Maps, Artifacts, and Other Arcane Magic (Dowser Series Book 5) (23 page)

Magic was about intention.

I ran the fingers of my left hand down the pen and whispered to it again. “Open sesame.”

The pen perked up. I pushed my magic and my intention toward it.

It started to write. Its ink didn’t make a terribly strong impression on the granite, but that was okay — because I just needed to see and copy its strokes.

It drew a line. I slashed a line after it with my knife. It drew a curve. So I slashed a curve.

It drew and I carved until five runes, each three inches tall and a quarter inch deep, were scribed in front of me.

The pen paused, waiting for more instructions.

“Thank you,” I said as I slipped it back into my satchel. Then I placed my hands over the runes, calling up the metallic taste of a magic I couldn’t actually manipulate. “Open sesame.”

“Thrice said,” Warner murmured behind me.

“Thrice meant,” Kett added.

“So heeded,” Warner said.

I’d never heard that invocation before — if that was what it was — but I could feel the power behind the words as Warner and Kett uttered them.

My magic filled the runes in a way I could feel rather than see. Then liquid silver rose out of the stone to smooth out all the gouges I’d carved.

The stone creature shifted to the side, then once more became a pile of benign boulders.

More silver runes appeared at the bottom edge of the cliff face, then those symbols slowly began to glow and spread upward to form an archway. The stone wall in the middle of this arch faded away to reveal an opening in the side of the mountain.

Kett and Warner stepped up beside me.

“Impressive, dowser,” the vampire said. Then he moved forward, immediately crushing my sense of accomplishment by adding, “Keep the pen handy.”

Warner laughed. When I glared up at him — more than a little hurt — he shook his head and nodded toward Kett’s retreating back. “The cold bastard is amusing. I thought you were brilliant.”

I snorted, pretending to reject the compliment even as it thrilled me.

Quickly sobering, I nodded toward the open doorway. “The rabid koala will follow.”

“Let her come,” Warner growled. “I’m tired of Shailaja’s games. We’ll draw her out, collect the instrument as the treasure keeper demands, then let the guardians sort it out. She alone is no match for us three.”

“There will be other traps inside.”

“Even then, she cannot possibly prevail.”

I reached over and squeezed his warm hand. That was all I could do in the face of his simmering anger. He placed a kiss on my palm.

Then we followed Kett into the side of a mountain.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Stairs carved out of the solid stone of the mountain led steeply down into the darkness. They seemed to widen as they did so. Heading downward was odd, because I would have expected to climb in the interior of a mountain.

Both Kett in front of me and Warner behind were dampening their magic like hot fudge smothered vanilla ice cream — though, sadly, the effect was nowhere near as tasty. So it was my first footfall that triggered tiny magical silver lights on either side of the third stair. Helpful, but not totally illuminating as we descended into the yawning, vast pit of darkness I could practically feel breathing beneath me.

Something dwelled deep in that darkness, but I couldn’t taste, see, or feel it. Still, I knew it was there. Because that’s how these sorts of things went, wasn’t it?

When the first sliver of silver glowed about five feet away from me, I paused, waiting for another attack.

Nothing else moved.

The silver lights continued to trigger one by one, on every third stair as I passed.

“It would be more helpful if they lit up ahead of us instead of beside me,” I muttered.

“You’ll want to find your way out,” Kett said, his voice disembodied in the dark. He was being helpful as always. Calming, even. Or not.

I stopped to examine the lights more closely. I hunched down to touch one. Warner hissed his disapproval behind me, even as the glowing light unfurled silver wings, which it flapped lazily as if just waking.

“It’s a lightning bug,” I said. “You know, a beetle. A firefly made of silver.”

I brushed my fingers across the back of the insect’s silver glow-bulb body. It appeared to be entirely constructed or cast out of silver. The design was simple — a beetle-shaped body that appeared to glow like molten silver, until I looked closer and could see actual liquid silver encased within it. Add a tiny head with tinier antenna, and gossamer strands of silver to form wings. Deceptively simple, but channeling complex, detailed magic. Or, more specifically, metallurgy.

