She seems to be right in the core of that pyramid, Jaxi thought. Next to the dragon.
Damn it. Why? He didn’t expect Jaxi to have the answer, but couldn’t help but blurt out the frustrated words in his mind.
Why? Isn’t that obvious? She’s linked to the dragon.
“Does anyone smell something?” Duck asked from behind him. “Something bad?”
“Yes,” Cas said.
What do you mean linked? Tolemek demanded, barely aware of the conversation. Or the presence of the others. He kept stumbling forward in the growing darkness, not willing to pause until he reached a spot where he could go down the side of the crater.
She’s a Receiver. It’s probably why they brought her here. To communicate with the dragon.
Tolemek stumbled to a stop, stunned. What in all the layers of hell was a Receiver?
A natural telepath with the ability to hear other people’s thoughts. With training, she would be able to hear other telepaths calling from great distances. In the army unit Sardelle worked with, there was a man who could relay messages across the entire continent.
A cold chill that had nothing to do with the mist wrapping around his legs came over Tolemek. Duck and Cas brushed past him, using their rifles to push away ground cover, as if they were looking for something. Again, he barely noticed. What happens, if these people aren’t trained, Jaxi?
Depending on how strong their natural aptitude is, it could cause some issues. She can probably hear at least some of the thoughts of others, and it can be difficult, especially for a child, to figure out why people aren’t thinking the same things as they’re saying.
Seven gods, is that why she’s… He resisted the urge to say crazy. He had always hated thinking of his sister that way.
Not showing similar qualms, Jaxi suggested, Missing a few paddles on her waterwheel? It might be.
Just how long have you known about this? Are there any other secrets about my family you’d like to tell me about? Remembering the way Jaxi had bluntly told him he had magical powers, Tolemek tried not to let his exasperation into his thoughts, but he didn’t quite manage to sublimate the image of strangling a sword that came to mind.
You act like it’s my fault you and your kin are so oblivious about what you are. I’m not sure today’s generation deserves dragon blood.
Jaxi…
I haven’t had any idea who or what she is. This is the first time I’ve been close enough to sense the presence of another sorceress.
She’s not a sorceress.
She could be. Isn’t that what we’re here for? To find her and teach her to be one?
Tolemek closed his eyes. I just want her to be safe. To have a chance at a normal life. To not be… shunned for being different.
“Sir?” Cas called back. “You’re going to want to see this.”
“I really doubt that’s the case.” Duck made a throat-strangling noise, as if he was trying to keep from throwing up.
“That may be true,” Cas said softly.
“What now?” Zirkander sighed from behind Tolemek. He sounded weary.
“Nothing pleasant,” Sardelle said.
“Tolemek?” Cas asked. She didn’t say anything else.
He put the conversation with Jaxi aside and walked ahead. The smell he had been trying not to notice increased: the stench of rotting meat. It was like the odor of the dead from the village but even worse. Whatever carcasses the team had discovered had been out here much longer.
“Over here,” Cas called softly.
He continued until he found her and Duck, only their heights allowing him to tell them apart in the vestiges of twilight. They were standing still, staring down at ground that was more open than that around it, as if it had been cleared for a bonfire.
“Can we risk a light?” Cas asked.
“Here.” Sardelle came up beside Tolemek, her soulblade out. It glowed so softly, it illuminated only the ground and the brush for a couple of feet around.
Congratulations, Jaxi, Tolemek thought, though he had no idea if she was still listening to him. I wouldn’t have guessed subtlety was in your repertoire.
My repertoire is overflowing. And you might want to keep your sarcasm to yourself. This is going to disturb you. It disturbs me. I’m glad I don’t have a nose anymore.
The soulblade’s soft glow revealed recently churned earth, with a few branches and roots sticking up from the dirt.
Look again.
Tolemek stepped closer, then wished he hadn’t. They weren’t branches. That was a human arm, what remained of one. It had been torn from its body and chewed on. It wasn’t the only one. Sardelle shifted the blade around, revealing everything from ribs to femurs and skulls littering the earth around the surrounding shrubs and trees. Some had been scraped clean by teeth and claw; others still had meat on them.
