Book II. Chapter 130. Undertow

“Taisia, wait!” Ardan caught up with her and grabbed her by the wrist as she stubbornly pressed on.

Instinctively, Shpritz snapped her wrist sideways, trying to pry his hand open. If Ardi’s inhuman strength hadn’t extended to his tendons as well as his muscles, he could never have held on to the seemingly fragile Taisia. She muttered a short curse when she realized her efforts were futile.

Slightly surprised, Ardan shifted his grip higher up her arm, feeling the hard muscle beneath Miss Shpritz’s biceps—the main muscle responsible for flexing the forearm. And that was only the muscle. The tendon along the outside of her forearm, anchored to the styloid process of the radius near the wrist, wasn’t normal either.

Or perfectly normal.

Depending on how you looked at it.

In the nearly two years he’d been studying at the Grand, despite all the lectures and seminars he’d skipped, Ardan had seen enough cadavers at every stage of decay to recognize when someone hadn’t led an entirely ordinary life. Even after accounting for every difference, including the fact that he was a man and Taisia a woman, that Ard was only half human, and that he trained with kettlebells every morning and evening, the main muscles in Taisia’s arms were proportionally stronger than his.

But only proportionally. Taisia still probably couldn’t have broken free from Boris’s grip, or from the grip of any other man who exercised or did physical labor. But no average person would have had the slightest chance of holding on to her. Even that, though, was extraordinary for a high-society woman.

“Are you done feeling me up, Skofsky?” Taisia snorted and jerked her hand away. “Though I admit, men usually try to touch me in entirely different places. But I suppose every man has his own tastes in bed.”

Ardi raised his eyebrows slightly. Shpritz might be abrasive and bitchy, but she never crossed certain lines. She kept those boundaries, and with the folding screen between them, he had never seen her in anything but a very loose nightgown made of thick fabric.

“You—”

“My main sources are usually men in power,” Taisia cut in. As though nothing had happened, she straightened her hat and tidied the hair beneath it. “And not all of them are anywhere near as gallant as Nalensky. Some take flirtation and games as an outright invitation to take things further. Others don’t even need that… Captain, after one brutal lesson, I made sure my ‘no’ had more behind it than frantic screaming and struggling. And afterward, a whole day in the tub, trying to wash someone else’s smell off me, and perhaps even my own skin.”

Ardan took one short step back.

“I’m sorry,” Ardan said earnestly. “I’m sorry, Taisia. I didn’t know.”

“It’s all right, Captain.” Miss Shpritz gave a small shrug. “It was a long time ago. I think I’d just turned fourteen at the time.”

Ardi felt his heart clench in his chest.

“My father had only just died. My mother couldn’t bear her grief, and the thought of life without a husband terrified her. Within a couple of months, she’d become a drunken wreck,” Taisia said, listing it all calmly, with a certain detachment. “Then the notary handling the papers decided he needed to see my signature not only on paper but in bed as well. And he did. I signed everywhere he wanted me to.”

Taisia’s eyes did not even glaze over. No haze clouded them, no veil of hidden sorrow or hurt. Ardi did not know why the dream of the Sleeping Spirits kept leading him only to women like this: women made of steel, women who would not bend. Like muscles. Partly torn, but not ripped to shreds. Muscles that had healed their wounds and only grown stronger.

“Is he alive?”

“Captain, you—” Taisia began, but when she met Ard’s gaze, she stopped short.

For a moment, they stood in silence some distance from the camp, where dozens of people now bustled about, scurrying like ants. Taisia stepped closer and lightly touched his arm. There was no hidden meaning in it, no undue intimacy. She simply touched him.

“If he were alive, you really would go looking for him.” Taisia wasn’t asking a question. She was stating a fact.

“They’re so beautiful, mister wizard.”

“Who?”

“The Angels.”

“Who gives a damn? Nobody gives a fuck about them!”

“They’re nothing but research material.”

Taisia hadn’t asked a question, but Ardan answered anyway.

“Yes,” he said, terse but firm.

“For a thirty-year-old woman who infuriates you for her own amusement and also uses you for her own selfish ends?” She tried once more to slip on her fox mask, the one whose razor-edged smile could cut you just for looking at it.

Ardan shook his head.

“For a child,” Ardan added. Brief again. Firm again.

