Balanced on the Blade's Edge (Dragon Blood, Book 1) (12 page)

Sardelle spread her hands. “I assumed you
knew. Or at least whoever started mining here knew.”

Was she being honest, or was this another
lie? His head was starting to hurt. It wasn’t even nine in the
morning yet; it was too early for headaches.

“These crystals,” she said, “are they—”

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, fast,
urgent footsteps.

“Sir!” The captain knocked on the door, but
Ridge was already on his way to opening it and caught the man, fist
raised in the air. “The airship is back,” he blurted. “And it’s
coming closer this time.”

Ridge cursed, grabbed his parka, and ran into
the hallway, tugging it on as he went. “It’s still snowing, isn’t
it? I thought that would keep them away.”

“It is, sir. And it’s not.”

“Wonderful.”

Left alone in the colonel’s office, Sardelle
debated whether to race outside after him or to take the moment to
study the map further, in private. A glance had told her that the
tunnels were several hundred meters from Jaxi’s location—it was
only dumb luck that those miners had stumbled upon her. The mage
shelters had been located in the deepest part of her people’s
complex, farthest into the mountain core. A mistake, it had turned
out, because so few had made it down there in time.

Only you.

I know.
Sardelle
touched the map, tracing the lower level tunnels with her fingers.
I think this is about where I was discovered,
though this doesn’t look like it’s been updated to include the
passage Tace and his cohort were working on.

Thinking of them again made her wince. She
had agreed to help Zirkander with his investigation on a whim,
because she saw her opportunity to barter for a look at the map.
She hadn’t expected to find out Tace was the murderer… or that
Bretta was someone who had denied him sex in the past—and used her
brawn to protect the other women from him as well. She certainly
couldn’t have foreseen the chain of events that would lead him to
accuse Bretta of giving him his new and persistent rash. Sardelle
might not regret defending herself, but she now wished she had
found another way. At the least, she should have later sought the
man out—from a distance—and healed what she had inflicted.

Unforeseen consequences. The elders had
understood them well. That was why the Circle had never acted as
judges over others and had insisted the Referatu be held
accountable to the same laws as the people in the rest of the
country. Until that handful of sorcerers had gone rogue, believing
themselves above the law. They were the ones who had established
the fear of magic in the population, a fear that had resulted in…
Sardelle gazed out the window toward the mountain, her chest
tightening with emotion she had been trying hard to distract
herself from. But talking to Zirkander and realizing that no one
even remembered the Referatu had been here…
A
few unforeseen consequences, and I’m the last of my
people.

Perhaps noticing Sardelle wasn’t thinking of
anything constructive, Jaxi directed her back to their current
consideration.
If you were to convince the
miners to extend that shaft and angle downward approximately
fourteen degrees, you would eventually reach my location.

And how do I convince
them of that?

Keep working on the
colonel.

The colonel is busy with—

A boom sounded in the distance.

“I thought he wasn’t going to use the
cannons.” But even as she spoke, Sardelle swept her senses out,
along the walls and confirmed what her ears should have told her.
The explosion had come from farther away. The airship, what
else?

Leaving the map on the desk, Sardelle ran
through the building and outside. Daylight had come to the
mountains, but the heavy clouds and the continuing snow made it
feel like perpetual twilight. She struggled to spot the airship and
wouldn’t have found it at all had she not seen a harpoon—no,
Zirkander had called it a rocket—streak away from the rampart. It
disappeared into the white sky, but by following its trajectory,
she located the intruders. The enemy airship was up near the top of
a snow-covered ridge, dropping explosives into the cornice she had
noted the day before. Yesterday’s fear returned in a surge.

The rocket exploded in the sky below the
craft’s wooden hull. Whatever force or shrapnel it hurled made the
ship rock, tilting on its side for a moment, but the massive oblong
balloon stabilized it. The captain must have had a good idea as to
the rockets’ range and was staying out of it.

Well, he didn’t know
her
range.

Sardelle stepped into the shadows of a
building and checked around to make sure nobody was watching her.
The miners were down in the mountain, and all of the soldiers in
the fort were busy grabbing weapons from the armory and running up
to the wall to fight. This battle wouldn’t be won with firearms
though.

Hating that she had to think of herself
first, that she dared not be discovered, Sardelle waited long
painful seconds so she could time her attack with the soldiers’
next one. While a second rocket was loaded and aimed, the airship
dropped another bomb.

“Hurry,” she whispered.

Finally, the rocket flew away. Sardelle
forced herself to wait until it exploded, to see if it might be
near enough that shrapnel would account for…

There. Orange light burst against the gray
sky, the weapon exploding even closer to the airship than the
first. Shrapnel reached the hull, though not enough to give it more
than a few dents and dings.

“Good enough,” she muttered. Sardelle drew
energy from within and cut a long slash in that balloon.

The envelope was thicker than she realized—it
might have held up to shrapnel even if the rockets had struck
closer—but it wasn’t a match for her power. She wasn’t sure how
long it would take to deflate, so she cut more holes, little snips
and pricks that would appear as shrapnel damage later. With more
time, she could have made sure the craft went down, but an ominous
rumbling started up. It wasn’t coming from the airship but from the
mountain behind it. From the snow.

A buzzing wail erupted from a horn at the
corner of the fort.

“Avalanche!” someone cried.

I was afraid of
that.

Don’t get caught
,
Jaxi warned.
Snow is just as impossible to dig
out from under as rock.

