I guess they figured out who was coming. Jaxi added a silver flare to Sardelle’s shield, making the boundaries visible to anyone close enough to see through the smoke. At first, Sardelle didn’t know why—it would make her shield visible to their enemies too—but when Duck and Ahn started shooting around the edge while keeping their bodies protected, she understood.
Slowly, she walked forward, in the direction the barrage of bullets was coming from. The six people were split into two groups, kneeling and standing behind columns to shoot. Ahn and Duck wouldn’t be able to see them through the smoke, and Sardelle groped for a way to explain where their enemies were exactly. She could have attacked them, but not without dropping the shield. The acrid smoke was already distracting enough that she struggled to maintain her concentration. It bit at the insides of her nostrils and tears streamed down her eyes.
A cry of pain came from ahead. Someone’s bullet striking a Cofah, even through the smoke.
Sardelle kept walking and was halfway to the closest column when Ahn dove to the side, rolling across the floor and disappearing into the smoke. Though surprised, Sardelle kept going. She wiped her eyes, and the outline of one of the thick columns came into view.
Four rapid shots came from the wall to her left. Even though Ahn had gone in that direction, Sardelle’s first thought was that the Cofah had crept around them and were firing from the side, where her shield wasn’t up to protect them. But no, she sensed the Cofah ahead still, and, yes, that was Ahn over there. Shouts and grunts of pain signaled the bullets finding flesh. Two of the Cofah behind the near column crumpled to the floor; the third turned and ran, clutching at his thigh.
Sardelle shifted toward the other column. Bullets were still pinging off her shield, but the Cofah had figured out the intruders had split up, and they were firing at Ahn now too. Since Sardelle couldn’t extend her shield to protect her, not without blocking her ability to fire, she rushed the column instead. No need to walk when one could run.
Close your eyes, Jaxi warned.
Sardelle did so, and a flash of light like a sun exploding erupted against her eyelids. The Cofah stumbled back, and the smoke vanished. Taking advantage of their blindness, Sardelle charged in, letting her shield drop and wielding Jaxi like the sword she was. The men knew she was coming and flung out their rifles, swinging them like clubs and trying to keep her at bay, but Jaxi cut through them faster than Tolemek’s goo cut through metal doors. She took one man in the chest at the same time as someone’s bullet slammed into the second’s forehead. Both guards dropped to the floor. Duck leaped into the fray and caught the third one from behind, pressing a knife to his throat. Ahn charged toward a corridor at the back of the room, following a blood trail.
“Be careful,” Sardelle called and almost ran after her, fearing traps under every floor tile.
But Duck’s prisoner was struggling, despite the blade at his throat. He opened his hand, dropping something, and more of the smoke spewed into the air. It must have surprised Duck, because the man was able to get his arms up and push the dagger away. He spun toward Duck, a blade of his own in his hand. Duck backed away, but clipped his shoulder against the column. The guard lunged. Sardelle lifted a hand, intending to throw a shield between the two men. But Jaxi attacked first, flaring, and blasted the Cofah with a stream of fire.
Duck stumbled away from the heat, but he wasn’t injured. Jaxi flared again, burning away the smoke.
I think he wanted to keep that man alive for questioning, Sardelle noted.
You don’t think he would have found that difficult if he himself were dead?
Duck stared at Sardelle and the soulblade, his eyes round. Jaxi’s glow had faded but not left entirely, and Duck’s expression was more one of terror than gratitude.
“We better catch up with Ahn,” Sardelle said. “She went—”
A shot fired from the direction in which she had run.
Duck nodded. “Got it.”
The clank of machinery came from the direction of the lift. Sardelle stepped out from behind the column to look as a huge metal wall slammed down with a thunderous boom. She gaped. It was more than a door sliding closed. The thick slab had fallen out of a gap in the ceiling to completely cover the lift and the entire length of the wall on either side.
