It was Sidonie who answered. Liv’s friend stood up straight, the wind whipping her scarf. “That happened at Duskvale all the time,” she complained. “You essentially needed to take anything you saw by surprise, and finish them in a single, overwhelming assault before they could get away.”

  “If they have the instinct to flee, that isn’t the worst thing in the world for us,” Keri pointed out, as the two Iravatan Eld walked back over to rejoin the group. “We’re not here to cull the rift, even if that’s what most of us are used to. We’re here to pull out anyone we can find. It doesn’t matter how many wyrms or insects we kill: it matters that they don’t stop us from moving in and out of the rift.”

  “That’s not a bad way of thinking about it,” Liv admitted, in spite of her instinctive desire to defeat the threats in front of her outright. “But we do need to make certain that we can handle a mana beast that decides to stick around. A wyrm that could hop into shadows like that could harry our people all the way back out of the crater, and if this group can’t handle it, I don’t trust our soldiers to be able to fight one any better.” She glanced over to Sakari. “What happened?”

  “It was very strange,” the former ambassador admitted, raising his voice to be heard over a sudden burst of steam. “The spell functioned, but it was like pushing against someone’s Authority.”

  “Was it intelligent?” Arjun asked. “Like Silica?”

  But Sakari and Karina were already shaking their heads.

  “Wyrms aren’t any smarter than a horse or a dog,” the apprentice explained. “Whatever Iravata and Ractia did to the first clutch, none of their descendants have ever been able to speak or use magic. Some of our elders think it had to do with tying each one of them to a word of power, but no one’s really certain.”

  “Alright.” Liv took a moment to reassess, and to call her blade of ice back to hang over her left shoulder, like a hornet ready to sting at the slightest provocation. The sword was sweating drops of water from the heat of the steam vents. “Let’s move out and link back up with Ghveris,” she decided. “We’ve already got enough information about the mana beasts here to head back and make a few plans, but I’d like to see if we can locate some of the ruins Jurian mentioned, on the way out. That would give us a place to begin.”

  It was lucky that they had Soaring Eagle to follow out of the steam, or Liv was certain they would have gotten turned around and lost twice over. He would beat his wings to climb up and into open sky for a moment, to get his bearings, and then swoop back down, circle to get their attention, and lead them in a direction that, from their position, might as well have been chosen at random.

  “I would have thought he didn’t need to see at all,” Sidonie mentioned at one point, coming up beside Wren.

  The huntress shook her head. “This isn’t anything like the jungle or the mountains,” she admitted. “I don’t blame him for being cautious. He probably could get us out by sound alone, but with the hissing of the vents, and the fact the steam is hot enough to really hurt someone - I wouldn’t want to trust my ears alone, either.”

  The moment a gust of wind cleared the steam long enough for them to catch sight of Ghveris’s immense form, Wren dashed forward to join him. Liv had the impression, for just a moment, that her friend was about to throw her arms around the Antrian juggernaut and embrace him, but instead, Wren pulled up short just in front of Ghveris, and the two exchanged words quietly.

  Liv hung back, Keri waiting at her side, to make certain that everyone had made it out of the steam vents before joining them all. She even took a silent count, to make certain she hadn’t lost anyone.

  “-not going to work,” Sakari was explaining to Ghveris, as Liv and Keri joined them. “We’re going to have to fight off any wyrms that come, if they’re all like this.”

  “What about wards?” Sidonie asked. “Could your word of power be used to make a barrier that wyrms can’t cross? It could help to defend the encampment, make a sort of safe zone that -”

  “That’s something to think about,” Liv said, quickly. She knew that if she let her former roommate get going, they’d be discussing magical theory and V?dic grammar until dark. “We can try drawing something up once we’re back in camp, Sidonie. Any problems while we were in the vents?” she asked, turning to Ghveris.

  “Not problems,” the immense warrior said, his voice echoing off the bare stone of the crater slope. “But I found something you should see.”

