Guild mage eld, p.36
Guild Mage: Eld, page 36
There was no way back up the rockslide; even if her chute down into the abyss hadn’t melted too much to be usable, Liv didn’t relish the thought of trying to climb up the smooth ice. One fall would be the end of her. If she couldn’t kill the bat, she needed to get past it, and the moment it was recoiling in pain was probably the best chance that she would get.
Liv scrambled back out of the crevasse and did her best to sprint across the cave, as much as she could with her balance thrown all out of whack. The bat didn’t notice her at first, inundated by its own pain, and she pumped her legs, heading for the same tunnel that Matthew and Triss had taken up and out of the cavern.
From what she could see of it, the mana beast was in terrible shape. Its chest had been pierced by thorns, its flanks stabbed by swords, its feet and legs shredded first by thorns and then crystals. Even its tongue had been pierced.
Unfortunately, its eyes still worked—and, presumably, its mana sense. The bat flung out a great, leathery wing, blocking Liv’s route, and she had to veer to the left to avoid running right into the membrane. She slipped on half-frozen dust and shards of ice, scrambled back to her feet, and dashed for the nearest place to hide: the tunnel that went down.
Liv splashed through the subterranean stream and down the incline; once again, the stone-bat was unable to pursue her only because of its immense size. She got far enough into the tunnel that she hoped she could avoid the tongue and slumped against the wall for long enough to catch her breath.
As she sat there gasping, the bat throwing itself against the entrance as if to force its body through, Liv could feel that the ambient mana of the rift had pooled more densely further down the passage. She chanced a look in that direction and frowned; the veins of mana stone looked different.
In every other part of the mine, the softly glowing veins spread through the mountain like fat marbling a cut of steak. They curved and spread, sometimes thicker, sometimes thinner. The mana stone down this tunnel, however, ran straight and true, like a rule or a plank of cut wood.
For a moment, Liv was seized by the simple, basic urge to go and look. Curiosity nearly drove her to get to her feet, but another impact from the stone-bat trying to force its way to her brought her back to reality. She didn’t need to go deeper into the rift; she needed to link up with Matthew, Triss, and Wren and get out. Liv knew she wouldn’t be able to fight anything without mana, which meant she needed to make it back to the encampment to rest and recharge.
Or did she?
Liv had avoided it before out of a fear that she might damage the structure of the mines even more, but that hardly seemed to matter now. She stood up and reached for the nearest vein of mana stone. She put her palm to it and pulled. Power flooded into her as the glow from the vein dimmed.
But that wasn’t even everything that was available, was it?
Liv had long hours of practice in preventing the raw mana of a rift from overpowering her body. Every time her father had taken her north to visit her grandparents, they’d passed in and out of a rift even more powerful than this one. Even now, she was aware of the crushing density imbalance: her body was practically empty, and the mana that surrounded her was desperate to get in.
Instead of restraining or slowing it, Liv breathed it in.
The mana of the rift filled her in the space of a heartbeat, and it was all Liv could do to direct it, pushing it out into every last piece of her body, to the toes and fingers, because there just wasn’t enough room. She had to do something with it, and she had to do it now.
Something about the feeling reminded Liv of the very first day she’d ever used her magic, reaching out desperately to pull Emma from the icy waters of the Aspen River.
“Hand,” Liv muttered, and her voice was very soft and far away, hardly even audible over the ringing in her broken ears. “Celet Ghesia!”
The intent was familiar, half remembered. From the subterranean stream, a massive hand of ice, a mirror-image of Liv’s own, rose. The fingers stretched and clenched, and she stumbled to the edge of the tunnel to see better. The bat spun around to face this new threat, but Liv had it by the head before it could get out of the way.
She squeezed her left hand into a fist, and the hand of ice squeezed the head of the bat. The wings flapped for a moment, jerked, and then something popped. Blood and viscera squirted out between the fingers of the frozen hand, and the enormous body of the stone-bat went still. Liv released the tension from her hand, and the fist of ice loosened, dropping the corpse to the cavern floor.
