Chapter Nine
The primary market in this area of Tartarus was a rabbit warren of goat trails through what looked like a magical shantytown.
A big cavern had been carved out of the earth and shored up with wards that everybody who wanted a place in the market had to help maintain, as part of the rent for their spot.
Yet despite that, space was usually hard to come by, as this was one of the biggest and best bazaars in the entire complex.
But today, there were a lot of empty spots, like spaces in a gap-toothed smile, with the missing merchandise having been shoved into some of those madly squeaking shopping carts and whisked away by the fleeing mob.
But plenty of tents, booths, and workshops were still in place, although most had been abandoned, their owners having fled.
The few people who remained had hunkered down and were watching us from inside tent flaps and from under counters, their eyes huge.
They didn’t know us, but they knew what we were. And while war mages weren’t usually popular around here, it looked like we had gotten upgraded. One guy even gave me a thumbs-up as we passed.
At least, I hoped that’s what it was.
But all I cared about was that nobody yelled out a warning that we were here, and that the remaining structures gave us cover as we crept through the big space, hearing the chaos ahead before we saw it.
It seemed to be clustered near the biggest tunnel out of here, which made the one we’d just come down look tiny by comparison.
Screams, cries, and people pleading echoed around the cavern, along with harsh voices issuing orders, and the sound of vehicles with big engines growling a pulsing rhythm in the background.
I figured that that was why the Black Circle had decided to come here specifically.
The market had a tunnel that led into one of the 677 miles of runoff channels under the city, specifically one wide enough for maintenance vehicles, as it moved its stock that way.
That had allowed the dark to bring in trucks to transport the people they planned to take.
Portals would have been an easier method, but they were far more expensive magically, not to mention bringing the Circle running whenever a new one tore through metaphysical space.
Trucks, on the other hand, were invisible to the Circle’s detection wards, which was why I guessed they were being used.
And then I found a view through the gap between two tents and confirmed it.
Warded pens held what looked like hundreds of people at the far end of the cavern, and behind them was a line of old army surplus trucks, big and having cloth covers over the backs, making it impossible to see inside.
Or to judge how many enemy combatants we had to worry about, although it didn’t really matter.
Those I could see already fell under the heading of “way too fucking many.”
“Shit,” Caleb summed up softly.
“No way backup gets here in time,” I agreed. “Not before those trucks start leaving.”
The dark knew they had missed Gerald and Kai, as their buddies hadn’t returned. So they had to know they had maybe half an hour before the Corps came down on their heads in force. They weren’t going to waste time.
“We could collapse the entrance to the tunnel,” I murmured, “and trap everyone inside—”
“Or kill them all,” Caleb pointed out. “You know how shit the wards are around here. We try anything, and the whole ceiling could come down. Better to find the boy and run—”
“And leave everyone else?”
“What else can we do? There have to be fifty goddamned Black Circle soldiers, and probably more on those trucks.”
I crouched there, my mind spinning with options, all of which were bad.
Letting those people go meant that many of them would be killed by the Black Circle, culled as so many others had been who didn’t turn out to have useful attributes.
And those who did pass muster wouldn’t be any better off, being flung against us in battle to spare better troops.
Either way, they were dead if they left here, but how were a handful of us supposed to stop them? And then my thoughts cut off when I saw a familiar face.
Freaking great.
“There.” I pointed at the brown-coated mage off to the far right. “That’s the bastard from last night. The leader.”
“Him?” Caleb frowned. The nondescript brunet didn’t look like a leader. More like a bored bank teller waiting for lunchtime. Despite the chaos, his couldn’t-pick-him-out-of-a-lineup face was just annoyed, to the point that he should have had a toe tapping impatiently.
But looks could be deceiving, and his definitely were. “He packs a punch.”
“And we care about that because?”
“We can’t just leave them.”
“Lia—”
“You have a better idea? Find and free Jace. I’ll distract the mage and try to keep those trucks here—”
“How?”
“By standing in front of them?”
“He’ll kill you!”
“No, he’ll kill you. He wants something from me. Maybe we can negotiate.”
“And maybe he doesn’t bother!”
“Again, do you have a better idea?”
“I do,” someone said, and I looked over my shoulder to see Jen with her eyes glowing green.
