“Take a deep breath, and define your pronouns.”
His eyes were wide, as if he were reliving the memory. She read the terror etched in his face. “A construct,” he said. “Huge. Lots of metal legs. Wire tentacles protruding from its back.”
She remembered facing such constructs on the battlefield. Eklor’s specialty. Absolutely terrifying in close quarters. And supposedly burned on the plains.I was right,she thought.
The thought didn’t comfort her at all.
“Amurra?” Kreya said.
“It had her.” He dropped his voice to a whisper, as if afraid Stran would hear. “We tried. You have to believe me. You have to tell him. We tried!”
Kreya wanted to shake him. If Amurra had been captured, they had a very thin window in which to rescue her before the trail grew cold. Even if she’d been injured, hope wasn’t lost. They could use flight and speed to chase after the construct. Catch it before it returned to whatever hole it had crawled out of. “Guine. If you don’t tell me what it said and did, I will feed your harp to you piece by piece, string by string.What happened?”
Guine began to weep. “It killed her. Right in front of me. She’s dead.”
Kreya heard a roaring in her ears. She kept her voice very, very even. “Dead?”
Across the room, by the waterfall that still burbled as if nothing ever happened in this room except mindless frivolity, Stran stopped moving. Kreya saw him out of the corner of her eye, but she kept her focus on Guine. “And then?”
“It took her body out the window.” He pointed.
She was moving before Guine finished speaking, running toward the window. Stran met her there. Climbing onto the windowsill, Kreya commanded, “Keep me from falling.” She felt her back twinge, and she winced, but she didn’t stop. Stran wrapped his arms around her legs, and she leaned forward.
Gouged into the stone were claw marks. After that, the trail vanished over the side of the fifth tier. Of course. Eklor would have imbued his creation with a stability bone. She signaled for Stran to pull her back in.
“Anything?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Gone.”
Inwardly she swore as colorfully as Zera—at the construct, at Eklor, and at herself. She hadn’t fortified the palace against attack. She hadn’t predicted any kind of retaliation, when retaliation was Eklor’s trademark move.
She’d been so certain. So arrogant...All of this is my fault.
She’d poked the hornet’s nest, and it had stung them where they were most vulnerable.
Kneeling, she picked up the remains of one of her own constructs. She recognized it, even though the metal gears were warped—it was the scout she’d sent into the valley, the squirrel-like one that had been so eager to search more.
Had it returned with news? Had Eklor’s atrocity followed it here?
My fault,she thought again.
“We know who did this,” Stran said. “We go to guild headquarters. Force our way to Eklor, if we need to. If the masters side with him, then they’re complicit in this, and we force them to face their guilt.”
“No!” Guine jumped to his feet. Both of them spun to glare at him. He gulped. “It talked. I didn’t know such atrocitiescouldtalk, but it did. It said if you withdraw the false accusations, then Master Eklor will bring her back to life. If you go on fighting, you could lose her forever.”
Sagging against a pillar, Stran seemed to deflate.
Kreya understood.
Revenge was one thing. She remembered how it felt when she charged into the tower on the plains long ago, intent on tearing apart Eklor, wanting to make him feel the kind of pain she’d felt when Jentt died. But this...
Amurra, whether dead or alive, was a hostage. Entirely different situation.
Crossing to the fountain, cradling the crushed scout in her arms, Kreya let the burble of the water drown out all else: Stran’s sobs, the servants’ moaning and crying, Marso’s comforting them, the boy Yarri’s worried chatter, Guine’s continuing to explain he’d done all he could...
She cleared a space in her mind to think.
I failed my team. I have to fix this. I owe it to Amurra. To Stran. To all of them.