For a moment, Taisia held his gaze as Ardi kept his instinct in check. It would have been so easy to cross that beckoning threshold and invade someone else’s mind. She had introduced herself to him, after all. She had willingly surrendered her true name. All he had to do was speak a single word, and she would remain in the stagecoach, powerless to defy his will.

She let go of his hand and took one step back.

“Now I understand better what Mrs. Egobar saw in you, you uncouth cowboy.” She laughed. “Don’t worry, Ard. He’s dead.”

Ardan could hear her heartbeat, after all.

“You’re lying.”

She nodded.

“And you know that I know you’re lying.”

“I know some Firstborn can hear other people’s heartbeats.” She nodded again. “Besides me, several other girls fell victim to that … creature. Ages eleven to fifteen. He had a good reputation in the City, so I had to dig up the evidence myself, basically doing the work of the guards’ corps for them.”

Something fell into place in Ard’s mind. Back when she had met him outside the Arena and given him a ride to the Markov Canal, he hadn’t been able to understand what had happened to drive her into that line of work. At the time, he’d thought it all stemmed from a tragedy involving her father. And it seemed he’d been on the right track, but had missed the details.

“So that’s why you became a journalist—”

“Yes,” Taisia cut him off yet again, then paused to think for a moment. “You know, Skofsky,” she said. She glanced around several times to make sure no one was nearby. “If I thought you were using Witch’s Gaze, I’d shoot you right here and now. But you’ve got some goddamn uncanny knack for winning people over. That’s exactly why you piss me off.”

Her heartbeat was steady. She wasn’t lying.

“As for the notary,” she said, deliberately avoiding the criminal’s name, “he was sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor. And given what convicts do to people who … prey on children, you can rest assured, Ard: death is all he dreams of. And I dream of him dragging out his miserable existence for as long as possible.”

Ard could hear her heartbeat. Steady and even, without a single hitch.

“You’re not cruel enough, Captain Skofsky.” This time sadness did show in her eyes. Not for Ard, clearly, but rather for herself. “Killing someone isn’t particularly difficult. But making someone suffer is different. Keeping them in pain for as long as possible, until they regret what they did every moment of their lives and writhe in horror because nothing can ever be changed. That’s harder. And therefore much sweeter. You can take my word for it. Although maybe it all comes down to women’s orgasms lasting longer than men’s, so we know how to make a feeling last instead of chasing one quick flash, and …”

“Taisia!” Ardan cried, feeling his face turn crimson again.

She burst into triumphant laughter, but it gradually faded until they sank into silence once more.

“Is that why you’re going to the caves?” Ardan understood at last. “Not because you’re bored or want material, but because …”

“Because.” By then, Ardan had lost count of how many times she’d cut him off. Not just today, but in all the time since they’d first met. “The undead in Bear’s Rift are like a dragon landing on the spire of the Treasury tower.” She checked once more to make sure no one could hear them. “The tower you wrecked.”

“I didn’t wreck anything. I only gave it a little scra—” Ardi broke off midword and simply waved it off.

It seemed he’d be hearing about that damned Treasury tower for the rest of his time at the Black House.

“And if there’s even the slightest chance he might lead me to those involved in my father’s death, then a bunch of animated skeletons won’t stop me,” Taisia said, finishing her thought.

“But the captains!”

“The captains?” Miss Shpritz frowned. “Which captains?”

“Rogov and Melin.”

“And what about them?” Taisia asked, genuinely at a loss.

Ardan gestured with an open palm toward a group of Hunters and two Blue Cloaks bustling about on the hill that separated Bear’s Rift from the plain where the caravan had made camp.

“They want payback because you got them dismissed and court-martialed!”

Taisia shrugged.

“Most likely,” she agreed.

“And you’re planning to go crawling into caves swarming with undead alongside them?”

Miss Shpritz blinked her long, mascara-darkened lashes and laughed so loudly, in such ringing peals, that Ardan started to worry in earnest that the sound would draw unwanted attention. She nearly folded in half. When her laughter turned to a wheeze, she clutched her stomach and could barely stay on her feet.

She guffawed for a good half minute before finally catching her breath and straightening, wiping tears and smeared mascara from her face. She even had to pull a compact mirror and a makeup palette out of her pocket.

Through it all, Ard waited in silence, counting the seconds.