  “Show us.” Liv waited for the Antrian to move out, and then fell in behind him, carefully picking her steps as they made their way across the scree. Keri’s orbs of light rotated over their heads, illuminating every detail of texture in the boulders and cracked stone around them, banishing all shadows.

  “How far did you go?” Wren gently chided Ghveris, from where she had attached herself to his side.

  “I circled the vents,” Ghveris explained. “I did not think it wise to remain in a single place. To be motionless on a battlefield is often to die.”

  Arjun suddenly paused, nearly tripping over a jagged piece of rock the size of a man’s fist, and Keri grabbed onto his sleeve.

  “Are you alright?” Keri asked.

  “I can - I can feel something,” Keri admitted, and turned to catch Liv’s eye. “Like how you can use Aluth to sense magic.”

  “Which word is it, then?” Miina asked.

  “Blood.”

  “Yes. Just a little further,” Ghveris called back. Liv waited until she had caught Keri’s eye, and he gave her a nod. Once she could trust that someone would make certain Arjun kept up, she hurried to catch up to the war-machine at the front of their group.

  They stopped, finally, at a sort of crater-within-the-crater: a pool, crusted at the edges with dried, rust-brown muck, like a particularly strange sort of seaweed. But instead of water, what steamed and bubbled before them was an expanse of blood, perhaps twenty feet across. While everyone else hesitated to approach, Arjun walked right up to the edge and knelt there, leaning over to look into the viscous depths. He even extended a hand, before everyone shouted at him in a sort of chorus.

  “I don’t think it would do anything to me to touch it,” Arjun grumbled, but he dropped his arm just the same. “It’s definitely saturated with mana. Not a spell, precisely, but - something.”

  “What does it do?” Kaija asked. She’d planted herself with her back to the pool, keeping a lookout for anything that might approach behind the party.

  “I saw birds descend,” Ghveris explained. “Thought they might have found a carcass, but they did not look like vultures - black birds with crests, and bright orange beaks. So I approached. They flew away when I came too close, but they seemed to be drinking the blood.”

  Miina shivered. “That sounds horrifying.”

  “We should take some and study it,” Sidonie declared. “Wren, can I have one of your vials?”

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The huntress sighed, slipped a vial from the loop at her belt, and then awkwardly worked to get it under her scarf. They all watched as Wren tossed her head back, and then maneuvered the empty vial back out again, and offered it to Sidonie.

  “Make certain you don’t touch it either,” Liv warned her friend.

  “I won’t.” Liv could picture the other woman’s grin, even if she couldn’t see it. Sidonie muttered an incantation, and conjured a hand of shining blue mana, striated with veins of gold. She then passed the vial from her flesh and blood hand to the magic one, and used her spell to dip the vial into the blood. Once she had it corked, she passed it back to Wren to put in her belt. “See?” Sidonie said. “I stole a trick from you, Liv.”

  “A bit more delicate than what I usually use those words for,” Liv admitted. “But I can see the utility of it. Alright, let’s see if Soaring Eagle can find us-”

  She paused, looking over the landscape. Ghveris had brought them around to a side of the steam vents that they hadn’t examined yet, with a new view of the crater descent which had previously been blocked by a few boulders the size of a farmhouse. Would that be the north rim? Liv was fairly certain that Jurian and his friends would have come south, if she understood the relative positions of Calder’s Landing and Godsgrave...

  There, upslope perhaps two hundred yards, was an expanse of cracked black stone that looked like someone had frozen a flowing river of rock into place. Gouts of steam erupted, periodically, though not to the extent of the field they’d just left. The rock formations which rose up looked particularly odd: they were angular and straight, tickling at a memory.

  Liv thought back to an afternoon of tea and sea-charts, and Coram Athearn’s words as his finger traced the lines of coral.

  “There,” she said, pointing. “That looks a lot like what Jurian showed me in the dream. I think those might be foundations, or what’s left of walls. I want to check that out, and then we’ll head back.”