“It’s a mass grave,” Cas said, standing on the far side. More ground had been dug up over there.
Duck stood beside her, pinching his nostrils shut as he stared down at a hole.
Tolemek forced himself to walk over, careful not to step on bones. The soft, damp earth sunk beneath his boots. Nobody would notice, not with all the paw prints in the dirt.
The hole held corpses that hadn’t been devoured yet, but the worms and other decomposers had gone to work, destroying facial features and making the people unrecognizable. Still, much of the clothing remained. Some of the people wore the garb of natives or the roughhewn clothing common in the city, but others were clad in Cofah uniforms.
“Why?” Tolemek whispered. “Why are they doing it to our own people?” He had assumed the deaths of the porters and the natives had been deliberate, some callous testing of a new toxin or disease on people deemed subhuman or inconsequential. Or perhaps it had been accidental, the fallout from a scientist’s creation. But there were as many Cofah bodies in the grave as there were natives. Maybe more.
“Let’s discuss this downwind,” Zirkander said, his voice calm, though his eyes had a haunted looked to them.
“Or we could not discuss it,” Duck croaked and hustled into the brush on the far side.
The rest of the group started after him, but something in the open grave caught Tolemek’s eye. “Wait,” he rasped, stretching out a hand toward Sardelle’s sword. He waved her closer, needing more light.
“What is it?” She didn’t sound like she wanted to come closer. Understandable.
Tolemek picked up the skull that had drawn his attention, shreds of flesh still attached to the bone. A hole had been cut into one temple, a hole large enough to allow someone to access the brain matter. He turned it toward the light, though he already had his suspicions. The edges were straight, neat. It wasn’t a hole an animal could have made with tooth or claw. A saw had scored those lines, then someone had carefully extracted the bone.
“Someone else has been performing autopsies,” he said.
He looked up at Sardelle, as if she might have the answers. Her eyes were wide, and she only shook her head.
Tolemek returned the skull to its resting place, not that this mass grave appeared restful. “They should have burned the bodies.” He wiped his hands on his trousers and looked down at them, the uneasy feeling coming over him again that they had all been contaminated, that it was only a matter of time before someone started showing symptoms.
His legs felt numb as he followed Sardelle another hundred meters to where the rest of the group had stopped. Insects hummed and buzzed, but the jungle was otherwise quiet.
Tolemek leaned against a tree next to Cas. Sardelle sheathed her sword, and darkness overtook them. He had no idea what the expression on his face had been before she extinguished the light, but Cas took his hand. For his reassurance? Or hers? Maybe both. Either way, he clasped her hand back, then pulled her into a hug. So little fazed her, especially when it came to death, but she wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her face in his chest.
“So, what’s the verdict, scientist?” Zirkander a
sked.
Good question.
“I don’t know what it is,” Tolemek said, “but I no longer think my people know what they’re dealing with. I’m wondering if some experiment got out of hand or took an unexpected turn.”
“So, no chance of them having a cure or antidote in there?”
Tolemek looked back toward the grave, even though the darkness and distance now hid it from view. “There’s a chance, I suppose.”
“Do you think this is something they’re making based on the dragon blood?” Zirkander asked. “Another potential weapon to use against Iskandia? Or whoever irritates them next?”
“I don’t,” Sardelle said. “Since humans and dragons can breed, it doesn’t seem plausible that anything in the blood would be toxic.”
Tolemek was reluctant to gainsay her, since she presumably knew more about dragons than he did, but after a moment, he said, “I’m less certain. If a tiny drop is potent enough to power an aircraft, it possesses properties we can’t possibly understand. Mating doesn’t involve exchanging blood, just the building blocks contained within, uh—” He would have waved at his genitals, but Cas was standing in front of them, and it was too dark for gestures, anyway. “The male’s and female’s baby-producing material.”
Zirkander snorted.
Cas leaned back and swatted him on the chest. “Tactful.”