The firefly took flight, hovering at my eye level as I straightened up. I lifted my palm to see if it wanted to land in my hand, but it flitted playfully away from me. I took a few more steps down, passing another stationary firefly that lit up as all the others had.

The first firefly moved closer, flitting up and around me. I laughed, delighted by its antics.

“Don’t play with unknown magic, dowser,” Kett said.

I stuck my tongue out in the general direction of his voice. Then I continued to descend, stone stair by stone stair, into the dark core of the mountain.

The stairs widened as we continued, the firefly lights spreading farther and farther away, until they eventually gave shape to high, rough-hewn cave walls.

I slammed into Kett, smashing my nose into the back of his head. He didn’t move an inch.

“Some warning would have been nice,” I growled, holding my nose. My nasal tone was annoying even to my ears.

Kett indicated ahead of himself with the barest of nods. I followed his gesture, and as if responding to me, the firefly flitted ahead, then cut right to illuminate a stone wall that stood about twenty-five feet ahead of us. It dipped up and down as it flew away, kissing or tickling each firefly light it flew over. Each of them glowed in turn, a line of silver lights forming along the edge of a walkway that appeared to branch off before us and run alongside the stone wall. The increased lighting slowly revealed the inverted dome of the massive cavern we’d descended into.

“Impressive,” Warner said as he stepped up beside me. He’d unsheathed his knife, and I could taste the darkly tinged magic of the blade.

“Obviously a natural formation,” Kett said, coolly dismissive of the grand scale of the cavern. “Simply and crudely adapted by its founders.”

The vampire glanced down at Warner’s knife. The sentinel noticed and sheathed the blade. I almost opened my mouth, then stifled my apology. Kett didn’t constantly need to know how sorry I was for killing him. And hopefully it would be just that one time.

The firefly reappeared on our left, still triggering other stationary fireflies as it flew toward us. The lights now appeared to form a massive ring around the stone wall, which curved off to either side of us before disappearing into the darkness. The wall was maybe fifty feet tall, if what I could see was actually its top edge.

That was odd, wasn’t it? A walled-off circular section deep within a cavern?

Wanting to get a closer look at the wall and perhaps spy a possible doorway, I started to step around Kett only to slam into his outstretched arm. He’d held it up so quickly I hadn’t registered it. It was like being punched in the gut, but with a steel pole. A thick, icy steel pole.

I exhaled every available molecule of oxygen available to me, then doubled over momentarily, unable to breathe back in.

“Really, vampire?” Warner asked.

“My apologies,” Kett said. “I’m still growing accustomed to … myself.”

“How long are you going to blame me for London?” I gasped.

“Would you prefer I let you walk off the cliff, dowser? I can’t see the bottom, but it must end somewhere.”

A wash of darkness that I assumed was just a deeply cast shadow sat between me and the wall. You know what happens when you assume, right? You look like a freaking idiot in front of your self-appointed mentor and new boyfriend.

The firefly zoomed back to me, illuminating enough of the walkway I was standing on that I could see the crevasse that began about a foot away. Reacting to my look, the firefly helpfully darted over the crevasse, but couldn’t penetrate the darkness that fell away from the sharp edge.

“I imagine what we’re looking for is on the other side of this wall,” Warner said, glossing over my almost foolish misstep and keeping Kett and me on task, rather than bickering over who hurt who more and when.

Kett nodded curtly and cut right to follow the curve of lights along the edge of the walkway. The lights would have been much more helpful on the edge of the crevasse, but apparently whoever built the cavern hadn’t been terribly safety conscious.

Warner pressed a hand to the small of my back and murmured into my curls, “Perhaps best to let the vampire lead? Since he can see in the darkness much better than you or I?”

I sighed. “Got it.”

The firefly continued to beckon us forward, but I saw nothing other than stone, stone, and more stone as we traversed the edge of the dark fissure.

“Shouldn’t there be more traps?” I asked.

“The door wasn’t complicated enough for you?” Warner teased.

“There will be more,” Kett said.

We rounded the wide curve, continuing to walk until we arrived at a narrow stone bridge. Or more of a ledge, really, which jutted out over the crevasse and led to a narrow set of stone stairs that cut straight into the wall on the other side.

