Keri tumbled off the end of the frozen chute, rolled across a stone balcony and then beneath an archway, and fetched up against an ancient wall with an impact hard enough to take the breath from his lungs. The orb of sunlight he’d been maintaining for nearly the entire time he and his companions had been exploring the Tomb of Celris bobbed along in his wake, casting shadows about the room.

For a moment, he couldn’t bring himself to move. Keri had heard the expression of weariness as ‘bone deep’ thrown about idly in the past, but he’d never truly understood it until now. The decision to accompany Valtteri ka Auris across the sea to Varuna had seemed, at the time he made it, what needed to be done – but months of travel had worn him down to almost nothing. The long sea voyage, the expedition through the jungle, all of that time away from his family – just when he’d thought it was finally over, the Garden of Thorns had erupted.

Somehow, he’d survived seven days fighting and they’d held the line, but he’d arrived back at Al’Fenthia so weak and wounded that if not for Liv and Arjun, he could well have died. There hadn’t really been time to recover, before they left for Mountain Home, but at least the prospect of seeing Rika and his son again had buoyed his spirits.

Keri, slumped against the wall, barked out a bitter laugh. No use thinking about how that had turned out. He’d spent so long fighting for his family that he’d lost them completely. If he didn’t get up – if he just laid down here and closed his eyes and waited for that six-winged Antrian monster to find him – he doubted anyone back home would actually miss him. They’d say the words over a pyre, of course, but then Rika would have her happy family, without the bothersome inconvenience of the actual father of her child.

He didn’t know how Liv did it. By all accounts, she’d been through as much as he had – if not more. Keri knew that she’d taken Elder Aira to stop the eruption of the Garden of Thorns, but before that she’d apparently made her way overland from Lucania through the mountains, fighting mana beasts and exploring rifts along the way. And before that, she’d been forced to flee the one place she should have been safe – Coral Bay – because of that power-mad fool Benedict’s machinations.

And yet, somehow, he’d never even seen her come close to giving up.

Instead, she pushed them on, with the same kind of dogged, stubborn momentum that had carried her father, and every warrior along with him, from the coast of Varuna to the waystone at the bridge. Neither one of them knew how to stop. Keri wondered if Liv’s aunt had been the same way, when she dragged her own friends down into this accursed place and to their deaths.

Keri was cold. He’d been cold since the moment they arrived at the rift, and nothing since had sufficed to warm him – not the furs they’d brought to sleep in, and certainly not the sputtering orb of sunlight he’d thrown nearly all his mana into maintaining. It would be easier to just give up.

The familiar, staccato barking of Antrian weapons echoed from somewhere off in the halls of this labyrinth. He recognized it instantly, from the fight to claim the waystone in Varuna. In the entire time they’d been in the Tomb, they hadn’t seen any war machines until that six-winged monstrosity flew up at them out of the darkness, but now it seemed they’d found more trouble than they were prepared to handle.

If the Antrians were using their weapons, that meant one of his companions was in danger. Rosamund and Arjun seemed like good people – they were dependable in battle, and the eastern boy had even given Keri a sympathetic ear the night that his family fell apart. But neither of them were really his friends.

Liv, though – Keri squeezed his eyes shut. He could still remember the moment he’d first seen her eyes in a vision, all those years ago. The way she’d marched across the beach and put a sword to the neck of that worthless human princess. And the spark of terror in his chest when she’d triggered the enchanted necklace he’d given her, raising a flare of light above the rooftops of Freeport as a cry for help. The panicked rush through the city streets to find her, hoping desperately they’d arrive in time.

Keri rolled onto his hands and knees, then lurched to his feet. He’d lost his Næv’bel; it was either still wedged into the armor of the machine that had attacked them, or – more likely – it had been thrown into the darkness of the shaft. There was no time to go looking for it now.

He ran forward, already exhausted but pushing himself on through sheer desperation. Once again, the fear of arriving too late drove him on, with reckless disregard for the cost to his own body.

Keri’s boots slipped on stone that might once have been carpeted, but now was bare. He careened off walls or arched doors, following the echoes of the fighting, until he finally scented smoke in the air. It was the same foul, rotten-egg odor that had hung like a haze over the battle at the bridge.

He took one last corner and found himself behind the line of three war machines. Two of the Antrians knelt, their mana shields linked together, while the third stood behind them. That peculiar weapon of linked, rotating metal tubes extended from a hatch that had opened at its shoulder. A fourth war-machine lay broken just to one side of the three that were still working together.

Across a long hall, set with alcoves on each side that all hosted stone pillars topped by sculptures of ice, Arjun Iyuz crouched behind a shield of raw mana, arms extended, wand in his hand. The blue light cast by the shield was the only illumination on that end of the hall, save for the cold sigils carved into the rock of the walls, pulsing in time with each other.

