Picking the lock doesn’t seem as important at the moment. I sit back on my heels. “Maybe. I’m certain he would have had to say something positive about me. I am great.”
“Maybe tell you how smart you are? You know, play to your obvious strong point?”
I’m pretty certain I don’t like where this is going. “I most definitely do not have an ego. An ego is something beyond truth and generally I’m pretty awesome.”
“I’m sure you are, Pinty. Tell me, how long has Tavos ruled the guild?”
“As long as I’ve known the guild to exist. He’s good at what he does.”
“And me, his daughter. Am I all grown up, capable of responsibility?”
“I know you well, Amber. You’ve been grown up and capable for a long, long time . . .” I kind of drift off there. The pieces are falling together. She gives me that arched eyebrow again. Ahhh, crap. “Seriously. Like, seriously? You’re the one waging war on your father? It’s an internal struggle, the classic story of the daughter denied her inheritance so she murders her parents for the throne? I knew you were entrepreneurial, more than driven, but . . .”
“Pinty! For one moment, stop being an idiot.”
Outside the door the guards are speaking really loudly.
Now I’ve got it! “This is a trap! You’re the leader of the upstart guild. You set this up. You knew your father would send me to rescue you. Nothing we had before matters. You couldn’t stand that I dumped you and so, as part of this huge plan, you’re having your revenge on me!”
Ambers face clouds over. “I used to love you, but now I am not sure I understand why. Can nothing penetrate that thick skull of yours? It’s like stone has replaced your brain. You’re freaking slow. Stop thinking that everything in this world revolves around you!”
I give her a look. “You are not serious.”
“More so than ever.”
Okay, next guess. “Tavos is preemptively cleaning house. He’s eliminating anybody who could be a threat to his hold on power. You, his top people — the competent are all being eliminated — which explains all the new faces and why Squints is still there. This isn’t a coup.”
“Of course it’s not.” Amber’s voice is a little more than aggravated. She might just be at her wit’s end.
“Then, the troll. He hired the troll to kill me. This was a trap. Not just the guild. Tavos is trying to kill me!”
Outside the door there is the sound of flesh being torn from bodies and guards screaming in agony. After a moment it stops.
“Pinty, did you say you killed the troll?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill the troll?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Would you be a dear then and finish picking the shackle? As in now.”
I would have done that right then, but the door bursts asunder. There, with what I assume is the blood of the guards dripping from its two gigantic claws, is the troll.
Chapter 22
The hurrier I go, the behinder I get, and I’m getting well behind on my task of unshackling Amber from the post. It would help if I hadn’t dropped the pick in surprise when the troll demolished the door and offered up an image of my (again) imminent death.
“What are you doing?”
“Picking your lock! Now hold still!” But I’m still fumbling around on the floor, hands madly feeling around for the pick. I look over my shoulder and the troll moves two steps closer, fingers twitching.
“We don’t have time — no, you don’t have time — for this. You better hope this works.” And she moves between me and the troll. “Immortal beast, you will not eat Shortkin today! I will not have it! I am your prisoner here, to be kept till summoned. The only way to Pinty is through me, and you will not harm me!”
Oh, wow! That was a freaking awesome speech — all “in your face, troll” and full of bravado. Why did I ever break up with this woman? And the best part: the troll stops! It stops! Blood dripping on the floor, hands frozen in mid-clutch, and stopped! Right in its tracks.
The troll thinks for a moment and bares its teeth. “No, I do not think you will hold me back. I will do exactly as I like. This small, pathetic creature has fled from me like a rabbit. It escapes into the warren, up the stairs, and now finds refuge with the matron doe of the clutch. Well, I’ve had enough of this and I will feast on his flesh tonight. You will either move or I will cripple you, snapping each limb and sweetly enjoying the shattering sound they will make as I do so.” A deep, throaty laugh issues from the beast, his flesh jiggling under the massive weight.
“Matron? MATRON! You, a festering mound of troll flesh, would call me an old hag?”
