The Fifth Vertex (The Sigilord Chronicles) (20 page)

"She should come with me," Goodwyn said, as though reading Urus's thoughts.

"You don't think I can take out one of the towers on my own?" Cailix huffed, hands on her hips. She had as much fire in her as a Kestian.

Goodwyn smiled. "It's not that. I just saw the way you went after that constable, and whenever Urus and I pick teams, I get to pick first, so you're on my team."

That seemed to satisfy her. Goodwyn always knew what to say and how to say it, even if it was a complete lie. Urus saw something in Goodwyn's eyes that told him there was more to his reason than that.

Corliss pointed off into the darkness. "If you get a running start and jump into a glide southeast, away from the fires, you should be able to land in the deep trees where the army hasn't cleared."

"We split up when we land, make for the towers, destroy them, then make our way back here without being killed or spotted?" Cailix asked.

"Simple," said Urus, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
 

"You'll need a weapon," Corliss said, offering a large knife to Cailix.

She shook her head. "I'll manage."

"This is the stupidest thing we've ever done," Urus signed to Goodwyn.

"Until the next time," he replied with a grin and walked to the far edge of the plateau, readying himself for the run.

16

Cailix took up a spot next to Goodwyn, double checking the clasps on the windrunner cloak.

Urus joined them, his stomach twisted in knots, sweat dripping from his forehead and palms.

"Ready?" Goodwyn asked.

"No," Urus replied. For the second time tonight, he was about to jump headlong into darkness, where he would most likely end up dead or mutilated.

"Corliss and I will have a distraction ready when we see the towers fail," Murin said. "We will be here when you get back and pull you back up to the plateau."

"And if things go horribly wrong?" Urus asked.

"Then we improvise. Make for the road and get as high as possible."

"Enough talk, let's do this." Cailix broke into a sprint and sped across the grassy plateau. Without missing a step she leapt into the air, spread her arms and legs like a gleaming yellow bat, and sailed off, away from the enemy camps.
 

Urus and Goodwyn exchanged a look, then both dashed for the edge. Unlike Cailix, Urus did miss a step, slipping on the damp grass, flying into the air, and, for a moment, dropping like a stone. But he quickly regained his wits, spread his limbs and turned his free fall into a rapid glide toward the glow of Cailix's cloak.

They soared through the air, and despite feeling as though he might crash and die at any moment, Urus was getting used to it and even starting to like the exhilaration; the speed and the wind in his face. Never would he have experienced anything like it in Kest.

Suddenly, Cailix's cloak folded in on itself and dropped out of the sky below the tree line. Urus aimed for that spot, but didn't want to risk dropping as fast as she had. He maneuvered around the first treetop, bounced off a branch, and ricocheted his way from tree trunk to tree trunk all the way to the forest floor, flapping and struggling to avoid falling at full speed. He rolled to his feet just as Goodwyn dropped from the sky onto an oversized fern.

"We'll be ready on our tower when you do whatever you're going to do," Goodwyn signed.

Urus nodded.

"Just remember what the battle masters say: Never take a step forward without planning two steps in retreat."

"We've lost our minds, you know," Urus said.

Cailix joined them, seeming perfectly relaxed. "Do you want to die trying to stop something worth stopping, or live knowing you never did anything worthwhile?"

"That's something my uncle would have said," Urus said.

"Be careful," Goodwyn grasped the inside of Urus's arm.

"You too," Urus said, returning the gesture.

He stood for a moment and watched as Goodwyn and Cailix disappeared into the thick forest, barely enough room between tree trunks for the two of them to squeeze through. Goodwyn led Cailix into the forest, turning abruptly without warning the way he had led Urus through the dungeons in Kest.

Urus took a deep breath, let it out, and rushed forward, angling away from the path the others had taken. He was thankful for the moonlight; otherwise he would have run headlong into just about every tree in the woods.

It took a while to work his way around to the side of the giant fuel tower without getting too close to the camps. Kestian warrior training in the desert had not given him much practice running through rain forests.

Crouching behind the undergrowth between a pair of trees, Urus peered over at the fuel tower. It was a massive thing, a dark tower of iron and steel and wood with serpentine tubes coming and going in all directions, plugged into cauldrons and boxes. After a while, he discovered where the tubes ultimately started, a central hub filled to bursting with gears.

That's it
, he thought.
If
I take that out, I kill the tower.

A small clearing lay between the safety of the wood and the tower, with relatively few patrols crossing through. Whoever these briene were, they didn't look like fighters and they certainly didn't know how to secure their own assets. Overconfidence always meant one of two things: either foolishness or the enemy was powerful enough to justify it. Urus hoped it was the former.

He watched the patrols, counted off the seconds between each, and found an opening where the back of the tower would be unguarded long enough for him to cross the clearing. Waiting until the last guard was out of sight, Urus sprang from the brush and ran as hard as he could.
 

No women or children
, he thought, remembering Murin's words about how the families maintained the machines. That must not have applied to the fuel towers.

Running at full sprint in the humidity, wearing the awkward bat-cloak, was difficult, but still he managed to take the clearing in short order. He clambered up the iron supports on the back of the tower and finally slid into a shadowy spot about halfway up before the first patrol returned.

Directly above him lay the central hub of gears, each grinding and spinning at a different speed, each a different size and lubricated with dark ooze. The gears pushed the fuel through the tubes, so if he could break the gears, it could be days or even weeks before they could use the tower again.

