The Rebels of Gold (Loom Saga #3)(12)
Fae might own the Dono, but Coletta owned Fae. Everything was moving according to plan on Nova. Now, before she’d give in to the demands of her quietly grumbling stomach, she would check in with her odd little Fenthri to see how things were progressing down on Loom.
Arianna
When dusk settled upon the world, Arianna was nothing more than a white smudge against a gray sky.
She peered down at Holx through her modified goggles from the rooftop of one of the airship yards. She’d been scouting since the afternoon, observing people’s comings and goings, studying the flow of machine and man alike.
The home of the Ravens’ Guild was unnaturally quiet. Or perhaps the quiet was too natural. Arianna heard howling winds and cawing birds, benign sounds at odds with the screeching trikes and revving engines Holx was famous for.
The one guild the Dragons supposedly hadn’t touched had, nevertheless, ground to a slow crawl in the wake of the fall of their world. It was unnervingly somber, a quiet testament to the devastation the Dragon King had reaped from his sky city.
Malice sparked within her and was promptly quieted by the thought of Yveun. Looking down on her, his claws on her flesh . . .
Arianna rubbed her neck, urging tension and the memory away.
She had a job to do, and there wasn’t nearly enough time to properly prepare for it. All she had was some basic information from Louie—oddly specific in some areas, completely blank in others—and whatever she could observe before nightfall.
It wasn’t nearly enough time to break into the guild’s hall.
As the sun fell behind the clouds that perpetually blanketed Loom’s sky, Arianna rose. She held out her hand. Magic pulled against her palm, drawing out a line from her winch box like a serpent from its den. The cord was cast in gold and tempered to her magic alone, the closest thing to a loyal friend she had at the moment. It was time to shake off the dust that had settled on her shoulders in Nova.
Arianna looped the cord around a heavy pipe that ran around the rooftop, clipping the line to itself. She walked to the edge of the building and put everything else behind her. Up here, she didn’t need to be Arianna the Master Rivet. She could cast aside the loose ties to Nova as Ari Xin’Anh Bek. She would ignore that her shroud of anonymity as the inventor of the Philosopher’s Box, the Perfect Chimera, had been lifted. She certainly wouldn’t spare a thought for Arianna, the rebel who had twice failed to slay the Dragon King.
She was merely the White Wraith—nothing more, nothing less. She was a vessel for her benefactors. All the rest, she would leave on the rooftop.
With a wide step and a whir of gears, Arianna tipped herself over the edge.
Golden cabling spun from the spools attached to her belt by the winch box. She ticked off seconds in her mind, calculating how much line she’d used based on the speed of her free fall and the distance covered. She’d know when to stop and swing onto a ledge, to magically unclip her line and cast it toward the next building, swinging from ledge to ledge until she reached her target.
Holx was a city of layers, each stacked on the next to create a labyrinth of tracks and walkways. She followed one track now; it had virtually no lights along its sides and would be almost impossible for Fenthri eyes to pick out in the growing dark. But with her Dragon eyes and refined goggles, she had little issue.
“Follow the red-lined trike path to the guild,” Louie had instructed. It was one of his more oddly specific notes, and was followed immediately by one of his decidedly less specific: “Once you get to the end, you’ll figure out a way in.”
Thanks, Louie, Arianna thought grimly as she reached the end of the red-lined path. Arianna waited for headlights and the roar of engines to vanish before easing herself down from the mostly abandoned upper paths she’d been traversing. But where there should have been an egress awaiting her, she found instead the fresh cement of a portal recently sealed.
She looked back up. There hadn’t been another ledge on her descent, no other obvious doorway. “Up” wasn’t an option, and before her was blocked, which only left . . . down.
The depths of Holx held a darkness that even her goggles and eyes couldn’t penetrate. She presumed she was somewhere close to the ground, or already below it. She might even be closer to the land known as the Raven’s Folly—the Underground—than she was the airship. She dared progress no farther without some kind of light; begrudgingly, she drew the duller of her two daggers.
She pushed her magic into the hilt and up through the blade—just enough to heat the metal to a faint, reddish glow. She’d fix the dulled point later. For now, the ambient light of semi-molten gold was enough to reflect off her surroundings and give her a rusty picture of where she was.
To her right was another track that dead-ended in a walled-up portion of the guild. Below and to her left was a perpendicular road that intersected with a narrow bridge. Arianna squinted. She moved her blade left and right, watching the shadows dance away in opposite directions.
One shadow didn’t budge.
Letting loose more slack in her line, Arianna’s winch box clicked her further down the narrow gap between guild and street, leaving no doubt she had crossed the threshold into the Underground. Just above the narrow bridge, she cycled her legs in a running motion along the wall—back and forth, building speed.
One hand on the dagger, the other on her winch box, she prepared for her one chance to successfully make this jump. There wasn’t even a ripple of apprehension across her nerves. At the apex of her parabola, she pulled the linchpin on her cable.