“But I do. Do not [unintelligible] with argument. If the Zhuren decide to hunt the red this time, I may be wanted. I do not want my captive to burn.” She gave the guard holding Cynna brisk instructions and headed back up the stairs a lot faster than she’d come down.
There was confusion enough in the next few minutes that Lily thought about trying to escape. Everyone around them thought the guys in uniform had to know more about what was going on than they did and refused to take “I don’t know” for an answer—proving, in Lily’s mind, that civilians were much the same everywhere. Her guards were distracted by the questions, the demands, the crowding. They kept hold of Lily’s arms, true, and her hands were tied. But they should have used an armlock the way Cynna’s guard was. Armlocks gave you much better control. Plus Lily had boots. Bring her heel down hard on Right-hand Guard’s foot and jab him in the diaphragm with her elbow. He was the perfect height for that. Drop, pulling Left-hand Guard off-balance . . . what came next would depend on how Left-hand Guard reacted, but she’d trained for this sort of thing. She had a decent chance.
If her ankle had been in better shape, she might have tried it. And that would have been a mistake. Even if she pulled it off and got away from the guards . . . if she somehow got her hands free and made it into the city . . . what then? What could she do better while hiding out in the city? The information she needed was here. She’d acquired a chunk of it today, a stomach-churning chunk. But not enough.
Besides, it was likely that one or more of those ifs wouldn’t pan out. She’d end up recaptured after putting them on notice that she needed to be handled more carefully. That would make a second escape attempt much harder when the time came.
None of that made it any easier when she saw what the guards meant by “the small cell off the interrogation room.”
“My coat closet is bigger than that,” she told her guards in English.
Their response was to shove her inside. Her and Cynna. The door slammed shut.
FOURTEEN
IT was dark. Really dark. Lily dripped on the floor and reminded herself that she did not suffer from claustrophobia.
“No doorknob on this side,” Cynna said. “Are you okay? Did he—what did Kongqi do?”
“Talked. Asked questions. I’m fine.” But she wasn’t. It felt like her only options were screaming and punching out the wall or collapsing. Screaming sounded okay, but punching out the wall would hurt.
Let the floor hold her up for a while, she decided, and put her back to the wall and slid down it, using mostly only one leg because her ankle hurt, dammit. It was awkward. She wanted her hands free. Would it have killed them to untie her hands before shoving her in here?
Once she was down, she was hit with a wave of pure tired. Tired in every way. She drew her knees up close, folded her arms over them, and rested her head on her arms. Longing had her checking with her mate sense . . .
“You’re not okay.” That sounded like an accusation.
“I’m considering trying Arjenie’s technique.”
“Uh—which one?”
“The fall-apart technique. Go ahead and fall apart and get it over with.” And there was Rule. Far away, but she could feel him. That settled her some. Not entirely, but some. Cynna didn’t have that, she reminded herself. She only had Lily. Lily roused herself to lift her head. “How about you? You okay?”
“I can’t pace.” Cynna’s voice was taut, as if she were a lot closer to the screaming and wall-pounding than Lily. “It’s not right to put me where I can’t pace. Otherwise, I’m as okay as I can be, here and now. This seems to be an expected thing. Hiding belowground from a dragon, I mean. Alice acted like it was routine.”
“Maybe it is. I asked one of the guards. He said their wards don’t work on dragons.”
“Yeah, I kinda figured that out while I was talking with Alice. See, I copied out the spell she wanted, and she was paying me for that by talking about wild dragons when we were interrupted by . . . well, by one of the wild dragons, I guess?”
The questioning note in her voice confused Lily briefly. “Oh. Yes. They talked about it being ‘the red.’” She sent her mindsense to Cynna. It’s not Reno. I checked.
“Damn.”
Aloud Lily said, “The spawn are dealing with the wild dragon—whatever ‘wild dragon’ means, and I really need to know what you learned from Alice, but maybe not right this second. But there is a dragon, according to Alice, and Dick Boy took off when the alarm—oh, about that. You know that tower in the center of the courtyard? The one with the Frisbee on top? The Frisbee thingie is the alarm.”
“What about Dick Boy?” Cynna’s voice was sharp. “What about him?”
“He dropped down to chat with me when I was on the way back from Kongqi’s workroom. Flew down. He wanted to know what Kongqi and I had been talking about all afternoon. When the alarm went off, he shot straight up. Is telekinesis an Earth magic thing?”
“Huh? Why do you ask?”
“I just wondered. His title means Master of Earth, and he’s clearly good at that flying thing they do, which uses TK. Did I tell you that earlier? I can’t remember. They use a form of telekinesis to fly. It made me wonder if telekinesis was connected to Earth magic. It doesn’t feel like Earth, but it doesn’t really feel like any of the elements.”
“Oh. No, TK is a really rare Gift for a reason. It’s balanced.”
“I don’t follow you.”
A sigh, then Cynna lowered herself to sit on the floor, too, her back against the opposite wall. That put her calf up against Lily’s thigh. Lily felt Cynna’s foot tapping restlessly. “Balanced means that it draws on all four elements equally—Earth, Air, Fire, Water. Gifts usually draw on one or two elements, not all four, and people usually have an affinity for one or two elements and aren’t as good with the others. That’s one reason complex spells are performed as rituals. A ritual lets you balance the elements within the spell instead of within yourself because hardly anyone can do that. It’s kinda the holy grail for practitioners—learning how to truly balance the elements. The closer you come to real balance, the more power you can work with. Theoretically, if you could balance them perfectly, you could do really complex shit without a ritual. Some people think that’s where the legend about power words comes from—that in the old days adepts were able to balance the elements so perfectly they could pack a zigaton of power into a single word.”
“But TK is naturally balanced?”
“Pretty much. Not perfectly balanced—that’s not possible, or that’s what everyone says, and by ‘everyone,’ I mean it’s the common wisdom in every branch of the craft I’ve studied.”
Lily thought that over. “Cullen had to balance the elements when he opened that gate, didn’t he? The one the Edge gnomes tricked him into building.”
“Yeah. Opening a gate requires a really tight balancing, and he had to hold that balance himself because it was ley line energy.”