Liv’s mind flickered through options the instant the monster began its dive. She was the one lowering the platform, because she was the one who held the most mana; Keri’s most important job was keeping his orb of light from sputtering out so that they could all see to fight. That left Arjun and Rose to take the lead in defending their group, but she wasn’t confident that would be enough.

Arjun was first – while Keri and Rose both set to receive the monster’s charge with their weapons, he conjured a mana shield in the path of the descending threat. A pane of shining blue light, striated with gold, snapped into existence so close to the winged creature that there was no time for it to veer aside.

With a single slash of its mana-sheathed talons, the descending Antrian – Liv needed to have some name or category for it, if only to help her process her own thoughts – shattered the mana shield, leaving only tattered wisps of dispersing mana behind.

Liv raised her wand and pressed the second button. Five shards of adamant ice, needle thin and designed to pierce armor as easily as flesh, formed above her and then launched directly at the creature’s head. She had time to see its own mana shield flare into existence, just as she’d expected, catching the first three shards of her attack and breaking them. The fourth shattered the mana shield, and the fifth broke against the ice and steel of the monster’s skull, leaving only the smallest dent behind.

Rose rolled to the side and slashed the Antrian with her rapier as it hit their platform, scratching a line of sparks along the steel armor of one arm. Keri, in the meantime, merely braced his spear against his foot and guided the blade of his spear directly into its armored chest.

The monster screeched in pain when, incredibly, Keri’s spear punched directly through its steel plating. By that point, there was no way for it to stop itself even if it had wanted to, and the mana disc Liv had been using to lower them all shattered into a dozen pieces under the force of the Antrian’s impact.

Liv reached out with her Authority and took hold of the wisps of remnant mana left behind by Arjun’s broken shield, and even the traces left by her enemy’s own enchantments, using them to supplement the four chutes of ice she silently created, one to catch her and each of her friends as they fell or leapt out of the way.

Shaped by her intent, the chutes curved down and out, freezing onto the stone walls of the shaft. Liv caught Arjun and Keri – who’d lost his spear in the impact – and managed to slide them down onto a balcony perhaps three stories up from the bottom of the shaft, on the opposite side of their attacker. She merged the chutes with which she caught herself and Rose into one tight spiral, dumping them down at dizzying speed onto the floor at the bottom of their descent.

Both women came tumbling out, end over end, across barren beds of cold soil, divided by stone paths. Liv slammed into a bench, while Rose’s skidding roll was arrested when she fell into the basin of something that might once have been a fountain. It was difficult to tell, because the only light came from the blue flames of the Antrian’s mechanical wings, now that the two women had been separated from Keri’s spell.

The monster’s attempt at landing was spoiled by the pain of Keri’s spear, still lodged in its chest, and the desperate thrashing of the creature as it struggled to get the offending object out. A small part of Liv was surprised to find that such an abomination could feel pain at all.

Somehow, Rose had managed to keep a hold of her sword, and still had it in hand when she scrambled to her feet. She brushed one gauntlet against the steel tassets of her armor, and Liv could picture the grin on her face. “Dirt. Must’ve been a garden.”

“If you can hold it in place,” Liv proposed, “I’ll take it apart.”

The Antrian finally stopped thrashing long enough to wrap one set of claws around the haft of Keri’s spear, yank it out, and throw it aside. The weapon clattered across the stones away into the darkness, lost from sight.

“Redim,” the creature of steel, ice, and blue flame roared, whirling about to face the two women again. Its claws cracked the stone beneath its immense weight as it crouched, like a tomcat ready to pounce. Liv was pretty certain that it had just called them rodents in Vædic.

Rosamund, in the meanwhile, had fired off one of her favorite incantations. The frozen earth beneath them roiled, falling away from the monster and dropping it into a great, yawning pit. When the Antrian stretched its wings in a flare of blue fire, Rose piled earth atop it, seeking to bury the entire thing alive. Or what passed for alive, in this case – Liv was fairly certain this must be the kind of Antrian construct that had a brain encased somewhere under all that metal and ice.

Of course, she didn’t expect being buried to hold the thing back for long. It was clearly powerful, both well armored and layered with so many enchantments it might as well have been a mage itself – if only an apprentice. After all, it had shown not even the slightest awareness of the scraps of ambient mana Liv had been sweeping up during their brief fight, and she hadn’t felt anything even resembling Authority from it yet.

Somewhere high above, beyond the vaulted ceiling of dense ice at the top of the shaft, was the open sky. Liv considered and then discarded the idea of reaching up to the clouds and pulling down lightning. She was confident that she could break even adamant ice with enough of a storm, but it would both waste time, and open the entire shaft to the snow and wind of the frozen northern plains.

