A knock sounded at the door to the artifact room.
“What?” Vann asked.
“Uhm, sir?” Lieutenant Kraden poked his head around the door. “There’s a prisoner here to see you.”
“Is it about a damned book?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you tell him that he’s not getting a day off?”
“Yes, sir. He said General Zirkander promised it to him, and he’s sure you won’t go back on that promise.”
Vann growled. “Fine. Send him in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You put my team together that’s going to guard the dig site from thieves yet, Kraden?”
“Working on it, sir. You didn’t want me to take anyone off their regular shift, right?”
“Right, this will be a double shift for whomever you pick. You’re a signal soldier. Spin it so it sounds like it’s an honor. Defending the king’s mountain from craven thieves.”
Kraden stared at him. “Spin it, sir? Signal is communications, not journalism. Or, uhm, sensationalism.”
“I know what it is, but you haven’t managed to get that new radio installed, so I’m coming up with other uses for your skills.”
The lieutenant flushed. “I’ll get it working, sir. It was working last week. I don’t know what’s wrong. Bosmont said it might be cursed.”
“Cursed?”
“On account of the bones. The radio stopped working the same day his team found them.” Kraden bit his lip, his gaze drawn to the tarp on the table. “You’re brave to be touching them, sir.”
Vann picked up the rib he’d dropped a few times on the trek back, tempted to throw it at the lieutenant. But he’d rather throw it at Bosmont. The captain was in his thirties, far too old to believe in cursed bones. “I don’t want excuses, Lieutenant. I want a radio. Right now, our bimonthly supply ship is the only way to communicate with headquarters.”
He had been shocked when he’d first arrived up here and found out the remote outpost lacked a way to send timely reports back to the capital. Vann could understand not being able to run wire for a telegraph station into these craggy peaks, but given the preciousness of the energy crystals that came out of the mountain, it seemed ludicrous that the outpost was completely cut off from the outside world. Fortunately, his superiors had agreed with him and had sent the equipment out to construct a radio tower. Unfortunately, they had sent a lieutenant who was six weeks out of the academy to do it. Vann neither knew nor cared why Kraden had received such a dubious first duty station, but wagered it had been a punishment, the same as it had been for him.
“I’ll keep working on it, sir,” Kraden said.
“Send the miner in.” Vann waved the bone. A strange tingle ran down his arm. He paused in the middle of the movement to stare at the fossilized rib. “Now what?” he grumbled.
His fingers buzzed, as if they held a strong magnet or something electric. Frowning, he set the bone on the tarp with the others. The feeling disappeared, but when he rubbed his fingers, the tips felt numb. He had been handling that bone all afternoon. What had changed? It couldn’t be magnetic, could it? Somehow reacting to something else in the room? He eyed the shelves full of books, tools, and boxes that had been pulled from the mountain, from what had been witch-infested tunnels three hundred years earlier. His predecessor had told him that precious little in this room was magic, and he’d done the cataloging himself and couldn’t remember anything magnetic. Besides, fossils weren’t magnetic. Even he knew that.
“Colonel, sir?” The miner who shuffled in held a wool cap to his chest and bobbed his head politely, his demeanor at odds with his rough face, one sporting a broken nose, a scar that curled his lip upward, and a burn mark where it looked like someone had tried to brand him like a steer.
“You’re not getting a day off,” Vann said. “As I’ve said multiple times now, that policy is no longer in effect.”
“But it took me six months to finish the book. I couldn’t have come in any earlier to give a report.” The miner’s gaze shifted toward the bones as he spoke. Bosmont better not have been spreading his theories of curses and hauntings to these people. “We don’t get much reading time, see.”
“What book?” Vann asked, though he wasn’t sure why. What did he care? He hadn’t read many of the classics that were in the prison library. When it came to books, he didn’t have much interest in the ones that dealt with matters other than military history.
“Milner’s Timeline of Independence for Iskandoth.”
Vann leaned his back against the table. He had read that one. He enjoyed the histories that involved his people kicking those scum-kissing Cofah trespassers out of their country. “Go ahead. Summarize it.” Maybe a prisoner who could get through eight hundred pages of history might be trusted to do something other than swinging a pickaxe. Such as going along to guard a dig site...
A few seconds after the man launched into a stumbling but accurate summary, a snap sounded behind Vann. He whirled, automatically dropping into a fighting stance. He spotted the reason for the noise immediately. A fresh crack ran diagonally across one of the windowpanes.
“Is some idiot throwing rocks?” After shooting a glare at the miner—maybe he had come up here under instructions to distract the outpost commander—Vann stalked around the table to the window. It looked out toward the outer wall and a tower rather than into the courtyard. He spotted a soldier at his post on top of the tower, but the man’s back was toward Vann, as he faced the valley. Vann didn’t see anyone on the ground, but some fool could have thrown the rock and then run around the corner of the building. To what end, he couldn’t guess. Throwing rocks wouldn’t get anyone out of this hole.
“I... was looking right at that window, sir,” the miner said, a quaver to his voice that hadn’t been there before. “I didn’t see anything hit it. The glass just... snapped.”
