49. Chapter 49 #2
The only light streaming into the tunnel was from the latch I’d left open.
Rough, flaking rust bit into my skin with every step down the ladder.
If I moved too quickly, the ancient iron let out a low, protesting groan.
It had to have been more than a century since this was last seen to.
I hurried as much as I could, careful not to be heard, until the ladder simply ended from rot—leaving ten feet of open air between me and the floor below.
I dropped the distance to save magic, allowing a small cushion of shadow and my knees to take most of the impact. My pride took the rest, my hands catching stone inches before my armor could announce me any more loudly.
I straightened slowly in the dark, ears alert for any hint of movement.
The scuff of steel on steel and steel on stone. Soldiers trying to be quiet and failing. I let my sixth sense, the one for magic, reach outward. I found multiple magical auras.
Assembly or battlemages.
No matter which, I was destined for a confrontation.
I welcomed it. As a man born to the darkness, I felt a peculiar sense of ease sink over me the deeper into the tunnels I went.
My hand brushed the cool, damp tunnel wall as I moved, nearly blind now, toward the sounds.
I silenced my footsteps by habit, erected a magical barrier around my mind, and breathed shallowly.
Muffin followed without a sound; I didn't need to check on him to know he was navigating the dark safely.
The guttering orange torchlight creeping around the bend signaled my quarry lay just ahead. Now able to make out voices, I pressed myself to the wall and took the risk of looking.
Three score men packed the passage ahead. They didn’t have any inkling that their comrades had already laid their weapons down. Unfortunately, with how dark it was, it would be impossible to replicate the strategy of targeting only the leaders like I had above.
Two figures in Assembly robes stood slightly apart from the soldiers, speaking in low voices to another of Coryanthus’s captains. And there, hovering at the edge of the light in his distinctive white healer’s robes, was Thibault.
Anger flared hot within me. He can die last.
How long had he walked our halls, eaten at our tables, sat at Berian’s bedside—all while slowly killing him, while plotting my downfall? With effort, I breathed all of it back down. There would be a reckoning for Thibault, but I had to be patient.
They were speaking:
“—not without direct orders,” a man I assumed was the captain was saying, his voice stubbornly resolute. “We’re to hold here to escort our Lord and his prize out.”
Prize?
“Your orders,” one of the Assembly mages said, “were to support this operation.”
“I am supporting it.” He gestured up the passage. “When you bring her down.”
Lunette.
The captain’s eyes moved between the three mages, and I thought something sharpened in his expression. “I’m not sending men up there blind into whatever you couldn’t handle yourselves without orders.”
From above, I heard a faint familiar male voice. “…kill you for this.”
Then distinctly Lunette’s. “Maybe, but you won’t be alive to see it.”
Keep fighting, moonlight.
She was still there, but they wanted to take her away from me. My pulse stuttered then began to pound with an alarming, erratic tempo.
Certainty that I had to act now settled into place next to the tightening bond.
Every thread pulled in the same direction until instinct and intention became indistinguishable.
Protecting her had never been a thought I had to reach for.
It lived in my body as something constant and absolute, as natural as the beat of my heart.
I hadn’t known how starved I was for living until she gave my life back to me a second time.
“Do you require an edict,” the second mage hissed, voice now strained, “to rescue your lord from her?”
The captain turned and barked a terse order. “First squad, belay orders. Force can be used on the prize.”
The soldier already climbing up the ladder let out a snort. “Lord said she’s meant for breeding anyway,” he said to no one in particular. “Parts of her can be broken for that.”
Every thought I’d been carefully maintaining—strategy, silence, the tactical patience I’d spent years honing—crumbled in an instant. I’d already chosen patience once.
I didn’t—couldn’t—this time. I thought I’d lost my mind while suffering through our separation. But this was rising madness. Violent, bloodthirsty madness.
The potent, untamed force of magic that flooded up from my chest and into my hands overtook everything.
I could feel it clawing up my throat, demanding release.
My vision sharpened with the shadows that flooded my eyes before every battle, but this time my focus turned the soldiers into nothing more than obstacles to be overcome.
Parts of her can be broken played back through my skull on a loop until rational thought stopped being a choice. The words warped and stretched until they meant nothing and everything.
Break them.
The waiting darkness poured from me, devouring the sparse torchlight as it flew unnoticed over the soldiers’ heads. The men on the ladder above stumbled as the light of the torches blinked out, their organization dissolving before my magic touched them.
They had just enough time to realize what was happening—not enough to stop it.
I felt the humming sensation of raw magic building from the three mages clustered near the tunnel’s mouth. Assembly-trained. They wouldn’t attack first. They’d shield themselves long enough to allow everyone else around them to die first, so they had time to devise a plan.
It wouldn’t save them.
A flick of will coaxed sharp edges out of the dark.
They skewered the hands of the first man on the ladder, the one who’d said she could be broken.
I watched him fall in slow motion, body crumpling to the rough floor below with a sickening thud.
The next man on the rungs had just enough time to look down before he hit the ground beside him.
There was no deliberation in my brutality. Only the absolute and total annihilation of anything in this world that thought it could put that sentence in the same breath as her name and continue existing.
The first soldier to spot me in the dark died instantly. I found the gap in his guard and drove a conjured blade through it before he could shout.
No slowing.
My focus remained fixed on the bright spot of moonlight I felt with every fiber of my being, waiting somewhere above us. I couldn’t see well enough to take out everyone at once, not without using the reserve of magic I’d need to protect Luna above.
A man to my right lifted his sword. A lash of blackness hooked his wrist and turned it inward, guiding the edge across his throat in one efficient slice.
Another tried to retreat, sabatoned feet scraping the rough floor as he turned.
I drove him into a barrier of jagged umbra erupting from the tunnel wall.
The shouting started.
Fear had finally pushed the mages to act.
The first drew on his magic to slice me with blades of air.
Fire flared in the hands of the second, who’d been far too interested in Luna’s bloodline.
In the total darkness, every man still standing flinched toward the flame, faces searching for me in its eerie light.
Behind them, Thibault backed toward the tunnel mouth, putting his men between himself and me.
Coward.
I lifted my hand.
Conjurations snapped, binding wrists, pinning arms, sealing mouths. They flung all three mages back against the unyielding stone hard enough to crack bone, holding them there without mercy.
The fire-evoker tried to release his concentrated power. Flame surged toward me, but a wall of night rose to meet it, folding over the fire and snuffing it out. Only smoke and the sounds of him uselessly struggling against his restraints remained.