Balanced on the Blade's Edge (Dragon Blood, Book 1) Read online

  * * *

  Sardelle woke with a start, her heart pounding out of her chest. Nothing except blackness surrounded her. Scrapes and scuffs reached her ears, and memories rushed over her: the sounds of the explosion, being ordered to the safety chamber, climbing into one of the mage shelters and activating it, then gasping in terror as the rock crashed down all around her, obliterating her world.

  She patted around, feeling for the smooth walls of the sphere, but they had disappeared. Only rough, cold rock met her probing fingers. The scrapes were getting louder. Her colleagues coming to help? But they would burn away the rock or move it by magical means, not scrape through it with pickaxes, wouldn’t they? Maybe the sorcerers of the Circle were too busy fighting back their attackers and had sent mundane workers.

  Sardelle?

  The telepathic query filled her mind with relief. Jaxi. Had her soulblade been buried in the rock somewhere as well? There hadn’t been time to run and grab the sword when the mountain had started quaking.

  I’m here.

  Thank the gods. You’ve been hibernating for so long. You can’t believe how lonely it’s been. There’s a limit to how many conversations you can start with rocks.

  I assume that means you’re buried too. The soft scrapes were getting closer, and a pinprick of light pierced the darkness a few feet away.

  Deeper than you. You left me in the basement training rooms, remember?

  Of course I remember. That was just this morning. As I recall, you were enjoying having that handsome young apprentice oil your blade.

  Sardelle waited, expecting a retort, but a long silence filled her mind—and the pinprick of light grew larger. When Jaxi finally responded, it was a soft, Sardelle?

  Yes… ?

  It wasn’t this morning.

  When, then?

  Three hundred years ago.

  She snorted. That’s funny, Jaxi. Very funny. How long has it really been?

  Those army sappers were utterly effective in collapsing the mountain. They were shielded somehow, and our people didn’t sense them. For that… we died. En masse. The mage shelter saved your life, but it was programmed not to take you out of stasis until favorable conditions returned to the outside. In this case, oxygen and a way for a human being to escape without being crushed.

  That part, Sardelle believed. She remembered Jetia sending out the telepathic announcement—more of a mental shriek of fear—about the sappers seconds before the explosions had gone off, before the rocks had started crumbling. But… three hundred years?

  If it makes you feel better, I’ve been conscious for all of those years, watching this mountain and hoping someone with mage powers would wander by, so I could call out for the person to retrieve me. I did manage to mind link with a couple of shepherds and prospectors, but they found my presence in their heads alarming, if you can imagine that. They ran off the mountain shrieking. Little matter. I estimate I’m under a thousand meters of solid rock. There would be no way for a mundane to reach me. Even you… I would appreciate it if you would find a way to get me out, but moving that much rock would be too much for you without me.

  Is that so? Sardelle managed to lace the thought with indignation, though it was more a habitual reaction to Jaxi’s teasing than a true objection. And this had to be teasing. Unlike with most sorcerers, who preserved their souls after they had lived many decades, Jaxi had died young of a rare disease, choosing to infuse her essence in the soulblade before passing. Despite having had several wielders and existing in the sword for hundreds of years, Jaxi retained her teenage sense of humor, often playing pranks on Sardelle.

  Not this time, my friend.

  I don’t—

  You’ll see in a moment. You better pay attention to your surroundings. The world has changed. Our people were destroyed, and those who remain fear anything that smells of magic. A while back, at the base of the mountain, I saw a girl who had been accused of being a witch weighted down with stones and drowned in a lake. Do not use your powers where they can be observed.

  Sardelle wanted to argue, wanted to catch Jaxi in a lie. Mostly she wanted for everything to be all right, for all of her kith and kin to have survived and for this all to be a joke. The scrapes had continued, and more light—the flickering of candle or perhaps lantern flames—seeped into her niche. Her eyes couldn’t yet tell her who was out there, so she stretched out with her senses… and knew right away the two men clawing at the rock with picks and shovels were strangers. Though she was often off on missions, she knew all the sorcerers and mundanes who worked in Galmok Mountain, the seat of culture, government, and teaching for those with the gift.