For a moment, she wondered how much she could sell the bones, the casque, the meat of the monster for. There was no way to get the entire carcass out of the cavern, of course; the poor beast was as trapped in death as it had been in life. But perhaps a piece . . .
Liv twisted the hilt of her wand, and it became the core of a sword shaped from adamant ice. Using the sword like an oversized hunting knife, she climbed onto the cooling body and set to work cutting the bat’s skin away from the casque on its shattered head. Then, she grew a layer of small ice crystals to crack the casque from the bone of the skull.
Carefully, Liv brought the hand of ice down, shedding the outer layers so that the gory remnants of the stone-bat’s death fell away. She used it to scoop the casque up and then stepped into the open palm herself. There was plenty of water and plenty of mana. Since stepping into the rift, she’d only been managing the swell of mana so that she didn’t hurt herself. Now that she was willing to open up and invite it in, the power surged through her with enough force to make the fine hairs on her arms stand on end.
The pouring waters of the subterranean water froze in great crusts and roils, pushing the hand up the right-hand path, with Liv riding in the palm. She kept her wand in her right hand and held onto one of the massive frozen fingers with her left, and the wind of her passage brushed her face. Faster and faster she moved until Liv doubted a horse could have paced her as she rode on up the tunnel.
Chapter thirty-nine
The Cascades
Wren flew out of the crevasse, struggling to keep herself aloft and moving in the right direction. Shifting between human and bat forms didn’t help her to heal wounds any more quickly, and even a fresh infusion of blood wouldn’t make for a miracle. What she needed was time to rest and recover, preferably with a few jugs bought from the local butcher.
Behind her, the two wounded Lucanian mages scrambled across the now-frozen floor of the cavern, jumping frosted vines and ducking to keep their torsos low. A single stalactite and a mess of pebbles and dust shook loose from the ceiling at the thrashing of the wounded mana beast, and Wren had to swerve desperately out of the way. While a falling stone might have left her with a nasty bruise in human form, as a bat, it could knock her out of the air.
The white-haired Eldish girl Wren had hauled out of the ice so many years ago had surrounded herself in some kind of frozen barrier—it looked like a rosebud, of all things. However ridiculous that might have seemed, the ice was holding up to the attacks of the mammoth stone-bat somehow.
Wren reached the upward tunnel, circled once to check on the two people she’d agreed to guide, and watched as nearly half a dozen other enormous, frozen rosebuds scattered around the cavern opened. Out of each one marched a soldier, all of ice, clutching a glittering sword. As one, they fell on the stone-bat, stabbing it with their blades.
How did that sweet little girl, Wren wondered, become such a monster? What exactly had happened over the past twenty-five years? She’d seen young Lucanian guild mages fight in the jungles of Varuna, but that was nothing like this. When Liv had proposed facing the stone-bat by herself, Wren had assumed the girl intended a quick distraction or, at worst, to sacrifice herself so that her friends could get away safely. But if she was capable of this level of magic, she might actually be able to win.
The two wounded mages—Matthew and Beatrice, was it?—had reached the upward tunnel, so Wren turned away from the ongoing battle and swooped low above their heads. She opened her mouth, sending out a high-pitched pulse of sound that no one in human form would be able to hear.
The most disorienting part of adapting to bat form for members of the Red Shield Tribe was not usually learning to fly. That came with a few bruises, certainly, but small children had a certain fearlessness and genius for physical play that usually saw them cavorting about the jungle clearings rather quickly. No, the hard part about using a bat form was mastering how to sense one’s surroundings using bouncing sound.
The organs for it were almost entirely new; the human throat couldn’t produce sounds of the appropriate pitch nor could the human ear receive or interpret the returning information. Of course, Wren had been flying and hunting for many years, but she still remembered hours of frustration and the patience of her father as he taught her.
