Reborn in ash, p.31
Reborn in Ash, page 31
“That must be the waterfall Barukh told you about,” Ada said to Clara, nodding towards a silver ribbon cascading into the chasm on the far side. The enormity of the chasm made the waterfall appear narrow, but it must have been wide enough to span Tamir’s compound on Relgis.
“If only we could explore the chasm’s depth,” Clara said. “What life so much water must feed.”
“There can’t be light that far down, can there?” Tabitha said.
“Life thrives in the darkest of caves. All it takes is water.”
Ada sat down and took an apple out of her pack. “What in the shadows could make such a huge crack in the ground?”
“Two dragons fighting,” Laith said, raking the air with clawed fingers. “They ripped the land apart with their raw might.”
“I was a child once too,” Ada said, “and I found that story ridiculous even then. How big would a dragon have to be to make something that size?”
Laith shrugged. “If it was some great monstrous beast, thank the gods there are none in Thellian now.”
“How are we going to find the mine?” Tabitha asked.
Ada swallowed a mouthful of sweet apple flesh. “We get closer to the scar, find a safe place to camp, then I search for the mine.”
“Not alone you’re not.” There was an edge to Clara’s voice, which Ada chose to ignore. Or rather, to hone. Perhaps she liked Clara’s fire a little too much, but she would savour it while she had the chance.
“If Amran came to investigate the mine, it’s valuable to the Rinnites. That means it will be heavily guarded. I’m not taking you there. Any of you.”
“And what if something happens? How will we know? How would we find you? I refuse to be separated.”
That stung. “Did you forget being separated is the entire point of this journey? If I’m not back in two days, you make for Yriah and wed the princess. Make them change the damned law about blood heirs.”
“Ada.”
Tabitha cleared her throat. “I think this time, Ada’s right. Everything will have been for nothing if you get caught, Clara. Their deaths will have been for nothing.”
Silence pressed down on everyone like a cairn of stones. They shared a simple meal, and still no one spoke as they moved away from the outcrop to lay out their bedrolls. Clara put hers so close to Ada’s it almost overlapped, and when they settled down to sleep, Clara held Ada tight as a vice. They may as well have shared a bedroll. At least it meant Clara had accepted Ada’s plan. Fighting about it would have been a waste of energy. Though Ada was determined to be less reckless, she would have vanished while Clara slept if she’d had to.
There was little conversation the next day – mostly Tabitha and Laith talking about their surroundings as if on a pleasant stroll. After making their way down the hill via a treacherous animal trail, they pressed through bramble-free woodland towards the waterfall. Clara walked close beside Ada, and their arms brushed together often. A curious thing happened. Without sending out her essen, Ada could sense Clara’s flaming astia through that touch, a comfort Ada hadn’t known she needed. Could she really call her plan reckless when she feared to go to the mine alone? She could only hope her thief skills and new ethelid would let her return to Clara again.
At dusk, they found a sheltered area not far from the chasm, where they stopped to make camp. After a cold meal, Ada slept, asking that someone wake her when darkness fell. Her essen woke her a moment before Clara shook her arm.
“I sensed you coming,” Ada said with a sleepy smile.
Clara cupped Ada’s face, yet she didn’t mirror Ada’s smile. “I’m glad your essen is improving, because you’re going to need it. We heard several patrols pass, all heading north along the scar. I think they’ve been searching for us the entire day.”
“We must have killed the empire’s only good trackers.”
Not a scrap of amusement appeared in Clara’s eyes. “If you’re in any danger, I want you to leave.”
Ada nodded, despite knowing Clara’s heart wasn’t fully in what she said. Clara was torn between love and duty, and Ada hated being responsible for that. All she could do now was return safely with Amran. Anything else would tear Clara apart. She got up, checked her weapons, and filled her belt pouch with stones, though she doubted she’d have trouble finding more near the mine.