  They made their way back upslope, at an angle across the crater, at first with a burst of energy which came, Liv was certain, from having a goal in mind. But climbing up was even harder on their knees and ankles than going down had been, and it wasn’t long before she could hear her friends panting around her. The least fit of them - Sakari and Sidonie, it turned out, and Liv resolved to have words with her friend about neglecting her exercise since leaving Coral Bay - began to fall behind.

  “I had a thought,” Miina huffed, scrambling up beside Liv. No one else seemed inclined to talk at the moment, but apparently even being exhausted wasn’t enough to stop Liv’s cousin. “About the blood - or really, about the whole wyrms hopping into shadows bit. We all know how you can sort of feel things with your word, right?”

  Liv nodded, and when her boot slipped, she wasn’t too proud to be grateful for Keri’s hand, reaching out to take her by the arm and steady her. “We do. A bit different for every word of power, but yes.”

  “Why don’t we round up a few soldiers from House Asuris?” Miina asked. “I bet they could feel it when something’s about to leap out at us. Maybe with the right spell they could even close the shadows off, or something.”

  “That’s - actually a really good idea,” Liv admitted, mentally altering her list of just what roles needed to be covered in any group she sent down into the crater. “I wonder if we could get one of the elders down here to do some spellwork. I can write a letter to -”

  At the head of the party, a great crack split the air, and a rumbling, mechanical shout. Ghveris dropped so suddenly that Liv could quite process what she was seeing, at first. Had something attacked him? Hit him from above? She dashed forward, pushing aside the fatigue in her legs, into a great cloud of dust, and then skidded to a halt, throwing herself down onto the ground rather than go tumbling over the edge of a dark, yawning pit.

  “Be careful!” she shouted back, and then carefully crawled up to the very edge of where the stone had crumbled away.

  “Wren!” Ghveris shouted, from somewhere down below, loud enough to be heard even over the skittering of pebbles, which fell over the edge of the hole like rain.

  Keri and the others were there beside Liv, suddenly, and one of his orbs dove down into where the ground had collapsed.

  It must have been the Antrian’s great weight that had done it, Liv realized, once she could see. The black rock they’d been walking on didn’t seem to be more than a foot or two thick, like a crust of ice over the Aspen River in winter, and like ice, it had given way, dropping Wren and Ghveris forty feet straight down into a sort of cavern.

  “I’m right here, big guy,” Wren murmured, reforming from blood into her human shape. The light from Keri’s orbs revealed her stretched out across Ghveris’s armored chest, where he lay on his back across a jumble of rock.

  A great sigh came from the war-machine, and he lifted his arm, resting the palm of his gauntlet on Wren’s back. “I thought - I thought you’d been crushed,” Ghveris admitted.

  “I’m right here,” Wren assured him, placing her own hand on his helmet. “I’m probably in better shape than you are - I just turned to blood and let myself splash.”

  Suddenly, Liv felt as if she was intruding. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have expected Wren to pull Ghveris’s helm off, and then kiss the man beneath. But she did know - that there was nothing there. Nothing but whatever mechanisms and enchantments Antris had crafted to replace a human face.

  “Are either of you hurt?” Arjun called down.

  “Like I said, I’m fine,” Wren called up, her voice echoing through the cavern. “And I can fly up whenever I want to. I’m more worried about Ghveris.”

  “A few dents,” Ghveris said, a moment later. “Nothing that cannot be hammered out by any good smith. But I doubt I can climb up on my own.” He sat up, easily catching Wren in the crook of one arm, and cradling her against his chest. Even with how close Liv knew the two of them had gotten, she was half-surprised the huntress allowed it.

  “Let me get a bit more light down there,” Keri shouted back, and sent his other two orbs of sunlight down, once again forming a rotating triangle that cast light to every corner of the cavern.

