Shadows, Maps, and Other Ancient Magic (20 page)

“The nexus doesn’t feel like this,” I said. “It feels full and vibrant.”

“It’s not the same,” Warner said. “This is just a pocket. The nexus is a universe. Nothing lives or grows here.”

“Things die here, though,” Kandy said. She’d stepped just inside the fortress doors. “I revise my previous no-dead-bodies-lying-around assessment.”

Taking extra care to not accidentally brush against anything, Warner and I followed Kandy into the fortress.

CHAPTER TEN

Three more doors stood beyond the main fortress doors. These were closed, though. One was edged with an inlay of yellow runes, one with blue, and the third with red. Sand covered the smooth stone beneath our feet.

“Don’t touch the doors,” I cautioned as Warner cut left and Kandy circled right away from me. “More magic. Way more concentrated here.” Actually, this sudden intensity of magic made me realize what I’d been tasting as we’d neared and entered the fortress. “Does the magic feel depleted to you? Like drained?” I asked Warner, not taking my eyes off the doors.

“Weak, yes,” he answered. “But I have no sense as to whether it was ever stronger or not.”

“Sorcerer magic,” I said.

“From all the dead sorcerers?” Kandy asked.

I glanced over to her. She was leaning over what I’d assumed was a pile of sand, blown up here from the beach in a storm or something. Except if Warner was right about this being a pocket of time, storms might not occur here. Kandy crossed to look at a second pile. There was also a third one against the wall she was standing by.

I turned to look at Warner. He was standing by two similar-looking piles. But farther into the entrance, propped in the corner next to the yellow-runed door, sat a partial skeleton. The sentinel hunched down to look at it. Then he reached into the rib section of the dry bones and picked up a silver metal rune that the corpse had worn on a leather tie, probably around his neck.

I couldn’t feel any magic from the item Warner held, but he didn’t lift his gaze from it until I spoke.

“This isn’t sand.” I was suddenly hyperaware of the grit I was walking on, but didn’t want to appear squeamish about it in front of a dragon and a werewolf.

“No,” Warner answered.

“We’re walking on the disintegrated bones of … Adepts?” Okay, I was getting a little squeamish. The leather tie of the metal rune had crumbled away when Warner touched it. He was now flipping the rune through his fingers one at a time. I wanted to make a snarky joke about magician’s tricks and coins — you know, to cover my discomfort — but I didn’t. See? I was all grown up now. “The rune emblem … these were sorcerers?”

“Perhaps.”

“What does the rune mean? Is it a word or just a letter? It looks like a decapitated, legless stick-person.”
 

Kandy snorted at my description, but kept her attention glued to the puzzle of opening the doors. I was a little sketchy on how runes worked. It wasn’t my kind of magic. Witches rarely used runes in their spellcasting, though Gran sometimes used specific ones to anchor her wards.

“Not all Adepts appreciate the protection of the guardian nine,” Warner said.

“People generally don’t like being told what to do.”

“This symbol — the eternal life — represents one such sect of sorcerers. A sect I thought long gone.”

“They are,” I said, gesturing to the piles of disintegrated bones. “Someone stopped them from entering the fortress. Another sentinel perhaps? Or they died trying to get through the doors?”

Warner made a noncommittal noise, not ready to share his thoughts. At least he didn’t just ignore me like some vampires I knew would have. Well, I only knew one vampire. And honestly, if the glimpse I’d had of Kett’s maker in London was any way to judge, I was seriously happy to leave it that way. One vampire was enough.

Kandy started toward the blue-runed door.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait. Wait. The doors are spelled. See the runes along the edges?”

“Yeah? So?” Kandy said. “We have the key.” She pointed to an indentation in the center of the blue-runed door, which looked a lot like the artifact I’d pulled out of the map — including being set with thin stripes of red, yellow, orange, blue, and violet.

“Fine,” I said, as I dug into my ruined satchel to retrieve the artifact. “But you don’t know we’re supposed to go through the blue door.”

“Blue and yellow make green.”

“There’s a yellow door right there.” I gestured toward the door on the far left. “Why pick blue?”

“I like blue.”

Warner laughed, calling my attention back to him. He was digging through the other disintegrated remains and retrieving more identical silver runes. It seemed he found Kandy’s methodology amusing.