“Don’t take risks,” Clara said. “If it looks like Amran is a lost cause, you come back to me.” She held Ada, but they didn’t kiss. Somehow, that would feel too much like saying goodbye. Or perhaps Clara found it too strange to kiss Ada before sending her to search for the man she planned to wed. Without another word, Ada made for the scar.
When Ada reached the last of the trees, she wrapped her essen around herself and sent out a thread the way she’d been practising with Clara. Her astia wouldn’t be hidden entirely, but she’d seem like nothing more than an insect. Crouching low, she crept towards where the scar waited, a hungry maw invisible in the darkness.
If it weren’t for Ada’s essen, she probably would have walked straight into the chasm. She couldn’t see it even once she sensed its boundary. Keeping it on her left, she made her way north. The night was deep when she found a wide ledge that sloped down the side of the chasm. No soldiers guarded it. If Ada hadn’t known the mine was in that area, she would have walked past and thought nothing of it.
Passing the slope, Ada followed the chasm a way further before dropping to her belly and shuffling to the edge. When she looked down, her heart sank. Some way below, torchlight lit the ledge, where soldiers kicked bodies into the depths of the void. Amran must have attacked the night before. He’d had a sizeable force, which the chasm now swallowed. There was no way to tell if Amran was amongst them or if he’d been captured alive.
If Ada turned back now, what would happen to Clara? Even if Ada could convince her to leave without knowing Amran’s fate, would Princess Zemira wed for a political alliance with one brother dead and the other missing? Mind made up, she pulled back from the edge and returned to the entrance.
Ada sensed a few guards a little way down the ledge. Two were sitting, and four leaned against the chasm’s wall, all with bottles in their hands. Higher up the chasm as they were, their words reached Ada. They jeered every time a body was kicked into the depths further along the ledge, and they called slurred praises to the Winged Goddess.
Anger swept through Ada at how the Rinnite soldiers celebrated their victory, the way they disrespected the dead. She should have turned back. She could still take Clara to wed the princess. And yet, Ada couldn’t bear what she witnessed.
She stepped onto the ledge, her astia revealed for all to sense, and her first stone flew.
Chapter thirty-five
Chasm
Rage coursed through Ada, and everything seemed to slow. The stone she’d loosed struck a soldier’s temple with such force, it flew through his skull and pierced the neck of the man behind him. Both slumped to the ground before the others could scream. But they did scream. Ada gave a female soldier a quick death, a thin line of blood trickling down her temple as she slid down the wall. The other three joined her in quick succession.
Ada didn’t celebrate their deaths as they would hers. If they knew what it was to sense astias snuffing out like candles in a storm, perhaps they’d be less inclined to revel in the loss of something as precious as life. Ada took a moment to swallow, holding back the vomit, then drew a sword and strode down the ledge-road towards the mine.
The moment Ada stepped into the circle of torchlight beside the soldiers she’d killed, arrows flew. She dodged most and knocked others aside with her blade, tracking the projectiles with ease thanks to her essen. Once she disappeared into the darkness ahead, fire arrows came and soldiers swarmed up the road. Fear found no grip in her heart. These soldiers weren’t mages. She reached deeper into her new ethelid and immersed herself in the river of magic as she loosed a dozen pebbles. A dozen soldiers fell.
In that moment, when the remaining soldiers stopped their charge and backed away, fear’s icy claws did rake across Ada’s heart. Taking a life with magic was too easy. What she was doing… It was akin to murder. Ada stopped her advance.
One man stood frozen, staring at the body of a woman. He barely looked of age, his face covered with the marks of adolescence. Did he have parents waiting for his letters, or had the ash plague made him an orphan too? But he was a Rinnite, and Ada was Asorean. Her pebble flew.
Ada grasped her pebble and changed its path, striking the boy in the shoulder instead. He went down, his sword clattering into the chasm, but he was alive. Ada choked down a mad laugh. She’d sentenced him to death and spared him in the same instant, yet who was she to make such decisions? The mage who’d almost caught them back on the hill had been called a freak because the Rinnites feared him. Ada didn’t want to make people fear magic. It was only another tool of war, and she a soldier who’d broken her oath to take no more lives.