  Except, now that Liv had a better view of the place, it was immediately obvious to her that this was no mere cave, nothing at all like the cenotes which were scattered throughout the jungles wherever tumbling boulders had pierced the ground. Ghveris and Wren lay atop a rough pyramid of broken stone, yes, but that was only the detritus which had accompanied their tumble down through the crust of black rock above. Once you looked past that pile of debris, the floor was perfectly flat and smooth, and made of metal.

  Liv suspected that if she could get down there, and close enough to have a good look, she’d find those little ‘v’s worked into the floor, the ones the V?dim seemed to use so often to provide a grip for boots. She could only see two of the walls - in fact, now that she had a bit of light, this looked more like a corridor than a room - but they were just as straight and flat as anything else the old gods built.

  “I think we found your ruins, Liv,” Miina observed.

  She was on her hands and knees, leaning forward so far over the edge that Liv couldn’t resist the urge to reach out and grab her cousin by the belt, to make certain that she didn’t go over. It was almost like having Rei around.

  There was a scuffling on stone, and Liv glanced over to see that Soaring Eagle had landed, and taken his human form. “So there is something left,” the Red Shield chief said. “I wanted to believe you, but actually seeing it -” He took a deep breath, clearly calming himself. “Do we go down now, or get them out and return with more people?”

  Liv tapped two fingers against Miina’s belt while she thought. “Ring counts,” she called, finally.

  “Twelve,” Keri said, from right beside her.

  “Nine.” Liv knew Arjun well enough to know that he wanted to get Wren back to their encampment and what passed for a field hospital, where he could have a look at whether she’d broken any bones. Still, he answered her right away.

  Sakari and Karina answered, one after the other, eighteen and eight rings, respectively. Kaija and Lina hadn’t been casting, but Sidonie was down to the same amount as Karina, after conjuring her mana-hand earlier. What mattered was that no one had less than two spells left in them, and that decided Liv.

  “We descend and take a quick look,” she announced. “If there’s no dead ends, and no immediate danger, we come back up, mark the location, and then head back.” Liv let go of her cousin’s belt with one hand, flicked her wand with the other, and conjured a broad plane of coherent mana that would be more than large enough for everyone to pile onto comfortably. She set it a hand’s height above the black rock that surrounded them, then stepped on first, herself.

  Keri followed her on immediately, along with Kaija and Lina. The only one who hesitated was Sakari.

  “This can support all our weight at once?” the older Eld asked, just reaching out to touch the platform with the toe of his boot.

  “It’s fine,” Karina told him, before Liv could even speak up. “We use these at the college all the time.” She grabbed Sakari by his sleeve and pulled, and he relented, climbing up.

  “Find me a good place to set us down?” Liv asked Keri. She lifted them all up, sent the pane of mana skimming out to the center of where the rock had collapsed, and then began to lower them into the ruins below.

  volume nine is off and running!

  here. I am more available there than I am here.

  Dramatis Personae

  Livara T?r Valtteri Kaen Syv? - Archmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Mountain Queen, and Lady of Winter. Of course she's going to keep going! [36+ Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]

  Arjun Iyuz - Journeyman Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim; his jati specializes in healing magic. Was totally about to touch the butt. [18 Rings of Mana]

  Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath - Formerly a Great Bat in service to Ractia, now the remains of his body form the heart of an Antrian juggernaut. Found it! [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]

  Kaija - Former Armorer at Kelthelis, captain of Liv's personal guard. Would vote to stop here and come back with another 50 soldiers. [21 Rings of Mana]

  Karina of House Iravata - First year student at Bald Peak. Can still throw poison, at least. [16 Rings of Mana]

  Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. "Everything about this place is disgusting." [21 Rings of Mana]

  Sakari, Elder of House Iravata — Fail :( [21 Rings of Mana]

  Sidonie Corbett - Guildmage. Would literally get distracted by magical theory while someone was trying to kill her. [19 Rings of Mana]

  Soaring Eagle - Husband of Calm Waters, father of Blossom. Red Shield Tribe. Would vote to press on.

  Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Has to carry the mystery blood.