“I will call you anything I wish. Right now I call you a happy distraction.” And the claws of his right hand flex out and his arm snaps forward into Amber’s face.
As he reaches out, Amber does something I’ve never seen her do before in my life. She taps into the veil that infuses all things, the intrinsic aether that is inseparable from everything around us but is normally inert. She summons magic.
Chapter 23
I’ve never tried the practice of magic and most shortkins avoid it as a rule. We tend, as a race, to be the antithesis of powers unseen and strange, instead relying on the actual and the physical to get work done.
This disdain of magic harkens back to the very beginning of creation. A common fable told by mothers to their children states that when all the races were first set upon this world, the gods spoke out and asked, “Who amongst you would like the power to tap the wonders of magic?” And while each and every shortkin put up their hand and jumped up and down, screaming “Pick me! Pick me!” none of the gods saw us, lost as we were in the swell of the taller, wider and fatter races. When all the magic had been handed out that day, the shortkins were left with none.
And so, we were left to live our lives mundanely in a world where everything else is infused with magic. “How privileged we are,” we keep saying to ourselves, “that magic isn’t easily learned by us! How amazingly special we are in our own way,” we shout out to all those who can hear! But really, screw them. We got robbed of our right to use magic.
That’s not to say no shortkins wield the power to perform magic. There are other ways, otherworldly ways, to infuse oneself with the power to cast spells. There are rumors of shortkin family lines that go back generations, where great-great-great-grandma or granddad fostered some deal, made some pact, or agreed to late-night shenanigans (read: sexual congress) with some creature or power beyond the pale in order to imbue their lineage with magic. The royal bloodlines of the shortkin are mired in such claims, but then of course royals will sleep with everything and anybody.
Magic itself comes from the aether, a flux that permeates the very structure of everything. It is a dormant energy, like gravity without the pull, fire without the heat, direction without movement. It’s always there, but quiet, waiting to be released.
And that’s what practitioners of magic do — they unleash the aether. Priests and clerics claim their power over aether is derived through channeling divine power for righteous deeds. Wizards will express their tapping of the aether through words and concoctions. Mentalists claim the aether is simply a malleable energy that is released with their own psychic emanations. There are a million ways to describe how to add pull, heat and movement to the aether and all are correct.
Aether when unleashed is also consumed. Drain an object of aether and it will crumble to dust. You can boil a cup of tea with aether, but that aether needs to come from somewhere. The easiest place to take that energy from is yourself. More skilled practitioners can draw aether from inanimate objects around them. Those few with intrinsic power, those born with magic as their fated path, pull aether from other living beings. And wherever you draw the aether from, it will be, in one way or another, reduced.
Anyways, it’s not that Amber, being human, shouldn’t be able to use magic. It’s just that the closest I’ve seen to her doing this befo
re was charming my heart.
Chapter 24
“Beak and Wing, Talon and Flight, bring forth yourselves, and those of your kin, in murderous flight!” Flinging her arms up defensively against the outreaching claws of the troll, Amber’s hands elongate, her palms stretching and widening. From her fingertips through to her elbows, the skin darkens from a light soot color to pitch black. The charcoal skin peels forward from her arms, transforming into four giant ravens that fling themselves straight into the troll’s face.
It doesn’t matter how quickly you can regenerate. Four sets of talons and four beaks tearing out your eyes, over and over, has got to hurt. Backwards and backwards the troll stumbles, his arms flailing in front of his face, bashing one bird away just to have three others pluck and claw more flesh from his face.
A second later, Amber’s arms again erupt. This time into a torrent of winged fury as scores of regular-sized ravens fill the room, the pounding of wings filling every empty space, the cawing overbearing all other sounds. After hundreds of birds escape, her arms return to normal.
“Pinty! I need the shackle off now! If you wait any longer, I’ll lose the leg!”
