9. Chapter 9
Chapter 9
Beware the void. You cannot see its truth, Son of Darkness. It is far from empty. It is the Unending Sea, and there are far more dangerous things than dragons lurking in the depths of that darkness.
~Vyran the Black, A History of Magic and Dragons
Maeve
I don’t know if I trust the Shade’s strength, but there isn’t any other option since I can’t shadow walk. The Shade believes he is strong enough to get me directly behind Casimir. It’ll be draining to move into a steel room like that, but he has plenty of experience shadow walking to know what he can and can’t do.
After that, things are going to become messy. The Shade will be too weak to shadow walk, and we’ll be two floors from the bottom of the Keep of Steel. We won’t be able to just jump out a window and fly away. No, it will come down to me and my Earth powers.
No one has questioned if I can get us out.
The Shade’s silence is a comfort now. No questions. No discussion. Just patient waiting while Darian and Lee make their way into Casimir’s cell, Darian dressed and changed into an exact replica of Jasper Wren and Lee transformed into a mouse.
“It’s time,” the Shade says and quickly grips my wrist. I nod to him, and shadows appear at our feet. My heart almost begins to speed up at the thought of visiting the void again, but that steady rhythm of my heartbeat never actually changes. It’s slow and steady and almost mechanical like a clock.
The Shade pulls us into the void, and my muscles relax as the darkness presses against me. It tempts me, begging me to give into it, but I resist. I have a purpose here. The world depends on me.
It almost convinced me once. When I found out that everything was a lie, I almost let the void take Cole, Darian, Lee, and myself. If the Shade hadn’t called in a debt, we’d all be lost to that darkness.
I feel the Shade reaching out with the power of the Shadowed Cloak, and he grasps at any bit of darkness in a prison cell covered with steel. Almost no one else would have the strength to force us into that room. Every bit of energy he pushes toward it is being consumed by the steel. Well, every bit up to a certain point. If he can flood the room with power, the steel won’t be able to absorb his power fast enough.
He does. We’re pulled out of the void and re-emerge into the normal world right behind a man wearing a bloodstained red military coat. Jasper Wren stands across the table from us, his eyes never straying from the man below us. The Shade falls to the ground, completely exhausted, and I ignore him.
My hands are moving immediately. Both of them wrap around Casimir’s temples, my fingers pressing against the black hair that’s so similar to Cole’s. For the first time in weeks, my heartbeat changes. Instead of peace, hatred for Casimir fills me. It’s a hate so intense I have a hard time maintaining control over myself. The world flashes red as I consider smashing Casimir’s face against the steel table he’s sitting at.
I don’t, though. I am not that Wyrdling who had no control over herself any longer. Instead, I focus on his pain and suffering, enjoying the knowledge that this is far more excruciating than anything he could do with fire.
Black lines form in his skin around my fingertips, and his body stiffens as my poison flows through him. Just like I could control shadows, this poison is mine, and it obeys my commands. It wants to move to his brain, leaving him a husk of a human. Then it would move to his heart, finally killing him, but not until he’d spent hours feeling the fiery burn of his veins melting and healing repeatedly as my poison moved.
Instead, I control it and focus its effects where I need them. I push it toward his mind. The black sludge that I nearly killed my cousin with encircles his ability to think and blocks it from any of his senses. He immediately falls over in his chair.
Jasper shifts back to Darian, and Lee is already on the floor and growing. Using my powers was harder than I’d expected because of the steel cell, but it wasn’t enough to drain me. The Shade is climbing to his feet, and I recognize just how close we were to not making it. I need to make sure he doesn’t have to use his powers for a while after this.
“Darian, please carry Casimir,” I say,
And then the sound of a lock clicking into place fills the otherwise silent room. So it was a better trap than we’d expected.
It doesn’t matter. Darian hesitates, and I snarl at him. “I said to get Casimir. I said that I’d get us out of here.”
Darian moves, and I ignore the people in the cell, my legs moving faster than ever before. I remember the description of the prison cell that the Shade told to the blacksmiths. The thickness of a breastplate.
If the walls are covered in metal that thin, the door won’t hold me inside it.
I hit it with my shoulder, and the hinges rock. I can feel the door bending where my shoulder is pressed against it. It’s not enough to break it down, though. I take a step back and ram my shoulder against it again. It shudders hard again, and I can feel the hinges deforming even more. But it’s not enough.
Anger explodes inside me, but then Darian and Lee are beside me. “You’re not all alone,” Lee says.
I smile. All three of us hit the door together, and it flies backward. It impacts the opposite wall hard enough to turn the granite into dust, along with the High Fae that was standing between the door and the wall.
The Shade is still in the cell, and I say, “Darian, get Casimir. Lee, take care of the Shade. I’ll take care of the guards.”
I stare down the approaching group of House of Steel soldiers. All of them are covered from head to toe in steel. They work in formations built for these hallways. Two Immortals carry massive shields in front. Two behind them wield long spears, and behind them, two more are holding heavy crossbows that look like they’re large enough that their bolts could punch through even heavy gauge plate armor.
It's a formation that’s meant to fight nearly any set of Immortals. Luckily, I’m not just any Immortal.
I close my eyes and press my hands to the floor. There’s the reverberating sound of a bowstring, and pain sears through me. I’m shoved to the ground, and my eyes flash open. The four foot long steel shaft of a crossbow bolt extrudes from my shoulder. The bolt pierced my stone armor and must have shattered my shoulder blade. Half the arrow is coming out of my back, and my vision swims.
I try to move my arm, but it doesn’t move the way it should. In a flash, Lee is in front of me. The entire corridor explodes in light so bright, I don’t know how anyone can see through it. Darian’s behind me, and he whispers, “This is going to hurt.”
