blazer didn’t look away from the route ahead.
They rounded a final bend, and a quarter mile ahead, the passage opened into another cavern. It was bright enough to see the wall of a stone structure on the far side. A pyramid? Distance and a few dangling stalactites made it hard to see details.
Rysha thought she glimpsed light glinting off water in there, too, but she spotted something on the floor inside their tunnel and focused on it instead. A mound of clothing or some other fabric lay crumpled on the ground near the tunnel wall.
“I think there’s more of that tainted iron up there in the cavern.” Trip grimaced, his gaze toward the opening. He didn’t seem to have noticed the mound, or he’d already dismissed it. “I sense something that repulses me.”
“There’s a lot here that repulses me,” Leftie muttered.
Trip glanced at Dorfindral and Eryndral, but didn’t say whatever was on his mind.
Rysha veered to the wall to look at the mound and played her sword’s bright green light over what turned out to be shredded clothing, bones, and the remains of a blanket and pack. Most of the bones were gone, and those that remained had been chewed bare of flesh, so the sight wasn’t gory, but it was disturbing. It looked like someone had tried to escape. And hadn’t made it.
The pack and blanket were almost as chewed as the bones, but she could tell they were fairly modern, years old rather than centuries old. Twenty-five years old, perhaps?
She poked at the hole-riddled pack with her sword, wondering if clues remained within it. Who had the person been? A man? The clothes suggested that. But what had brought him here? Tales of the dragon?
“Think this might be someone who came with your mother?” Rysha asked, but neither Trip nor Blazer nor Kaika had stopped advancing.
Leftie and Duck had paused to look with her, or to keep an eye on her, but they only shrugged.
“Something in the pack,” Duck said, pointing.
Rysha crouched and pulled out a metal canteen that hadn’t yet succumbed to rust. There were also a couple of tin packages of salted and chopped meat, the labels worn off, and a leather-bound book. She gasped and clutched that to her chest. It looked like a journal. If the pages hadn’t faded too much, maybe she could find some answers inside.
“Hells,” came Blazer’s voice from up ahead. “What are those?”
Duck and Leftie ran to join her. Blazer, Kaika, and Trip had reached the end of the tunnel and all stared at something inside the cavern and to their right.
As much as Rysha wanted to flip through the journal, she stuffed it into a pocket in her trousers and raced to catch up with the others.
Trip stepped out into the cavern, raising Jaxi and Azarwrath. The blades glowed with red and blue light.
Rysha cursed. Had they already found some enemy to battle?
Lightning shot out of Azarwrath’s blade, and a fireball sprang from Jaxi’s tip. Kaika ran out into the cavern, Eryndral raised. Blazer leaped to the side of the tunnel and raised her rifle.
Hunt! Dorfindral seemed to cry in Rysha’s mind.
“They’re immune to my attacks,” Trip said, as Rysha reached the mouth of the tunnel. He lowered the soulblades as she stepped out, raising Dorfindral.
She didn’t have to search to find a target—two targets. Twin giant dark-gray metal constructs rolled around in front of a tunnel that led into a stone pyramid at the back of the cavern. The lower portions of their bodies were metal versions of the pyramid, the bottom half of it, but instead of being stationary, they rolled around on dozens of small wheels, wheels similar to those found on ore carts. Rysha had no idea how to describe the top portions of the constructs. The pyramids seemed to have been sawn off to create platforms, and a body rose up from the center of each one. They had human-like heads and torsos—from her position on the ground, she couldn’t tell if they had legs—but they had eight arms instead of two, like some ghastly blend of a person and a spider.
The bodies also appeared to be made from metal, but they were lifelike with those arms moving around and the eyes in those heads shifting to track those below. Those arms all had hands that held weapons: axes, spears, shields, and swords. Half of those weapons glowed a very familiar pale green.
“Chapaharii,” Rysha gasped in recognition.
Eight of them. Damn.
“Yeah, and they’re coming this way,” Blazer growled.
Yes, the constructs rolled toward them with deadly intent. The ground had been carved into a flat floor between the pyramid and their tunnel. That made it easy for the wheeled creations to maneuver. Further, the stalactites that had once stretched down across the entire ceiling of the cavern had been shaved away in the middle and would not interfere with the towering constructs.
Rysha spotted heaps of abandoned ore carts in a pile to the right side of the cavern. Their wheels were all gone, and she imagined some ancient engineer making those constructs, some peer of Trip’s with a love for machines. Magical machines. The water she had glimpsed earlier formed a pool along the left side of the cavern, with yet more stalactites leering down over it. Rysha also spotted a few of those plants waving from the shadows.
“Meyusha!” Trip called as the constructs approached the tunnel. “Meyusha!”
His voice rang with power. Rysha glanced at Dorfindral, then realized he was directing the command for “stand down” at the chapaharii blades the figures atop the pyramids carried.
“Shit, Trip,” Kaika growled. “You turned Eryndral off.” She shook the sword, but its green glow had been extinguished.
Dorfindral continued to blaze brightly, as if it hadn’t heard the command. Because it responded to new commands now.
Later, Rysha would be delighted at this proof that Trip’s pain hadn’t been for naught, but for now, her gaze lurched toward the closest construct. Had the command worked on the four chapaharii weapons it carried?
“Meyusha!” Trip yelled one more time, but he was already shaking his head.
None of the green-glowing blades that the figures wielded had gone dim like Eryndral.
“It’s not working?” Blazer looked at Rysha. “Why not?”
“A dragon or powerful sorcerer might have given them the attack command, which would supersede Trip’s order,” Rysha guessed, but Trip kept shaking his head.
“I don’t sense an enemy like that around.??
?
“Then maybe someone else had the reprogramming idea. Or those weapons could have been created before or after the period during which the Iskandian ones were made and the instructions printed in books. Maybe they’re prototypes.”
“Trip,” Kaika said in exasperation, shaking Eryndral again.
He waved at the blade and gave the command for it to stand ready. It flared back to life, glowing green again.
“Stay in the tunnel, everyone,” Blazer ordered. “They’re too big to get in here.”
She fired as she backed into the tunnel mouth. Duck and Leftie also fired, the reports deafening so close to Rysha’s head. Their bullets struck the torsos and heads of the constructs, but bounced off the metal without doing damage.
“I’m getting tired of that,” Blazer growled.
“Ancient guardians,” Trip spoke, his voice again ringing with power as he stepped in front of the group, both soulblades raised once more. “I am not an intruder. I share the blood of Agarrenon Shivar. Stand aside and let my group pass.”
One of the automatons pumped its arm and hurled an axe at him. Trip sprang to the side so swiftly that Rysha was sure some power, either his or the soulblades’, assisted him. The glowing green axe whistled past, embedding in the stone wall of the tunnel behind him.
Blazer stepped toward it, as if to claim the weapon for herself. But the axe shook itself free, then flew back toward the construct, landing again in the hand that had thrown it.
“What the hells are these things?” Blazer asked for the second time. “Magic or not magic? If they’re magical, how can they be using chapaharii weapons?”
Trip shook his head as he climbed to his feet. “Some of the metal from the quarry is embedded in them, and then some regular iron, and then… I’m not sure. Magic was definitely used to create the bodies, and I can sense that it plays a part in ambulating them, but it may be compartmentalized somehow. I’m surprised the chapaharii weapons are allowing something even partially magical to use them, but if a dragon played a role in creating these constructs, who knows what was possible?” Trip spread his hands, the soulblades still in them. “I just know I can’t affect them with my power. And neither can Azarwrath and Jaxi.”