  Voices reached Sardelle’s ears, rough and slightly accented.

  “… see something, Tace?”

  “Not sure. Maybe a room? There’s a gap in the rocks up here.”

  “Maybe there’s a crystal.” Rock shifted, pebbles raining down a slope. “That would be cracking—they haven’t found one all year. We’ll get a pint if we bring one up. The general might even invite us for dinner.”

  They shared chortles at that notion.

  Some of the words and pronunciation have changed over the generations, but you’re fortunate the language is the same. You’ll be able to communicate with them without entering their minds. Jaxi was silent for a moment, but Sardelle sensed the unease through their link. Actually… I’d stay out of their minds altogether if I were you.

  Telepathic intrusion without invitation is forbidden except in emergencies, Sardelle thought. The mantra was one of the early ones in the Texts of the Referatu, something Jaxi surely knew as well as she.

  If being buried alive in rubble for centuries doesn’t count as an emergency, I’ll cede myself to a doddering geriatric to be used as a cane for the rest of my existence.

  Sardelle sighed. I’ll… consider your point.

  Finally enough rock fell away that Sardelle could make out the men. Her saviors, whether they knew it or not.

  They don’t. This is your opportunity for escape, but you’ll have to be very careful.

  I’m not leaving without you.

  A lantern lifted to the hole, one that was now more than a foot wide. A moment later, a man’s face came into view, his skin caked with grime, a matted mustache and beard hanging to his chest, his greasy dark hair held back from his eyes by a dusty bandana.

  “There’s something in here,” he said to his comrade. “I see cloth, and, er…”

  “Greetings,” Sardelle said. “Tace, was it?”

  Surprise widened the man’s eyes, and he stumbled out of view. An auspicious beginning.

  “What was that?” his comrade asked.

  “There’s a girl in there,” Tace blurted.

  “You tugging on my shovel? There’s no girls down here.”

  “I’m a woman,” Sardelle said, “and I’d be obliged if you dug me the rest of the way out of here.” She glimpsed a tunnel behind the men. She could handle the rock barricade in her own way, but Jaxi’s warning trumpeted in her mind. They fear anything that smells of magic.

  “A woman,” Tace whispered. “A woman down here.”

  “How’d she get in there?”

  “I don’t care.” More rocks fell away as the men worked at them with renewed vigor. “There ain’t no soldiers ’cept back at the cages. They ain’t gonna hear nothing. She can be ours.”

  And with those words—and the burst of lust that emanated from Tace like heat from an inferno—Sardelle came to understand Jaxi’s warning.

  “What if she’s uglier than your grandma?”

  “Don’t care. Last time I tried to get with a girl, that nasty Big Bretta drove me out of the barracks like I was diseased. This is a prayer answered.”

  A prayer? What kind of man prayed to what kind of god for a woman to rape? Or maybe the deluded miner thought she would willingly jump into his arms because he had dug her out? No, he wasn’t even thinking that—he was simply consumed with lust like a man digging t
oward a golden vein. She hadn’t delved into his thoughts—and wasn’t a gifted enough telepath to do so without alerting him anyway—but his emotions were on the surface, so strong she would have had to erect a barrier around herself to keep from sensing them.

  More rock fell away. If she stepped to the front of the niche the mage shelter had left when it dissipated, she could have reached the men, had them pull her out, but she hung back, considering her options. Handling a would-be rapist wasn’t a difficult matter if she could use her powers, but dare she? There were only the two men in the tunnel, but she sensed others in a maze of mines that snaked around inside the mountain. She wouldn’t kill these two to keep them from divulging her presence. That was the sort of usage of power that had scared the mundanes into the sneak attack that had brought this mountain down.