Rifle in hand, Duck jumped over the charred Cofah and ran for the corridor Ahn had gone down. Maybe she hadn’t been the one to fire that shot; maybe the Cofah had escaped and activated this new trap.
Duck was about to turn into the corridor when a grim-faced Ahn strode out of it.
He skidded to a stop. “Are you all right? Did you get the Cofah?”
“Yes, but he smacked some lever in a little room before I caught up with him.” Ahn flung a disgusted hand toward the metal wall blocking the lift. “I assume that’s what he activated.”
“We didn’t want to leave yet anyway, right?” Duck said.
The way Ahn’s lips thinned wasn’t a smile. “Let’s find that blood.”
She led the way down the corridor, with Sardelle and Duck following. Doors lined the route on either side, some open and some closed. Small, dark rooms lay behind them, all with glass walls on the far side. They came to one with lanterns lit inside.
“Wait.” Sardelle wanted to see what was behind the glass. She stepped inside of what turned out to be an observation room overlooking a lab on a lower floor. There weren’t any people in it, but the workbenches piled with tools and machinery looked like they had been used recently.
She ticked the glass with a nail, wondering if they might break it and escape that way when they were ready to go. It sounded thick.
More than six inches. Given enough time, I might be able to melt through it, but there’s something in there.
What?
As if in response to the question, something moved in the shadows of a far corner. Sardelle was about to stretch out her senses to get a feel for it, but it moved first. It flew.
A construct similar in size to the unmanned flier floated up to the observation window. Instead of having a propeller on the nose, like the other one, this craft had a propeller circling above it, allowing it to hover in place. Small rockets were mounted beneath its compact frame.
Those look like the ones that stalked Ridge’s flier, then exploded, Jaxi observed.
Maybe we’ll keep looking for another way out.
Maybe a good idea.
By the time she returned to the corridor, Duck and Ahn had reached the end and were standing in front of another big metal door. It took up the whole back wall and appeared as sturdy as the slab that had fallen to block the lift. Before Sardelle got close, she could feel energy humming from it. No, through it.
“That’s our spot,” she said.
“How can you tell?” Duck asked.
“I just can.” Sardelle was surprised they couldn’t feel any of the power. It crackled in the air around them like electricity.
“Any ideas on how to get in?” Ahn touched three shallow divots on one side of the door. They were the only markings. “Does a key go here, or…?”
“I’ll try to figure it out.” Sardelle stepped closer and touched the cool, smooth metal. It was hard not to jerk her hand back. The power swarmed over her skin like fire ants, ants that bit and nipped at her fingers.
Good luck. I’ve already looked at the locking mechanism. It’s a lot more complicated than what operated the trapdoor, and if I melt it, I think we’ll just permanently lock ourselves out.
Maybe the sides of the room—vault?—are less secure and we can cut our way in from another direction.
It’s all metal. They like metal here. As heavy as this mountain must be, I’m surprised the whole thing doesn’t sink into the hot springs out there.
The facility did have a lot of metal. The floors and walls weren’t made of it, thankfully, or the iron in the steel would have interfered with Sardelle’s ability to sense their surroundings. Her thoughts hiccupped. Was that why she couldn’t sen
se Ridge and the others? Maybe they hadn’t fallen to their deaths, after all. Maybe they were simply buried under too much metal for her to sift through.
She looked at Ahn, opening her mouth.
The walls and floors aren’t metal, Jaxi pointed out. You were just acknowledging that.
Sardelle closed her mouth. She would wait to say anything to Ahn until she had more proof, but maybe if they could find a map, she could see what was down below the entrance chamber. Once they had the blood, they could check on Ridge and the others. She wouldn’t leave them unless she knew without a doubt that they were gone.
We haven’t even figured out how to get the blood or get off this floor yet.
Then we have a project.
Better hurry it along. There’s a lot of activity now in the rest of the compound. It’s a foregone conclusion that the rest of the guards know where we are. I doubt they’re going to let us sit here and pry our way into their vault unopposed.
Your cheerful optimism is always a pleasure to be around.