Her feet moved again, carrying her to torchlight and the soldiers within it. Some fought to squeeze into a wide doorway in the chasm wall, while others rallied and rushed at Ada with blades bared. Her stones struck shoulders, arms, and legs, piercing them. Yet what need had she of such grim injuries? She tugged back on her magic, weakening her strikes until they left no more than a nasty bruise. The soldiers were alive but incapacitated, unable to bother her beyond assaulting her ears with their screams of pain.
Shouting turned to pleas as the mine’s heavy wooden doors closed. The soldiers trapped outside fell in groups as Ada continued her barrage, and soon she stood amongst them before the entrance. Some soldiers gripped their swords tighter, inching the tips up. A few stones hovering in warning put a stop to that.
Keeping an eye on the threats outside, Ada pressed half of her essen through the wooden doors. The space beyond was full of astias. Did the soldiers think they were safe, or did the reinforcements rushing up the tunnel give them hope of victory? Her essen was dulled thanks to the thick door, and sweat beaded on her brow as she lifted a dozen stones inside the tunnel. Still, she was far from her limit. Group after group, the soldiers fell.
When no more reinforcements arrived, Ada found a large stone inside the tunnel and smashed it through the thick bar holding the doors closed. The entrance opened before her boot, and a woman let out a groan as one door collided with her head. All the soldiers not lying down pressed their backs against the tunnel walls, and a few lifted their hands in surrender. One even pissed himself in fear. It was less than they deserved.
Ada strode along the tunnel, stretching her essen as far ahead as she could. If there were mages in the mine, they’d be rushing to guard whatever the Rinnites had found there, but Ada wasn’t taking any risks. She held stones in her fist, her essen wrapped around them ready to act the moment she sensed movement.
It wasn’t long before the tunnel branched. Ada pushed her essen along both and sensed no life, only more turns she could get lost down. The mine must have been a maze, yet the orange glow of the wall torches revealed dried blood here and there down one tunnel.
Following the splatters of blood, Ada came across some dead bodies. Half were covered in shrouds. The others, who must have been Yrians, had great gashes across their bodies. Ada set her essen on one wound and found something there. A ghost of what it was like to sense someone else cast magic. And this magic was like none she’d felt before. Unnerved, she moved on.
After taking so many turns that she wondered how anyone found their way around, Ada came to a wide hall stained heavily with blood. It was so long, her essen couldn’t reach the far side, where a swathe of soldiers waited. They all wielded spears instead of swords, and some of their eyes were unfocused, haunted. It wasn’t because of her. They kept looking over their shoulders.
“What is this place?” Ada asked without meaning to.
A man in a metal helmet stepped forwards. “This is a place you’ll wish was your grave. For people like you, it’s a living nightmare.” He lifted his hand and twitched a finger. “She’ll show you to your doom.”
The soldiers parted, and a scrawny young girl stepped forwards, dressed in nothing but rags, if they could be called that. Her blonde hair was filthy and matted, yet what shocked Ada most were her grey eyes. No emotions lay there. Not fear. Not sorrow. They were utterly devoid of life.
“Don’t damage her too much,” the soldier in the helmet said.
The girl’s hand drifted to her neck, where she wore a thick leather band. No, not a band. A collar. Set into it was a red gem. Ada recoiled as she realised it was a fire ethelid, but the girl didn’t touch it. Instead, she lifted a leather cord from beneath her tatty dress and clutched something at the end of it. Ada touched her new ethelid in response and lifted a stone as she charged forwards, praying her strike wouldn’t kill someone as frail as the girl looked.
The air hummed with magic, but it wasn’t Ada’s. She wasn’t in range. The girl’s essen rushed across the hall and swiped at Ada’s face. Ada flinched at the sting on her cheek and ran on, trying to ignore the line of warmth that ran down her face. The moment the girl was within range, Ada stopped and shot her stone.