Tucking the runes into his pocket, Warner straightened from his crouch and turned to look at the three doors. “The magic on the doors appears untouched?”

“The magic that I guess once coated the walls, stairs, and front doors is diminished. As if it was drained or transferred somehow. But these three doors don’t taste weak like that. I don’t recognize the spells, but each door is spelled differently by the same group of Adepts.”

“No one stopped these guys,” Kandy said. “Look at how they were sitting.”

I wasn’t sure that piles of disintegrating bone could be described as “sitting,” and the one that was partially preserved looked more like it was slumped. “They could have been thrown there. Their necks broken, maybe? I mean, I’m not the only one that happens to, right?”

Warner furrowed his brow at me, and Kandy didn’t look much happier. Okay, so joking about broken necks wasn’t funny. Got it.

“If a sentinel like him …” — Kandy nodded to Warner — “…came through here, the sorcerers would have been ripped apart.”

“More likely decapitated if they fought,” Warner said. “Most likely apprehended and imprisoned.”

“Sorry?” I asked, snagging on to that last nugget of information. “There’s a dragon prison?”

“I thought you were the treasure keeper’s apprentice?”

“I work for him, but I’m not his apprentice. Not like Drake is Chi Wen’s successor, if that’s what you mean. But what does that have to do with a dragon prison?”

“The treasure keeper keeps more than just treasure. But these interlopers would have simply been turned over to the sorcerer’s League for punishment.”

Note to self — don’t do anything so crazy that the dragons decide to punish me. I’d take the Convocation over Suanmi any day.

“I didn’t mean to imply you were in line for ascension,” Warner continued. “Very few dragons are capable of surviving the ceremony and accepting the mantel of a guardian. This Drake you speak of must be very powerful.”

“And prone to prison breaks,” Kandy added. “Key, please? Or are we going to order tea and crumpets?”

“I have no idea what crumpets have to do with it,” I muttered. I handed the artifact I’d retrieved from the map to Kandy.
 

She slowly turned the circle in her hand, then peered at the indentation on the blue door. She held the key up to the door but didn’t insert it. Then she turned it in her hand again, as if attempting to line it up with the door’s indentations.

“Chi Wen is the eldest now?” Warner asked as Kandy worked.
 

“Yes,” I answered. “Drake is Suanmi’s ward, but the far seer’s apprentice.”

“Suanmi,” Warner repeated, with just enough edge that I suddenly liked him a whole lot more. “I have slept for half of Chi Wen’s ascension.”

“No one’s feeling sorry for you, buddy,” Kandy growled as she stalked over to the yellow door.

“Kandy,” I admonished, though I knew she was probably just bitchy about figuring out she’d chosen the wrong door. “I guess the colors didn’t line up?”

“I’m just saying we all go through shit. He’s lucky he slept through most of his.”

“Except, of course, his very existence is tied to shit going down.”

“Except this,” Warner muttered. “Why wasn’t I called to this?”

“Because they didn’t have the map?” I asked as Kandy slotted the key in the indentation of the yellow-runed door. She’d turned it upside down, if I remembered correctly, opposite to how the key had worked on the map.

“I’m tasked to protect the locations of the instruments of assassination. An incursion here should have woken me.”

“Always?”

“Yes,” Warner replied tersely.

Figuring I’d press him until he stopped answering, I said, “Maybe someone out there knows how to get around triggering you.”

Warner frowned and — as expected — let the conversation drop. Instead, he crossed to examine the corpses on the other side of the entranceway — the ones Kandy had been hovering over earlier.

Kandy turned the key.

“Wait,” I cried, but was too late to stop her.

Somewhere beside or behind the door, large gears creaked as if they were turning for the first time in what sounded like over a century, if not longer. Though, given the supposedly timeless nature of the pocket that concealed the fortress from the human world, that was just an impression, not the reality.

Nothing else happened.

Kandy smirked, then wagged her eyebrows at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “With the map, I had to be the one to hold the key.”

“That was a map conceived by the former treasure keeper and tattooed by an alchemist,” Warner said. “Here, the key would have to be usable by sorcerers.” He retrieved a rune from the piles of bones he’d been digging through. He now had five of the silver ‘eternal life’ pendants.