“I’d say you’ve been reading too much detective fiction, Skofsky, but since you have so little use for fiction, I’ll have to state the obvious: you’re suffering from professional deformation.” She wiped the ruined makeup from her face with a small handkerchief and quickly put herself back together. Sleeping Spirits, she really was even better at it than Baliero’s makeup artists. “Do you really suppose Melin and Rogov dream of nothing but setting some kind of trap for me and sending me to the Eternal Angels?”

Ardan turned away and grumbled something that sounded vaguely like “That’s about what I thought.”

Taisia gave another quick laugh.

“No, of course they’ve got a bone to pick with me, maybe more than one.” She did not deny the obvious. “But murder . . . Skofsky, you live in a world of your own, I understand that. But among us ordinary mortals, grudges like these usually lead to a setup or a shakedown, not bloodshed. The Church, conscience, hard labor . . . Those things keep us in line, you know? So they’ll . . . well . . . you know, say, try to set things up so I lose my job or stop being invited to high-society events. Or at the very least, they’ll cook up some ‘favor’ and make me pay for it. Rogov and Melin can’t keep it in their pants, and they cheated on their wives with whores when they were in the field, but they’re not cutthroats.”

She waved a hand. By now she wasn’t even smirking; she coughed, or maybe choked a little, as if she’d swallowed wrong.

“Of those options, going after money is the likeliest, given how dim they both are.” She shrugged. “I’m sure Rogov and Melin dream of nothing but getting me to pay them for . . . for anything at all. That way, in their minds, they’ll have screwed me good and hard.”

“Miss Shpritz,” Ardan said, almost pleading.

“Figuratively, Skofsky,” she said quickly. “If there’s one thing I appreciate about the company of mages, it’s that you’re all so obsessed with your science and your Stars that, for you, desire barely enters into it.” She glanced sidelong at Chaz Nalensky as he climbed the hill toward the detachment, which was already almost fully assembled. “There are exceptions, of course. What I don’t understand is this, Skofsky: you mages can cure so many things, yet you can’t use magic to get your pecker up.”

“It’s extremely difficult to use seals to regulate the exact amount of nitrogen needed to get blood flowing into the corpus cavernosum without stopping the heart, so for that purpose, we use alchemy, which—” Ardan rattled it off as if answering an exam question, then stopped short. “Damn it, Taisia. You did that on purpose!”

“Yes,” Miss Shpritz replied at once. “Because, as I’ve told you more than once, you irritate me. So much that I sometimes find myself plotting how best to provoke you. But so far, I haven’t come up with anything beyond mocking your upbringing.”

Ardan thumped the butt of his staff on the ground and swept an open hand toward Taisia. Sleeping Spirits! She was right! Even in a situation like this, he wouldn’t allow himself to point directly at another person, much less speak without all the verbal niceties of “polite conversation.”

Mother had made sure that, at least in this way, Ard could win over people who were bound to notice his inhuman fangs.

“You’re free to do whatever you like, Miss Shpritz,” Ardan growled. “But if I have to burn through accumulators because of you, then, with the Light and the Eternal Angels as my witnesses, you’ll repay every last kso!”

“Uh-huh” was all she said, clearly enjoying how worked up he was getting. “And just so you know, I need material for the article too, Skofsky. A girl has to earn enough for food and pretty little dresseses somehow.”

“That’s not how you pluralize that word.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

Ardan closed his eyes for a moment. Then he spun around so sharply that his cloak nearly wound all the way around him like a broad ribbon. Irritated, he tugged its front panels straight and strode toward the hill.

“Ard.” The word came softly, barely audible, too faint for human ears, though a matabar might just have caught it.

Ardan turned.

Taisia was looking at him... like an ordinary woman. Strong, dangerous, cunning as a fox, and a little lonely. She looked at him as if he were an amusing child. Only then did Ardan realize that, although only ten years separated them on paper, Taisia was much older than he was.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Ardi couldn’t understand this woman. Nor did he want to. Yet somehow he knew that if he answered her any differently, the next two months would turn into his own private hell. So he said the one thing the situation called for:

“Kiss my ass, Taisia.”

Taisia’s smile widened.

“You’re married, but I’ll keep that invitation in mind.”

Ardan sighed, shook his head, and continued up the hill. Taisia followed, and her heart felt a little lighter, as though, if only for a while, it had slipped free of the weight holding it down.

People.

Why were they always so complicated?

Taisia was right about one thing, too. Ardan had run up against the Puppeteers’ schemes in so many forms, and had seen their ruthless methods so often that he’d begun to look at the world as an investigator, not as an ordinary citizen of the Empire.