“Blood is still important,” Sardelle said. “If the blood types aren’t compatible, the fetus will be aborted. There are humans who are different enough that they can’t produce children with each other. Dragons are remarkable in their ability to mate with many different species. Some of the scholars of my time proposed that it was the magic itself or perhaps the fact that dragon-to-dragon offspring were so rare that they evolved other ways to continue their line. Others claimed it was simply because they were gods.”
“That’s all interesting,” Zirkander said, “not that it explains the octopus, but I’m more concerned about what the Cofah are doing with that blood and how to stop them.”
“Walking in and shooting them should work,” Cas said.
“You have a knack for bluntness,” Tolemek murmured.
“It’s a useful trait for a soldier.”
“We’ll go in and assess the situation,” Zirkander said. “Later tonight, when it’s more likely people are sleeping. We’ll still have to deal with the guard out front and any alarms he may have rigged, unless someone’s aware of a back door.”
Tolemek looked toward Sardelle, thinking of the way Jaxi had melted that vault entrance in the volcano laboratory. But nobody answered. The crickets hummed softly.
“You’re all looking at me, aren’t you?” Sardelle asked.
“I’m looking at your sword, actually,” Zirkander said. “Do you think Jaxi could burn us a nice hole in a side wall, so we could slip in unobserved?”
“Jaxi says that stone wall is extremely thick—there’s a lot more rock than open space in the pyramid.”
“Does that mean she can or can’t do it?” Tolemek said.
Can’t you people just subdue the guard? You have more weapons than he does.
And he presumably wasn’t the only guard in the place. You burned down a one-foot-thick steel vault door. And a wolf.
Yes, and now I’m tired.
“She thinks it’ll be faster just going in the front and dealing with the guards,” Sardelle said. “I can convince the man in the doorway to take a nap. I wouldn’t think there would be a lot of soldiers patrolling the tunnels once we’re inside. They’ve lost a lot of men, and they must be busy working on their mission.”
“Unless they’re expecting us,” Zirkander said. “Didn’t you say the dragon might know we’re here? And Tolemek’s sister apparently is talking to him, so she knows we’re here.”
Tolemek scowled at his dark form. “What are you saying? That she would tell her captors that we’re coming?”
“We don’t know for sure that it’s a prisoner-captor relationship, do we? Maybe they offered her escape from that hospital in exchange for working for them, and she agreed.”
“She wouldn’t betray me,” Tolemek said. As for the rest, he silently admitted that he couldn’t know for certain. Hadn’t he worked for the Cofah once, after all? They were his people, and perhaps he would still be in the military today if his disgrace in battle hadn’t led to his discharge. And he knew so little of Tylie now. It had been so long since they had a normal relationship.
“All right,” Zirkander said. His tone was neutral, but Tolemek got the impression that Zirkander was humoring him. “We’ll still wait a couple hours, in the hope that most of the people inside will be asleep.”
“We shouldn’t delay further,” Tolemek said. “Time could be more important now than ever.” He waved in the direction of the mass grave, implying that they had all been exposed to whatever was killing people. In truth, he was more worried about Tylie, that she was in trouble in there, being tormented and forced to work for the military.
“We should be able to finish this one way or another tonight,” Zirkander said. “A couple of hours shouldn’t matter. Besides, I wouldn’t mind if those pirates showed up again and made a distraction for us.”
Cas stirred, stepping away from Tolemek’s chest. But if she had something to say, she kept it to herself.
Tolemek didn’t want to wait. He didn’t say as much out loud, but his fist balled of its own accord, and he stalked into the brush, thoughts of going in on his own filling his mind. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. He couldn’t forget that Zirkander was here for the dragon, not for Tylie. If the group of Iskandians decided the dragon needed to be destroyed and if Tylie was caught in the middle of it…
He could not allow that to happen.
Chapter 10
Cas found Tolemek standing at the edge of the crater, staring down at the ziggurat. Or maybe scowling down at it. The shadows hid his face, and she read his mood more by his stance and the sulky silence bleeding off him than anything else.
“Did they send you to make sure I didn’t run off?” Tolemek asked.
“I’m sure Sardelle could monitor you without my help. But I’m going back to see if those pirates are indeed finding their way here. I wanted to make sure you’re all right.”