Magic rolled through the runes at the edges of the yellow door. Each one glowed briefly with a wash of blue sorcerer magic before that magic moved up to the next. Then the door opened about a foot wide.

Kandy slipped through without another word. Warner straightened from gathering his clues and tucked a sixth metal rune into his pocket. I knew I should have been more interested, but frankly, bone dust freaked me out, and I wasn’t here to figure out some incursion that happened centuries ago. I was here to retrieve an artifact for the treasure keeper. Also, I had a hard time wrapping my head around time like that. I didn’t like to frustrate myself by thinking of things I really couldn’t comprehend for too long. It gave me headaches, and my chocolate stash was a world away.

I followed Kandy into the next chamber. “The magic is still active,” I said. I had to push the door open a bit wider to get through.

Kandy was standing, staring at three more doors. They were edged with orange, green, and violet runes. More skeletons lined the walls here, but the bones were better preserved.

“Well, that’s a game changer,” I said.

Kandy growled something and tossed the key up in the air with her right hand, then caught it again. Like pitchers did before they threw.

“If you break the key, we won’t get much farther.”

Kandy sighed and wandered over to peer at the indentations on the orange door. Then she looked closely at the key, comparing the two. “Is the magic the same here?” she asked.

“Yep,” I answered, reaching out with my dowser senses to confirm. “Same spells on all the doors. Well, different spells on each, but the same magic.”

Warner entered through the door behind me and immediately crossed to the three corpses slumped to the right side of the small chamber. Dust hung suspended in the late-afternoon light that filtered in through windows cut into the stone along the top edge of the wall above him.

I tried to block out the idea that the dust was from the disintegrating corpses, and that I was currently breathing it into my lungs.

“No clothing to help identify the time period,” the sentinel said. “More of these.” He held up the silver ‘eternal life’ runes for me to see.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was kind of hoping the ones in the entrance died from the utter boredom of not being able to get through the doors.”

“Only three corpses in here,” Kandy said as she crossed to the green door. “Six in the last room.”

“I guess they were getting better at getting through the spells,” I said. “Question is, what killed them? And is it coming for us?”

Neither Kandy nor Warner answered. I couldn’t feel anything malignant in the magic the doors held, but the diminished magic all around worried me because I couldn’t get a specific read on it. I couldn’t really taste it, except for its sorcerer roots.

“So, did these eternal life sorcerers hate dragons?” I asked Warner.

“Immortality seekers,” he answered.

“And dragons don’t like to share?”

“Dragons aren’t immortal. And guardians don’t believe in immortality. Such power usually has terrible side effects.”

“Evil side effects.”

“No one should live forever.”

“That’s why you hate vampires?”

“Vampires take life to live.”

“They don’t have to.”

“Any one of them who tells you that is lying.”

“They have rules.”

“About not getting caught, and not drawing attention.”

A loud click drew my attention back to Kandy. She’d inserted the key into the green-runed door.

For a nanosecond, nothing happened. No gears turned. The door didn’t open.

Kandy turned to look at me. Her eyes glowed green to match her hair. “Sorry, Jade,” she whispered. “Wrong door.”

Sorcerer magic boiled up at her feet, just as her own shapeshifter magic rolled over her torso, arms, and legs. I lunged for her, but my outstretched fingers only brushed the fabric of her tank top as the ground beneath her feet dropped away. She plummeted down, even as she transformed into her six-foot-tall half-beast form.

She didn’t even scream.
 

I tried to fling myself after her, only to have Warner wrap his arm around my waist and lift me off the ground.

“Hey!” I shouted, twisting and turning in his iron grip. “Asshole! That’s my friend.”

Far beneath us, a series of somethings snapped and cracked. I panicked, thinking I was hearing Kandy’s bones shattering. I slammed my head back into Warner’s mouth and nose in my effort to get away from him. He grunted in pain but didn’t loosen his hold. Starbursts exploded before my eyes as I felt what I assumed were his teeth denting my skull.

“I’m okay,” Kandy called up the dark shaft beneath my dangling feet. Her voice echoed, and her words sounded mangled by her three-inch incisors. “But yuck. I’m not the first one down here.”