  Sardelle swam around Tace’s overpowering emotions, trying to get a sense of the second man’s state of mind. Might he be more reasonable? Someone to whom she could appeal? Her hope was squashed by her first brush with him. A darkness hovered about him, and she had the impression of a different sort of lust, of someone who liked to hurt, to cut with knives, to see pain on another’s face. He would kill his comrade Tace as happily as work with him, if he could get away with it, and he would kill her too.

  Sardelle drew back, her heart racing from the chilling contact. She snapped up her barriers to repel further brushes with their emotions.

  I told you. Jax sounded sad rather than triumphant.

  Enough rocks had been pulled away that the men could reach her now. They raised their lanterns for a good look. Sardelle stepped into the light, more because she wanted to scout the tunnel—and an escape route—than get closer to either of them. They smelled of sweat and grime, and even someone without the gift could have read the lechery on their faces. They were both large men, men who had been toiling here a long time and who had grown strong because of it. Through accident or design, they were blocking the narrow tunnel.

  “It is a girl,” Tace whispered, eyeing her from head to foot.

  Sardelle had been dressed for the president’s birthday celebration that morning—not that morning, but a morning hundreds of years in the past, she corrected, for she was gradually coming to believe Jaxi. She wore sandals and a dress fitting for a gala, not for tramping through tunnels. Her black hair hung about her shoulders, instead of being back in the braid she usually wore for work. Her pale green silk dress didn’t show a lot of skin, but it did hug the contours of her body, and she realized the delicate collar had been ripped at some point in her mad race for safety. Both men’s eyes locked onto that pale exposed flesh.

  Tace grinned and stepped forward, reaching for her arm. Sardelle sensed Jaxi in the back of her mind, like a panther coiled to spring. The soulblade would attack their minds if she didn’t find a way to defend herself.

  Though rushed, Sardelle called upon a simple trick she had learned from a field healer, one she had used before when caught in difficult situations. She gave them rashes.

  Their discomfort took a moment to register, and Sardelle feared she would have to use a more direct attack. Tace hauled her out of the rocks, and he pushed her against the cold stone wall, pressing his body against hers. He reached for his belt, but then he paused, a confused expression twisting his face. Behind him, his comrade was leaning on his pick with one hand and scratching his balls with the other.

  Sardelle wanted to shrink away from Tace’s hot breath washing her face, but she held her composure and merely raised an eyebrow. His hips shifted and the hand that had been about to unfasten his belt drifted lower, as he too suffered an overpowering itch.

  The pickaxe the other man had been holding clanked to the ground, and he twisted and bucked, both of his hands now occupied. Tace’s hands went back to his belt, but not with any intention of dropping his trousers to molest her. He stepped back, alternately scratching and investigating what was happening down there. Both men hobbled to the closest lantern for a better look, their trousers around their ankles.

  At first, Sardelle only took a couple of steps, easing away slowly and silently, not wanting them to notice. When they didn’t, she turned her walk into a jog, taking care not to let the sandals slap on the stone floor. She was already wishing she had worn her work leathers to the president’s birthday, huge gala or not. The tunnel was dark and uneven, but her senses guided her, and she didn’t conjure a light. She guessed that any other miners she met down there might be of similar mindsets to those two.

  Good guess.

  What is this place, Jaxi? Sardelle could handle a couple of dark-souled brutes, but what if… what if this was a representation of what the world had become? Her people’s beautiful community destroyed, to be replaced with this? Her people… Her friends. Had they all died in that demolition? Tedzu, Malik, Yewlith? Her brother? Her parents? Even if they hadn’t, they would have died in the years since. Was she all alone in the world now?

  I’m here. For once, there was nothing flippant in Jaxi’s response. She sent a feeling of compassion and support through their link. Sardelle appreciated it and wished it were enough. It wasn’t. She was glad for the empty darkness of the tunnel, for tears were streaking down her cheeks and dripping from her chin.

  It’s been a mine for the last fifty years or so, and it’s also a prison, Jaxi explained. As to the world beyond this mountain? I don’t know. I can’t sense that far.

  I understand.

