EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (256 page)

Tikaya woke with a start. The soft light of the room left her confused as to the time. She was in the sphere, with its shelf of air acting as a mattress. Though she had no blanket, a cocoon of warmth kept the alien bed cozy.

Rias sat next to her, head cocked, ear toward the window.

She touched his bare back. “What is it?”

“I think I heard a scream.”

“Not one of mine?”

“Not this time.” He smiled and kissed her before crawling past her and out of the sphere. He reached the window before she maneuvered off the air cushion.

“Better get dressed.” Rias jogged to their piles of clothing and tossed hers on the bed.

“What’s going on?” She tugged her shirt over her head and tied her hair back.

“I can’t see. There’s some kind of fog out there.”

As soon as Tikaya had trousers and boots on, she hustled to the window. A gray-blue haze made it impossible to see more than a few feet. She could not make out the reservoir, the walls, or the ground where the marines camped.

Rias belted on his sword and checked the rifle.

“Wait,” Tikaya said as he headed for the lift. “What if it’s poisonous? What if everyone is already...”

Rias hesitated, one foot on the blue circle.

A yell of pain pierced the walls and was cut off.

“They’re not dead yet,” he said.

But he did retrace his footsteps and find the towel he had used earlier. He tore it lengthwise, handed half to her, then wrapped the other half around his head to cover his nose and mouth. She tied hers and followed him down the lift.

Rias slid the door open and paused to listen before venturing out. “Stay close,” he whispered.

They slipped outside. The haze stung Tikaya’s eyes. Even through the cloth, she smelled an odor reminiscent of burnt coconut.

Rias led her toward the camp. Visibility ran only a few feet in the dense fog. They reached the first prone form, Agarik, still under his blanket.

“Is he...” she started.

Rias knelt and checked for a pulse. “He’s breathing.”

“Sleeping?”

Rias shook Agarik’s shoulder, which elicited a snore, but nothing more wakeful.

“Not the type you can be roused from apparently,” Rias said.

They crept farther and found more sleeping marines. None of them could be shaken awake, and Rias stopped trying.

At the edge of the fog, a hint of green clothing appeared on the ground to the right. Tikaya stepped over a marine to find herself staring at an unknown face with blood still streaming from a slashed throat. She struggled for detachment—and to keep from stepping in the spreading crimson pool. The dead person was small and thin-boned with a green shirt and brown trousers that lacked any hint of military uniformity. Definitely not Turgonian, but she was not sure of the nationality.

“Rias?” she whispered.

He had disappeared in the fog. She walked in the direction she had last seen him, but tripped over one of the marines. Her reaction was too slow and, almost as if she floated in water, she toppled face-first to land on the man. He grunted but did not wake.

Confused at the heaviness of her limbs, she pushed herself up. It felt as if a hundred pound rucksack burdened her. The cloth covering her face might delay the fog’s effects, but she would be snoring alongside the marines soon if she did not get away from it.

“Rias?” she called a little louder.

“Tikaya?”

She nearly tripped again. That wasn’t Rias. That wasn’t any Turgonian. It sounded like...
 

She put a hand to her chest. It couldn’t be.

“Tikaya?” the voice came again. “Are you here?”

She closed her eyes. The voice, so familiar, was speaking in her language.

“Over here,” she said. She did not say his name. She still did not believe it could be him. How could it be? He was dead, his ship sunk over a year before.

She held her breath as the fog stirred. A shape coalesced.

“Parkonis,” she croaked, lifting a hand.

He was a slight figure in comparison with the Turgonians, and he looked even thinner than she remembered. His curly red-blond hair, always a mess, had grown and stuck out in every direction, much like the beard hiding his chin and neck. Anxious blue eyes looked her up and down. He was the one who had watched from the opposite side as the marines entered. Oh, Akahe, if she had been close enough to identify him earlier, would she have...

She glanced behind her shoulder. Where had Rias gone?

Parkonis started toward her, arms wide, a white toothy grin escaping the beard. But his toe bumped against the fallen green-clad man.

His smile faltered. “Tatkar, no.” His gaze darted a dozen directions. “One of them escaped the gas. We have to—”

A dark shape slipped out of the fog behind him.

“No!” Tikaya shouted before she even saw the bloody dagger.

She lunged forward, knowing she could never stop the assassin in time. He, too, wore a cloth across his face, but it did not hide the intent in his cold, dark eyes.

Rias stepped out of the fog behind Sicarius and dropped a hand on the assassin’s shoulder. The dagger froze.

Parkonis whirled, took in the tableau, and stumbled back. Eyes still fixed on the assassin, Tikaya stepped forward and gripped Parkonis’s hand.

“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 XIX

T
IKAYA
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.

Tikaya kicked her in the gut. The woman doubled over, clutching her stomach and gasping for air.

Lancecrest forced Tikaya to the ground, leaned a knee into her back, and shoved her face to the floor. She tried to twist free, but he wrenched her arms until she gasped with pain. Her cheek smashed against cold rock.

They were too strong. Her fate was unavoidable.

Gali’s hand came down on the back of her head, nails gouging skin. Tikaya felt the other woman’s annoyance, not just in those tense fingers but in her mind.

Images from the last month were dragged into her surface thoughts. Tikaya tried to fight it. She thought of cutting cane on the plantation, her family, school, childhood escapades, anything but—

Rias.

The foreign presence in her mind focused on him, tearing into any thought related to him. And there were a lot. Tears formed in Tikaya’s eyes at the pain the invasion brought, the disdain she felt through the woman’s link. The experience was bad, maybe worse than Ottotark’s attack back in Fort Deadend. For the first time in her life, she regretted not studying the mental sciences. A practitioner would have known how to block a telepath.