Keri could guess what had happened. Arjun had encountered the Antrian war-machines – likely trying to find his way down to the bottom of the shaft, or to link up with Keri – and managed to take one out using the blades of pure mana that all of those who’d studied in Coral Bay seemed to favor. Then, he’d been pinned down behind his own shields when the counterattack came, and found himself outnumbered three to one.

If he’d still had his weapon, Keri wouldn’t have hesitated to charge the enemy from behind and break their formation. The war-machines were tough, but they usually seemed to fight as if by rote, without really being able to adapt to the changing circumstances of a dynamic battlefield. Between he and Arjun, Keri was confident they would win, and then move on to link up with the rest of the party.

But he didn’t have his spear, and Keri knew that he wouldn’t be able to fuel more than a single spell. The only advantage he had was that he hadn’t been noticed yet.

Keri’s eyes flicked up to the orb hovering just behind him. No, not the only advantage. With nothing more than his intent, he sent the ball of sunlight bobbing ahead of him, into the hallway, just low enough not to touch the ceiling. As he’d hoped, the Antrians didn’t respond to it. So far as the machines were concerned, if something wasn’t either an immediate threat or a target, it didn’t matter.

In the meanwhile, Keri pressed himself against the stone wall, concealing most of his body around the corner while he leaned forward to watch the fighting. Arjun’s shield was beginning to crack, and Keri doubted it would last for much longer. He needed to move quickly, or the healer would be dead and his plan wouldn’t matter.

Keri frowned, assembling the incantation he needed in his mind. He wasn’t Liv – he couldn’t adapt spells on the fly, or assemble them whole-cloth for whatever desperate need he encountered. He had a few trusted tools that he’d drilled over and over, and he would have to make them work. As quietly as he could, Keri slipped the straps of his pack off his shoulders and lowered it to the ground, tucking it against the wall so that he could fight without its weight.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Savelet Fleia o’Orvis,” Keri muttered. Without his Næv’bel to focus his mana, he didn’t have enough power to split the spell into two beams of light, or to accelerate the casting – but he could alter the source of his attack. As his mana began to move, Keri dashed around the corner, closing with the rear Antrian as quickly as he could.

Just as he’d anticipated, the war-machine heard him coming. The sound of boots and sabatons pounding across stone wasn’t exactly subtle, and as the Antrian turned to confront him, Keri knew that he’d never have been able to clear the distance in time. A mana shield flared into existence, between Keri and the war-machine, and it extended a blade etched with glowing sigils from its left arm.

The orb of sunlight floating near the ceiling was now just above and behind the Antrian – and, more importantly, behind its mana shield. Keri’s spell completed, and a blinding bar of white light linked the hovering sphere with the elbow of the Antrian’s blade arm.

Keri turned, his boots sliding across bare stone for a terrifying moment before finding a grip, and rolled himself around the edge of the mana shield. There, lying on the ground, the severed mechanical arm of the Antrian smoked from one scorched end, where the metal glowed red-hot.

Praying to Bælris that the leather of his gauntlets would be enough to protect his hands, Keri scooped the severed arm up, aimed the mana-reinforced blade, and brought it down on the damaged war-machine. A normal blade probably wouldn’t have been enough to cut through the steel armor of the damaged Antrian, but the sigils which enchanted the blade were still glowing, and it sliced through Keri’s target as easily as a well-honed knife through meat.

By the time Keri had dropped the rear machine with four furious blows, the two which had been kneeling in the front rank had realized there was a threat at their backs. Since Arjun wasn’t attacking them at that precise moment, they spun about to deal with Keri.

A thin piece of leather was not, it turned out, enough to prevent Keri’s palms and the insides of his fingers from being burned, and he found himself screaming wordlessly from the pain as he swung the severed arm and the blade attached to the end of it at the Antrian on his right. Its mana shield was facing him, now, and while the enchanted blade put cracks in the shield, he wouldn’t be able to break it down quickly enough to drop one of the Antrians before they killed him.

That didn’t matter, because now that he had their full attention, their undefended backs were turned to Arjun. Half a dozen blades of mana slammed into the rear of the Antrians in a single volley, and they fell to the ground smoking and twitching. Keri dropped his looted arm-blade and cradled his hands to his breastplate, gritting his teeth against the pain. He was completely out of mana, and the orb which had been lighting the party’s way since they entered the darkness of the rift flickered once, like a candle in a sudden wind, and then went out.

Keri hardly heard Arjun’s footsteps as the other man crossed the room, and he blinked against the sudden gloom, struggling to distinguish shapes in only the dim blue light that emanated from the Vædic sigils adorning the walls of the chamber.

“Where are you hurt?” Arjun asked, kneeling beside Keri.

“My hands. I burned them on the heated metal.”

“We’re going to have to get that armor off your hands,” Arjun muttered. “This is going to hurt, Keri.”

