“ I have no idea how he’s here,” she said, talking to Sicarius who seemed to be deciding whether to finish what he had started or not, “but this man is a gifted archaeologist, and if anyone can help you get your weapons, he can.”
Parkonis’s Turgonian was as good as hers, and she had no trouble reading the incredulous look he gave her- helping the empire was the last thing he wanted to do. She squeezed his hand, hoping he would recognize the don’t-say-anything signal. Rias’s gaze fell to the hand hold, and guilt washed over her at his pained wince. He closed his eyes for a long moment.
Tikaya lifted her free hand and spoke as much for him as for the assassin. “Let’s figure out what’s going on before we do anything else.”
Rias pulled a mask over his face, but instead of responding he released Sicarius and disappeared into the fog.
“ Brace yourself,” Parkonis whispered in Kyattese.
Tikaya opened her mouth to warn him the assassin understood their language, but the hairs on the back of her neck leaped to attention. A heartbeat later, blinding whiteness engulfed the cavern, and a thousand cannons roared in her ear. Her feet floated from the floor, and someone-Parkonis? — wrapped his arms around her. She had the impression of weightlessness, of her body moving toward the chasm.
“ What’s going on?” she yelled, but she could not hear herself over the clamor in her ears.
With her senses overloaded, it took a moment to realize what was happening: Parkonis was rescuing her. And she did not want to be rescued, not if it left Rias to wonder if she had scurried off with her old lover.
She thrashed. She had to escape before they reached the chasm. Her elbow caught Parkonis in the gut, and she felt rather than heard his pained exhalation. Regret mingled with desperation-she did not want to hurt him.
Parkonis shouted in her ear, but she could not hear words above the roar. She squirmed again, determined to free herself. He let go with one arm, and she thought she had her chance, but something cold and coin-sized pressed against her temple. The world blinked out, and she knew nothing more.
CHAPTER 19
Tikaya woke slowly, mind groggy. She lay on her back, her head in someone’s lap. Rias? No, concerned blue eyes peered down at her. Parkonis.
She struggled to sit up. A woman and a man in marine blacks stood above her. Colonel Lancecrest had not bothered removing the name tag from his wrinkled jacket, though she would have guessed his identity without it. Greasy salt-and-pepper hair stuck up in spicules, bags haunted his dark eyes, and furrows creased his weathered face. He looked like a man with nothing left to lose.
The woman had straight blonde hair and pale skin, so she might be Kyattese. Crow’s feet lined her cold green eyes, and her thin lips flattened further under Tikaya’s scrutiny.
“ Where are Tatkar and my men?” Lancecrest asked.
“ Dead or captured,” Parkonis said. “Sorry, we-”
“ Idiots.” The colonel clenched a fist and stalked away, back rigid.
“ Hate that man,” Parkonis muttered.
Tikaya rubbed her face and tried to clear the wooziness from her brain. Another cavern stretched around them, this one with cracks and buckles marring a floor decorated with bat guano. Its pungent smell tainted the air. Stalactites hung from a ceiling far overhead. No sign of a camp or recent habitation marked the cavern, but her spine tingled with the telltale sense of nearby practitioner work.
A fifty-foot-high butte rose in the center, a natural formation with a steep, jagged face. A single chamber with transparent walls took up the space on top. Lit from within, the bright interior revealed dozens, maybe hundreds, of bristling rockets. Similar to the one in the fort, they stood upright, their outsides loaded with dense strings of colored cubes. Larger black cylinders stood in the middle, and Tikaya had no idea what they might do, but she doubted anything up there existed for a purpose other than devastation.
There was no obvious way to get to the chamber. Two broken pillars and the remains of a ramp had crumbled and collapsed. A cool draft whispered against her cheek. If bats were living in the cave, there must be access to the outside nearby. Several tunnels led from the cavern.
“ Thank you for your help, Gali,” Parkonis said, addressing the woman. “I thought that sleeping gas would be enough, but you were right: one of their guards was too alert.”
“ Tatkar was my colleague for years.” Gali turned icy green eyes on Tikaya. “You better be worth it.”
How nice. Tikaya had found people as amiable as Bocrest to be her new captors.
“ She is.” Parkonis rested a hand on her shoulder.
A thousand questions for him burbled in her mind, chief among them how he was alive and what he was doing with relic raiders, but she would wait until she could get him alone to ask. As long as he was here to vouch for her, she might have the freedom she needed to investigate those weapons and plot their demise. Maybe she could even destroy them before the marines showed up.
Colonel Lancecrest returned, his face composed, though frustration still tensed his body. “You Starcrest’s ally or his prisoner?”
“ She’d never ally with that monster,” Parkonis said.
Tikaya climbed to her feet, pushing back dizziness. She touched her temple. Whatever Parkonis had used to render her unconscious was gone.
“ Captain Bocrest is in charge.” She decided to give them information that didn’t matter. Maybe she could gain their trust if she seemed to hold nothing back. “He kidnapped me from my parents’ plantation and threatened to kill my family if I didn’t translate these runes for him. I have no loyalty to him.”
“ And can you?” Lancecrest asked. “Translate this gibberish?”
Parkonis turned curious eyes toward her.
“ Some,” she said. “I’m learning more every day.”
Lancecrest jerked his chin at Gali. “Test her, witch. See if she’s telling the truth.”
Gali scowled but stepped forward. She cracked her knuckles and flexed her fingers. Lancecrest closed in on Tikaya.
“ Test?” she asked.
She had never failed an academic test in her life, but somehow she doubted these people wanted to assess her ability to categorize vowels. Lancecrest stepped behind her, reinforcing her supposition by taking her arms in a viselike grip. An inkling of what they meant to do stirred in Tikaya’s gut, and she tried to pull away from him. He held her firmly.
“ Telepath?” Tikaya asked Gali.
“ Yes.”
“ Just in case the oath you took matters to you, I do not grant you permission to poke around in my thoughts.” Numerous people on the Kyatt Islands had a knack for telepathy, but it had never concerned Tikaya since back home there were strict laws against intruding without permission.
“ We’re not on Kyatt,” Gali said. “No one here to enforce oaths.”
“ That’s when they matter the most, then, isn’t it?”
The woman stepped forward without answering and raised her fingers. Tikaya tensed. Cursed sea, she did not want someone rooting around in her mind, reading her memories, maybe replacing them with more acceptable ones.
“ I’m sorry, Tikaya,” Parkonis whispered behind her.
In other words, he was abandoning her. He must not have much power in the group. She could not help but think about how Rias had started out with no power amongst the marines and he had never failed to fight for her. She pushed thoughts of him from her mind. They could only get her in trouble here.
Gali’s cool fingers prodded Tikaya’s temple. Something itched inside her mind, like stitches being pulled out. Panic gripped her. These bastards had no right to her thoughts. She yanked her head back.
“ Hold her still,” Gali growled and reached again.