And all that after only a year and a half of service...

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Ardan shook his head. No. The moment he and Milar cracked the case, he’d go on tour with Tess. While his wife performed, he’d focus on seals and research. And then...

“So, everyone’s here.”

Ardi flinched. His thoughts had wandered into some distant, impossible future, and he’d been so absorbed in them that he hadn’t noticed he was now standing with two mages and twelve Hunters. Bors’s and Rita’s teams accounted for ten of the Hunters, five to a team, including the leaders, and every one of them looked peculiar. One glance at people like that made the thought “Come on, they’re not cutthroats” seem absurd, but appearances can be remarkably deceiving.

Marat, predictably enough, was still on the hill, fastening small vials of orange liquid to several arrows. And of course Zalessky himself was still there too, armed with a shotgun as well as his broadsword.

It was a brand-new military weapon, and it had caused an uproar. Rumor had it the outcry had been loud enough that someone in Congress had tried to force through an international agreement banning the manufacture of shotguns, but the whole thing had died after a thunderous declaration from Tazidahian and Urdavan.

The captains in blue cloaks, Rogov and Melin, slipped additional rings onto their fingers; each ring held a military accumulator. Unlike Ardi’s rings, Rogov’s and Melin’s were engraved, as were Gleb Davos’s. The engraving showed the crest of the Hunters’ Guild: a spyglass and an oak leaf.

“Maybe Skofsky should stay behind.” Rogov nodded at Ard’s fingers. “If he still has any Army accumulators left, apparently he’s spent the whole time since his concussion using that cloak of his to scare small fry all over the city.”

You could see Rogov’s point. The Army alone left its accumulators unengraved. The reason was simple: at that scale, engraving them would have cost the Treasury an unimaginable sum. That was why the law instead required everyone unaffiliated with the Army to have their accumulators engraved, so the Black House could keep direct control over the small number of military accumulators in circulation.

“He’s with me,” Taisia cut in for some reason, lifting her portable camera and notebook for emphasis.

Zalessky turned to Shpritz.

“And you…”

“I’m free to do whatever I please.” She gave Senior Magister Nalensky a charming, positively bewitching smile. “Isn’t that right, dear Chaz?”

He all but melted on the spot.

“My dear Taisia, this does involve danger.”

“That’s the job, dear Chaz,” she said, her tone at once affected and syrupy, tinged with sorrow. “But in the company of so many brave men, a woman every bit as brave, and, of course, my faithful Skofsky, I have nothing to fear.”

Ardan ignored the tone she used when she mentioned his “name.” It was the tone people usually used to praise their pet dogs for doing something.

“What a circus.” That was all Zalessky said. “All right. Everyone signed an agreement waiving any claims against the Guild in the event of death, so let’s go over the final details and move out. Time’s running short.”

***

The crack in the rock gaped before them, a slanted, ragged maw. Ardan imagined that some fabled blow had once split the mountain and left it frozen that way, its jaws still open. Lichen and moss grew over the edges of the fissure. The stench rising from its depths was so foul that even boastful Rita, who by her own account had “seen everything but her own funeral,” went still for a moment and pressed her mask more tightly to her face.

It smelled of rot, but nothing like the kind Ardan had become inured to while examining the Shaggyer carcasses above. This rot felt both older and deeper. The stink had permeated the stone as though the rock had spent decades soaking up someone’s death and was now exhaling it in long, grudging drafts.

Something sour and metallic mingled with the sweetish, cloying odor, leaving the taste of blood on the tongue. Lower still, beneath layers of suffocating mustiness, the smell of scorched bone lurked at the very bottom. Ardan remembered that smell well. An acrid, mineral bitterness tinged with burned chalk and rancid fat. Each semester, every student at the Grand had to attend at least one cremation of cadavers used for study. It smelled exactly the same here, only colder, as if the fire that had left this mark radiated frost instead of heat.

Ardan stepped inside after Zalessky and immediately felt the air change. The steppe wind seemed to hit an invisible wall at the entrance and stay outside. Inside, a raw, damp chill closed in around them, slipped under his jacket, and settled on his skin as a fine, icy sweat. The unhewn walls of the fissure glistened with moisture, and in the flickering glow of the torches the hunters held, they looked as though they might heave upward at any moment, like a stone chest drawing a deep breath. Ard even thought he could see them pulsing faintly, but of course it was only a trick of the hunters’ bobbing torchlight ahead.