The walkway continued onward, but I assumed it simply circled back around to the bottom of the main stairs. Plus, the firefly bobbed helpfully about halfway across the bridge. Or, from my perspective, the single-file stone ledge that ran across a crevasse with no safety rail and no perceivable bottom.

Fan-freaking-tastic.

“It isn’t a wall, then,” I said.

“The stairs lead upward. Perhaps to a wide platform?” Warner said. “Ringed by the fissure. We should circle it to be —”

Kett started across the ledge without a second thought.

“Don’t look down,” I called. I shook my head at Warner and moved to follow the vampire, who passed the firefly without bothering to answer me. Then he started to climb the stairs.

I really, really missed Kandy. The green-haired werewolf could always be counted on to laugh in the face of impending death.

Halfway along, the ledge was narrower and longer than it had appeared from the other — stable, thicker — side. I briefly wondered if it was a magical optical illusion.

Then the freaking firefly dive-bombed my head without warning. I instinctively threw my arms up to shield my face, but lost my balance on some inconveniently loose rock. Though perhaps the rock was convenient for the firefly, which had apparently been luring me to my death.

Damn my stupid fascination with shiny objects.

My ankle twisted and I went over sideways.

Warner snagged the back of my jacket.

I was suspended over the bottomless crevasse, hanging at an almost forty-five-degree angle out from the ledge.

“Holy fu —”

A light flared beneath me. Way, way too much silver light. I screamed as it seared through my eyes and into my brain, throwing my arms around my face a second time.

I was blinded. The silver light exploded through my mind as the metallic taste of the metallurgy flooded my mouth, plugged my nasal cavities, and choked off my scream.

“Bend your knees, Jade,” Warner growled.

Clinging to the command in his tone for sanity’s sake, I bent my knees. Even though I desperately wanted to claw the metallurgy out of my eyes and throat.

He hauled me back until I was crouched over my firmly planted feet.

I tried opening my eyes, but all I could see was silver, silver, and more silver. “I can’t open my eyes,” I cried.

“They’re open,” Warner murmured as he picked me up and — I could only guess — carried me the rest of the way across the bridge.

I twisted my fingers through my necklace instead of scratching at my eyes. “What the hell was that?” I was thankful I could talk, even though the silver felt like it had completely filled my throat. I tried to not cling to Warner as I attempted to rapidly blink away my apparent blindness.

“A river of molten silver.” Kett’s cool voice came from somewhere behind me.

Warner placed me carefully down on a step. I sat, desperately gripping at the edge of the stone rather than his leg.

“Impossible.” Warner stepped away from me, perhaps to look at Kett’s ‘molten silver.’ “It’s just water spelled to appear silver.”

“It’s a crucible,” Kett countered. “And we just stepped onto a platform at its center.”

“But you can see?” I asked.

“Yes,” Warner said. “As before, I can’t feel any magic. But I assume the concentration of metallurgy is affecting your sensitive senses differently than mine or the vampire’s.”

Kett pressed his cool fingers to the back of my neck. “Shall we proceed?”

I still couldn’t see a damn thing, nor could I grab or push away the magic that was affecting me, but I nodded.

“Give her a damn second,” Warner said as I stood. I reached through the silver light toward his voice.

Still grumbling under his breath, he flipped me over his shoulder and followed Kett up the stairs. The taste of his black-forest-cake magic soothed me as I attempted to discern individual objects within the haze of silver that was all I could see. If I squinted madly, I was fairly certain I could see the line of the bridge behind us, but only because it was a slightly darker gray within the pervasive silver blur.

∞

We made it to the top of the stone stairs without me seeing or doing another damn thing.

I heard — twice — some sort of kerfuffle ahead of us as Warner climbed. Some sort of smashing of what sounded like metal. I assumed Kett had confronted and overcome some sort of metallurgy, but the vampire didn’t offer any verbal enlightenment.

Warner paused at the top of the narrow stairs, shifting me off his shoulder to set me on my feet in front of him. He kept his hand clenched into a fist at the back of my ski jacket, like I might wander off unexpectedly. But still silver-blind, I wasn’t going anywhere.