Ice Forged (The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga) (68 page)

As he neared the center of the labyrinth, he felt as if he were moving against an invisible force. Yet just beyond the maze’s center, he could see the circle on the floor that looked to be the best match to the disk he wore. The last few steps to the heart of the labyrinth seemed to require all of his strength, but with effort, he stepped onto the red stone nexus.

Light flashed, and a white-hot bolt of wild energy caught Blaine full in the chest, furious as the magic storms they had survived aboveground. Uncontrolled, rogue power crackled in the air. A scream tore from Blaine’s throat as the light seemed to boil through his veins.

I’ve triggered something
, Blaine thought as he fell to his knees.
Was it meant to be a trap? Maybe this is what Penhallow was trying to warn us about. Or did the death of magic make the ritual power go wild, like the storms?

Kestel’s scream echoed from the rock walls, followed by a cry of pain. She fell to her knees clutching her head. Verran and Dawe also fell, anguish clear in their faces. Piran stood longer and then cried out and toppled backward. Geir was the last to go down, and Blaine could see determination warring with pain in the
talishte
’s face.

“Blaine—get out of there!” Geir shouted, his voice hoarse. He crumpled against the stone wall and lay still.

The light flared, making it impossible for Blaine to see. Excruciating pain radiated from where the bolt pinned him, and Blaine could hear his blood thundering in his ears. His body convulsed, shuddering uncontrollably, and Blaine could not draw breath. His vision blurred, reduced to dancing pinpoints of light as he gasped for air, and consciousness slipped away, leaving nothing but darkness and pain.

Gradually, the pain receded. He had no idea how long he lay on the stone floor of the vault. Blaine groaned and opened his eyes, managing to turn his head slightly to one side.

He could see the bodies of his friends around him, motionless on the floor. Blaine felt panic rise in his chest.
Sweet Charrot, don’t let them all be dead because of me.

Blaine drifted in and out of awareness, unable to tell whether it was sleep or unconsciousness that took him. The air around them had grown bitterly cold, and all but one of the torches had guttered out. The attack had left him numb, unable to move, and the immobility coupled with the darkness triggered suffocating fear.

Faint light came from the doorway, and in it, the figures of men appeared. Blaine tried to hail them, but only a rasp escaped his lips.

“Over here!” Boots crunched on the stone floor as their guards entered the room. This time, no wild magic flared.

“Can you stand?” The captain of the guards bent over Blaine. “We’ve got a situation topside.”

“What kind of situation?” Blaine asked, using all of his willpower to pull himself up.

“There’s a sizable force headed this direction. Toley and Danner took the wagons and horses back the way we came so they wouldn’t give us away, and threw the rope ladder down to us. Said they saw armed men, at least thirty strong. We didn’t think a fight would go in our favor, so I’m hoping there’s another way out, or we’re stuck down here for a while,” the captain replied.

To Blaine’s relief, the others were stirring, helped to stand by the guards. Blaine pointed to the rubble at the other side of the
room. “There might be a door under there, but no telling where it leads.”

The captain grinned. “Anywhere away from here is good,” he said. He turned to the guards. “Let’s get to it, men.”

Verran and Kestel locked the door to the cistern passageway while the others made slow progress clearing the ruined doorway. Geir insisted on being at the forefront, protected more than once from falling stone by his
talishte
reflexes. They worked as quietly as possible, unable to tell whether the armed troops had stopped in the ruins above them.

The doorway opened into a tunnel, but the first several feet of the passageway had collapsed. Gradually, they cleared the rocks away until an opening was big enough to pass through.

“Where do you think it goes?” Blaine said to Geir.

“Back under the old fort, would be my guess,” Geir replied. “Of course, given the damage the fort has taken over the years—and in the Great Fire—there’s no guarantee that we can get through at the other end.”

Blaine shrugged. “Unless you want to take your chances with a small army up top, I don’t see that we’ve got a choice.”

Armed with torches, they filed carefully through the doorway and into the dark tunnel. Geir went on ahead, not needing the torchlight. He returned a few minutes later.

“There’s some blockage down the way a bit, but I think we can clear it. From what I can tell, the ceiling looks sturdy. And I found this,” he said, holding out a small leather book.

“What is it?” Blaine asked.

“I couldn’t see much, but what I saw looked like mage symbols. And several of the pages are signed with a ‘V.’ ”

Blaine looked up sharply. “Vigus Quintrel?”

“That would be my guess. Why the book is here, I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s been down here for very long, which
means someone else passed this way fairly recently.” Geir paused. “I don’t think the passageway collapsed. I think it was intentionally blocked.”

“To prevent anyone from using the ritual chamber?”

“Maybe. Or to protect it. No way to know.”

Blaine took the book and slipped it into his shirt for safekeeping. They soon reached the next place where the tunnel was blocked, and worked in shifts to clear away the fallen rock, passing the stones back along a human chain to clear the way. Once again, Geir scouted on ahead, and this time, he returned with a smile.

“We can get into the cellars of the old fort. I didn’t go farther than that, but at least it gets us out of the tunnels,” he reported.

Tired, hungry, and covered with dirt, the group climbed through a narrow opening into a large room. Blocks of hewn stone formed the walls of a cellar large enough to hold them all with room to spare.

“The question is—are we trapped in here?” Piran muttered.