The torches lit ten or fifteen paces of the passage ahead; beyond lay a dense, clinging darkness. It crowded their sight and distorted their vision, so that one moment the stone vaults hung low overhead, forcing them to duck, and the next they suddenly swept apart, revealing chasms where fissures split off to either side. From those fissures came a draft and something else. Something heavy and suffocating, something that made each step a strain.

Ard paused briefly. He leaned on his staff, and his breathing quickened slightly. The walls around him began to draw inward. The ceiling sank lower and lower, pressing against his weary shoulders. It grew so hard to breathe that Ardan felt his bones creak with every inhale.

He shook his head. As he did in elevators and other enclosed spaces, he fixed his attention on his own heartbeat.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

It helped. Though not much.

About three minutes later, Ard spotted markings on the walls. At first, he took them for natural grooves left by water or roots. Then he looked closer and realized his mistake.

Abstract symbols decorated the walls.

Someone had used something sharp to scratch them into the wet stone at chest height. They ran along the passage in a ragged line. Spirals sat inside misshapen circles, and rays spread from their centers; the whole design only faintly resembled the ribs of a skeleton.

“Give me some light, Captain,” Taisia asked.

Ardan brought the torch closer to the symbols, and after loading powder into the camera’s flash chamber, Miss Shpritz took several photographs.

“Hey!” Bors shouted from up ahead. “No flashes, scribbler! We’re not here for a stroll!”

Taisia didn’t so much as blink. The Hunters walking beside her merely grumbled something about “damned journalists.”

Who had carved these symbols into the rock, and why? They had nothing to do with either Star Magic or the art of the Aean’Hane. For now, answering those questions mattered most.

The party moved on.

The cave floor sloped downward, and their boots squelched more often as they went. The uneven stone floor, covered with mineral deposits and debris from ancient cave-ins, disappeared beneath a thin layer of water mixed with some kind of brown, oily filth. Every step made a vile slurping sound that swelled into a booming echo and rolled between the sloping walls.

The cold damp kept seeping through the seams of his boots, coating his toes in a slick, icy film. At one point, Ardan stepped on something hard. It shifted sideways under his sole with a bony rasp, and Ard looked down.

A finger bone showed through the brown sludge, too long to have belonged to a human and too slender for an orc’s hand. He bent down and touched the remains. The bone looked black, as if charred, but under his fingers it felt wet and cold. Ardi straightened and walked on, trying not to think about how many more phalanges like it lay buried beneath the layer of sludge they were all churning up with their boots.

“I don’t like this, boss.” Rita shuddered. “Where are the cold ones?”

“And this from our undead expert?” Bors tried to needle her, but under the circumstances, no one was eager to trade barbs.

The Hunters had counted on a slightly risky stroll, but their nerves were gradually winding tighter. They’d been descending for almost ten minutes now, deeper and deeper, yet so far they’d encountered neither a pack of undead nor any sign of what might have drawn such a pack here.

“Stay sharp,” Zalessky hissed, his shotgun at the ready.

The others were just as alert. Ard was no exception; he was ready to cast Ice Tail at any moment. It wasn’t the best choice against the undead, but its kinetic energy would be enough.

“Look, Captain.” Taisia pointed to a section of the wall.

There, just below the symbols, long parallel grooves glinted. They matched the grooves on the Shaggyers’ bones higher up in the cave, only deeper and broader. In several of them, Ard spotted fragments of fingernails, and that was what made him pause a second longer than he should have.

Not claws. Fingernails would be more accurate. Thick and darkened, they had long since split into layers and been torn from dead flesh by scraping against the frozen stone. Without thinking, Ard ran the pads of his fingers along one of the grooves and immediately wished he hadn’t. The edges were coated with a thin film of sticky slime that sent a faint, unpleasant prickle through his palm. Ard wiped his hand on his pant leg and promised himself he wouldn’t touch anything else here, though he knew perfectly well he would break that promise.

“Rule number one, mage,” said one of the Hunters walking beside him. “Keep your hands to yourself. If you get the urge to touch something, use your own staff. Got it?”

Ardan nodded, and Taisia let out a brief chuckle.

The deeper they descended, the more symbols they encountered. The spirals became intersecting lines resembling stylized skeletons, then, farther on, long, wavering grooves appeared, stretching across the ceiling as well. Ard tipped his head back and noticed that the vault was coated with something dark and wet that had gathered in thick, uneven clumps.