“Going to hurt,” it turned out, was an underwhelming way to describe what Keri actually felt. Arjun had to pull the gauntlets off, tearing layers of burned skin away, because his palms were stuck to the leather. Whatever illusions Keri had about being able to grit his teeth and bear the pain were gone in an instant, and he howled out in agony. The worst part was that after the first gauntlet was off, he knew exactly what was coming the second time.

“I’ve got just enough mana to heal you,” Arjun told him. “Hold your hands out palm up, and keep them steady.”

“No,” Keri gasped. He felt hot and cold all at once, and his teeth had begun to chatter, his body to shiver. “No, at least one of us needs to be able to cast. I’ll be fine.”

“You most assuredly will not,” Arjun scolded him. “You’re going to pass out if I don’t heal you, and I can’t carry you. Do your best to hold still. Cailet Co Aen’Thelia.”

For the first time since they’d come to the rusted Tomb, a part of Keri’s body actually felt warm. The rush of soothing, numbing relief poured from Arjun’s wand into Keri’s ravaged hands. While the light was too dim for him to see exactly what was happening, he could feel the itching sensation of new skin growing across his palms, sloughing off the blackened, burnt mess in its way. When the spell finally passed, its work done, Keri collapsed onto his side, blissfully free of pain.

“Thank you,” he croaked, after a moment. He was still shivering, and couldn’t seem to stop, but Keri hoped that if he just waited a few moments, that would pass.

Arjun settled onto the floor next to him. “That was clever, using the orb to attack from above,” he said.

“Always been good at fighting,” Keri mumbled back. “Might be the only thing.”

“I never have been,” Arjun admitted. “I always hesitate. Not like you or Liv, or even Rose. Either one of them would have ripped through those three machines without even slowing down.”

Keri couldn’t help but laugh. “Don’t compare yourself to Liv,” he told the other man. “The first time I saw her, she thrashed a princess in a duel that everyone else thought she’d lose.”

“Still,” Arjun grumbled. “These things are a bad match for me. My best attack spell doesn’t work on them at all, because they don’t have bones. If you hadn’t come when you did, the only thing I could think to do was to turn around and run, and hope I could lose them. Thank you.”

“You’re a healer,” Keri pointed out, rolling onto his back. The shivering was beginning to subside, and he didn’t feel like he was going to pass out any moment, now. “Your job is to heal, while we do the fighting. It’s good you can defend yourself if you have to, but don’t try to fight like anyone else.”

“Not much of a healer at the moment,” Arjun said. “Without any mana. Where do you think Liv and Rose are?”

“Somewhere down below,” Keri said. “Try to get a bit of jerky out of one of the packs. Mine’s back against the wall where I came in.”

He listened to Arjun rise and fumble about in the dark. Within a few moments, the eastern man had both packs dragged over to where Keri was, and they were both chewing on pieces of jerky that crackled with mana. It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning.

Once they’d both caught their breath, Keri used the mana blade still attached to the severed Antrian arm to dislodge the blades from the other machines. When he was finished smashing and hacking away, he had four blades, each etched with sigils which he thought should still function as enchantments. None of them had anything like what he would consider a traditional handle, but the two men tore up strips of spare clothing from their packs to wrap the twisted and battered bits of metal with something they could actually hold.

“I think,” Keri said, as they each wedged two blades into their belts, “that if we send a bit of mana into these, the enchantments will function.

“I’ve got enough for that, at least,” Arjun confirmed. Then, the two men set off into the darkened halls of the tomb, searching for a way down to their friends.

☙

There were stairs, it turned out, though it took some time to find them.

If Arjun still had enough mana for a platform, they could have attempted another descent of the shaft, but instead they were forced to stumble through the gloom, exploring hallway after hallway as they descended the slow way.

Whatever the outcome of the fight between Liv, Rose, and the winged Antrian, Keri knew that it must be long settled by now. He hoped that meant that their friends were alive, and the monster had been destroyed, but there was no way to be sure and the doubts gnawed at him.

Perhaps even worse, Keri was slowly beginning to admit to himself that the only way he and Arjun would find Liv and Rose would be by accident. He thought they’d reached the same level as the bottom of the shaft, but it was impossible to be completely certain. Without the sound of fighting, there was nothing to tell the two men whether they were even going in the right direction.

Distracted by his own worries, Keri didn’t notice at first that Arjun was no longer by his side. He stopped and looked back, peering into the darkness for the shape of the healer.

“Don’t move,” Arjun murmured. “Keri, look around you.”

Frowning, Keri scanned the gloom. They’d entered a chamber with a thin walkway through the middle, and machinery on all sides, connected to the wall by pipes, dark rope-like shapes, and even stranger things. He stepped toward the bulk nearest to him, and squinted his eyes.

There, quiet and still, was the shape of an Antrian war machine, resting in a kind of casket stood upright against the wall. Keri’s stomach dropped, and he turned, scanning the room. Shape after shape, all the same, lined the walls to either side of the walkway.

They were surrounded by slumbering enemies.