“What?” But I already understand or, more accurately, I already smell her calf cooking in the leg hold. Witchiron. The shackle is made of witchiron. It is already blistering hot, reacting to her magic, feeding off the explosion of aether she just converted from inert to active. This is costing her way more than just what she pulled from within herself to summon the flock.
Somewhere back towards the door, obscured by all these birds, a very, very unhappy troll is thrashing madly at the air, connecting with both wall and ceiling, shaking the room with each impact of his fists. Every so often the dying screech of a raven is heard as well.
“I see it! I see it!” I’m on all fours, crawling, but I’ve got the pick in my hand and I’m back at the shackle. I wrap my left hand in some loose clothing to hold the lock steady and start jamming away at the tumbler. Her calf is blackening, charring, cooking. She buckles from the heat and the exertion from summoning the ravens, throwing me back, away from the lock.
“Pinty! You’re not . . .” is the last Amber can muster before she momentarily blacks out. Then she comes to, screaming in pain.
I crawl back to her, jam the pick back in and hold my breath until the lock pops. I tear the shackle from her burnt leg and toss it aside.
“Okay, you’re free, but I think the only real exit is through the door I came.”
“No, I’ve given this some thought. Get me to the balcony.”
“It’s a hundred-foot drop — two hundred for short people. I appreciate that suicide may be preferable to the troll, but it’s not what I would call a plan.”
If I gave her my knife I wouldn’t have to commit suicide, she would kill me right here and be done with it for that comment. So between her crawling and my pulling, together we make the agonizing trip to the balcony a little quicker. Glancing back towards the door, enough of the birds have fallen that I can see the troll in the maelstrom of beaks and talons. It’s still not pretty for the troll, whose face just remains a mess, the birds repeatedly reducing his face to pulp.
Amber lifts herself to the parapet and looks over. “Okay, when I make it to the bottom, follow me. Jump. Can you do that or would you rather face the troll that shouldn’t be here because you apparently killed it already?”
I look over the parapet as well and the ground is a long way off. Worse yet, we’ve come back around to the drop side of the mountain pass. No cliff wall here. If I miss the landing and fall too far to the side I’ll miss the path altogether and bounce all the way down into the canyon. Unappetizing, to say the least.
“So the plan is to jump?”
“Yes, we jump.” She looks back down and then inside at the troll. The tide appears to be turning. More ravens litter the ground around him than fly at him.
“And you’ve offered to go first, so when I jump I’ll have something soft to land on?”
“If that’s a fat reference, I will kill you. And not while you sleep.”
“I thought that’s what you were doing with this plan anyway.”
“Pinty, shove it.” And with that she leans back and lets herself flop over the parapet. It’s natural reaction for me, when I see someone go over a high wall, to reach out and grab them, and I do try. But she slips just beyond my reach and tumbles downward.
It’s a long way down.
Chapter 25
Look, I am absolutely not turning to avoid the heart-wrenching sight of Amber splattering on the rocks below. I’m turning back toward the room and heading inside to face the troll.
In that moment of turning around, those four intimidatingly-oversized ravens Amber summoned disengage from the troll and screech past me as one, buffeting me back out the door and towards the edge of the battlements. A heartbeat later the four are over the parapet and plummeting downward, zeroing in on Amber’s free falling body.
“Well, I’ll be.”
The giant ravens easily overtake Amber’s fall. Clutching with claw and beak, the four birds manage to arrest most, but not all, of the speed of her descent before she hits the ground. I can still hear an audible whump a second after I see her impact, but it’s not the splat sound I was expecting.
“Okay, then. I think I know what she expects.”
I glance back at the troll. With the four main ravens gone, the rest of the birds are quickly scattered. Its face, under a blanket of blood that it wipes away, has again regenerated. It does not smile. Instead it bellows another rock-shattering scream and charges. It’s decided, then. I have a plan and that plan does not include letting the troll tear me into bite-sized pieces for his stew.
I give the troll a smile, climb onto the parapet, lean back, and let gravity take me as I fall from the wall. It doesn’t matter that I believe I’ll be saved in the same manner as Amber. Falling off a hundred-foot balcony still scares the crap out of me. I scream.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah . . .” One one hundred. Two one hundred.
