She touched a finger to the shimmering wall, something like wonder on her face. It quickly dimmed.
“I hear them,” she whispered as the footsteps and voices grew louder. “I can sensehim.”She held the ocarina to her chest, but Zen caught the brush of her thumb against her left wrist. “I think…I think they found me through the tracking spell.”
Cold guilt trickled down Zen’s back. Leaving the Boundary Seal had been a mistake. Ulara’s theory had been that the spell in Lan’s arm would remain active so long as it was preserved. The Seal the masters had administered to it merely hindered its power, along with the power of the Boundary Seal. Leaving Skies’ End had removed one of the protective layers.
He reached out, putting a tentative hand on Lan’s wrist. “The Seals on this chamber allow us a looking glass that goes only one way. We can hear them, but should they knock down this wall, they will find naught but grass and trees where we currently stand.”
“Because of the Gate Seal,” she replied.
He nodded, then pressed a finger to his lips. The Elantians had entered the outer chamber.
“…magic came from here.” A feminine voice, speaking with militaristic efficiency. Zen’s ears pricked.Magic.That was what they called qì. The woman was a magician.
The sound of the Elantian language never failed to incite that old feeling of nausea and fear in him. Trapped in a small space as he was, with no way out, no way to defend himself, and most of his strength expended on the summoning Seal, the sensation was magnified. He closed his eyes and regulatedhis breathing, focusing his mind on the space of nothingness in the way Dé’zihad taught him when old memories threatened to spill into panic.
“It’s empty,” commented a second speaker. There was the sound of rubble being kicked. Then the same speaker said, “Well, it’s not hard to tell that our army came through here in the early days.”
The speaker chuckled, and Zen’s blood ran cold. The way he pronounced the sentence, his intonations light and glib, yielded no uncertainty: the man was jesting about the massacre of the entire School of Guarded Fists.
Bile rose inside him, sharp, bitter, burning. It didn’t have to be this way. If he let himself—if he allowed the darkest part of himself to finally resurface, he could stand a chance of taking down at least a few Elantian magicians.
“Such topics are not to be joked about,” the female said sternly. “Those yellow curs practice magic with souls of their dead. We do not wish to accidentally invoke the wrath of their ghosts.”
“You believe in all that Hin spiritual nonsense?” the male cackled. Zen frowned, processing the foreign language carefully in his mind. So this second man was no magician.
“Silence.”This word cut through their chatter like a clap of thunder. And as Lan tensed beside Zen, he suddenly realized why this third voice sounded so familiar.
It was him—the Alloy from Haak’gong. Even now, Zen could imagine the bone-white gleam of his armor, those eyes burning like blue flames in a colorless face.The Winter Magician,Lan had called him.
“You said you tracked the girl here, Erascius?” The female’s tone was deferential when she addressed him. The other speaker had fallen quiet. The room was filled with the sharp scuffs of their boots as they prowled.
Lan made a small noise.
“I thought I did.” The Winter Magician’s—Erascius’s—tone was cold, flat, a vast, unbroken expanse of ice that seemed to fill the chamber. “My spell grows weak with the passage of time…yet I believed I was…close.”
As he’d spoken, his voice had drawn steadily nearer to the spot where the Seals had hidden away the Chamber of Forbidden Dreams—and Zen and Lan with it.
“Did they tamper with your spell?” the female suggested wryly. “You yourself said that you felt a period of disconnect before it flared up. What if this is a trap?”
A bitter silence followed.
“Are there spells here? Could they be hidden?”
Lan had wrapped her arms around herself, curling inward. Her eyes, though, she kept wide open.
The image struck deep in Zen’s heart. He knew the feelingof helplessness in the face of violence. After all, he had stood in her place thirteen cycles ago, before a different group of soldiers bearing dragon-tailed pennants and armor of gold.
“Did you say the girl had something you wanted?” the other male speaker asked.
“I would have thought His Majesty the King would have assigned a more capable captain to work with us,” the woman snarled.
“Lishabeth,” Erascius said, “Captain Timosson and his company are on loan to us in a new partnership. I would counsel patience, as not all are familiar with the findings and inner workings of Royal Magicians.”
“Yes, Erascius.”
“Captain Timosson.” There was an icy grace to the way Erascius spoke. “It takes order at every level to keep an empire as great as Elantia in power. Lishabeth and I have been assigned by the governor, at the direct order of His Majesty the KingAlessander, Angels Hold His Name, to establish the Elantian Central Outpost. These Central Plains of the Last Kingdom have gone unchecked for too long. We had once thought they held nothing but wild forest and tundra lands…yet our recent skirmish with the two practitioners in Haak’gong has led us to believe otherwise. Especially considering how they disappeared into the central region.” A pause. “I believe there still exists an organized…nest of Hin practitioners that slipped through our fingers. I believe they are hiding in the Central Plains, somewhere near here…right under our noses.”
Zen stopped breathing. The Alloy spoke ofthem—of their encounter in Haak’gong. By saving Lan, Zen had confirmed the existence of the School of the White Pines.
