The Paladin Caper (15 page)

Heat pricked Desidora’s face and arms, and she looked down to see that her skin had gone pale. The air around her stung like a sunburn, the ambient magic reacting to the power of her death-priestess aura with the beginnings of another explosion.

With Ululenia’s wide and
ostensibly
innocent eyes upon her, Desidora let out a long, slow breath and released the anger. The magic swirled away, and she was a love priestess again, feeling Jerval’s confused but
very excited
aura reacting to Ululenia.

The lift finally stopped in a massive circular chamber from which multiple tunnels led off in every direction. Mine-cart tracks were laid down through most of them, although in some cases the tracks were clearly in a state of disrepair, inhabiting tunnels that had been boarded over.

Desidora saw that they were not alone. In the strange ruby-red light of the mine, it was hard to guess at size, and everything was either red or black, but she guessed that the figures would only come up to her waist. They moved around at what could best be called a scamper, some walking, some leaping on all fours with furry tails flitting behind them. She thought they had fur, and their faces looked like something between fox and human.

Desidora could feel the inherent life energy of every natural living creature. Humans and elves and dwarves had auras, with the elves feeling brighter and sharper and the dwarves feeling more solid and stable. Fairy creatures had no auras at all. The question of whether something had an aura had never been a
confusing
one.

Until now. Looking at the creatures, she saw energy, the beginning of a familiar pattern, and then it . . . went somewhere else, her eyes sliding over the blank space back and forth uncomfortably like a tongue worrying at an aching tooth. The energy didn’t end. She would have been able to sense that. Instead, it was as though it went to some place Desidora could not follow, like a road twisting out of view behind the trees.

“Oh, those are so cute!” she chirped, feeling the magic around her and working out how to draw upon that power without immolating herself if need be. “What are they?”

“Kobolds,” said Jerval, looking nervous. “You’re supposed to be nice to them. Miners who aren’t nice have accidents.” He lifted the hand that didn’t have Ululenia all over it, counting. “Usually only see one at a time, if that. Maybe the explosion brought them out, or . . . No, this isn’t right. We shouldn’t be down here. Come on, I’ll take you
erotic eggplant.
” He shook his head again.

“Jerval,” Ululenia said, coiling her arm around his waist, “I bet there’s one mine where nobody has gone for a long time, and there are rules about it, even more than the other ones that are shut down, and, Jerval, if you could point me at that mine, I would be sooooo grateful.” Her leg was hooked around the back of his knee, almost like they were dancing.

“I . . . um . . .” said Jerval,
“fondling fern,”
and pointed at one of the tunnels.

“Mmm.” Ululenia leaned in with a kiss that twined around Jerval like a warm summer breeze, and the virgin sank to the floor of the lift and did not move when Ululenia stood up.

“So at least fondling fern stayed the same,” Desidora said, stepping off the lift and into the mine.

“I saw no reason to change it.” Ululenia followed her, and Desidora heard a faint hiss followed by, “Damn it!”

“Horn reacted to the ambient magic?”

“As the wasp stings my forehead,” Ululenia muttered.

The kobolds scampered away as the two women walked toward the mining tunnel Jerval had pointed at. They watched from the edge of the room. Looking carefully—there were no shadows, which made it hard to tell for certain—Desidora thought that some of the kobolds watched from
in
the walls.

“Have you heard of them?” she asked. The magic still pulsed around her, but she had gotten the feel for it now. Outside, she had pulled magic from the wall itself. Here, she might be able to do it from the air, if need be. “The kobolds?”

“Never,” Ululenia said. “Fairy creatures have little use for mines. But the feel of them is . . .”

“Wrong?”

“Yes.”

Whatever they were, the kobolds stayed carefully distant. Their eyes tracked the women as they crossed the floor and came to the tunnel Jerval had pointed at. It was boarded off like the rest, but Desidora saw that the boards had been built into a simple door, and the mine-cart tracks were clean and functional.

She pulled the door open, and the kobolds, all of them, darted back at the squeak of hinges. Magic rushed out around her, and she let the death aura roll over her, used it to turn that magic away, to be the oil around which the water flowed without dissolving it. “Ululenia, are you all right with this?”

“It . . . yes. For now.” Ululenia’s voice was strained. Desidora looked back and saw that Ululenia was leaning over, one hand shielding her forehead. “Let us hurry.”

The tunnel ahead was darker, which at first made no sense to Desidora. As she started down the path, though, the magic boiled around her, and she realized the truth. “The crystals fling out energy, some of it light. As we get closer to the purest sections, the magic is so strong that it overwhelms even that light.”

Something skittered in the walls, something with a voice between a giggle and the sound of a tin fork dropped onto a wooden table. “How do
they
live in this?” Ululenia said behind her.

“I’m not certain they live at all.” Desidora kept the magic safely at bay and kept moving. If not for her death magic, she would already have died.

The walls faded to blood red as they walked, and then a deep burgundy, and then, as Desidora began to fear they would be walking in darkness, she saw light ahead, blessedly normal white light from a glowlamp in a chamber in the distance.

“When this is over,” Ululenia muttered through gritted teeth, “I am going to
ravish
young Jerval.”

Desidora looked back. Ululenia’s face was flushed, and she squinted as she walked. “Do you need to go back?”

“I am fine.”

“You didn’t sound as though young Jerval would be choosing to enjoy your company of his own free will,” Desidora said very quietly.

“I am
fine
,” Ululenia hissed, “and he would be as well. He was
more
than willing. I was in his mind.”

“Yes, I know,” said Desidora. “Decadent dove. Erotic eggplant.”

Ululenia let out a long breath. “I am
trying
.”