From a distance, they looked like wasp nests hanging upside down, except they were black and wet. Every so often, a heavy drop broke loose, leaving greasy stains the color of old blood on their leather jackets. One drop landed on Bors’s shoulder. He jerked and immediately brushed it off with a handkerchief.

“Poison?” he asked no one in particular.

One of the Hunters drew a vial from his bandolier, pulled the cork out with his teeth, and splashed the drop with a shimmering violet solution. A second passed, then another. Still nothing happened.

“No reaction,” the Hunter said, stating the obvious. “So it’s either harmless or the Guild’s alchemists have no idea what it is.”

Bors swore. One by one, the others joined in.

No one spoke for the next few minutes as they descended. Ardan heard only footsteps, the slick patter of falling drops, and a dozen and a half mouths breathing hard through potion-soaked bandages. With every breath, the minty bitterness of the potion in the bandages grew fainter, letting more and more of the stench of underground rot and scorched bones seep through to his nose and mouth. Ard began to feel he wasn’t so much breathing the air as swallowing it. Thick and foul, it sat on the tip of his tongue like water gone bad.

A nasty sensation.

His third eyelid twitched involuntarily, trying to slide shut, and Ardan had to suppress the sudden urge to let it close. Yes, perhaps no one would notice the white membrane over his eyes in darkness this deep, but he didn’t want to risk it. Besides, the Mask hadn’t been designed to accommodate a third eyelid, and who knew how the spell would behave?

Ard set aside the idea of refining his disguise. He’d come back to it soon.

The passage narrowed.

The ceiling dropped lower and lower.

With every step, the smell only grew thicker and more intense.

The passage led them into a cavern, though Ardan could tell more by sound than by sight. Until then, the narrow walls had hemmed in the echo of their footsteps. Now it suddenly raced off in every direction and vanished somewhere in the unseen distance. Only a minute ago, the ceiling had pressed down on their shoulders. Now it had drawn back overhead and dissolved into darkness. The Hunters’ torches no longer reached the walls; their light spread in useless cones through the black, heavy air, still reeking of scorched bones and rotting earth.

Zalessky raised a fist sharply, and the squad halted.

In the cavern’s silence, dense and damp as a compress on a fresh wound, Ardan heard a rustle. An unusual one. Nothing like a rustle in the forest or a shadowy back alley.

A quiet, many-voiced rustle, like dry leaves whispering in the wind. Except no wind had blown here in a long time, and there were no leaves either. That rustle alone made the Hunters’ skin prickle.

Bors lifted his torch higher. Ardan saw them, and so did everyone else. Maybe if they hadn’t relied on torchlight from the start, the matabars, whose eyes were better suited to darkness, would have spotted the silhouettes a little sooner.

The cavern was a good fifty paces long and just as wide. It was packed so tightly with those shapes that, for a moment, Ard mistook them for outcroppings of stone.

Skeletons, half-decomposed corpses, and things halfway between the two stood motionless, like soldiers on an endless parade ground forgotten long ago. Ardan tried to get a rough count but lost track somewhere beyond a hundred and fifty. The rear ranks were swallowed by darkness, and there was absolutely no telling where that mass of dead flesh ended and stone began.

And all at once, every one of those hundreds of skulls turned toward the entrance.

The mass of corpses shuddered, the motion spreading through them like ripples over still water from a thrown stone. The corpses’ heads turned with a soft, wet crunch, and their empty eye sockets, some filmed with a cloudy membrane and others gaping with liquid blackness, stared at the torch flames. Ard thought he saw something stir in those hollow pits, something faintly like hunger, though he knew perfectly well that the dead couldn’t feel or think. They simply obeyed the commands of the one who had raised them from the earth.

”Damn,” Rita whispered, then worked the bolt on her rifle.

”Mages,” Zalessky snapped.

Rogov and Melin had already opened their grimoires. They moved to the front of the hunters’ formation and stood shoulder to shoulder. Watching from the second rank, Ardan was once again convinced: however awful Rogov and Melin might be off the battlefield, here, in a cavern packed to its vaulted roof with undead, they were exactly where they belonged, doing the work that must have won them their honors.