She also put aside the idea of using Dā, though the prospect of rusting away those steel armor plates was tempting. In this case, Liv was still the victim of her incomplete knowledge of Vædic vocabulary. If she’d had a word for armor, or even steel, she might have tried it – though if this monster really had been waiting in the tomb for over twelve hundred years, she doubted that another few centuries of rapid aging would accomplish its end. Not unless she could strike at that preserved brain itself.

Liv had already seen how ineffective Rose’s sword was, so instead she fell back on a spell she’d used to great effect in Lendh ka Dakruim – albeit in a slightly more advanced form. “Celent Aiveh Dvo Ghesiam,” she muttered, focusing her mana out through her wand.

Two massive hands of ice solidified out of the ambient moisture in the air, each as large as a horse. In a flare of blue fire and a spray of dirt, the Antrian shot up out of Rose’s pit, only to be caught by one arm and one leg. For a single instant, its burning blue eyes met Liv’s, and she imagined she recognized fear in its gaze.

Liv sheathed her wand, raised both hands to grip only air, and then mimed the motion of pulling them in opposite directions. The ice cracked, steel shrieked, and the Antrian roared in pain as Liv ripped off both limbs, throwing them to either side where they tore up soil and stone alike in the ancient garden.

“Blood and shadows,” Rose cursed from Liv’s side.

The Antrian writhed in pain, scrambling back away from Liv in full retreat now, shoving at the benches and pathways to push its sinuous body back. The wing-mechanisms flared with blue fire, but Liv simply moved her conjured hands of ice around behind the monster, grasped both upper wing-frames, and ripped them off as easily as a cruel child might torment a moth.

A torrent of Vædic erupted from the crippled war-machine’s inhuman throat, and though Liv couldn’t catch every word, she grasped the general meaning.

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“What’s it saying?” Rosamund asked, her blade still raised in a guard position at Liv’s side.

“I’m pretty certain it's begging for mercy,” she said. “Do you speak Vakansa?” Liv asked it, without a great degree of hope. Out of all the modern languages, the tongue of the Eld was the closest to old Vædic – Sidonie might even have argued that it was more properly understood as a dialect.

“The tongue of the Eld, yes,” the monster half-roared, half-whimpered. “You are one of them, yes? Not the first to come here.” Some of the words weren’t quite right, and the accent was atrocious - but then, things would have changed a good deal since the war.

“Can you see if you could find Keri’s spear?” Liv asked Rose, before she responded.

“Be careful of this thing,” the dark-haired girl cautioned. “Until it's dead, it's dangerous.”

Liv nodded. “I won’t let down my guard. But I want to see what I can learn from it.”

Rose lowered her sword and headed off into the shadows cast by the banked fires on the Antrian’s four remaining wing structures. Liv was pretty certain she was moving in the general direction of where the spear had been lost, so she trusted Rose to take care of it and switched back to addressing the thing that had assaulted them.

“You were created by Antris?” she asked in Vakansa.

“Antris, Celris, and Iravata,” the war machine confirmed. Liv nodded: that made sense. In addition to metal framework and armor, it seemed to integrate the kind of almost living, moving ice she used when she created soldiers to fight for her. And then there was the serpentine shape of the body, which was indeed similar to the wyrms she’d fought at Valegard - even if those hadn’t had arms or legs.

“And you’ve been guarding this place since the war?” Liv asked.

“Since the slaves cast down their masters, yes,” the monster grumbled. It was surprising how clear a tone of resentment could be in a mechanical voice, and that only served to convince Liv further that this thing had once been a person.

“About forty years ago, a party of Eld came here,” Liv said. “They were looking for a crown, resting on a skull. One of them would have been a woman who fought using five swords. Did you see them?”

“Ripped the leg from the Eld-man,” the Antrian answered. “And left him to bleed his last. His mate tried to bind his wounds and carry him with her.”

“His mate was the woman with five swords?” Liv pressed.

The monster nodded its immense, armored head. The eyes that burned blue within its artificial skull seemed to taunt her cruelly. “Yes. There were only two, by the time they came to me. Could have been more, when they entered.”

Liv’s father had never said anything about his sister having a husband - a daiverim. She’d rejected Airis ka Reimis, Liv knew, but that didn’t mean that her aunt Livara hadn’t found love with someone else. She wondered whether they’d intended to wed after they returned from the rift; whether the relationship had been a secret, or merely something new.

For a moment, Liv pictured Rose with one leg torn off her body, a gout of blood spurting from the wound. The dark-haired girl’s face growing pale, her eyes closing, as Liv desperately tried to stop the bleeding in the cold shadows of some ancient hallway.

“Show me,” Liv demanded. “Take us where they went.”

“And you will spare me?” the Antrian asked.

“If you don’t, I’ll rip the rest of your wings off right now,” Liv said. “You don’t need them to crawl.”

