“What if Tiri’s wrong? What if there’s nothing in the mountains for us? What if we fail, Ket?”
“This is a big decision. I’m as scared as you are.” That was no lie; her fear crept through our bond and mingled with my own. “We might fail. We might all die. But if we stay here, we’ll definitely fall. Be strong, Corey. Only you can lead them.”
No pressure, eh?
The murmuring voices of the two humans filtered down through the skylight. I glanced up, trying to imagine what it would be like on the surface. Still I couldn’t bring myself to venture up there, even in god’s-eye form, though I’d be forced up there in my entirety soon enough.
Perhaps sooner than I thought.
The afternoon was only just beginning to wane, but it was dark as evening. The thunderclouds that had been gathering throughout the day now covered the sky, their hulking forms a threatening presence hanging over us.
The plan was to wait as long as we could in order to give Tiri time to join us. She had all the information we’d need, and her instincts and intelligence would guide us even if her knowledge failed.
But nature waited for no man or woman. Even as I frowned at the clouds and their implications, Bekkit came zooming down from where he’d been monitoring the water levels upstream.
“We cannot delay any further. The stream has burst its banks. We must leave. Now.”
This was it. The moment we’d all dreaded was finally here.
Even as I agonized over activating the ability that would upend everything we knew, the first heavy raindrops started to fall.
Twenty-Two
Aloof
Varnell
Thunder crashed outside. The rattling of the windowpanes was followed by a hail of pattering raindrops as the rising wind swept them from the sky and dashed them against the leaded glass.
Varnell barely noticed. There was another storm to the north that interested him far more than the one currently battering at his tower. He leaned back in his armchair and closed his eyes.
Now, instead of his own office, he looked down across a gently sloping meadow. The grass was a swath of blue-gray beneath a canopy of storm clouds, which grew darker and heavier further north toward the mountains. The mountains themselves were just smudges of dark gray amid a blur of distant rain.
It wasn’t raining here, but it would be soon. Beneath the ground, he knew, the Core would shortly be forced into his trap. However, Limpit—through whose eyes Varnell was looking—had not approached the cave’s entrance, preventing him from seeing inside. He felt a jolt of surprise followed by anger when he saw the reason why. Or rather, two reasons.
The warrior—the one who still owed outstanding fines in the region of several thousand gold, the clumsy oaf—was practicing his forms. The mopey-looking pyromancer was sitting nearby, talking, though Varnell couldn’t hear what he was saying from this distance.
Not for the first time, Varnell silently cursed the circumstances that necessitated his own inaction. His regular meetings with the Arch-Academic—not to mention the less predictable visits from Varnell’s patron—left him essentially trapped at the Guild, forced to rely on his familiar and increasingly unreliable agents to be his eyes and hands.
He tried to think of himself as a spider, waiting patiently at the center of his web. Yet so often he felt like the fly, struggling vainly in denial at being stuck.
Limpit was a great deal further away than he would have liked—from both Varnell and the targets of his attention—but at least it gave him an idea of what was going on. The humans’ status as voluntary exiles meant he could no longer scry on them using the Guild’s seeking bowl, but Double Sight meant that his familiar could still be his eyes, if not his ears, even this far from the Guild.
Interesting that Double Sight was an ability shared by mages and Cores alike, though he didn’t like to think too much about their similarities. It made destroying them that much harder.
A flare of orange drew his eye to the emberfox. It was sitting a few feet away from the mage, sniffing the air. Varnell urged Limpit to move further away, ensuring his own familiar remained upwind and hidden in the long grass, even as he raged at the sight of the stolen property.
It looked as though the mage hadn’t even bonded with it; the creature was clearly keeping its distance from its kidnapper, and though it remained aloof, it kept shooting suspicious glances at the two humans whenever it thought they weren’t looking.
Why are they here? What sort of deal have they struck with the Core?
Of course Varnell knew plenty about striking deals with Cores, but there was no way these two inept traitors had anything to offer in return for an alliance.
Still… they might be inept, but they were here, and they could potentially disrupt his carefully laid plans.
A thorn in my side. Again.
If only I had someone to take care of them.
Varnell cursed himself for removing his final agent prematurely. The young man had planted the first seed—Heh—of danger several weeks earlier, but the Core’s dirty little minions had dealt with the new threat far too efficiently.
The agent had offered to go back and sow more chaos on Varnell’s behalf. However, the man had already known too much, and once he’d dealt with one final ‘heated’ matter within the Guild, Varnell had been forced to terminate him.
The unexpected return of Varnell’s right hand had been surprisingly convenient. This particular agent had unmatched skills and Varnell had immediately put them to use once more in furthering his own ends.
Lightning flashed in the sky above the meadow. The conjured storms up in the mountains had been raising water levels for days, and the Core’s minions were on the very brink of being driven from the safety of their lair—straight into the waiting arms of Varnell’s dark ally.
Assuming he doesn’t try to flee, like my master believes he already has.
There, the Core would fall.
As will those who