Melin was the first to strike his staff against the stone floor. A blue seal flashed beneath his feet so quickly that Ardan barely had time to make out its contours. A stream of oily gray smoke poured from the head of his staff and spread beneath the cavern ceiling, a thick cloud that smothered the first ranks of undead under its pall.

Rogov joined him an instant later. He slammed his staff against the stone, and a red seal blazed across the stone beside the blue one. The head of the staff sprayed a fan of sparks, bright and hot, straight into the cloud of smoke. The cloud exploded with such a roar that Ard’s ears rang, and the shock wave hurled him backward into Taisia. She swore through clenched teeth but stayed upright, clinging to his shoulder, while the first three ranks of skeletons ceased to exist in any meaningful form. Ash settled where they had stood, and half-melted stones smoked.

And then it all became a bewildering whirl of flashes.

Blue and red seals flared beneath both mages’ feet at a pace Ard had seen only at the Magical Boxing Arena. One seal followed another; staffs thudded against stone; spells snapped perfectly into place, one after another. The two captains worked in such perfect coordination that one spell flowed into the next with no visible seam. Much to his satisfaction, Ardan found he could keep up well enough to distinguish their seals and trace the logic of their combinations.

The captains used a very basic strategy. One would conjure an auxiliary Green Star seal, and the other would immediately augment it with offensive Blue Star magic. Ard couldn’t help noticing that the army instructors who had trained Rogov and Melin knew exactly what they were doing.

Rogov struck the stone with his staff again and released a fiery haze in front of him. Translucent and trembling, it hung in the air like a shimmering curtain of rippling heat. Melin answered at once with a sharp strike of his own, and a blast of superheated wind shot from the staff’s head. The wind caught the haze and fanned it until the translucent curtain became an unbroken sheet of roaring flame, a wave of fire rolling through the ranks of the undead.

The undead did not even make it a few meters.

The stone beneath the skeletons’ feet melted and ran in brown rivulets; their bones flared up like dry kindling, and the skeletons that only a second earlier had been stirring and grinding their teeth settled onto the molten floor as smoking ash.

Melin did not stop. He shook the shimmering dust of the disintegrated accumulator out of the ring on his left hand, took a fresh one from the holder on his belt, and slotted it into place. Rogov did the same a second later, and they struck their staffs against the floor again almost simultaneously.

The front ranks of the undead had already turned into a smoldering haze, but the rear ranks kept pushing forward, stepping over the charred remains of those who had fallen ahead of them.

Among the ordinary skeletons, Ardan spotted one whose ribs and vertebrae gleamed unnaturally. When Rogov sent a Fire Lash at it, the skeleton jerked instead of catching fire, blazed from within with a blinding white light, and burst apart. Fragments of crystalline bone flew in every direction like shrapnel from an exploding grenade. Melin reacted before Ard could blink. He drove his staff against the stone and spread a protective seal over the squad. A ghostly blue barrier shaped like a knight’s gauntlet shimmered into being above their heads, then spread into a broad dome. A moment later, the crystalline shards drummed against the barrier like hail, scattering showers of blue sparks.

“Crystals!” Bors roared at the Hunters. “Cover the mages!”

Rita spotted another one like it. She shouldered the rifle with ease and fired a precise shot. The bullet punched through its skull, and the creature collapsed where it stood. But even as it fell, its body burst into flame and flew apart in a cloud of sharp, glowing fragments.

“Damn it, Rita!” Zalessky shouted.

“What?!” Rita roared. “It was close anyway!”

“Then you could’ve saved your ammo!”

Melin’s shield saved the squad yet again, though Ardan could see the spell already beginning to tremble under the onslaught, strained by the sheer Ley-energy required to sustain it.

Even during those final few seconds, both captains looked as if they were doing something ordinary, even faintly tedious. Rogov yawned. One strike of his staff sent a chain of tiny fireballs into the mass of undead, each no larger than a freshwater pearl.

Rather than exploding when they struck the skeletons, the flaming beads clung to skulls and ribs. Then, slowly and methodically, they began burning through the bones, making the creatures crumble even as they moved. Ardan didn’t know that spell and, honestly, had no desire to trade places with the skeletons. He had no idea whether his Green shields could withstand that kind of strain.

Meanwhile, Melin brought a torrent of boiling water down from the ceiling, diverting it from an underground stream with a simple Red seal. When the water struck the stones made red-hot by Rogov’s spells, it instantly became a cloud of scalding steam that reduced another dozen skeletons to smoking remnants.

