Chapter 24
Suddenly: a Canyon
Cha’s grin solidified into a determined grimace.
She’d drawn plenty of law hounds off Big Betty’s tail over the years—exploiting the back leys to do it—but not on the wrong side of the Obsidian border.
Guiding Katu on an unfamiliar ley line in foreign territory with an unmarked carriage carrying aggressive Obsidian fae trying to crawl up her ass, she fully and suddenly comprehended the extreme audacity of this gig they were attempting.
On the human side of the border, Cha had a feel for the rural leys.
A true inborn instinct. Even the ones far from where she’d grown up had a familiar pattern to them, dictated in part by how people used them and how the human mageineers designed them.
You could count on certain consistent elements—like that they wouldn’t go through someone’s house or barnyard or grain silo, for example.
Or that no one would build a road through a frozen lava flow so inhospitable and saturated with background magic that the ley line kept vanishing into the surrounding rock, even to her keen senses for such things.
Or, even more prosaically human, that the road went from here to there with some purpose.
She was beginning to worry that this one did not. Even worse, up ahead the ley line forked, one side going nowhere visible and the other going to the exact same nowhere.
“Which way?” she asked, tapping the map, which spun in an unhelpful and dizzying blur of black snowflakes. Snarling in frustration, she raised her voice. “Left or right?”
“You’re asking me?” Azul replied, clearly startled.
“Only you and me here, buddy. Pick one.”
“But I don’t know what—”
“Pick!” she barked, the junction roaring up on them with daunting speed.
“Right!” he shouted back, grunting as she swung hard to the left, flinging him against the side panel. “Why did you even ask me to pick if you were going to do the opposite,” he demanded, not posing it as a question.
She lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “Intuition. Sometimes I don’t know what I should do until I hear the answer that sounds wrong.”
“You are the most contrary person I’ve ever met.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“Says you.” They coursed over the twisting landscape of unrelenting black, going ever farther from the Black Thirteen and closer to absolutely nowhere at all. “Why is this ley line even here?” she muttered to herself.
“Do you want an answer?” Azul inquired with just a tinge of haughtiness. “Or am I to leave that to one of your other personalities?”
“Cute. You get more charming all the time, my pretty princeling. If you know the answer, that would be convenient, and—before you get snarky with me—by that I mean, yes, please.”
“Mining.” He pointed ahead and she squinted.
“I don’t see anything but more of this lava field.”
“Obsidian field,” he corrected, then sighed at her puzzled frown. “What did they teach at that academy of yours? Obsidian is volcanic glass. The Obsidian fae mine it. Up ahead, obviously, is a mining refinery.”
She shook her head. “I still don’t see it.”
He pointed again. “Right there. Towering on the horizon?”
“I see nothing but frozen black lava going… Oh. Those glassy castle-looking things?” If she squinted hard, and kind of looked from the corner of her eye, she could make out the fanciful spires made of such a finely transparent material they nearly blended into the sky deepening in color with oncoming twilight.
Only the fae could make something like a refinery look like the spun-sugar candy treats she’d taken the kids.
“I’ve never seen a mining facility that pretty though. ”
Azul snorted. “That’s because you’re hopelessly human.”
“Aha!” She stabbed a sideways finger at him. “And you aren’t?”
“I never said so. Nobles that consort with fae develop a different—watch out!”
“Whoops!” The ley line plummeted downhill precipitously.
She corrected as Katu skidded on a too-tight curve, dangling their collective rear midair for a moment before she helped him dig claws into a meatier section of the ley.
The line made a full circle before switching back the other direction as they dropped into the sudden canyon.
Which shouldn’t be a thing. Suddenly, there was a canyon!
With all that black on black and increasingly dense magic, she hadn’t seen or felt the defile.
“I hate this place,” she observed, concentrating on the wildly curving ley line that descended in daunting angles down the side of the sudden canyon.
“At last, we agree on something,” Azul gritted out. “Please don’t drive us into the abyss. I’m too young to die.”
“How young is that?”
“Not saying.”
“Can you?”
