5.5 - Under the Ice Blades (12 page)

“I think it goes to the generator room I mentioned.” Angulus pointed at the cable. “Someone is siphoning our electricity for something.”

“Something? Like they want fancy lamps of their own?”

“I don’t think you would go through all the effort of drilling a long tunnel and killing people for lamps.” He waved for her to lead the way past the opening. “Let’s continue on. Follow the cable.”

“Is it possible they didn’t
want
to kill people? That your two scientists got in the way? Caught them stealing the electricity?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” he said as he scrambled around the hole, banging his knee on the edge and clunking his head on the ceiling again. “But why would they have drilled into the main chamber then? Why not go directly to the generator?”

“Wrong turn?”

“Even if the first tunnel was an accident, they would have been discovered eventually by going to the generator room. It has to be filled with fuel every day.”

“Maybe they found out there were secret research projects in the big cave, got greedy, and decided to try to get those too.”

“Then why was everything still there?”

Kaika shrugged. “When we find them, I’ll hold them down so you can question them.”

Angulus thought of his two dead men. “I’d like that very much.”

The tunnel cut around a corner again, and Kaika slowed down. “Light ahead,” she murmured. “Better turn down the lantern.”

Maybe the electricity thieves
were
powering lamps. But surely, there must be more to it than that.

She kept going, a pistol in hand and her rifle across her back, just shy of scraping the edges of the walls. He clambered after her, doing his best not to make noise. Somehow, she was moving without making a sound, while he kept clunking his rifle—and himself—against the walls.

As they drew closer to the source of light, Angulus cut out the lantern. He bumped the cable with his toe and thought about cutting
that
too. If he dropped whoever was up there into darkness, maybe they could more easily attack their foes. But it would also warn them that something was wrong. They would be more prepared for someone coming out of the tunnel.

In the end, he did nothing. He continued after Kaika and tried not to feel superfluous.

After easing around a final corner, the tunnel straightened, and the exit came into view. He scooted closer to Kaika, so that he could see over her shoulder better, and also so he could protect her back, the same way she was determined to protect his.

All that lay visible beyond the tunnel was an open area, with a rock wall at the far end. At least one hundred meters across. Whatever they were about to enter, it was a cavernous space. A soft yellowish light illuminated it, but he couldn’t guess at the source. It was far more powerful than a few lanterns or candles would be, and it had a different hue than the harsh lamps in the facility. The wall he could see in the distance appeared to be natural, suggesting a cavern rather than a space hollowed out by man. Angulus frowned at the idea that the engineers who had chosen this mountain for the building of his secret facility hadn’t noticed that there were giant caves in the backyard. If they had, they might have anticipated someone burrowing in from back here.

Kaika paused a few feet from the mouth of the tunnel and tilted her ear toward the exit. Angulus hadn’t heard voices or any indications that people waited for them, but he stopped to listen too. He thought he detected a faint regular ticking.

Kaika looked back at him, her eyes troubled. “Problem,” she mouthed. “Possibly a
big
problem.”

M
aybe it was a clock. A nice big grandfather clock sitting in the middle of a hidden cavern, cheerily ticking away for the bats.

“Yeah, sure,” Kaika muttered under her breath.

Judging by Angulus’s expression, he hadn’t figured out the implications yet. He didn’t work with explosives for a living. Kaika thought about explaining, but in case time was limited, she had better not dawdle. Besides, there might be people out there, people who could overhear them. Of course, they would have to be suicidal people if her guess proved right.

Hoping she was wrong and that something innocuous was responsible for the sound, Kaika eased forward. A draft whispered across her cheeks, smelling of bat guano and ancient mustiness but of the outdoors, as well, moss and fir trees. Maybe she and Angulus would be able to escape without dealing with the problem she suspected awaited inside.

When she reached the opening, she had intended to glance in every direction, hunting for enemies, but she ended up gawking at the unexpected sight.

