I looked down just in time to see the spreading fracture beneath my boots, before it all came apart around us. The floor shattered, and we tumbled into the interior of the lift.
Forty-Four
Ifound myself lying face down on the wooden roof of a big wagon. Dathka was next to me on her side, and by all the saints, the lid to the lamp remained closed. When I went to sit up, there was a lot of tinkling and crunching, which was when I realized we were both covered in broken glass, and any sudden moves might result in getting cut.
Turned out, the lift’s roof was made of a bunch of different smaller panes of glass, rather than one big magical one like each of the sides. And we’d only shattered one of those panes, rather than the entire thing, which would have dropped jagged shards onto all the innocent passengers.
As for them, from the noise they were making, most were confused or frightened, while a few cooler heads were urging the others not to panic. The merchant’s wagon was tall enough that they hadn’t even seen us lying atop it yet. There’d just been an extremely bright light coming up the chute, and then a moment later, some glass had broken.
We’d been lucky to hit the wagon. Between the tall body and big wheels, that extra ten feet of falling probably would’ve injured a lot more things than my pride.
“Don’t move,” I whispered to Dathka, who was still getting her vision back.
“I’m scared to. Did we fall through the lift?”
“Yeah.”
The passengers hadn’t spotted us yet, only because the merchant’s wagon was really large and the roof was flared out to the sides, but as soon as we reached ground level, this lift would surely be swarming with investigating paladins. At minimum, they’d confiscate our treasure. At worst, they’d blame us for all the violence above and we’d be off to jail in chains. We needed to get out of here, and that wasn’t going to happen through the front door.
There was a hole above us, and through it, I could see the corkscrew road passing by. “Do you trust me?”
“Not particularly,” Dathka hissed.
“Then you can stay and get arrested. Otherwise, stand up real gently so we don’t get cut, and then hold on.”
She sighed. “Fine.”
When we got up, the passengers spotted us and began shouting. I ignored them as best as I could as I shook the broken glass off my cloak. “Ouch.” I got a few little cuts anyway. Trax would have no problem finding us now! With the box tucked tight under one arm, I lifted my air glove skyward. “Grab tight.”
“This had better work,” Dathka said as she wrapped her arms around me.
If it didn’t, we’d find out really fast. “I’ve never tried toAscendwith this much weight before.”
“Are you calling me fat?”
Rather than answer that, I concentrated on awakening the Clear embedded in my glove. When I felt the air solidify and wrap around my extended arm, I willed it to pull us upward. “Ascend.”I’m fairly certain that if I’d tried this on the ground, the spell would’ve barely lifted us at all. Except we were on adescending platform, so it was more like the spell held us in about the same place as the floor kept going down without us.
Dathka held on to me hard as she had Gerzog when she’d been trying to murder him. The broken pane passed us, and then we were dangling in the open shaft.
“Shit!” she exclaimed as she tried to squeeze the life out of me.
That was probably what I’d sounded like flying on a kwetzel. From the lights of the district, we were probably halfway to the ground, but thankfully, there was a patch of corkscrew road only twenty feet away and below us. This was going to be the tricky part.
“Hang on.”
I focused on the road as my target and cut the spell. We began to drop. “Descend!”
My descent was rough even at the best of times, but with a box in one arm, and a shrieking deadlander hanging off me, it proved even clumsier. We went down at an angle, way too fast, bashing first against a pillar, then tumbled over the metal railing. We hit the road and went rolling.
The stupid box popped open again.
The beam of light illuminated the entire district. If the authorities hadn’t known we were here before, they sure knew now!
“Why didn’t Gerzog install a latch on this damned box?” Totally blind, I crawled toward where I thought I’d dropped it and fumbled about until I found it and slammed the lid shut.
The two of us lay there, waiting for our eyes to sort of clear.
“They’re going to catch us,” Dathka said. “We should get our stories straight.”