  If it was a prison, maybe that meant some sort of sane person was in charge, someone she could talk to about… about what, she wasn’t sure. How would she explain how she had come to be in the prison in the first place? And how could she escape and leave Jaxi buried under tons of rock? For that matter, how could she escape without investigating further and seeing if something remained of her people? Of her friends? Wasn’t it possible that if she had made it to protection, others had too? Jaxi might simply not sense them because they were in the hibernation induced by the shelters.

  I’ve checked. Hundreds of times. Trust me, I’ve checked. It’s been a long, boring three centuries. I’ve also read all the books in the very dusty, very seldom-used prison library. If you ever need a summary of the titles, let me know.

  Sardelle didn’t appreciate the humor, not then. When I was in the mage shelter, could you tell I was alive?

  Yes.

  Sardelle struggled to find logic to refute Jaxi’s certainty as to the others’ passings. She didn’t want to give up her hope. We’re linked. Maybe that was why you could sense me and—

  No.

  Oh.

  Light appeared ahead, lanterns hanging from nails in wooden supports. The dirt and rock that had been heaped against the walls in the area where the two men had accosted her was cleared here, and iron tracks ran along the ground, with ore carts here and there. More sections of track were stacked along one wall, the route waiting to be extended.

  Sardelle slowed down, sensing more people ahead. Soon, the banging of carts and scraping of dirt reached her ears. With lanterns lighting this section, sneaking past miners would be difficult. That Tace had mentioned cages. Some sort of lift or tram system? He had also mentioned a guard. A guard could take her to whoever was in charge.

  Someone jogged past an intersection ahead. Sardelle leaned against the wall between two lanterns, hoping the shadows hid her. Maybe she ought to wait in the darkness somewhere until the shift ended. But no, that wasn’t an option. Sooner or later, her two rash victims were going to stop scratching themselves and seek medical attention, and she hadn’t passed any branches in the tunnels.

  She crept forward again. The bangs stopped, and it grew silent ahead. Had a lunch break been called? Maybe she would luck out.

  Sardelle reached the corner and peeked around it. It wasn’t an intersection, but an open chamber with lanterns hanging from a high ceiling as well as from the walls. Two men stood guard on either side of a metal cage on rails, a mesh door on the front side. The rails, as well
as a cable attached to the top disappeared into a shaft angling upward at a diagonal. To the right of Sardelle’s tunnel, at the back of the chamber, a big metal contraption with wheels and pulleys was bolted into the stone floor. A tram system. She had found her way out if she could get past those guards, or should she try talking to them?

  Based on their tidy hair cuts, shaven faces, and clean uniforms—gray trousers with silver piping and navy blue jackets—they looked more likely to be reasonable than the thugs, but evil could walk in many guises. And it made her nervous that she didn’t recognize those uniforms. They weren’t the dark greens of the Iskandian Guard, the soldiers she had once worked with to defend the continent. More than that, she didn’t recognize their weapons. Oh, she had seen things like the daggers they had sheathed at their waists and the studded maces on short chains hanging from their utility belts, but they bore firearms as well. Not the clumsy matchlock muskets she was familiar with—weapons many soldiers eschewed in favor of longbows or crossbows—but sleek black weapons the likes of which she had never seen. There was no ramrod attached to the top, nor were the men wearing powder containers, as far as she could see.

  They’ve replaced powder and musket balls with bullets that contain the charges within, Jaxi informed her. Each rifle can hold six rounds, and that lever on the bottom is for loading them into the chamber. They can fire rapidly, one shot every half second or so.

  Sardelle was fortunate the guards were talking to each other in low voices, and not paying much attention to the tunnels that emptied into the chamber, for she had been staring at them for a long moment. Even without Jaxi’s explanation, the firearms—the rifles—would have told her what she hadn’t wanted to believe. This wasn’t her century anymore.

  Sorry.

  I know. Sardelle blinked, fighting back tears again. This wasn’t the time. She would find a place to cry for her lost friends—her lost everything—later.