It clattered to the ground and fell into two pieces. Without pause, Ada wrapped her magic around them and hurled them again, only for tiny shards to fall uselessly around the girl.
“The air,” Ada breathed. “You cut with it.”
The girl’s only reaction was to draw on her ethelid, warm yellow light flaring between her fingers. Ada cried out as cuts appeared across her body. It was as if thorned vines swirled around her. Again and again, the very air cut Ada, sending scraps of her jacket and trousers drifting to the bloodstained floor. Ada knew then. The girl was the last Rinnite Amran and his soldiers had faced. They hadn’t stood a chance.
Ada lifted the fragments of her stone and sent them at the girl. Air cut them, and Ada shot them at the girl again, a dance they repeated until there was only dust. But the dust had been stone once. Ada spread it out and sent it at the girl’s eyes. Air cut at it, useless against so much. The girl screamed and clawed at her eyes with one hand. In her other, the light dimmed. Then it flared brighter than before.
Pain sliced across Ada’s left arm, and her fingers fell away from her ethelid. Blood gushed from a gaping wound on her forearm. It was open to the bone. She should have done something to stop the blood, but all she could do was stare at it and think of Clara as she sank to her knees. She should never have entered that place alone.
The soldier with the helmet grabbed the girl and threw her behind him, soldiers scattering rather than catching her. “I told you not to damage her, you stupid freak.” He strode up to Ada and pressed his hands over her wound hard enough to make her scream. “You’ll live, but you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
The world faded as Ada tipped sideways. All she knew was how her heart screamed, desperate for her plea to reach Clara.
Don’t come here.
Chapter thirty-six
Beyond Despair
Ada lived, as the soldier had promised. When she woke, her entire left arm throbbed, the sensation pulsing up her arm to reach her jaw. Her head felt thick too. Opening her eyes, she found bars an inch from her nose. She might have cared more about being in a cell if it weren’t for the metallic tang filling her nose. Her left hand lay limp on the stone floor, and blood seeped through the poorly applied bandage, leaving a sticky patch of red beneath her arm.
All Ada wanted to do was sleep. Fortunately, she was all too aware that was the blood loss talking. She pushed off the floor with as much strength as her right arm could find and slouched against the bars. Vaguely aware she wasn’t alone, she ripped a strip off her magic-battered jacket and wrapped it tightly around her arm, using her teeth to fasten a knot. Only then did she turn her eyes to the rest of the cell.
Huddled at the back were close to twenty people. The shadowy area they occupied seemed to be an excavation into the side of a large cave, and their cell wasn’t the only one. Several of Ada’s cellmates had bandages on their arms, and the rips in their clothes revealed the sort of muscles you only got from weapons training. They could have easily worked together to push the floor-to-ceiling bars away from their fixings. Yet their eyes were almost as dead as those of the girl who wielded air magic. It was clear why. Everyone in the cell wore a matching collar.
Ada flexed her left hand. Or tried to. She couldn’t feel her fingers, let alone move them. It didn’t really matter right then. Her swords and ethelids were gone, a new adornment gifted in their place. She lifted her right hand to where her own collar was fastened at the front by a buckle covered by a metal plate. At its centre was an ethelid. Curious if hers was also a fire ethelid, Ada set her finger to it and reached for the magic.
“Stop!”
A young man scurried across the cell and yanked her hand back, but he was too late. Ada screamed as heat spread through the collar, searing her flesh beneath. Snatching her hand free from the prisoner’s grip, she fell to the floor and clawed at the leather band, her fingers burning as she tried to pull the collar off. He tugged her hand away.
“By the undercurrent,” he said. “Touching that thing will lead to a gruesome death, and you’ll burn the rest of us along with you. What you feel now would seem like nothing more than a gentle kiss from the summer sun. Control yourself.”
Ada screamed, her skin blistering beneath the collar, but she heard his warning. She opened her hand, and he took it, letting her squeeze hard to focus on the contact. The magic had stopped, yet it was as though flames still licked her neck.
