I thrust away the rising horror of being responsible for those deaths, threw off the backpack, and then stripped off my jacket and shirt. Though only a small portion of the muck had gotten through the material, it bubbled away against my skin and caused a widening circle of damage. I grabbed the flask from the pack and trickled it over my shoulder. The pain immediately eased, but I continued to wash the wound until the blistering had completely stopped. I shook the flask and discovered there was only a little bit of water remaining. Not enough to wash down another wound if I got it, but maybe there was another lake somewhere in this warren where I could refill it. I stoppered the flask, shoved it back into the pack, and then gently probed the back of my head. The lump was huge and the hair around it was sticky with moisture, but from what I could feel, the cut itself wasn’t that bad. It certainly wasn’t gushing blood, and given the whack I’d received, that was something of a miracle. Once I’d sprayed some sealer over it, I shoved on my shoes to stop any further damage to my feet, and swung the pack over my shoulder.
The air screamed a warning just as a blur of lavender came out of nowhere and barreled into me. We crashed to the ground in a tumble of arms and legs, and all I could see, all I could hear, was the clashing of mandibles. I shoved a hand against its throat in an effort to keep them from my face, but the creature was so damn big—so damn heavy—that it was crushing me, and every breath was becoming a struggle.
I called to the air again. As the wind ripped the Irkallan from my body, I sat up, pulled the sword free from its sheath, and swung it with every ounce of strength I had. The blade began to glow a fierce blue as its sharp tip sliced the Irkallan’s head from its body, but as the wind flung the two pieces away, splattering blood and gore everywhere, I saw in the sword’s glow more Irkallan approaching. I swore and jumped fully to my feet, but even as I did that odd coughing pop sounded, and globs of mucus were flying toward me. I reached out, grabbed the air, and spun it violently. As the vortex redirected the globs into the walls of the cavern rather than my flesh, I pressed it forward and charged at the Irkallan, my sword raised high.
They answered in kind, their mandibles clashing as they screamed. The vortex hit them, tearing the weapons from their grips then bending them as easily as one might paper, making them unusable. I kept pushing the vortex forward, forcing the Irkallan back, even as a slight ache began in the back of my head. Not from the wound, but from the effort of controlling the air like this.
I ignored it, and continued to force the five Irkallan backward. They screamed and fought and continued to call both for my death and for help. It did them no good; with the metal doors into both the breeding chamber and the queen’s now closed, there was no help for them.
I pushed them back until they were pinned against the metal door that protected the queen’s chamber, and then I killed them.
With that done, I dropped my knees, closed my eyes, and sucked in air in a vague effort to ease the pounding in my head. After a while, it did so, but it was very evident that I wasn’t going to have the strength for too many more stunts like that.
I pushed to my feet, waited for the slight dizziness to go away, then resolutely made my way back to the children’s chambers. The gates weren’t locked, but I guessed there was no need for them to be if the Irkallan were keeping their witchlings under sedation.
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to harden my heart against what I was about to see. It was one thing to order foul deeds to be done, quite another to face the result of those orders.
I slowly pushed the first gate open. There were twenty pods in this room, ten on each side, but only nine of them were occupied. Every child was naked—which wasn’t a surprise given the warmth in this place—and they were lying on thin blankets that wouldn’t have provided much in the way of padding for their small bodies. Their ages appeared to run from the very young—perhaps no more than four or five—to several who would be classed as adults in Winterborne. All of them were severely stained, with at least seven whose skin had absolutely no color other than lavender. Two of those even had wisps of close-cropped lavender hair. Given the length of time the breeding program had been going, it was unsurprising that they had more children than bracelets—and as equally surprising that there weren’t more children here than the nine in this room and the twenty in the other. But perhaps the cost of creating the tunnel that now sat on the edges of Winterborne wasn’t only earth deprived of life, but also a high death rate amongst these children.
The bracelets weren’t hard to find—they were sitting in a storage nook set into the wall, every one of them the exact same size. Given they fitted the wrists of the smallest child as easily as they did adults and even that Adlin, they were very obviously adjustable even if they didn’t appear to be. I quickly collected them, then walked into the other room and retrieved the remainder.
Now I just had to figure out a way to get rid of them. The black lake was a chamber and two rather heavy metal doors behind me now, and while I could undoubtedly order the earth to create a wide enough tunnel around what was left of that chamber to allow the wind to carry the bracelets through, I suspected that would sap a whole lot more of my strength than was wise given what I still had to do.
But I still had four blocks of M185 left, and while I doubted it would be enough to bring the whole mountain down, it surely would destroy the bracelets and perhaps even create an explosion powerful enough to kill a queen. I moved out of the nurseries and walked down the hall.
The door into the queen’s chambers was huge and black, although the rust running across its metal surface hinted at the decades it had been in place and at the mercy of the moisture that was so much a part of this apiary.
I stopped in the middle, where the two halves met, then emptied the pack of everything except the bracelets. After setting the timers for twenty minutes, I carefully placed the blocks back into the pack and then strapped it closed to ensure they wouldn’t move. I attached the two NP10 balls onto my belt, slipped the small medikit into my pocket, and slung my sword over my shoulder.
With all that done, I sat down next to the pack and, with a deep breath to gather strength, I pressed my fingers into the rich earth.
The response was so swift and powerful it just about fried my fingertips. What is your wish?
I need these doors forced open enough to enable me to get through, and a hole in one of the walls large enough to hold the pack. And I need both done quickly, as I only have a limited time to place the bombs and run like hell.
Power surged and the soil thrummed underneath my fingertips. It pulsated through me, a heartbeat that my own swiftly matched. Though it wasn’t actually pulling on my strength, I nevertheless felt it slipping like rain from my body. This was the cost of the earth magic and one I was more than willing to pay if it achieved my aim.
The earth in front of me began to rise; thin fingers of rock pushed into the almost nonexistent gap between the two doors and slowly but surely pried them apart, until the gap was large enough for me to slip through sideways.
In the darkness beyond, I could see figures moving. That odd coughing noise gave me warning that I’d been seen, and I spun the air through the gap and flared it out, sending the globules back toward my attackers.
A small chamber has been created to the right of this door, the earth said. We will seal it once the pack is inside. Hurry.
That last warning wasn’t one I needed. Not when a small part of my brain was now doing a countdown of the time I had left.
I quickly primed the NP10, then brushed the vortex to one side and threw the two balls into the room, one to the left and one to the right. I pulled the air back into place across the gap then grabbed the pack and crawled to the left side of the door in order to protect myself from the blasts.
My head was back to pounding, my breath was little more than short, sharp gasps for air, and my stomach was growling so hard it was clearly audible above the shrieking sirens. Obviously, my body wanted me to replace the energy the earth had drawn from me, but the little food I’d had left was now buried in that old mine shaft.