A huge limestone cavern stretched out in front of her, a dry streambed meandering between natural pillars that supported the towering ceiling. She barely noticed the terrain. Along one wall stood a row of enormous statues of crouching dragons, each one different in size and pose, though each had its wings folded about its body to fit into the cavern. Each was also perched on a pedestal, the talons of their big lower legs curled over the edges. The pedestals were placed at regular intervals, and she counted ten of the grayish statues. The statue at the end, barely visible from her vantage point, was only half gray with the top half a bright coppery gold. Wires had been draped all over the statues, linking each one in a chain, and even from a distance, she could see brown paper packages poised on the heads of the dragons. Explosives. She didn’t have to be close enough to read the stenciling on the packages to know they were Cofah Army RSF-45s. The biggest, most powerful explosives their military used. She couldn’t see the clock ticking down to detonation yet, but it had to be in there somewhere. The soft ticks echoed through the quiet cavern.

“What in all the cursed realms is this?” Angulus breathed, resting a hand on her shoulder as he leaned forward to peer out.

Another time, she would have contemplated how she felt about that hand on her shoulder, especially in lieu of his startling but intriguing revelations, but now, she barely registered it.

“No idea, Sire,” Kaika whispered, tearing her gaze from the explosives to see if anyone else was in the chamber. She doubted she would find anyone—people didn’t usually set timers for bombs and then loiter in the area—but she couldn’t assume that.

Nobody was standing out in plain sight, but the copious pillars offered numerous hiding places. Glowing lamps that reminded her of flier power crystals had been mounted on the long wall opposite the dragons. They created deep shadows among the statues and behind stalagmites and pillars. Any of those shadows could hold a threat—an
additional
threat. It would take ten minutes to run through the entire place and check all of the nooks.

Angulus shifted behind her. “Let me out, please.”

Kaika hesitated. Should she presume to tell him to stay put, to let her do a thorough check before releasing him? Did she have
time
to do a thorough check? Her body twitched, wanting to propel her toward the source of that ticking. They might have hours until the explosion, or they might have minutes.

“Can you stay here while I look around?” Kaika eased to the side and stood, her legs relieved after crouching for so long.

“I can, but I won’t.” Angulus stood beside her and hefted his rifle. “Go find the timer. I’ll look for threats.”

She hated to let him expose himself, but with only two of them, his orders made sense. “Yes, Sire.”

Before either of them could go far, the keening wail they had heard before sounded, this time much more loudly. Kaika cupped her hands over her ears. It didn’t help. The bizarre noise banged around in her skull like a clapper in a bell. She felt it—the pain of whatever creature was making it—with her entire body, and a strange power accompanied it, almost forcing her to her knees. The ground shuddered, and she stumbled backward, bracing herself against the rock wall.

Angulus gripped the wall beside her, a pained grimace crossing his face. Kaika worried the shaking would escalate, that they would have to suffer through another large quake, this time without a counter to hide under. But the tremors did not last long or increase in force. The wail faded away, and the shakes along with it. As the last of the tremors disappeared, Kaika stared up at the explosive atop the closest statue. Its perch on the dragon’s head, resting between a horn and a ridge that thrust up from the skull like a bad hairdo, seemed tenuous.

“Need to do something about those,” Kaika said.

Not waiting for a response, she jogged toward the statues, glancing left and right as she did so, knowing she was risking herself by running into the open. Nothing stirred. Not even a bat, though layers of guano coated the floor, and she crunched through a crust. Lots of other footprints had punctured that top layer too. She might have found useful information in those prints if she’d had more time to look, but she was too busy peering into the alcoves between the statues, looking for a ticking clock.

Why someone wanted to blow up a bunch of statues, she couldn’t guess. She also couldn’t guess what those statues were doing here in the first place.