“Who are you animating?” I asked because the guys in the cages were alive. And the crowd back in the corridor had barely left enough of the dark mages they’d attacked to wet the concrete. Nobody was raising them.
“Not me,” Jen said. “The Black Circle. They’re using zombies as workers. See?”
And I guessed she meant that last word literally. Because a slim hand found my shoulder, burning cold even through the leather. And the next moment—
“Auggghhhh!”
“Shhh!” Jen hissed in my ear.
“Auggghhhh! Auggghhhh! Auggghhhh!”
“Be quiet! You’re going to give us away!”
“I’m going to?” I whispered-screeched, right before the finger I was shaking in her face fell off.
Thankfully, it wasn’t mine, but that didn’t make me feel much better.
Because it was a gross, gray-green that flesh absolutely should never be, and definitely, one hundred percent, not alive.
“Shit!” I stared down at the rotting thing on the filthy floor in front of me. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“It’s okay,” Jen soothed, or rather, she tried. But her voice was as horrible as she currently was, gravelly and rough, and it didn’t help. “Your body is fine. Your body is back where it always was. Caleb has you. This is just a kind of far-seeing—”
“Which I didn’t know you could do! It’s not in your papers!”
“Oh, did you finally get around to reading those?”
“Do not. Be sarcastic. With me. Right now!”
“Sorry. And uh, the reports might have left out a few things. We didn’t volunteer a lot of information back at school. The more dangerous they thought we were, the less chance of us getting out.”
“Fine, but you warn me about this shit first!” I hissed back because that was all I could do at the moment.
She and I were somehow inside a couple of the shambling corpses who were pulling people out of cages to load them onto the trucks, all under the watchful eyes of a bunch of well-armed dark mages.
They were guarding small openings in the wards that they had made to use as doors, but nobody seemed to have noticed that a couple of their dead workers were acting a little funny.
Maybe because they were focused on the people in the pens instead of us.
And some of those looked worthy of attention. The still-closed pens held Weres, as Gerald had said, and they were furious. Half had transformed already, and the rest looked likely to follow at any moment.
They kept charging the wards, trying to break free and getting the crap shocked out of them for their trouble.
But the rest, the people we were loading up now, were just magical humans, the kind the dark must hope would show some useful talents after dosing them with whatever brew they’d come up with.
Meanwhile, I was seeing all this through a zombie’s eyes, my rotting clothing clinging to my desiccated corpse, and even trying to wrap my head around that was insane!
“Sorry,” Jen said again. “I forgot to mention, I can see through another necromancer’s spell, although I cannot control the bodies. Not unless I fight him for them. But this should allow us to find Jace, if he’s here.”
I fought an instinct, a strong one, to just start screaming. This was awful. This was…
I didn’t have words for what this was. And I couldn’t even see properly, because a flap of skin was covering one of my eyes. “Why do I only have one eye?” I growled.
Jen’s rotting corpse shrugged. “The other fell out?”
“What? It’s not even there?”
I reached up to grab it, and something hissed in my head. “Augghhh!”
“You need to calm down,” she told me sternly. “Or you’re going to ruin this. That was the necro controlling these things. You got his attention for half a sec.”
“Ruin this?” I whispered because the words didn’t even make sense.
“You’re a war mage!” she snapped. “Act like it!”
“If I acted like a war mage, I would have already attacked everything in sight,” I snapped back. Including the rotting corpse I was currently wearing like a dress.
God!
But I somehow got a grip, because I didn’t have a choice. And because she was right, we couldn’t find Jace from halfway across the room. This was better for that, at least, although not for doing anything to help these people.
“Do you have no control over these bodies?” I asked, as we loaded up some more terrified prisoners.
“Why?”
“The first truck is big enough that, if we stall it out, it’ll block the entrance.” I stopped talking for a moment as a mage walked nearby. “People can slip around it,” I said more quietly. “But the other trucks can’t.”
“Until the mages blast it into oblivion,” she pointed out. “Or have their zombie horde push it out of the way.”
“Blasting won’t work. A pile of half-molten metal and a bunch of tire-piercing shards would be no better than the original blockage. And what zombie horde?”
“This one?” But her tone said she already knew what was coming.