“What—die? Yes! Why these questions?”
He was still being evasive. Not quite answering. She filed that away as they nearly spun off another curve so tight it wouldn’t be legal in a human realm. “Just ticking boxes on my immortal fae test.”
“Even the fae can die from irreparable physical damage,” he gritted out. “Like being flung into an abyss because someone was chatting.”
“I’m just making conversation. Did you need to be doing something else right now?”
“Obviously I’m nothing but a helpless bit of baggage here—”
“Attractive baggage, though,” she put in.
He continued, talking over her, “But you need to concentrate on keeping us alive.”
“Always top of my mind.” Fortunately, the fae carriage chasing them had backed off, allowing her to slow Katu, making the tight curves somewhat less lethal.
Then a bad thought occurred to her. Maybe it wasn’t concern for their lives or carriage that had their pursuers confident enough to take their time.
“So, if this is a mine—does that make this a quarry pit, not a sudden canyon?”
“I don’t know what a ‘sudden canyon’ is, nor am I a mining expert, but I’d guess that yes, this is the extraction pit.”
“Any knowledge on whether there will be a road back out?”
“Do I look like I have encyclopedic knowledge of the Obsidian Realm? Use your map device there.”
“An astute observer would note it’s spinning like a top and giving me nothing.
Also, while I find the way you get even more arrogant and disdainful in times of crisis perversely charming, the reason I ask is that if this ley line terminates at the bottom, as one would expect for some sort of quarry, then we’re trapped. ”
“Oh. That would be bad, wouldn’t it?”
“As the sages put it, yes.” She tapped the marcasite channel. “Goldilocks, you read me?”
Nope, the silence replied.
Cha switched to gold. “Bandit here. Anyone out there?”
Silence silence silence.
Just as she’d feared. “All this sodding pixie-dust infested glass is screwing up the magic,” she noted. “We’re on our own. Any brilliant ideas?”
“You should have gone right at the fork,” he said in a helpful tone, actually smiling when she threw him a sour glare. “I can see why you like this sarcasm thing. Like a pressure-valve release.”
“As if you weren’t already the King of Sarcasm.”
“Prince of Sarcasm,” he corrected.
“Yes, well, Your Highness, all the sarcasm in the world won’t help us when we hit bottom and we’re quarry who are tragically trapped in, well, a quarry. Give me my magic wand.” Despite everything, it was kind of fun to say that. She held out an imperious hand and he laid the wand in it.
“What do you plan to do with that?” he inquired politely.
“Magic.” She tried to sound important and mysterious as she uttered the word, but who was she kidding? She had no fucking clue. “Maybe I can vanish the Obsidian fae carriage like I did the iron demon.”
“Good luck with that.” He said it the way people did when they didn’t wish you good luck at all but figured it was a lost cause telling you that you were fucked in the head if you thought your plan would work out.
“Why?” She remembered as the bottom of the canyon rushed toward them, more of that lovely spun-sugar equipment at the bottom, swarming with ant-like Obsidian fae miners, growing larger with every switchback.
Hey, she was busy and could be forgiven for forgetting a few newly learned facts.
“Oh, because the wand is Moonstone and Ruby magic, and these are Obsidian fae.”
“Give the woman a cookie.”
“But wait, don’t Moonstone and Ruby both trump Obsidian? So it should work.”
“It might, if you knew what you were doing, which you don’t.”
She flipped the wand in her hand, thrusting it at him handle first. “Then you do it, Sorcerer Azul.”
At least he took the wand, but he looked a little lost. The Obsidian fae miners had grown to bunny size, and had noticed the carriage chase down their road, several pointing, horned heads swiveling to watch. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, almost plaintively.
“I really don’t care,” she answered, trying not to snap at him. “Anything that gets us turned around and headed back to the Black Thirteen with skin intact, preferably with no more law hounds, well, hounding us.”
“The ley line continues up the other side,” he said, pointing helpfully at what she’d already noted.
“Yeah, and what are the odds it terminates in the glass castle of refining?”
“Pretty high,” he admitted.