“You’re leaving?” He shifted to face her.
“Not far. I’ll be back to help you roll that snoring guard into a closet after Sardelle knocks him out.”
Tolemek grunted. “I doubt thousand-year-old ancient pyramids come with closets.”
“You don’t think people needed to hang up their clothes back then?” Cas stepped forward and took his hand. “Will you wait to go in? Just a couple of hours? I don’t think we should split up the group.”
“Aren’t you about to leave the group?”
“I’m scouting, not splitting.”
“That’s a relief.” Tolemek squeezed her hand. “My concern is that the group and I are going to have different goals once we go inside.” He took a deep breath. “Listen, it might be my father’s fault that Tylie was in that asylum, but I broke her out and then… when I couldn’t help her, I took her back. I thought I could more easily try to find a solution on my own, if I wasn’t dragging her around with me and watching after her.” He turned to face the crater again, but his chin drooped to his chest, and she doubted he was seeing anything. “If I had kept her with me, she wouldn’t be in this situation now. She never would have been made into some tool for the government. If they’ve been hurting her, coercing her somehow—” He lifted a hand to rub his face. “This is my fault. Every delay…”
Cas shifted, not knowing what to say to alleviate his guilt. She had never been good at dealing with other people’s emotions. She didn’t know if she could blame her austere upbringing for that, or if it was just some failing in her blood. “We’ll get her. Whatever’s happened, it’s not your fault, but you’re going to fix it. We’ll get her out of here, and Sardelle will know how to help her.”
Tolemek sighed noisily. She didn’t know if that meant her words had helped or not.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Cas said, “but if you believe the colonel’s mission will endanger her, I don’t think that’s the case. He’s not someone who’s going to sacrifice a woman for some perceived greater good. He’s more likely to get himself in trouble trying to be a hero.”
“Glad to hear it.” Tolemek sounded bitter.
Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned Zirkander. Every time she did, it seemed to grate at him. She didn’t know whether she should apologize—and would she have to continue to apologize every time she mentioned her commander’s name?—or accept that it was his problem that he needed to resolve on his own.
“I’m going to go check on our pursuers,” she said, letting go of his hand.
“Cas?” he said softly as she stepped away.
She paused. “Yes?”
“Thank you.”
She didn’t know what she had actually done, but she said, “You’re welcome.”
She waited another moment, to see if he would say more, but he didn’t. Hoping that meant he would stay put until she returned, she slipped into the brush, heading back toward the main trail. Zirkander thought she was going to check on pirates, and it was possible they were back there, but her senses had never relaxed, not since they had left town, and she couldn’t shake that feeling that something more inimical than bumbling treasure hunters was following them.
Indeed, as she crept through the brush, the sense grew more profound. Maybe it was all her imagination, or the creepiness of this place getting to her. She wasn’t superstitious, and dead bodies rarely bothered her, probably not as much as they should, but the mystery disease added a strange element.
After following the rim of the crater, she reached the trail that meandered down the hill toward the ziggurat. The close, humid air smelled of the fires burning in the braziers. The guard was still at his post. He must not have noticed any of the shots that Cas had heard in the distance, or he—or a team of soldiers—would have come out to investigate. None of the natives had guns, at least insofar as she had seen, so the sound of firearms would be a sure sign of intruders. She gazed down the trail and was on the verge of stepping out to follow it, but her instincts screamed a warning. She stepped into the shadows between two trees instead and found the trigger of her rifle with her finger. Reminding herself that she shouldn’t fire so close to the Cofah guard, she lowered the weapon on its strap and slid out a dagger instead. She wasn’t the most powerful person, but if she could sneak up on an enemy, she could cut a throat efficiently enough—her father had seen to that. But she had no idea where her enemy was. She must have heard some tiny noise or seen a shadow moving at the corner of her vision—what else could have set her senses to jangling so? But no matter how hard she strained her ears now, she couldn’t hear anything above the buzz of insects and the soft rustles of nocturnal creatures scampering through the leaf litter. Nobody was walking up the trail, and the guard hadn’t moved. So what—