Death Sworn(79)

Icy, but shallow; it only came halfway up her forearms. She knelt in it, gasping, then got to her feet. Another freezing splash hit her side as Sorin landed beside her.

His magelight illuminated an underground lake so still that it was almost invisible. She could see the white rock formations beneath the water as if there was no water covering them at all. Around the banks were more structures, like tiny castles and fortresses, formed of sparkling fernlike rocks. Tendrils of stone as thin as flower stems were scattered over the ground, also in that unearthly white. Ileni drew in her breath. She felt like an intruder, heavy and awkward in a place where no human beings were ever intended to go.

“Sorin. Maybe we should—”

“Hsst!” he whispered sharply, and she clamped her mouth shut just as a new light flared ahead of them. It illuminated a chasm several feet from the edge of the lake, and beyond it a flat white rockface lined with deep cracks and framed by a vast archway of pearly stone.

Karyn stood beneath the archway, waiting for them.





Chapter 18

The sorceress stood with her legs braced apart, her face remote and calm. Her green tunic and black leggings were now dirt stained and torn, but somehow she looked almost majestic. The magelight floated several feet above her head, below a white ceiling pitted with holes and sparkling with tiny liquid droplets.

Sorin surged out of the water onto the white rock shore, moving with such grace that Ileni didn’t even hear a splash. Karyn raised one hand, and a line of thick white stalactites snapped away from the ceiling and fell directly in front of him in a series of echoing crashes. Sorin stopped short, and Ileni scrambled out of the lake to stand next to him. Water squelched in her shoes.

“Well,” Karyn said pleasantly. “Here we all are.”

Ileni shut her eyes briefly, trying to sense Karyn’s power. But the sorceress felt completely mundane, not a spark of magic in her.

Something was wrong.

Sorin stepped around the fallen rock in front of him, and Ileni followed, as if getting one step closer might make a difference. It didn’t. The chasm between them and Karyn was wide and deep, a wedge of blackness among all the ethereal white, and she still couldn’t sense any magic.

“We’re here to talk,” Sorin said.

“So am I.” Karyn smiled. “But not to you.”

She swiveled to face Ileni. Ileni’s stomach tightened, and she lifted her chin.

“Confused about me, aren’t you?” Karyn dipped her hand under her tunic. “Allow me to enlighten you.”

Sorin hissed and crouched on the balls of his feet. Ileni reached for the knife under her tunic. But all Karyn did was hold up a perfectly round stone, so small it fit neatly into the palm of her hand.

The breath went out of Ileni’s body in a whoosh. The stone was beautiful—glassy and clear, with dozens of shimmering colors swirling beneath its surface—and it lit up all her senses with the feel of magic, of power. Of everything she had lost.

“What is that?” Sorin demanded.

“I don’t know,” Ileni whispered, and didn’t care what he thought of her ignorance. She couldn’t take her eyes off the rock. The power within it, too vast to be crammed into something so small, called to her with hypnotic urgency.

Karyn held the rock out, as if to give her a closer look. “We call them lodestones. They store magical energy.”

Black magic! Ileni tried to look away, and managed it just long enough to see the eagerness in Sorin’s eyes, the predator’s focus as he slid one foot forward.

Karyn saw it, too, and laughed. “It can only be used by someone with no power of his own. So don’t bother.”

Ileni’s heart pounded so hard it hurt, and her breath caught every time she drew it in. All that power, trapped and waiting . . . she could imagine drawing that strength into herself. Being full of magic again, able to do anything.

It wouldn’t last forever. She would use it up, and it would be gone, and then she would go through that loss all over again. She didn’t care. She had never wanted anything so badly in her life.

Karyn lifted her eyebrows. “More interested in talking to me now?”

Ileni’s mouth was too dry for speech.

“I think we’ll be taking that,” Sorin said, and pulled two knives from beneath his tunic.

The knives flashed in whirling silver streaks over the chasm. Magic flashed from Karyn, blindingly powerful, and the knives flew back, straight at Sorin.