The thought brought a pang to her chest, and Wren wondered whether she would ever see her father again. She wondered whether the man who’d picked her up when she was crying over a skinned knee would recognize what she’d become now.
A mental map of the tunnels built in Wren’s mind with each pulse of sound, and she steered the fleeing mages first right, then left, but always upward. She squeaked at them when she needed their attention, and if that didn’t work, she swooped in low, just past their heads. Neither of them was moving quickly, but they were moving, and that was something.
Nearly physical waves of sound erupted from behind them, and Wren guessed only the enormous, deformed creature trapped back in that cavern could possibly be responsible. Matthew and Beatrice stumbled, clutching their ears in pain, and Wren dropped out of the air to land in human form on the tunnel floor.
“What was that?” Matthew asked once any of them could hear again.
“It was the bat,” Wren said, gasping. “That’s horrifying. I don’t know whether it’s just the size or something about how mana from the rift has altered it, but the thing must be able to use sound as a weapon.”
“If it hurt us that badly,” Beatrice said, placing one hand on the tunnel wall for balance, and forcing herself to her feet, “I can’t imagine what it must have done to Liv. We need to go back and help her.”
“That’s the last thing you should be doing,” Wren argued. “Both of you can barely walk, and he’s missing a hand. Goddess knows what’s still between us and the exit, and you want to go backward?” She regretted the slip as soon as the word had left her mouth; Ractia was no longer the sort of name Wren wanted to be invoking, but it seemed like old habits were going to take time to break.
“She came back for us,” the Lucanian girl argued. “And you’d abandon her? Just like that?”
Wren laughed and rolled to her feet. “I’m not abandoning anyone. Did you see what kind of magic she was using? If that girl can’t beat the thing on her own, there isn’t anything you or I are going to be able to do to help her.”
“Matthew?” Beatrice said, turning to the wounded young man. “She’s your sister, or might as well be.”
“The only sister I ever had,” he said. Wren saw that the man’s face was far too pale and observed that unlike the two women, Matthew hadn’t gotten to his feet yet. “Whether it’s legal or not. And it kills me to leave her back there. But Wren is right.”
“What?” Beatrice exclaimed, opening her mouth to argue.
“You hit your head,” Matthew said. “And you’ve been foggy ever since, Triss. You’re not talking like someone who’s been on a culling before. Neither of us are in a condition to do anything but pull back. You need to trust me to make this call.”
“However talented she is, Liv isn’t trained for this,” Beatrice insisted.
“She’s more trained than you want to admit,” Matthew shot back. “You read her letters same as I did, Triss. Six years with her father. She’s been north. You need to trust her. Remember that duel in Freeport? You trusted her then. Have a little faith now.”
“Blood and shadows,” Beatrice cursed, and then bent over to help Matthew up to his feet. “Lead the way, Wren. But if she doesn’t make it out of there, Matt, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Neither will I,” he murmured. “Can you still find us a way without your wings?” he asked Wren.
“I know the next few turns, at least,” Wren assured him. “Come on.” With her hunting knife in hand, she led the two of them up through a dizzying array of rough tunnels, ever upward and toward the roaring sound of water. Finally, they broke out onto a tumble of rock that framed the descent of a subterranean cascade.
Above them, the buried river tumbled down in a great rush, crashing over the rocks onto which the three companions had emerged and then down below them into a great, dark pool from whence the current continued on into the darkness. The air was wet with mist and spray, and the rocks were slick, darkened with moss.
“Up there,” Wren said, pointing to the top of the falls. “That’s the level the mines are on. We can climb the rocks.” If she could have shifted into bat form, the ascent would have been simple enough—but that would require more blood, and Wren didn’t have any to spare. The faint traces of power that lingered in her from licking Matthew’s wound were hardly enough to keep her injury healing.