“Turning around it is.” The bottom neared, the Obsidian fae the size of hip-high elflings now. “When I hit bottom—hopefully only literally and not figuratively this time—I’m going to spin Katu to face our pursuers. That will be your moment.”
“My moment.”
“To do your thang.” She clapped him on his lean thigh, squeezing fast and removing her hand quickly before he could do it for her. “Dazzle me, my helpless and attractive bit of baggage.”
By the time they hit bottom—literally and not figuratively, though the metaphorical variety might not be far behind—the Obsidian fae miners had grown to normal size.
Half-again as tall as even Cha, who was no slouch in the height department, they were all charging towards Katu, brandishing various implements of volcanic-glass destruction.
As Cha had hoped, the ley line opened into a flat, wide area chock full of nicely charged pixie dust. The fae had none of the issues humans did with walking around on the stuff, and having it embedded in the very ground of the quarry likely helped the miners move stuff around.
A number of enchanted vehicles of various kinds indeed scurried about, carrying loads of glistening black rock to bins or along the ley line that wound up the hill on the other side of the canyon.
Though the area teemed with equipment of all types, Cha knew her stuff and had just enough space to throw Katu into the promised one-eighty spin. As soon as he gained traction on the ley, he leapt forward with a predatory growl, heading straight for the unmarked carriage pursuing them.
Azul yipped, then shouted, “What are you doing?”
“Putting them off balance. Think fast.”
They zoomed toward the still-descending law-hound carriage, accelerating despite the slope.
Gotta love that pure dust for prime velocity.
The fae carriage came around that last, hairpin switchback, and spotted Katu racing for them.
A cloud of black pixie dust billowed up as they braked, and Cha cackled in glee, imagining their panicked expressions.
“Eat me, you fae fuckers!” she yelled, goosing Katu faster.
Azul was making a high keening noise and—for a split second—she second-guessed giving him the wand.
But he got ahold of himself, stood and aimed the wand at them, singing something in an astonishingly beautiful tenor voice, in a language she’d never heard.
Pink glitter bloomed in the air around them, swirled menacingly in a way pink glitter never should, gathered itself, and arrowed at the oncoming carriage.
For a moment, nothing seemed to happen and Cha braced for a head-on collision.
No way would she play the chicken and dive off the side.
Only a courageous end for her. Then the glitter glommed onto the fae carriage, obscuring it in pink, then contracting.
It narrowed to a pinpoint, then exploded into candy-pink vapor.
It immediately cleared again, revealing a terrified zebra and two stunned Obsidian fae in the middle of the ley.
Well shit.
She didn’t care about running over the fae, but the zebra was an innocent.
It stood there frozen, legs splayed, muzzle down, staring with wide, shining black eyes at its onrushing demise.
The fae had no such issues, scrambling over the side of the cliff and abandoning their poor, terrified beast, which only fueled her hate.
“Hang on,” she told Azul, who groaned, sliding back into his seat.
“I’m beginning to hate that phrase, too.”
She didn’t answer, full concentration on Katu—and on hoping the zebra didn’t panic and try dashing the wrong way. “Come on, baby cat,” she murmured, and told him to leap.
Azul screamed thinly as Katu left the ley line, arcing to the steep cliff side rising above them.
They collided with a rock outcropping—sending black glass shards flying—bounced off, and landed on the far edge of the ley line.
Too far on that edge. They teetered for an endless moment, half the jag hanging over the drop, Azul clawing at the upholstery as if it could save him, before Katu found his footing, clawing at the ley line and heaving them solidly back to the meat of it.
They sped up the hill, Katu as happy as any of them to escape the sudden canyon of mining doom. In the rear view, the zebra shook its head, then trotted over to the side to grab a mouthful of scraggly foliage, as if nothing at all had occurred.
Very carefully, Azul tucked the magic wand into one of Katu’s side pockets, letting out a long breath, saying nothing at all.
Finally, as they made it to the top without further incident, coursing back toward the Thirteen, he took another breath, and said, almost philosophically, “I should have taken my chances with the fell wolves.”