Interlude
Ten Years Prior
Damascus pressed his lips together, holding back a chuckle at the way his daughter squinted daggers at the Amarala boy.
They were bickering over a game of Weiqi.
She was certain he had cheated. But Damascus knew better.
He had been watching the boy carefully, recognizing the way Nero’s son looked at his daughter.
It was the same way Damascus had looked at his wife when they were teenagers, when he was a foreigner with strange burns and a thick accent, yet every time she caught sight of him she invited him to sit beside her at her loom.
She would beg him to tell her fantastical tales of the world beyond.
They had fallen in love over those long hours spent talking while she worked.
Caius Amarala looked at Damascus’ daughter like she held all the light of the moons and stars above. The boy would happily let Oliviana win if that would gain her favor. But Caius knew Oliviana well. She was smart and fiercely competitive. She would never give him a chance if he let her win—
The ground rumbled, calling Damascus to his feet, yet the warning klaxons remained silent.
Damascus shook his head. Something was wrong.
He could feel it. His magic—infused into the very infrastructure of the caves through the channels of life-giving water he carved through Bǎodela—told him the truth of it.
“Stay here,” he called out over his shoulder to the children before running through the caverns toward the disturbance. It had come from the southeast, near the IturLái River, the source of water for the Lorategián caverns that housed their gardens.
Damascus quickened his pace once the first guard station came into view.
He prepared to call out but stopped himself when he noticed a body lying slumped on the ground, explaining the lack of sirens.
Damascus’ pulse pounded in his ears. Clutching a supple leather pouch strung on a cord around his neck, he whispered.
“Itxarxàng, my old friend. Watch over us.”
A gaping hole in the cavern wall was the first sign that something was amiss. The second were the two men, swathed in black leather studded with brass, with scarves wrapped around their heads obscuring their faces, who were scaling the wall above the IturLái river.
“Leave now and we all live to fight another day!” Damascus called out over the roar of the swiftly moving river, swollen with snowmelt and dangerously close to flooding.
One of the men slipped. He reached out, looking for a handhold, but the rock around the river was slick with spray, and his fingers merely glided over the surface. His eyes bulged wide before he hit the surface, and then he was swept away beneath the current.
Damascus’ gut twisted. He didn’t want anyone hurt. He meant what he’d said. He was a tinkerer, not a soldier. He didn’t want to harm these men.
The second man shoved a packet into the hole drilled into the rock. Thick cables tumbled out of the wall. Damascus’ eyes traced the cables across the rock face, and his stomach plummeted. They meant to collapse the tunnel and stop the flow of water to the life-giving gardens.
The man flicked open a cylindrical lighter, catching the fuse, then scaled the wall back across the river, dropping to his feet before Damascus, drawing a thick curved blade. He wasted no time.
Damascus barely had time to dodge back from the flurry of slashes. He danced away, keeping just outside the range of the blade.
The orange glow of the fuse burning through the cord drew his focus.
A moment of indecision. He hadn’t used his magic so blatantly since before Oliviana was born.
Since before he had so much to lose. But if the tunnel collapsed, if they lost the water source that fed the gardens, the consequences would be catastrophic.
Pain sharpened his focus as the Suadeian blade nicked his shoulder.
He had been distracted, and it had nearly cost him.
There was no more time to think. The fuse hit the split, sending off sparks in seven different directions.
Damascus inhaled deeply, drawing up power from that thread-like connection he still felt to the source.
Even now, with Itxarxàng passed from this plane, a piece of the connection remained, fused with his bones.
Then he exhaled, shooting his hand forward with a surge of energy that flew at the river like a cattail whip, striking seven slaps across the water in unison, sending a torrent of waves up to extinguish the fuse.
The task done, Damascus shifted his focus to his opponent, wrapping his forearm in power manifested in light.
He blocked the next blow. The blade shattered against the lattice of magic.
“Kanavarah.” Rider. The man’s dark eyes blew wide.
Damascus was thrown from his feet. The Suadeian man disappeared from his view as the world turned, and the earth rumbled.
Everything went silent. A sharp ringing ripped through the quiet.
Damascus staggered to his feet, red dust settling over his light hair and short beard, coating his skin as the aftermath of the explosion fluttered through the air.
“No,” Damascus whispered. One of the charges had detonated, taking down half the wall, spilling the swollen torrent into the cavern. Damascus took in his surroundings but the Suadian man had disappeared in the commotion.
Ice-cold water licked up Damascus’ boots. The river was diverted from the gardens, spilling the floodwaters into the cavern that would soon flow out into the residential district. There was a downward slope, and soon the stacked homes of the sub caverns would be underwater. He had to fix this.
Damascus sprinted forward, drawing on that connection he had to source, pulling more power than he had ever dared to pull, enough to lift a mountain, he hoped.
He slammed his hands against the cavern wall, letting his magic spill out over the surface and search for a fix, the same way he did with his machines, but this time it would be pure force that would put the cavern back together.
Once he had aligned the puzzle pieces, finding how each rock and boulder fit, he dumped all the power he could muster into the stone.
What started off as a dull throb built into a searing pain, as if the magic wanted to rip his very marrow from his bones.
He didn’t care. It didn’t matter if it took his life.
If he didn’t fix this, thousands would be displaced, thousands more would starve.
He wouldn’t let that happen. He pushed every last bit of magic through his fingertips until there was nothing left.
He dropped his hands to his sides, staggering back to inspect his work. An exhausted smile pulled at the corner of his lips. He had done it. And if the Suadeian tried again, they would find a structure as strong as diamonds to contend with.
Completely drained, he turned to return home, craving nothing more than the warm embrace of his wife and a hot meal to fill the gaping hollow in his belly.
The dream evaporated before Damascus could fully appreciate it. Oliviana and Caius Amarala stood frozen at the cavern entrance, mouths agape, dispelling any hope that the boy had not witnessed Damascus’ forbidden magic. Magic that would sign his death sentence if Nero ever found out.