Checking to make sure there was no one above him, he pulled himself up to the next level and crouched, carefully watching each cog and wheel. He followed them, one after the other, until he located one point that, if broken, could cause all the others to fail.

He checked the other tower—no alarms, no fighting, no bodies falling from the scaffolding. This was a good sign.

Urus unhooked a mace from his waist and held it right above the key point in the network of gears. He paused, closed his eyes, and signed a prayer to Ishimani, asking for her strength and fortitude.
 

Heat surged through his fingers, radiating out from the palms of his hands and into his arms. As he gripped the mace, it felt as if the blood in his veins had been switched with hot water. He saw the glowing blue wisps of smoke drifting up from his fingers, but this time his mace glowed just as brightly.

A mix of fear and elation surged through him, along with the heat from the power, presumably the power of a sigilord if Murin was right. All that power and no one to teach him to use it, no way to control it, and no way to know if he would hurt someone with it.

What a waste of a gift
, he thought.
I was definitely the wrong person to get this power.

For now, he was glad it had come to him when he needed it. With renewed confidence, he plunged the haft of the mace into the gap between the two main gears he had spotted earlier. He waited a moment to make sure the gears stopped, then dropped to the level below.

He didn't want to be anywhere near the tower when those gears finally broke.

He waited at the tower's midpoint, his heart pounding in his chest, his slick palms barely able to keep a grip on the steel girders. He knew he didn't have long before the trap sprung, but he had to wait for the patrol below to leave.

He watched, gritting his teeth at the little brienes' slow footsteps. Finally the patrol walked out of sight and Urus dropped from one level to the next, dropped to another and another, landing in the clearing ready to run.
 

He ran with every ounce of strength and speed he had left and leapt from the clearing into the woods, rolling into the brush and behind a tree. Still trying to catch his breath, he felt the earth shake.

Flaming debris flew past him into the woods, setting the brush on fire. Huge lengths of tubing flapped and bounced through the air, flames jutting from both ends like some kind of mutated, beheaded dragon.
 

He risked a glance around the tree to see the tower in flames, metal supports buckling and pieces of it popping and shooting everywhere. His plan had worked far better than he could have imagined.

Now all he had to do was get back to the plateau without being killed by the flaming debris or any soldiers, though the briene were surging toward the tower from all directions, not paying any attention to the forest.

As soon as he recovered enough to breathe again, Urus sprang up and ran deeper into the forest, taking an even wider route than he had last time, careful never to backtrack over his own trail in case it had been discovered by a sentry.

He didn't have time to look back to see how Goodwyn and Cailix were doing; he was too concerned with running and not falling. A moment later he got his answer. Mid-stride, a rush of hot air picked him up and threw him into the side of a tree like he was nothing more than a twig.

Wincing in pain—he felt he had a couple of broken ribs—he looked back at the towers to see the second one had exploded. Where some of Urus's tower still stood smoldering, the other had been blown completely apart, littering the entire camp and much of the nearby forest with flaming parts.
 

Chaos marred the camps and the briene were running around, at a loss for how to react.

They don't act like any military I've ever seen,
Urus thought. They might know how to build weapons, but they lacked the organization and discipline of a true army.

He pulled himself up with the help of a low branch, then ran as fast as he could, but with his injuries it wasn't much more than a hobble. He kept running until skidding to a halt at the forest's edge, where a vast clearing separated him from the plateau where he hoped to find Murin and Corliss.

Urus didn't have a chance to figure out how to get across the clearing. The landscape exploded in brilliant light on the far side of the plateau, a spectacle of bright yellows and oranges with flashes of white. The air reeked of burning dead wood, smoke, and the acrid odor of a blacksmith's furnace, probably coming from all the hot metal.

To his left, under the flashing lights and the glow of the nearby fires, he saw thousands upon thousands of briene, all of them scurrying this way and that with their soot-covered aprons and their strange helmets and goggles.

It was now or never. If he waited too long, the camps would regain order and he would be square in the middle of an enemy army with no way out.

Shaking his head at the sheer stupidity of everything they had been doing lately, Urus again sprinted from the safety of the forest, out into the clearing.
 

He hadn't gone more than a few strides when the sky above the clearing erupted in bright white light. Still running, he looked up to see torches burned as bright as the sun, floating down from the sky, carried by giant white tarpaulins spread wide, almost like white windrunner cloaks. He was curious about the flares, but not curious enough to stop running.

Urus didn't need to be able to hear to know that there were briene charging his way. He could smell them on the wind and feel them pounding the earth beneath his feet.
 

There was nothing else to do now but run, and run hard. He was too far into the clearing to race back to the forest. He had to make it to the plateau and then try and glide across to the mountain road.

A blast of wind from behind knocked him to the ground as he neared the center of the clearing. Instinct told him to lie flat. Obeying that instinct he slid across the freshly cut brush, just as a massive bronze wing sliced through the air above his head.

He scrambled to his feet to see a huge bronze bird pulling up high into the sky, preparing to come around for another dive. Urus looked around for someplace to run or hide and found nothing except the sight of thousands of approaching soldiers.

Again he ran, biting back the pain in his ribs and legs.

The bronze bird swung around and dove straight for him.

Urus remembered slogging through the water in the cavern below Kest, remembered hesitating and almost getting killed because he wouldn't act. This time, Goodwyn and Murin weren't around to save him.