“Aaaaaaaaaah . . .” Three one hundred. Four one hundred.
“Oh, come on! Aaaaaaaaaaah!”
The four ravens grab me in the same manner they did for Amber, talons digging into my leathers, their wings frantically pulling at the wind, trying to cut my fall, reverse my death. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a bird pant before, but they most certainly do at this moment.
And then, in what seems to be but a moment after, I hit. One leg lands first and I curl up and roll, the brunt of the impact bruising my arm, shoulder and back. They will cramp from the landing, but I am alive to complain about it. I most certainly am alive. I celebrate this fact by lying there, not moving, and staring back up at the balcony. I fell from there. That’s freaking awesome. That’s awesome plus two. I think I need a moment to catch my breath.
And as I lie there watching the sky and the clouds, a large shape launches itself over the balcony. A large, massive troll shape. A regenerating troll shape. A troll launches itself over the balcony. Seriously, I really need this to stop.
One one hundred, two one hundred. Here it comes. Three one hundred.
Then, while I count out its descent, the four ravens that saved Amber and me wheel into sight, straighten their path and intercept the falling sack of troll. They hit it with just enough force to buffet the huge beast a precious few feet farther out. A moment later, instead of landing beside me, the troll continues to plummet further out and down to the valley floor.
From somewhere in the valley below I hear a very distant, very painful, splat.
Although it hurts, I start laughing. There is nothing left to do but laugh.
Chapter 26
I roll Muel over and he pulls in a deathly, rattling breath. Opening one eye and then the other, he looks at me. Then he blinks.
“It’s six.” I say.
“Six?”
“Most definitely six. I just rolled you off him. I don’t know how you are s
o freaking lazy as to find yourself a pillow in the middle of a fight, but you did.” He smiles at the ribbing and quickly breaks into a fit of coughs. His wounds are legion, and he spits out more blood with every exhale.
“Hold up here a moment. Let me check.”
He’s taken a beating. There’s blood everywhere, enough in his boots that, after I pull them off his feet and tip them over, it floods red. His skin, where the blades got past the armor, is split open like a ripe tomato. From the location of the wounds, I would wager the very important bits inside have been nicked and split.
I go over to my mare, who has wandered back into the clearing, grab some bandages from the packs and get to work wrapping Muel. By the time I finish, he could be mistaken for a mummy, a very tall, well-built, oozing, red mummy.
“How did you do with the troll? And Amber?”
I tilt my head and look over to Amber, who I’ve already tended before seeing to Muel. It was a tough decision, who to tend to first, but Amber won out. Not by much, mind you, but enough. “She’s out cold, likely will be for days. She used the aether in our escape and I think she yanked it from within herself. The bastards bound her with witchiron, so she still might lose the leg. And then she took a hundred-foot fall that turned out to be more of a whump than a splatter. All in all, not too bad, but we do need to get her back to the Bottom Up.”
“And the troll?”
I’m about to say something macho and aggrandizing about how I slew it or some such nonsense, but seeing Muel in the shape he’s in makes me realize the truth would be better. “Not dead, but it did take a tumble all the way down the valley. I think we have days before it makes it back here. Even with that headstart I still want to be moving before nightfall.”
“Fair enough.” He tries to move, but I can hear bones freely grate beneath his skin and his effort only brings him close to passing out. “I can help.”
“No, in this case, you can’t.” I pull one of the vials from my hip strongbox. The vial is half empty, the remaining liquid a crisp, crystal blue. “I’ve given half this to Amber and you get the rest. It should kick-start some healing or at least stop you from getting significantly worse, as in dying.” I pull the cork, put the vial to his lips and drain the remaining fluid into his mouth. He swallows it down and then nods off. The stuff really will work — accelerating a day’s worth of healing in about eight hours — but it has a crazy side effect of putting you quickly to sleep.