  She was on the verge of stepping out of the tunnel, when the guards stopped talking, one halting in the middle of the sentence. They stared down one of the passages, not Sardelle’s. There were men gathering behind a bend down there, but she didn’t think the guards could see them from their position. Were the miners up to something? She thought about warning the guards—maybe that would buy her some appreciation from them—but she was too late.

  A boom came, not from the tunnel with the men, but from one to the left of the cage. The ground shivered beneath Sardelle’s feet. Black smoke poured from the passage, while the men who had been gathering down the other tunnel charged from around the bend.

  Sardelle opened her mouth to shout a warning, but the guards were already reacting. They stepped back into the mouth of the tram shaft for cover, then, each man facing toward one threat, dropped to one knee, their rifles coming up to aim. Nothing came out of the smoky passage, but the guard facing the advancing men started firing. Sardelle, sensing the bursts of pain as the bullets found targets, had a chilling demonstration of the rapid-fire capabilities of the weapons. Even so, three of the charging men reached the guards, and the skirmish switched to hand-to-hand combat. The brawny miners wielded their pickaxes and shovels with fury and power, but it soon became clear that the soldiers were well trained. They kept the tram cage at their backs, so their attackers couldn’t maneuver behind them, and they swung the maces with precise, compact strokes, deflecting the picks and shovels, then smashing the studded metal heads into ribcages and jaws. The three miners soon lay unmoving on the ground.

  Other people had crept toward the chamber from the other tunnels, though nobody had come as close to it as Sardelle had. They seemed curious and hopeful rather than antagonistic. Harmlessly watching the show in case something happened in the miners’ favor? A warning twanged her senses. They weren’t all harmless.

  “Look out,” Sardelle called to alert them to a new assailant back in the direction of the smoke, the one who had originally lit the explosive.

  A long cylinder with flame dancing at the end of a fuse sailed out of the tunnel, landing in front of the tram. One soldier fired at the man who had thrown it while the other stamped out the spitting fuse, as calmly as if he were grinding out a cigar stub.

  All right, so they probably hadn’t needed her warning…

  One of the soldiers knelt to check the throats of the unconscious men. The other stared at her—she didn’t try to hide, there being no point since she had given away her position, but she didn’t step fully around the corner yet either. She wanted to see what their reaction to her was first.

  “What are you doing down here, woman?”

  Not exactly a thank you.

  Sardelle was about to respond, but the second guard had taken out a knife and, without so much as a hesitation for a prayer or apology to whatever gods the miners worshipped, slit one of the unconscious men’s throats.

  “What are you doing?” Sardelle blurted, even as the soldier shifted to dispatch a second miner. “They’re no threat now. Why kill them?”

  The guard wielding the bloody dagger barely glanced at her. The other soldier strode toward her. “You people made your choice when you picked lives of crime, and these idiots made their final choice just now. There’s no leniency here. We’d have to deal with that kind of thing every day if we were lenient.” He jerked a thumb toward the men—toward the bodies, their life’s blood flowing out onto the dark stone. Unlike Tace and his buddy, these miners were thin—too thin—with gaunt faces and hollowed cheekbones. They wouldn’t have been a match for the soldiers under any circumstances.

  Belatedly, his words sank in. You people. He thought she was one of them, one of the miners. Sardelle braced herself against the corner, ready to defend herself again if she had to. Would he try to slit her throat, as he had the others?

  The soldier hung his mace on his belt and carried the rifle at his side rather than aiming at her, so she let him approach without reacting. She didn’t sense kindly thoughts from him, but she didn’t get the feeling that he meant to hurt her either.

  “Come on, woman. You’re not supposed to be down here. You know that.” He gripped her arm and pulled her into the chamber, then frowned at her dress and sandals. “Or don’t you? Did you come in with the prisoners yesterday? Didn’t you get the orientation?”

  Orientation, as if this were some educational campus where people were directed how to find their classes and the dormitories… But if it could explain her presence down here, she would go with it. “No. No orientation.”

