In spite of the warmth of the dragon-scale cloak, Annev shivered. He turned and ran in the opposite direction, planning to hide in case Tosan had seen him.
After almost a minute of running, Annev paused at the end of one of the long aisles. There’d been no rumble of the doors opening again, so it was possible he was safe. Perhaps Tosan hadn’t seen him after all. Or perhaps the ancient had more pressing things to do than pursue him.
Annev took a step beyond the aisle, towards the open space at the centre of the room, and all thoughts of Tosan fled his mind.
The source of the Vault’s strange luminescence stood before him: a pool of lightwater – the same liquid that had been dripping into Annev’s cell – nearly twenty feet in diameter.
This isn’t a Vault or a cave, Annev realised. It’s a grotto.
The liquid rippled and flowed as if alive, moving first one way then another, with no apparent reason or pattern. The watery light ebbed and flowed at the edge of the pool, spilling over and trickling down into evenly spaced runnels carved into the floor. These flowed down every tenth aisle, filling the Vault with subdued ambient light. In some places, the runnels had cracked and the lightwater had spilled out, spiderwebbing across the floor or trickling down into the unseen depths.
Annev circled the pool, awed by the aqlumera and forgetting for a moment why he was there – but then the light shifted to the hazy colour of misty blood and he remembered the violence occurring a few floors above him.
Sodar is up there, somewhere. He came back for me, and Tosan will punish him for it. I can’t leave him behind … and I can’t hide here for ever. He swore, thinking, not for the first time, that he should have stayed in Banok or fled with Sodar when he’d had the chance. But that time was past. Right now, he needed to get to the surface, even if it meant fighting his way there.
Fighting, Annev thought. I need a weapon!
He dashed down one of the aisles he had seen earlier, his eyes dancing across the items housed there: javelins, daggers, a hammer, a trident, a two-handed crescent blade. When he spied a sheathed longsword hanging from a black belt, he slid the sword from its scabbard and examined the blade.
Flamberge. Good steel. Sharp. He tried to get a sense of the magic it contained and felt a sensation similar to the phoenix lantern – warmth and light. He imagined the blade glowing, shining like a beacon in the night, but the steel stayed cool and dark in his hand. He shrugged, slid the wavy-bladed sword back into its scabbard, and spent an awkward moment tying it to his hip using only one hand. He started looking for an axe next but took two paces and stopped.
What am I doing? I can’t use a second weapon … unless there’s another hand somewhere in here. He paced the room, searching for magic limbs, and eventually found two shelves covered with prostheses, including three hands that ended at the wrist, two matching legs, a left foot, and a right arm. The latter included a shoulder, biceps, and elbow instead of just the forearm and hand, but it was still unusable.
No more fighting catspaw, he thought grimly. Worse, if he couldn’t find something here, he would probably never find a replacement hand. The thought was painful, but he didn’t have time to feel sorry for himself: he had to focus on escaping the Academy and surviving the next twenty-four hours.
Maybe I can compensate for the missing hand, he thought, returning to the weapons aisle. When he saw nothing useful, he moved to the next row of shelves and discovered an assortment of armour. Maybe a vambrace … or a modified shield. He hurried to the adjacent storage shelves and spied a curious steel disc hanging from a long peg. Too large to be a proper buckler, yet too small to be a full shield, the convex disc had an embossed lightning bolt centred on its exterior side. Annev picked it up, slid the belts over his forearm, and cinched the shield tight. He couldn’t grip the handle at the edge of the disc, but it felt secure and would give him a tiny bit of additional protection.
I’m guess I’m ready, Annev thought, though he didn’t feel like it. He sprinted back the way he had come, towards the ironwood door. As he passed a table he had overlooked upon entering the Vault, he saw a familiar sight.
The phoenix lantern … and Myjun’s glove!
Annev snatched up the carved block of wood and slid it into his cloak pocket. He took the glove, too, though he knew he could never wear it again. Did Narach just assume it had magic because it had a phoenix on it, like the lantern? Whyever it was here, Annev was grateful to have the garment back. He scanned the table for his other belongings – Mercy, Breathanas’s banner, the lamp that Janak claimed was the Oracle – but they were not there. Instead, the table was littered with a white handkerchief, two finger rings, and a dull wooden rod. With barely a thought, he scooped them into the pocket with Myjun’s glove to assess later. Finding the phoenix lantern had given him hope, though, for it meant the other artifacts were likely nearby.
I didn’t see Mercy in the weapons aisle, though. It had been the first thing Annev had looked for. Now, he wondered. Kenton was holding it when Myjun hit me with the torch … so maybe, in the confusion, he kept it.
Only if Kenton still carried the sword, he could have cut himself free of the prison cell – and he couldn’t have been promoted to Master Avatar without relinquishing the artifact first.
Unless he gave them the harp he stole from Janak’s. Then he could have kept Mercy and no one would have been the wiser …
Annev bit his lip, wanting to search, yet knowing every second he spent in the Vault was another moment Sodar’s life hung in the balance. I’ll come back for it another day, he swore. Right now, Sodar needs me.
Annev sprinted the rest of the way to the door, inserted the ironwood rod into the aqlumera symbol carved on the interior side, and imagined the portal opening. Just as the glyph split in half, he retracted the key and the door-within-the-door swung inward.
Annev’s breath caught in his throat.
Blood and gore littered the length of the hallway, sprayed across the walls and stone floor. When his gaze reached the end of the corridor, his key ring slid from his hand and clattered to the floor.
Narach lay dead on the far side.
Chapter Sixty-Six