Maybe Angulus had an idea. She glanced back, the question on her lips. He was frowning into the shadows behind a stalagmite. She would wait until later to ask. It was probably a question for an archaeologist to answer. All that mattered for now was nullifying the explosives, or, if that couldn’t be done easily, finding an exit to the outside. But dealing with the bombs would be ideal. Given that the facility was full of weapons, some of them probably explosives, having bombs go off this close could be a very bad thing. The earthquakes were troubling enough. If the bombs in here went off, it could bring down the entire mountain. She had a flash of insight as to why those Cofah fliers—and the sorceress—might have been so far away from here. Maybe they had been the ones to leave these bombs, and they’d been escaping, making sure they got far enough away not to be hurt by the collapse. Maybe the fliers had even been coming to pick up the sorceress when the Iskandians chanced upon them.

As Kaika got closer to the end of the row of gray statues, she stumbled on uneven rock, blurting a curse as she got a better look at the multi-hued one. She stared, unable to parse what she saw before her, even forgetting the bombs for a moment.

The bottom half of the dragon appeared as the others, gray stone—or what she had first taken for stone—but the golden top half seemed alive. It
had
to be alive. It was bleeding. Two long lances had been thrust through the creature, one going through its shoulder, pinning the wing to its chest with the point sticking out on the back side, and the other cutting through the side of its neck. That one looked like a mortal wound, but drops of blood were dribbling from the puncture, leaving a streak down its scaled torso. Dead dragons didn’t bleed, did they? The creature’s eyes were closed, but its face, reminiscent of a cross between a lizard and a wolf, wore an expression that seemed the equivalent of a human grimacing in pain.

Wires stuck out of the ends of the lances and trailed down the dragon’s wing and across the floor to a square box on the ground with a couple of switches sticking out of it. The air around the box and the dragon hummed, reminding Kaika of being caught out in an electrical storm. There was an odor, too—charred meat.

“Uhm, Sire?” Kaika glanced back, wondering if he’d seen this yet and what he made of it.

He was only a dozen steps away, holding his rifle and watching her back. She was supposed to be watching
his
back, but this wasn’t the time to point that out.

“I have no idea,” he said softly. “Have you found the timer?”

Kaika flinched. How could she have forgotten, even for a few seconds? The dragon was an oddity, but it didn’t appear dangerous in its current condition. The explosives were another matter.

She ran toward the box on the floor. It didn’t appear to have anything to do with the explosives, as its only wires were hooked to the ends of the lances, but maybe the clock was nearby. She almost tripped over a black cable, the same one they had been following through the tunnel. It connected to the back of the box. They had found the receptacle for their stolen electricity.

In the shadows of the wall next to the dragon, Kaika spotted the timer, a clock face attached to a detonator with all manner of wires running out of it. It looked like a mess, like someone hadn’t known exactly what he had been doing. That could make it more dangerous than explosives laid by a professional.

“Wonderful,” she muttered, racing toward it.

A giant, dusty bronze plaque was mounted on the wall above the detonator. She could make out writing, something old and in a language she didn’t recognize. There wasn’t time to do more than register the plaque’s presence. Whatever it said, she doubted it had anything to do with the explosives.

Angulus was on the move again, finishing his search of the chamber. She would be on her own for this.

Kaika dropped to her knees in front of the detonator, careful not to touch anything. She had dealt with Cofah bombs before and knew they tended to be less stable than their Iskandian counterparts. She’d seen a crate of them go up in a fiery explosion when men loading it onto a dirigible had lost their grip and dropped their load to the ground. That had been a gory mess. Each of the explosives she had passed had been balanced atop the heads of the frozen dragons. One inadvertent tug of a wire could start a chain reaction that would bury her and Angulus.

“Sire, there’s only thirty minutes left on the timer,” Kaika said.

“Can you disarm it?”

“I know how, but a lot of things can go wrong. I’d rather not try with you here. Or anywhere near this mountain.” Thinking about what could have happened if they hadn’t come to check out this chamber made her hands shake. They could have died in a fiery explosion that would destroy the mountain without a clue as to where it had come from or why. At least this way, there was a chance to survive. Thirty minutes wasn’t a lot, but she could work with it. “What do you think about finding wherever that draft is coming from and going to flag down Zirkander?”