A large slab of stone blocked the cellar’s entrance. Without Geir’s
talishte
strength, Blaine wasn’t sure they would have been able to move the stone, but together, they forced it back far enough for everyone to squeeze through, and then put it back to conceal their escape route.

They found themselves in what remained of a storage room. The ceiling, like the floors that once were above the room, was long gone. Ruined walls remained, open to the elements. By the position of the moon, Blaine could see that the night was far spent.

Wordlessly, the captain tapped Blaine on the shoulder, indicating with a gesture toward the courtyard near the cistern’s entrance. Soldiers armed with broadswords roamed the area,
but none of them seemed to focus on the cistern itself. Nor was their attention at the moment focused on the ruined fortress.

Two by two, they stole away, moving silently in the darkness. To Blaine’s relief, they found the guards and their horses waiting safely a short distance from Mirdalur. Only then did they feel comfortable speaking, and only after Geir had scouted the area and confirmed that they were alone.

“Do you think those were Pollard’s men?” Kestel asked in a near whisper.

“Hard to tell, m’lady,” the captain replied. “I didn’t see any insignia. Since the Fire, there’ve been armed bands springing up everywhere. No telling whose they are.”

They mounted up and rode single file, anxious to put distance between themselves and Mirdalur before dawn. When they had traveled several miles without incident, Kestel rode up alongside Blaine.

“What now?”

Blaine thought about the failed attempt in the chamber beneath Mirdalur, and the leather-bound book inside his shirt. “Pollard and Reese apparently think that one Lord of the Blood might bring back the magic. So do I.”

“Mirdalur didn’t work,” Kestel said.

“We don’t know what Penhallow’s found out, or what’s in this book.” Blaine tapped the journal beneath his shirt. He met her gaze. “Pollard’s not going to quit coming after me until one of us is dead,” he replied. “I’ve got other plans. First, we’ll figure out what happened to Penhallow and Connor. Then, I’m going after Vigus Quintrel. Magic or no magic, I’m going to get this settled, once and for all.”

Donna Jernigan

G
AIL
Z. M
ARTIN
discovered her passion for SF, fantasy, and ghost stories in elementary school. The first story she wrote—at age five—was about a vampire. Her favorite TV show as a preschooler was
Dark Shadows
. At age fourteen she decided to become a writer. She enjoys attending SF/Fantasy conventions, Renaissance fairs, and living-history sites. She is married and has three children, a Himalayan cat, and a golden retriever. For book updates, tour information, and contact details, visit
www.AscendantKingdoms.com
. Gail is the host of the Ghost in the Machine Fantasy Podcast, and you can find her on Facebook (The Winter Kingdoms), Goodreads, Shelfari, and Twitter (@GailZMartin). She blogs at
www.DisquietingVisions.com
.

Your previous five novels, including the Chronicles of the Necromancer books and the Fallen Kings Cycle, were all set in the same world and featured many of the same characters.
Ice Forged
marks the beginning of a new series. How much of a departure are we in for? How did the new series come about?

This is a whole new enchilada! Brand-new world, completely new characters, totally new magic system and gods.

I love my Fallen Kings Cycle and Chronicles of the Necromancer series characters (and do plan to come back to tell more stories about them at some point), but let’s be honest—after everything I’ve put them through, in what for the characters is a little over two years, the survivors really deserve to put their feet up and have a few beers for a while.

So I’d been playing with the idea of what if magic broke (as it nearly did in the Chronicles books), and what if we had a postapocalyptic medieval world, and what if a world sent its convicts to the northern rim (instead of, in our world, Australia)… and I was off and running.

One element
Ice Forged
shares with your previous series is vampires. What about them fascinates you? How do they enhance the way you build your worlds?

I watched
Dark Shadows
when I was in preschool (what
was
my mom thinking?), and the first story I “wrote,” at age five (I had to have my grandmother write it down because I couldn’t spell yet) was about a vampire. I’ve been hooked ever since. In my world of the Winter Kingdoms, you saw vampires as a paranormal minority, treated as ethnic minorities have been in our world—accepted in some places, persecuted or tolerated in others. In the new Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, the vampires (
talishte
) are more rare, although not the only immortals. I enjoy looking at the world through the eyes of a character who has lived several lifetimes and wonder what would keep you wanting to stick around? Would it be power? Wealth? Family? Nostalgia? The answer, I believe, is highly personal to the specific
talishte
. I think they represent both the ultimate outsider and a melancholy creative force. For those few who do choose to remain among mortals for hundreds of years, there has to be a good story. I want to tell that story.

In your novels, magic appears as a kind of vast natural force. In
Ice Forged
particularly, magic is taken for granted and incompletely understood by the people wielding it. Does anything from our reality guide how you present magic in your fiction?

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of magic as a force of nature. Those with a talent for magic have an inborn ability to sense and use the power. In the world of the Ascendant Kingdoms, magic is much more prevalent than in the Winter Kingdoms books—until the magic disappears, and the civilization that utilized it crumbles. In that sense, magic becomes a natural resource, like water or fertile ground, and when any civilization takes its resources for granted, problems ensue.
History is full of vanished civilizations that thrived and then disappeared because a river changed course, land was overfarmed, or other natural catastrophes made the resources unusable. Modern-day postapocalyptic fiction doesn’t intrigue me (a long story, but it has to do with my upbringing, which expected the end of the world at any moment by various means), but I was interested in how it might play out under these circumstances in a medieval setting. So here we are!