  The second soldier stalked down one of the tunnels, his dagger still in his grip as he went to check on the people they had already shot.

  The man gripping her arm shook his head. “This way. Randask, I’m taking this one up to the women’s area. I’ll report this mess to the captain, who can report it to the general, who can sit in his office and drink his vodka and not care a yak’s butt, like usual. You going to be all right down here?”

  “Yeah.” The man walked back into the chamber, his dagger awash in blood. Sardelle had a hard time tearing her eyes from it. He walked into the opposite tunnel, though she could sense that the man who had thrown the explosive was dead. “The peepers have gone back to work.”

  Yes, the watchers Sardelle had noticed earlier had drifted back down their tunnels. Clangs started up again in the distance. There wouldn’t be another attack for a while. She wondered what had prompted this one.

  Desperation, Jaxi suggested. Misery. They have nothing to lose.

  Do we?

  I can’t speak for you, but I live in hope that my situation will improve. At the very least, perhaps some new books will be dropped off in the prison library.

  “This way.” The guard ushered Sardelle into the cage, then shut and latched the door. He hadn’t let go of her arm yet, as if she would run off and return to those awful tunnels. She suffered the grip, though couldn’t help but dwell on the fact that yesterday—no, three hundred years ago—few men or women would have presumed to touch her wit
hout invitation, even some of the military commanders she had worked with for years. It wasn’t so much that she was aloof or in the habit of reprimanding people who did so, but the ungifted had always regarded the gifted with respect—or, in some cases, perhaps more than she had realized, fear and wariness.

  The second soldier walked over to the machine and pulled a lever. Clanks sounded, and the cage started moving, being pulled up the rails into darkness. Sardelle twisted her head to squint up the track. A distant light waited, little more than a pinprick. As the cage rose, she could feel herself being pulled farther and farther from Jaxi. Their link was strong enough that they could communicate across a lot of miles—since being joined with the soulblade, she had never been far enough away to truly test their range—but the symbolism made the problem feel more dramatic than it was. Nothing was truly changing, and yet… she felt like she was abandoning her only friend left in the world.

  Don’t worry, came the dry response. You wouldn’t be going far.

  Right, Jaxi had said this was a prison. Walking out the front door or gate or whatever they had up there wouldn’t be an option. She trusted that she could evade whatever security they had and escape though.

  Not unless you’ve learned to fly. The Ice Blades are as high as they ever were, and the road over the pass was destroyed when these people’s ancestors took down half the mountain. Also… the first snows of winter have come.

  Oh. But the guard had mentioned new prisoners arriving. How do these people get in and out?

  Weather permitting, they fly.

  They fly? Sardelle was glad for the darkness, so the soldier wouldn’t see the way her mouth had dropped open.

  They have ships that sail the airways, held up by giant balloons, and they also have small, maneuverable mechanical craft designed after the dragons of eld. As I’ve been telling you, the world has changed.

  “How’d you get down here, anyway?” the soldier asked, disturbing the images she had been trying to form.

  Sardelle shrugged. “Just came down.”

  “Huh.”

  She caught a hint of irritation in that single syllable. A point of pride? Since she had implied she had somehow gotten past him, or perhaps one of his fellow guards? They did seem a competent bunch; she could see where a suggestion of laxness would rankle. So long as he didn’t start thinking of magical reasons she might have slipped past.

  The tram seemed to be making decent speed, with a hint of cold fresh air whispering into the cage, but they had only made it halfway up. Sardelle wondered how deep into the mountain their tunnels reached. Maybe there was some way she could convince them to angle toward Jaxi’s resting place. With pickaxes and shovels, it would probably take ages, but… she had to try.

  “You mentioned taking me to a women’s area,” Sardelle said, “but I actually need to see the person in charge.” She hoped that wasn’t the vodka-swilling general he had mentioned. “Can you take me to him or her?”

  The soldier snorted. “The general doesn’t see prisoners.”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever.”