Together, the three of them slowly worked their way up the rocks, clambering from one to the next. There was a great deal of swaying, several scrapes and near falls, and a lot of cursing. By the time they were nearly at the top, Wren’s fingers were numb from the cold water, and her hunting leathers were soaked. Her hair was plastered to her skull, wet and limp. Neither of her companions looked any better.
Wren hauled herself up onto a wide, flat boulder, then turned around and offered her hand to help pull Matthew up. Beatrice stayed below, got her hands beneath his boots, and shoved upward. The young man had been struggling, and he’d gotten quieter and quieter over the course of the climb. When the two women finally got him onto the rock, he simply rolled onto his back and lay there, eyes closed.
“He’s not going to make it,” Wren said.
“Shut your mouth,” the girl hissed. “I’ll carry him if I have to.” Before Wren could ask how she intended to do that, Beatrice raised a hand, took a breath, and chanted a quick spell. “Aluthet Thlākis.”
A shimmering blue plane of raw magic formed beneath where Matthew had collapsed, and it gave off wisps of gold and blue light, the same as the mana stone veins in the walls of the caverns. Beatrice raised her hand, and the shining rectangle lifted, carrying the young man.
“How long can you keep that up?” Wren asked.
“As long as I have to,” the young woman said through gritted teeth. Wren decided that, rather than waste time arguing, she’d see to it they covered as much ground as they could using however long the spell lasted. She led Beatrice off the rocks and to the bank of the underground river that wound through the caves and the mines. She could see a cut shaft ahead with obvious signs of stonework and shadows that might even be wooden bracings.
Halfway there, a monster erupted from the river, spraying cold water in every direction. Beatrice staggered backward and drew her sword but lost control of her magic, dropping Matthew onto the riverbank. He didn’t make a sound, or even flinch, and Wren could only hope that he was unconscious rather than dead.
One glance at the pale mana beast that had half-slithered out of the water convinced Wren that she had no business getting in close, even if she’d had her dagger. The thing was long and thin with a segmented body that sprouted dozens of fins, each pair extending out from either side of a given segment. It had some kind of long feelers or sensors extending from its head, though Wren could make out nothing that she recognized as eyes, and great fangs that looked like they could take a limb with a single bite.
She backed away, grabbed the hilt of Matthew’s sword and drew it from his sheath. The unfamiliar motion pulled at her wounded shoulder, but Wren ignored the pain and watched as Beatrice drew her own sword and rushed in. The point of the woman’s rapier sunk into one of the many body segments, but Wren couldn’t tell how much of an effect it had or even whether the monster was capable of feeling pain.
It lunged at Beatrice with its head, mouth gaping, but the young woman’s eyes sparked blue, and she slipped aside, slashing out again with her rapier as the monster’s segments passed her. This time, sigils along the thin blade of the sword sparked to life, shedding bright light, and the wound seemed to panic the beast.
Wren, circling to keep her distance, couldn’t figure out why for a moment until she saw the injured segment of the monster’s body shriveling up as if it had suddenly lost all the moisture within. It looked like that one section had been left to dry in the sun for days or perhaps been smoked over a fire.
It recoiled in pain, thrashing about the water as it tried to get at Beatrice again. The young woman, however, always seemed to know exactly where to step to keep herself out of harm’s way, and every cut she made withered the monster’s body more.
Finally, the mana beast turned and slipped back into the water, having apparently decided this particular prey was more trouble than it wanted to deal with. Wren picked her way back down to the riverbank and slid the wounded man’s sword back into the sheath at his belt.
“We should get moving before it comes back,” she said. “Can you use that spell again?”
Beatrice shook her head. “That’s the last of my mana,” she admitted, sheathing her own sword. “We’re going to have to carry him the old-fashioned way.”
Wren didn’t much like the sound of that, but she managed to get the man’s uninjured arm around her shoulders while Beatrice took what was left of the other. Between the two of them, they pulled him up off the ground and staggered forward. Then, Wren frowned.