“Got something?” Ahn asked.
“Just thinking,” Sardelle said. “While I’m working on the door, you two might want to consider how to defend us if guards show up.”
“You think that’s likely with the lift blocked?” Duck asked.
“If there are other ways in, they’ll know about them.”
“We’ll be ready.” Ahn hefted her rifle.
Sardelle faced the vault door and shut out the rest of the world to focus on the locking mechanism. She tried not to find the complex system daunting, but failed. As Jaxi had said, if they melted or broke the lock, they would prevent the door from opening. That might be desirable when an angry and armed guard was on the other side, but not now.
We’re going to have to sign up for some engineering courses, Jaxi.
I already read Denhoft’s Theories on Aerodynamic and Aerostatic Flight, and those two extremely dry engineering books in that prison library. They were not illuminating.
Sardelle found the latch and tried to lift it out of the door, but it couldn’t move until the mechanism behind it disengaged. She left that area and probed around the other walls, trying to determine if they were metal too. Unfortunately, they were made from the same thick steel as the door. As was the floor and ceiling. It was interesting that she could sense the dragon blood through the walls, since iron blocked magic, and there was plenty of iron in steel. Maybe there was simply so much power that it bled through.
I should have asked Tolemek for one of his jars of burning goo, Sardelle thought. Or I should have had him teach me how to make it.
Maybe I could melt a hole in the door. It’s even thicker than that glass, so it would take a while, but I’ve melted cast iron before.
A hole? Why not melt the whole door?
You don’t want much, do you?
It’s either that or we have to master the lock.
I’ll melt the door.
Chapter 14
Ridge tumbled through the darkness, his back, then shoulders, then head striking against the sides of some kind of diagonal shaft. Knowing he might break every bone in his body when he landed—if he ever landed—he tried to slow himself down by grabbing at the walls. But they were cold and smooth and too far apart for him to brace himself against. And then they disappeared. Ridge fell straight down, plummeting through emptiness, and in the dark, he couldn’t prepare himself for a landing.
He fell into a surprisingly soft pile of dust that flew up everywhere, coating his eyes and tongue. The landing was still jarring, but not nearly as much as if he had struck stone or dirt.
Something heavy smacked his chest, and he let out a pained, “Oof.”
That hurt more than the landing. Ridge pushed the object away, only to realize it was someone’s arm. Had the whole team fallen into that hole? That trap, he amended with a mental kick to his own butt. He’d allowed his people to be herded right toward it. And here he’d thought having a sorceress along would make everything easier, that it would let him succeed where Kaika and Nowon had failed. What a fool.
Judging by the thud and the flinging of more dust in every direction, someone else landed.
“Sardelle?” Ridge hoped she was with them, because if she wasn’t… she was stuck up there with those statues.
“No,” Tolemek said, removing his arm from Ridge’s hand. “She, Cas, and your other lieutenant were farther away.”
“Duck?” Ridge asked.
“Yes.”
“Apex, are you down here too?”
A groan came from a few feet away.
“I’ll take that for a yes,” Ridge said. That had definitely been a masculine groan. “I have a first-aid kit somewhere.” His rucksack hadn’t come off his shoulders during the fall. “Are you injured?”
“Yes,” Apex said, a wince in his voice, “but if you’re the only option for medical services, I think I’d rather leave my health to fate.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my medical skills.” Ridge groped his way over to Apex.
“Aren’t you the one who offered to staple General Paltimer’s nostrils shut to heal his sinus infection, last fall?”
“That had nothing to do with clogged sinuses. I was going to staple his nostrils shut so he wouldn’t be offended by the stench of Tiger Squadron’s failure—his words—on the Dasikar Bay mission. I thought that was quite polite of me.” And if it had earned him a demerit, it had been worth it, for the look on that pompous ass’s face.
“Ah, I was mistaken.” Apex’s breathing was labored, his voice weak.
Ridge shrugged off his pack. “Let me find a match, see how you look. See where we are, too, maybe.”
