I raised my hand and urged the magma to flow. Intense heat blazed through me, then burst from my hand. A ball of magma, like those the spirit had flung at me, shot out. It landed, glowing, next to one of the smaller cairns, and the dirt around it melted.
This was clearly a powerful weapon, but any weapon was only as good as the person wielding it. I aimed at the cairn and channeled the magma again.
Once more, a glowing ball burst from my hand and sailed through the air. It hit the heap of rocks and spattered across them. They melted and ran into each other. Within seconds, the whole cairn had dissolved into a pile of slag.
“Wow.” I looked at my hand. “I thought you said that came at high levels?”
“You are the Swordslinger,” Nydarth purred. “Are you really surprised that you’re already so powerful? And, I suppose there are also benefits to wielding the Sundered Heart.”
“And the Depthless Dream,” Yono added. She’d been quiet after I’d gained the new element, and I figured she probably didn’t have much to say about a combination element that didn’t involve water.
“I’d better not keep practicing here,” I said. “Don’t want to destroy this place. Let’s head back.” I sheathed my sword and trident before I started moving toward the fortress.
I pause for a moment and considered something else. We needed an edge if we would ever take back the city from the cultists. I’d been wondering whether Mahrai was truly in the service of the cultists, whether she could be swayed to join against them.
She had likely returned to the city. Even if she hadn’t, I could always do a little intelligence-gathering by going to the city by myself. If I returned to the fortress and shared the idea with the others, they’d think I was crazy.
Hell, maybe I was crazy. But I’d done undercover missions before. And this would be just another op. I was already wearing the uniform of a city guardsman, so I could slip through the gates without so much as a second glance from the soldiers manning the walls. As long as I was back within a few hours, Kumi and the others would be none the wiser, and I’d potentially have a new ally or at least some new information we could use.
Chapter Nineteen
I headed out of the boneyard, down into the valley, and across the dried-up river bed to the main road through the province. If I was going to approach the city, I didn’t want to do it from the direction of the fortress, where my friends were. Better to approach from the opposite side to keep the enemy from realizing what we’d achieved so far.
As I went, I practiced my Hidden Burrow technique. It could be invaluable in future fights or for getting past opponents unobserved, but for that, I needed a better understanding of how it worked—how far it could take me, how fast, whether I could tell what was on the ground above.
It turned out that it was a good thing I’d practiced, as the technique had some limitations. I couldn’t use it on hard stone or anything more dense than packed dirt. The range was short; the magic forced me back up if I went more than 30 yards. And accuracy was limited; I seldom appeared exactly where I’d been aiming for. And it all came at a high cost in Vigor, as the technique burned through my reserves of power.
Tahlis had made it look so easy that I’d been thinking this was an answer to half the challenges I faced. In reality, it was going to be more of something to use when I really needed to either conceal myself or sneak up on an enemy. Still, I was determined to become more accurate and increase my range, but that was going to take a lot of training.
I burst out of the ground one last time in a shower of sand and found myself standing in a familiar spot. I was on the approach to the sand-sunken village where we had defeated Targin and his forces. The same place where I had last confronted Mahrai and her towering golem.
I considered the last time I’d seen her, arguing with Targin before she stormed off back to the city. There was more to her than just another follower of the Cult of Unswerving Shadows, and I suspected she was far from committed to the dark values of the Straight Path. Shadiy had also alluded to the possibility, so I wanted to at least speak with Mahrai before I would have to kill her on the battlefield.
Many other opponents wouldn’t have been spared like this, but we needed someone on the inside. Lord Ganyir was unpredictable at best, and Tahlis was probably certifiably insane. Even so, I imagined Mahrai might have her own problems, but a mole was always a complex person, no matter how much you wanted them to be otherwise.
“What do you think of Mahrai?” I asked, not out loud but in the mind voice I used to talk to my spirit weapons.
“I think that she’s a fearsome threat,” Nydarth replied. “But you have the tools to overcome her now that you’ve combined earth with other powers.”
“He’s defeated her golem before,” Yono said. “He can do it again.”
“I don’t mean to defeat her,” I said. “I think there might be more to Mahrai than just another evil Augmenter set on terrorizing the people around her. I wonder if we could get her to change sides, bring all that power to the right path.”
“That’s very sweet,” Nydarth said. “But that woman is a threat, pure and simple. Anything she’s done to imply otherwise is just lulling you into a false sense of security so that she can stomp you down into the ground. Fight her, incinerate her, and move on.”
“That doesn’t feel like an honorable