Had it been extremely cold or extremely hot, Vann might have believed that, but it was neither. He scowled out the window again, then walked back to the table, continuing past it to stand next to the miner. He folded his arms over his chest and glared hard, still suspicious that the man was part of some scheme.
“Continue,” he said softly, dangerously. He hoped to make the man nervous enough to babble a confession. Nobody here would make a fool of him, nor would anyone successfully escape while he commanded.
The miner appeared nervous—he kept rubbing an old scar on the back of his hand—but he wasn’t glancing at Vann. Instead, he kept eyeing the tarp.
“Are those dragon bones, Colonel? I heard... well, that’s what I heard.”
“So what if they are?”
“Dragons are magic. And a dragon burial site... they say that strange things happen around one.”
Vann snorted. “Who says that? I don’t believe that anyone here has ever seen one. I doubt there even is such a thing. Dragons were rare, even thousands of years ago, and they were hard to kill. Are hard to kill, something I can personally attest to now that there are some back in the world.”
“Yes, sir,” the miner mumbled, his gaze still locked on the table. “You know, now that I reconsider things, I might just stay at work. There’s no bones down in the tunnels, right? Should be safe down there.” The man backed away from the table, tripped over nothing, and scurried for the door. A soldier out in the hall escorted him out of the building.
“Guess Kraden gets to put together his team solely from soldiers,” Vann said when he was alone again. “Ought to put Bosmont on that team. If he’s the one who’s been spreading these rumors, he deserves it.”
Noticing that he was talking to himself, Vann snapped his mouth shut and walked back to the table. He frowned at the rib bone and frowned harder at the cracked window. Magic, please. He could believe that dragons themselves were magical, but some bones that were probably thousands of years old?
“Why not check?” he muttered, realizing he had a way of doing so.
He jogged into the hallway an
d down the stairs to where the officers had their quarters. He stepped into the room at the back of the building that belonged to him, it being distinguished only by the plaque on the door that read Commander. The bunk was slightly larger than those in the other quarters, but the room was otherwise identical. No perks of command here. Not that he cared about luxuries, especially when he had no one with whom to share the bed.
He dropped to his knees next to it. He had been allowed to bring few personal belongings, leaving most of his things back at the family property near the capital, but he had a few books and some of his favorite weapons, which included a sword locked in a dented and charred box under the bunk. Kasandral, a dragon-slaying sword that was reputed to be thousands of years old, had been in his family since the days when sorcerers had ridden dragons and wars had been fought with magic rather than might. Vann shuddered at the idea of sorcery being rampant in the world, and he was proud to be the heir to a weapon that could defeat witches and dragons.
He pulled out the box and unlatched it. The blade rested inside on velvet that covered a metal lining that was supposed to dull its influence. The sword could sense magic and had a sentience of a sort. It had once guided Vann to a witch who was trying to kill the king, and had allowed him to cut through her magic and slay her. It had also tried to get him to slay a witch and a dragon that had been fighting for the king. Controlling it was not easy, but he did not mind the challenge.
Unlike when there were magical beings around, those who had dragon blood flowing through their veins, Kasandral lay quietly in its box, no hint of its power on display. The ancient runes etched into the side of the blade appeared nothing but ornamental, but he had seen them glow before and knew what it meant when they did.
Vann pulled out the sword and jogged back up to the artifact room, not answering the surprised stare he received when Lieutenant Kraden spotted him with it. He walked inside, prepared to wave the blade over the table to wake it up. There was no need. As soon as the bones came into sight, the ancient sword started glowing.
He froze, scowling at it, and then at the bones. It wasn’t glowing as fiercely as it did when an enemy who possessed magic was nearby, but a pale green glow definitely emanated from the runes. An alien tension bunched Vann’s shoulders, and an image flowed into his brain, an image that involved him taking the sword and hacking those bones into a thousand pieces.
He gritted his teeth and backed out of the room. Bosmont’s “science people” definitely wouldn’t have good things to say about him if they arrived to find the rare fossils in such a state. In the hallway, Vann closed the door and locked it, all desire to catalog the bones disappearing. Let the scientists deal with them.
Chapter 3
The mountains were majestic, snow and glaciers gleaming under the sun, and absolutely breathtaking. Even though Lilah was freezing in the back seat of Sleepy’s flier, her jacket doing little to stave off the wind that the craft generated, she wouldn’t have given up her opportunity to see the world like this for anything. She’d flown in a dirigible a couple of times when she and her husband had traveled, but the plodding conveyance had been nothing like these fliers. Sleepy, following in Ridge’s wake, swooped in and out of canyons, glided across ice fields, and dove through valleys carpeted with the most amazingly colorful meadows of wildflowers. Now and then, her stomach protested, but the cold fresh air helped alleviate her queasiness.
The fliers rounded a glacier-draped mountain, and a valley dotted with evergreens came into view, snow still covering the earth in the shady spots. A walled outpost rose from one end of the valley, the surrounding area cleared of trees, leaving lush green grass and a stream that ran straight through the compound on its way toward a waterfall a couple of miles away.
