“I’d rather not take even more people away from the Death King’s security.” It was bad enough that the man himself was absent. “I doubt the entire House of Earth is involved, but I reckon collapsing their tunnels will slow them down. If they’re leaving the cantrips through the city, they must have left a trail behind we can use to track them down.”
I backed out of the street, my eyes on the rooftops in case any more assassins appeared. It wasn’t until we’d walked for nearly ten minutes that I found an upturned heap of earth concealing an opening to a tunnel.
An earth mage was here.
Miles hissed out a warning when I kicked the earth away, exposing the hole until it grew large enough to accommodate a person. Below, a proper tunnel had been carved out through the middle of the street. In true earth mage style, they’d created tunnels which looked like they’d been there for years. I’d bet the rest of the centre of Elysium contained similar tunnels to enable them to spread their cursed cantrips throughout the city.
“Sure you wanna go down there?” he said.
“No, but we need to stop those bastards.” I dropped into the tunnel, while Dex flew down and lit up the way through the gloom.
“Incoming!” Dex warned.
Two mages flew through the tunnel, crashing in front of me. I tensed, ready to attack, only to see they were both unconscious. A lithe figure with pointed ears followed.
“Trix?” I stared at the elf in disbelief. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“I heard Liv was in trouble, but I can’t get into the citadel,” he said.
“So you decided to go underground instead?” I said. “The Elemental Soldiers are still in the citadel, as far as I know.”
Trix leaned down to pick up one of the cantrips the mages had dropped.
“Don’t touch that!” I said sharply. “It’s infected with a magical plague. Hang on. I can get rid of it.”
I kicked a pile of soil on top of the cantrip. Not perfect, but it’d have to do for now. In the meantime, I climbed aboveground to join Miles, who regarded the elf with an expression of confusion. “You came here alone? Did you know the House of Earth has been taken over by the Family?”
“Is that why they’re all underground?” asked Trix.
“Wait, you saw them?” I said. “Which way did you come into the city? Through a node?”
“Yes,” he said. “I came as close as possible to the barrier around the citadel and started looking for ways in, but most of the tunnels lead to dead ends.”
“Did you run into anyone else?” I asked. “Because we’re looking for someone carrying a cure.”
“There’s a cure?” said Trix.
“Maybe,” I said. “If not, then we’re screwed.”
But Tay seemed to think there was. We needed one, badly, and despite everything she’d done, I wanted to honour her last wish.
20
Dex led the way as we descended into the tunnel again. Trix had left a trail of unconscious guards along the way, and it was a good job he hadn’t picked up one of those cantrips. Though it might not have as much of an effect on an elf. They were immune to most diseases which affected humans, which was why it had always surprised me that so many of them had died in the war or been driven out. After Lex’s revelation, though, I couldn’t help thinking there was more to their fate than any of us knew.
I did my best to bury every cantrip I found below our feet, but all it’d take was one more earth mage to dig them up again, and without a cure, we had no way to stop their effects.
“This must be why they took over the House of Earth first,” I remarked. “They needed the tunnels to get around, and an earth mage can move much faster belowground than a regular person. It’s easy to hide a cantrip smuggling operation if nobody can follow you. They dug a bunch of tunnels on the Family’s estate, too, probably for the same reason.”
Trix’s face screwed up in confusion. “What family? Yours?”
“No, the Family,” I said. “They experiment on mages and create illegal cantrips for their own amusement. They’re behind this whole operation.”
Trix stopped walking. “They created the cantrips? The infernos, too?”
“Yes… why?”
“Because,” he said, “it was something similar which wiped out the elves’ communities years ago, around the time of the war.”
My spine stiffened, while Miles turned to look at the elf, too. “Seriously?”
The elf gave a solemn nod. “Yes. Few people remember, but it’s true.”
My throat went dry. “I didn’t know.”
But it made a horrible kind of sense. Lex had hinted that she and Roth had used the war to do much more than take advantage of the chaos the warring mages had unleashed on the Parallel, and it would have been easy to hide any crimes in the confusion which had followed.
Trix’s head drooped with sadness. “The elves tend to be forgotten because the war affected the whole Parallel, but we were driven out of our strongholds long before the war reached the humans’ cities.”
I swallowed hard. “They didn’t wipe out all the elves, did they? Some of you survived.”
“We did,” he said. “I was born after the war, but I don’t remember my family. They were killed when my town burned down when I was a child.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Um—you should know, I’m half elf, and I don’t remember my family either. My real family, not the ones who raised me.”
He was silent for a moment. “They raised you? The same humans who are killing people in this city?”
“Did I mention I had a messed-up upbringing?” I picked up the pace, hearing movement aboveground. “I’m pretty sure they helped the spirit mages destroy one another in the last war, too. And now they’re trying to do the same again.”
We passed beneath another opening leading aboveground, while the tunnel came to an