“Underground,” Tolemek said.
“Yes, that’s obvious. But what is this? The garbage dump? The prison where idiot trespassers are deposited?” Ridge wiped his eyes. Whatever that dust was, it was clinging to every part of him. It was humid and hot down here as well, almost as if they had fallen into a furnace room. Maybe they had. This might be ash they had landed in.
“Obvious because we fell, perhaps, but confusing since we shouldn’t have,” Tolemek said. “How could there possibly be a basement when the ground all around this mountain is full of water under pressure and heat? You’d think any attempt to dig out earth down here would result in it being flooded. The mountain itself is odd.”
“I’ll trust you on that one. I was too busy making paper fliers to pay much attention during my geology class in school.” Ridge had two emergency candles in his pack. The first one he found was broken, but he pulled out a second one intact. “The other science classes too. And when I had that extremely tedious math teacher in third year, I spent at least a month perfecting a launching catapult for my flier. Or was it a trebuchet? I get those two mixed up.”
“It’s reassuring to know the man leading our mission is so well-educated,” Tolemek said.
“I know my weaknesses. That’s why you’re along. Did nobody tell you that you’d be the brains out here?”
Apex grunted. “Please.”
“I assumed I would be the cannon fodder, should things go wrong.” After a moment where he was probably contemplating the subterranean darkness, Tolemek added, “Wronger.”
Ridge lit the candle. “Only if you don’t have a bottle of goo in your bag that can get us back to the others.”
The weak flame didn’t reveal much beyond the grime-smeared faces of the two men sitting on top of a pile of dirt with him. No, it was ash. He had been right. If there was a furnace somewhere, he couldn’t see it in the shadows beyond the candle’s influence. He had the sense of another large room, not as big as that entrance chamber perhaps, but the ceiling—he could just make out the black hole they must have been dumped through—was about twenty feet above them. They were lucky they hadn’t all been killed in the fall.
Apex was lying on his back. His cap had fallen off somewhere, and the fine ash had turned his hair gray. His face was pale too. Ridge did a quick surv
ey of him and didn’t find any blood, but the way he gripped his ribs and kept his inhalations shallow told him much.
“I’ll bandage your ribs,” Ridge said. “No staples.”
Apex managed a quick smile, but his eyes were haunted. Ridge knew that look, the sense of fear when one’s mortality caught up with a man, the awareness that this might be the last mission. If he had internal bleeding, he might have a reason for that fear, but he couldn’t know. Best to make him believe he would be fine.
“It’s probably just a couple of cracked ribs,” Ridge said. “You’ll be able to walk, shoot Cofah, and find a way out with us.” Ridge wished his candle had hinted at a set of stairs leading up. Tolemek was rooting in his satchel. Maybe he had some more candles and could do a search. “And we’ll catch back up with Sardelle. She can heal you.”
“She can do that?” A hint of hope brightened Apex’s eyes.
“Yup, that’s what she was trained to do back when she… oh, that’s a long story. And probably more hers to tell than mine.”
“Is it the story of how she came to be in our world—in our time? Because she doesn’t really fit here.”
Huh, Ridge wouldn’t have guessed Apex had been paying that much attention or could have guessed that. “What clued you in?”
“There are some words she says like they said them a few centuries ago. And the instruction note in the box that held the communication crystals—I looked over it after we dealt with the pirates—there were diaereses over half of the vowels. Those fell by the wayside about two hundred years ago, at least on Iskandia. The Cofah still use them, but nothing else added up to Sardelle being Cofah.”
Ridge wasn’t sure whether he should encourage Apex to talk when he was hurt, but it seemed to be distracting him from his pain. He had to be the only one in the squadron who could find linguistics talk distracting, instead of painful in its own right.
“How long have you known? And sit up, will you? So I can wrap you.” Ridge held up the roll of bandage. “Here, hold this candle, too, eh?” He helped Apex sit up, grimacing at the gasps of pain his pilot made.