The fliers coasted toward the outpost, then, as the momentum faded, the pilots flipped switches, and the propellers turned off as thrusters ignited in a display of engineering that left Lilah wondering at the mathematics. She doubted the technology would have been possible without the yellow power crystal that glowed from a casing inside the cockpit. From what she’d heard, the army denied that they were magical, instead, promising they were completely natural phenomena. Lilah had always doubted that, being intimately familiar with the earth’s natural fuel sources.
Sleepy landed beside Ridge atop a large, flat roof on a big, two-story building made from stone. Soldiers patrolled a wall, complete with towers and large artillery weapons, including cannons and shell guns. It looked like the kind of outpost one would find on the coast nearest to the Cofah empire, rather than some remote mountain deep within Iskandian borders. Lilah glimpsed some bare-chested men fighting in the courtyard and thought of the criminal-miners Ridge had warned her about. Perhaps they were permitted an evening exercise session.
“Ma’am?” Sleepy had already hopped out of the cockpit and was offering her a hand down.
Lilah lowered her gear to him, then climbed out on her own.
“Why is that man fighting every time I show up here?” Ridge grumbled from a few steps away. He and Kaika were also on the ground, Kaika shouldering the duffel bag—it didn’t look like she had taken more than a few items out of it after Ridge had ordered her to lighten the load.
“It’s what he’s good at, sir,” Kaika said. “At least this time, it doesn’t look like an insurrection is going on.” She jerked her thumb toward the courtyard. Now that the propellers had died down, Lilah could hear the jeers of men and the smacks of fists striking flesh. “That’s just how Therrik winds down after a hard day of not killing people.”
“It would be nice if he’d wind down by coming up to greet us,” Ridge said. “I know he didn’t miss our arrival. Fliers aren’t exactly stealth craft.”
Lilah walked to the edge of the rooftop, curious to see the man of whom they spoke. Maybe it would be wiser not to be curious, but uncurious scientists did not make many discoveries.
The fight broke up as soon as she poked her head over the edge, though she doubted it had anything to do with her. Half of the men were kneeling or sitting, grabbing arms or shoulders and grimacing in a manner that suggested they regretted participating in the first place. Another lay on his back, his palm protecting what promised to become a black eye. The men were shirtless, muscular, and didn’t look like they would be easily defeated, but none of them had any fight left. Except for one.
A brawny, broad-shouldered man stalked across the courtyard, his shirt dangling in his hand. Every line of his musculature stood out, like one of the marble statues of ancient warriors in the courtyard at the university, though the dagger tattoos on his forearms wouldn’t be found on many statues, at least not in her town. Another tattoo darkened one pectoral muscle, though she couldn’t tell what it depicted from here. It seemed thorny or barbed. Definitely prickly. He looked prickly, too, with short, thick black hair speckled with gray, a square jaw, and dark, intense eyes.
Built to kill and to like it, the phrase popped into her head, a line used frequently in the Time Trek novels to describe Commander Asylon, the hero of the series. Commander Asylon was an honorable man under the rugged exterior. She had no idea if this fellow would turn out to be similar.
He looked toward the rooftop, a fierce—or maybe fiercely annoyed—expression on his face. If he smiled, she imagined many women would call him handsome, but he didn’t look like someone who did that often. Lilah found herself stepping away from the edge, uncomfortable holding his hard stare.
Ridge came up beside her and looked down as the big man approached the outside stairs leading up to the rooftop. “You better not be out of uniform when you get up here, Therrik. There are ladies present.” He elbowed Lilah and whispered, “The promotion was worth it just so I could outrank him.”
“Kiss my tattooed ass, Zirkander,” the man called up as he started up the stairs.
“Does he know you outrank him?” Lilah asked.
“He has a hard time remembering it. Too many blows to the head during his career.” Ridge tu
rned toward the stairs, clasping his hands behind his back as he strolled across the rooftop.
When Colonel Therrik came into view, he had donned his shirt, a black short-sleeve one that did little to hide the musculature of his torso. He seemed to be missing the uniform jacket that typically went over the shirt. Lilah told herself it was silly to appreciate that lack, especially when the officer seemed to have the personality of a premenstrual porcupine. Definitely not Commander Asylon.
“What do you want, Zirkander?” Therrik asked, sparing Lilah a glance but nothing more. Surprisingly, he offered Kaika a nod. It was almost cordial, at least in comparison to the glower he fixed upon Ridge.
“We got Bosmont’s report on the dragon burial site,” Ridge said.
“It’s not a damned burial site. It’s just some bones wedged into some rocks. Stopping to worry about them is delaying our mining preparations for that part of the mountain. It’s probably going to impact how many energy crystals your pilots are going to get this winter.”
Ah, Sleepy had been right. Therrik seemed someone more likely to eat academics than to work with them. Lilah was glad Ridge had orders from the king.
“Nevertheless, I’ve brought you a paleontologist to examine the site and the bones and determine if they can be safely excavated or if we’ll have to work around them.”