It’s worse than anything I could have imagined. There’s a cracking sound as Darian breaks the bolt and rips the shaft from my shoulder. I can’t stop the scream that claws its way out of my throat. Another bolt flies and clatters against the granite.
“Hurry,” Lee hisses. I can already feel the splintered bones knitting together now that the steel is out of my shoulder. I push myself to my feet and feel the anger rippling through me, so similar to the way I’d felt when Calyr had refused me all those months ago.
I’ve worn the Painted Crown for three months, and I’ve fought nearly every day in life or death battles. In each of those battles, the rhythm of peace flowed through me. Now, I embrace the lightning of anger as I feel for the soldiers.
They’re staying back, trusting that we’re trapped and I’m bleeding. They’re waiting for reinforcements—probably Rhion. I don’t want to deal with that. “Move,” I say through a snarl, and I run past Lee. I don’t even bother to get my knife out of its sheath. Sometimes a razor-sharp blade is the right weapon for the job. There are other times that it’s the last weapon I’d ever want.
As I pass Lee, the light shifts just a touch, and it’s enough that I can see what’s in front of me. Six soldiers from the House of Steel. Just like before. This time, though, I’m not trying to be clever.
They’re shading their eyes, and I leap at them. Two shields, two spears, and two crossbows. If I were to stand in front of those shields, they would do their work far too well. But if I can get behind them, none of these soldiers have anything that can touch me. At least not without unsheathing a weapon. It’s enough time.
They see me as I leap. My right shoulder still throbs fiercely from the crossbow bolt, a reminder that it may not be of any use. I’m going to have to fight all six of them with just my left arm.
My body straightens out horizontally in the air. The two Immortals with spears try to stab me, but I’m moving too fast and at too strange an angle as I soar at shoulder height. Their spears brush against me, hitting my armor and sliding over the interlocking stone plates as I spin in the air. I slip past all six of them, and I land in a roll on the opposite side of the Immortals carrying crossbows.
I’m on my feet in an instant, but as I turn, one of them fires his crossbow at me. It hits me in the thigh but flies through the muscle, leaving a thumb-sized hole in the muscle and skin, missing the bone.
The pain is enough to make me grit my teeth, and I stumble. I’m moving again before the second has a chance to fire. The spearmen haven’t been able to turn their weapons around, but instead of trying to maneuver their weapons like that, they just drop them. Both of the spearmen’s hands become sword blades made of stone.
Their stances change to reflect their new weapon, and it’s obvious that this is something that they’ve trained. The shield bearers slide between them, moving to cover the crossbowmen.
As the two crossbowmen reload their weapons, I charge.
It’s pointless, though, because the Shade appears behind them, rising out of the shadows at their feet. A midnight black blade is held in each hand. He slips those blades through the eye slits in the two crossbowmen’s helmets, sinking the impossibly sharp shadow daggers into their skulls.
They slump to the ground. The Immortals with swords for hands try to spin on him, but that only brings their eye slits closer to him, and in these cramped spaces, the unwieldy long swords that are attached to their bodies only keep them from being able to wrestle him and possibly protect themselves.
His daggers are in their eyes before they’ve even turned all the way around.
The shield-bearers have even less chance. Each of them is pulling a sword from their side, but they aren’t wearing helmets, and the Shade’s blades are in their skulls before the ones with swords for hands have hit the ground.
They all seem to slump simultaneously, falling around him as he gasps for breath. “We need to leave,” he hisses. “Now.”
I nod to him, his words shaking me out of the stupor that I’d fallen into. I’d struggled against them, and I might not have been able to win that fight, but the Shade had killed them all while barely having the energy to stand.
I squat down, closing my eyes as I touch the gray granite floors. We’re nearly at the bottom of the Keep of Steel. To the west lies the mountain. To the east lies the wall of Draenyth. Just like in Stormhaven, I reach down to the mountains below Draenyth, and I pull. Stone flows from the ground like water, becoming a wall in the middle of the hallway. I may not be as capable a warrior as the Shade, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve.
As soon as the barrier is in place, Darian picks up Casimir, who is still passed out and hopefully will stay like that until I pull the toxin out of him. When I touch the stone of the hallway, I force it to flow downward. It’s only enough space for us to walk through, and Darian has to stoop until he shrinks while he follows behind me. The Shade is behind him, and Lee covers the rear.
I stop when everyone is clear of the hallway. In order to cover our escape, I pull another wall from the ground as I’d done a few seconds ago. If Veris, the god of good fortune, is on our side, no one will notice. The last thing we need is the House of Steel to catch us. This isn’t exactly quick work.
When I get back to the front of the group, I put my hand on the wall. The stone in front of me disappears as if acid was eating away at it. Each drip of the liquid stone hits the ground and is absorbed. A flat floor and rounded tunnel are left for us to walk through.
The Shade doesn’t seem to be bothered by the quick way I’ve altered the very stone under the mountain, but Darian and Lee certainly have looks of shock on their faces. I don’t say anything, more than a little disappointed in myself for needing help from the Shade. I’d been sure that I could handle myself, and maybe I would have been able to if we weren’t in such a hurry.
It’s done though. I may be disappointed in myself, but we were successful with minimal problems.
We begin our slow walk out of Draenyth. Slightly upward toward the walls of the city. It’s not fast, but it’s simple and safe. As the only person in the House of Earth, I’m the only person who can do this. No one else will follow us unless they break down the wall I made in the hallway.
But I can hear the Shade’s labored breaths behind me. We won’t be able to shadow walk back to Stormhaven, so Lee and Darian will have to carry me and Casimir on the flight.
We rescued Casimir, though. All we have to do is survive the escape and get back to Stormhaven. It could be worse.