Desidora turned back to the tunnel ahead. The kobolds scampered through the walls, making whatever strange noise they made. She put them out of her head and focused on listening up ahead. She thought she could hear something. Words, maybe.

She picked up her pace. The magic swirled around her as the ocean’s waves now, first pushing her back, then drawing her forward, lifting her and pulling at her ankles. She half expected sand to have buried her feet with each step.

The words had a cadence, a rhythm like a chant. It was familiar, and it took a moment, echoing off the tunnel walls, to make itself known to her. When it finally clicked in her mind, Desidora broke into a run.

“Kun-kabynalti osu fuir’is.”

Desidora had carried the magical warhammer Ghylspwr for months.

“Kun-kabynalti osu fuir’is.”

He had been a gift from the gods when she became a death priestess, an ally in her quest to stop the Glimmering Folk from returning to the world and one of the few friends who had trusted her even when she radiated the power of death.

“Kun-kabynalti osu fuir’is.”

And it had all been a lie. Desidora had been tricked with all the others, blind to her ally, her friend leading them astray as he brought his people back to rule the world.

She stepped out into the chamber at the end of the tunnel. It was circular, the walls glossy black crystal, and Dairy, wearing only a loincloth, lay chained to a crystal altar, unconscious as far as Desidora could see.

Standing over him was a golem controlled by Ghylspwr, who held the great warhammer up over Dairy’s helpless body.

“
Kun-kabynalti osu fuir’is,
Ghyl,” Desidora called out, and felt the cold black power of death coil around her. For a moment, it burned, and then she took that boiling ocean and pulled it
into
her,
through
her, and flung a bolt of jet-black fire that slammed the golem carrying Ghylspwr into the far wall.
“Nobody will die while I watch.”

Indomitable Courteous “Icy” Fist avoided cursing, as he avoided strong intoxicants, defacing religious property, and eating the flesh of animals. He had not sworn oaths to this effect, as when he had sworn to commit no deliberate harm to a living creature, but the temple where he had trained had listed them as
strong suggestions
.

As such, he did not yell anything rude at Tern or Hessler as he spun through the air, flexing his body to roll with the shock wave of the immense explosion that Hessler’s magic had just triggered.

Upside down, still tumbling, he looked back to see a boulder flying at him from the rockslide that had started. This was a problem, as was the fact that he was perhaps fifty feet above the ground and would likely be landing on rocks.

He twisted, flexed, let the boulder come to him, caught it with both feet, and kicked off it and
up
, letting the boulder sail below him as he gained altitude. This carried him into the path of
another
boulder, but twisting in midair he let it whoosh past his back, close enough to graze his golden robes, and then into the path of a smaller rock sailing at his head.

He found the point of stress on the smaller rock, reached out with one cupped palm, and snapped his hand taut just before it would have smashed into his head. The stone shattered into dust, and the effort checked Icy’s momentum and stopped him from tumbling, which was excellent, because the spinning had made it hard for him to concentrate, and the next several seconds would benefit from as much concentration as Icy could muster.

No more rocks were sailing at him, and for one brief moment, Icy hung suspended in the air, at the apex of his leap from the boulder, looking down at what was now a
sixty-
foot drop.

With a breath of effort, Icy snapped his arms and legs out wide. As his golden robes flared out with them, his hands and feet caught the sleeves and hem and pulled them taut. As he began to fall, his robes billowed out like a great circular sail that caught the wind.

Icy rode the wind, his robes slowing his descent just enough to turn it from an absolute certainty of broken bones into something that a very well-trained man could, with skill and a little luck, roll away from with nothing more than a few bruises.

Icy was a very well-trained man. He hit the edge of the rockslide feetfirst, tucked into a roll that spread the impact across arm and shoulder and back as he came up to his feet, immediately leaped over a jagged boulder that would have dashed his brains out, parried a smaller rock as he twisted to the side, turned that into
another
roll, and came back to his feet atop a pile of rocks that he danced across with nimble little steps before leaping clear onto solid ground.

“Three tugs,” he said to himself in a tone that was not significantly far from cursing.

The rockslide had entered that precarious point where much of the great mass had settled into a stable position, but enough was still shifting and falling and sliding that none of it could really be called finished yet. As countless tons of rock had poured from the shattered canyon wall, the landscape of the area had shifted, and Icy looked around, trying to gauge where Tern and Hessler had been standing.

“Thief,” came a voice that sounded like a man speaking through a long tube, and a cloaked figure of about dwarven height hopped down from the rocks and landed before Icy.

Icy had barely caught any of the conversation between his teammates and the presumable trackers, as they had been down on the ground fifty feet below while
he
had been very quickly worming his way out of a collapsed tunnel at the time, but Tern had sounded alarmed.

“Your allies are likely buried under this rubble,” Icy said, “but may still be alive. The same applies to mine. If you care for them as I do mine, I suggest we search for them now and resolve this confrontation at a later time.”

“Thief dead,” said the dwarf-size figure, and now, having had a moment to recover, Icy listened past the strangeness of the voice and caught what else was wrong. He saw the figure’s cloak, miraculously free of dust despite the rockslide, even while Icy’s own golden robes were stained with glowing red grime.

Icy shut his eyes.

He felt the movement behind him, pivoted, and allowed the attack by the
real
tracker to hiss past him. It was not humanoid, whatever it was, and Icy heard the hiss and click of countless little legs scraping on the dirt.

Then the rocks cracked as the tracker struck them, its blow carrying it through the illusion it had projected. Icy opened his eyes and saw, for one moment, something akin to a scorpion with a body the size of a large dog and a strange lumpy tail with a great crystal stinger and a glowing sac beneath it.