Rose emerged from the shadows, carrying Keri’s spear, and Liv found herself grateful the other woman couldn’t understand what she was saying. “It remembers my aunt and her party,” Liv explained. “It ripped the leg off the man with her. It’s going to show us where they went.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Rosamund asked. She sheathed her rapier, so that she could carry the spear more easily. “This thing’s still dangerous.”

Liv raised her arms, and her enormous hands of ice mirrored her motions, taking hold of the Antrian’s two middle wings. The creature lowered itself to the ground and cast its eyes down, practically grovelling before her. “It knows what I’ll do if it tries anything,” she said.

Rose reached over with her left hand, and placed it on Liv’s shoulder. Something of the effect was lost, between her gauntlet and Liv’s pauldron. There was only a sensation of weight, not the comfort of skin on skin. “You don’t seem alright, Liv,” she said.

“It said the man was my aunt’s mate,” Liv explained. “It ripped his leg off and watched as she carried him away and tried to save his life. It practically laughed about it, Rose.” It wasn’t until the metal armature of the Antrian’s wings creaked and groaned, and the monster hissed, that she even realized she’d begun pulling.

“Alright,” Rose said. “I understand. But you’ve only ever killed when you had to, Liv. Don’t do something that’s going to tear you up inside. Please?”

Liv relaxed her fingers, allowing the hands of ice to let go of the wing structures. The Antrian seemed to sag in relief.

“Keri and Arjun?” Rose asked.

“Somewhere a few floors up,” Liv said. “I trust them to find us. I’ll leave them signs.” Maybe she should have waited, or made an effort to find them, but now that she was here, now that she knew how close she was to where her aunt had died, she couldn’t stop. It was like a fire in her gut, like a chain hooked into her heart pulling her forward.

Rose nodded, and didn’t press the question.

“Show us the way,” Liv commanded in Vakansa, and the broken war machine crawled off to their left, moving awkwardly and slowly due to its missing limbs. With the toe of her boot, she traced an arrow of frost on the stone of the garden path, to indicate which way they had gone.

“Did you find out its name? Something to call it?” Rose asked, as they fell into step together behind the monster.

“I don’t want to know its name,” Liv said. She allowed her immense hands of ice to crumble to the ground, leaving them as heaps of frozen dust.

The crippled Antrian dragged itself to a corridor that was large enough to be a city street. Doors and side passages, capped by decorative arches, opened to either side, but it neither turned, nor slowed. It let the torches that extended from its wing mechanisms die, so Liv concentrated more mana into the mana-stone in the pommel of her wand until it shone with a soft glow, like the lights the Vaedim so often set into their ceilings. Besides that, the only things that broke the darkness were the sigils set into the walls and into the war-machine’s armor, pulsing bright blue, then dimming again, like the rising and falling of a sleeping man’s chest.

Liv found herself searching the stone floor beneath their feet, looking for dark stains the color of rust. There was no dust anywhere, and that made her wonder whether some other Antrian machine cleaned the place. Would it have scrubbed away the blood that marked her aunt’s passage? The blood of her dying lover?

She felt it before she saw it – the same combination of magic from the great hall, far above them. Liv picked up her pace and hurried past the crippled Antrian until she found the frozen bier of ice, set up against the wall just inside one of the corridors that branched off from this route.

Liv could tell that her aunt had rushed this casting, because most of the ice was nearly an opaque white, with only a single frozen surface made with sufficient care to be transparent. She held her wand in a reverse grip, with the glowing pommel over the head of the cold casket, so that she could see the face of the man inside.

He was Elden, of course, with the delicate, pointed ears of her people. Like the woman entombed in the great hall, his hair was a shade of lavender so light that it was almost white, and his skin flushed more purple than pink. His eyes were caught in the moment of closing, as if he’d been falling asleep when the spell took hold. Toward the middle of the ice, there Liv could see a red stain, and knew that his wound had still been bleeding when he was encased.

“He almost looks alive,” Rose said. She’d come up on Liv’s side quietly, and now leaned down to look at the face.

“I think that he actually might be,” Liv said. “Look. He was still bleeding when she cast the spell, and his eyes were just closing. I think she used Cel and Dā to preserve him, so that she could bring a healer back later.”

“He’s just been waiting for her, dreaming she’s going to come back,” Rose murmured. “That’s horrible. She’s been dead all this time, but he doesn’t know.”

Liv rested her left hand on the ice, just over the man’s heart. “I’ll come back for you,” she promised in Vakansa, then switched back to Lucanian. “When we’re finished here, I’ll melt the ice and Arjun can heal him. We can bring at least one person back to their family.”

She turned back to the broken Antrian, which had been waiting for them this entire time.

“Now,” Liv commanded. “Take me to Celris. Take me to the crown.”