Rogov answered by setting a long Blue Star seal across the floor and drawing his staff along the seal like a bow across a violin string. A wall of steady, blinding white flame flared up ahead of him, rolled through the remaining ranks, and incinerated everything in its path all the way to the cave’s far wall.

Melin changed the crystal in his ring again. His face remained calm and focused, like a clerk wrapping up yet another quarterly report.

“Watch out!” Bors shouted.

Something lurched out of the rear ranks, forcing its way through its own blazing kin. The mere sight of it made Ard’s jaw lock. A huge, bloated zombie with a belly the size of a barrel of salted fish waddled along on thick, swollen legs. Its gray-green skin, slick and gleaming with moisture, bubbled at every step. Its lower jaw hung almost to its collarbones, and tangled, bluish loops of intestine showed through the split seams in its belly.

Rogov hit the potbellied thing with the standard version of Fire Lash, the one Davos used, and the creature instantly burst into flame. In less than a second, it had become a howling pillar of greasy, smoking flame from head to toe. Another second passed, and the swollen belly burst. It burst with the kind of bang a balloon the size of a tram would make, drenching the nearest Hunters in hot, reeking slime and scattering chunks of entrails throughout the cave.

And the guts came alive, too.

Yes.

Exactly.

Long and thick, slick with some vile fluid, they came spilling out of the ruptured belly. Instead of flopping lifelessly onto the stone, they writhed across the floor and slithered like snakes in every direction. Each one stretched toward the Hunters’ legs, hands, and faces, spasming and whipping the stones with its wet, slimy tail.

“Hairy!” Zalessky roared. His broadsword slashed into the darkness, shredding the nearest strand to ribbons. “Hack!”

Bors slashed diagonally with his saber and cut one of the intestines in half, but both halves writhed and crawled on, each now heading in its own direction. Rita drew a broad cleaver and began hacking the vile mess into tiny pieces, kicking anything that still moved aside with one foot. Only the smallest severed bits finally went still, curling into motionless, smoking rings. The other Hunters did the same, wasting no words as they hacked, sliced, and stomped on everything crawling across the floor. Before long, the cave filled with such a stench of burned entrails that, despite the cloth over his face, Ard’s vision went dark.

Why, of all things, had the mutant’s venom impaired his regeneration rather than, say, his sense of smell?

Suddenly, Taisia seized him by the sleeve and jerked him aside. Ardan had been intent on the fight, holding the Ice Tail seal at the ready, and it took him a moment to realize what was happening. Only after she practically dragged him into a narrow side crevice did he snap out of it. He was about to protest, but Taisia pressed a finger to her lips and pointed at the floor.

Tiny fragments glinted among the dust and fine gravel on the crevice floor. Ardan crouched and held his torch closer. The pieces were small, almost invisible, their sheen a distinctive deep blue in the firelight. Ard didn’t need an expert to tell him what they were.

Crystal dust.

The remains of an accumulator that had been used until it was completely spent and crumbled to dust. Household accumulators didn’t do that. They simply grew dim and ceased to function. Sometimes they cracked slightly. Only military accumulators crumbled into dust like this when wrung dry to the very last ray. Ley moved through them so quickly that their crystal lattices gave way and turned to powder.

“I think we’ve found something, Captain,” Taisia whispered as the Hunters and mages behind them continued, utterly absorbed in turning the horde of undead into a bonfire of bones.

Someone had used military accumulators here. Very recently, too, since the dust had not yet mixed with the dirt on the floor and still lay on top of it in a thin, undisturbed layer.

Ardan raised his head and looked at the ceiling of the crevice.

“You may be right,” Ardan said.

A cable ran along the ceiling, neatly laid in stone brackets driven into the rock at regular intervals. A Ley-cable. It was fabric-sheathed, with a core of Ertalain, exactly like the cable Ardan had laid with his own hands along the baseboards of the Brolid Arena only a few months ago. The cable led deeper into the crevice and disappeared into the darkness around a bend. Yet its sheath looked brand-new: completely undamaged, with no trace of moisture or mold.

Here, underground in a cavern packed with undead, someone had installed Ley-wiring. They’d installed it no more than six months earlier, and they’d done it competently enough, with long-term use in mind.

Taisia and Ardan looked at each other, and for the first time since they’d met, Ard saw neither sarcasm nor mockery nor a predatory glint in her eyes.