I know. I grew up around
here, remember?

Sardelle ignored Jaxi’s snarky retort. She
took several deep breaths and flexed her hands, like an athlete
getting ready for a race. Cutting a hole in a balloon was easy, but
this?

With a soulblade in her hand, her power
combined with Jaxi’s, she might have handled it, but even then, she
would have needed time to plan an attack. The snow was already
falling, gathering speed, gathering more material as it tumbled
down the steep slope. That high up, there were no trees to slow its
momentum. Sardelle tried to create invisible barriers to slow it
down, but it was like sticking her fingers into a dam to plug up
holes as more and more burst open. Then that shelf of snow
collapsed completely, rushing down too fast, too powerfully. All
she could do was partially divert it away from the fortress, to
angle it off to the side, but the installation was at the lowest
point in the valley, and even a sorcerer couldn’t defy gravity for
long.

The tail end of it crushed into the east
wall, knocking men down, devouring them. The rocket launcher
disappeared, too, and—Sardelle gulped, and whispered a plaintive,
“Noooo…”—Zirkander, who had been trying to shove other men away, to
push them toward the back side of the fort, was swallowed too. The
wave of snow crested the towers and crashed halfway across the
courtyard, burying that eastern wall and two of the tram entrances,
before tumbling to a stop.

Only vaguely aware that the wounded airship
was limping away—and losing altitude as it did so—Sardelle raced
for the mountain of snow.

A shovel
, Jaxi
warned.

What?

You need a tool. Don’t do
anything—anything
else
—that could get you
noticed.

It was good advice, even if she didn’t want
to heed it. Already she had hesitated, protecting herself instead
of simply attacking. If she hadn’t, she might have stopped that
ship before it dropped that last explosive.

“Shovels,” someone yelled. “Get those men out
of there!”

Sardelle clambered up the slope with a surge
of soldiers, all of them slipping on the ice and snow but desperate
to save the men. “The colonel went down here,” she yelled. “I was
watching, I saw.”

She didn’t expect anyone to listen to
her—Zirkander was the only one who treated her as anything other
than a prisoner—but maybe the confidence in her voice convinced
them. Three soldiers scrambled over to join her. She pointed, then
grabbed a shovel from someone who had brought extras. She
had
seen Zirkander go down, the wave
sweeping him from the wall, but she could also sense him beneath
several feet of snow. He was alive and not badly hurt, but
confused, trying to figure out which way was up, and how much air
he had.

Sardelle dug. She had never been caught in an
avalanche but had heard from others who had survived. The snow
became like cement once it compacted above a person, impossible to
dig through. A man had to be dug out by others. She flung snow to
the side, planning to do just that.

“You’re sure it was here?” one of the
soldiers asked.

“Yes,” Sardelle said without looking up from
her task. They had only gone down two feet. They needed to descend
at least four more, but she kept herself from explaining that.
Someone would later remember such unlikely precision.

“Because the snow would have moved him,” the
soldier said.

“I know that. I’ve already factored it in.
There’s a… mathematical model that I’ve studied.” There. That
sounded plausible, didn’t it? For all she knew, there truly was
such a thing.

“Just keep digging, Bragt,” another soldier
said.

Sardelle’s hands were already growing raw
from the shoveling, but she didn’t slow down. Two more feet. They
ought to be close, ought to hear something soon. Zirkander should
hear them soon and cry out, let them know they were close.

“Stay below,” someone’s voice came from
across the fort. “Just stay down there. We’ll let you know when
it’s safe to come out.”

The soldier next to Sardelle grumbled, “If
those prisoners get out and try to use this to their advantage…
”

“I’ll shoot them, no questions asked,”
another responded. “Sir! Are you down there? Can you hear us?”

A faint muffled groan came from within the
jumbled slope of snow.

“I heard him,” the soldier cried.

“He’s here!”

Soon there were so many shovels digging in,
that Sardelle could barely see the snow. Someone grabbed her from
behind and pushed her out of the way.

“We’ll handle it, woman.”

She stumbled and almost fell. She hadn’t been
digging slowly—there had been no reason to move her.

And you wanted him to see
your face first?
Jaxi raised a mental eyebrow.
To know you were responsible for pulling him
out?

No. That doesn’t
matter.
Sardelle scowled at the back of the soldier who had
replaced her. She was done delivering rashes, but he might look
good with his belt unbuckled and his trousers around his ankles.
Maybe a little
, she admitted to Jaxi.

Better he not have reason
to later dwell on your uncanny ability to find him.

A collective gasp sounded, then a sigh as a
hand reached out.

“It
is
the
colonel.”

Everyone had joined in to dig him out. Though
she hadn’t been here for long—and he hadn’t been here for… even
longer—Sardelle thought she knew Zirkander well enough to guess
that he would be annoyed when he realized they had stopped
searching for everyone else to focus on him.

The hand was followed by an arm, with no less
than four people grasping it. They pulled, and Zirkander’s head
came next, snow sticking in his hair and frosting his eyebrows.
With their help, he clawed himself out of the hole, then collapsed
on the slope a few feet away from Sardelle. He dug something out of
his pocket, a little wooden carving, and kissed it before returning
it to its home.

“Are you all right, sir?” one soldier
asked.

“Do you need to see the medic?”

“That was a brilliant shot with the rocket
launcher, sir! Did you see? Their balloon was struck, and they were
going down.”

“Uh, yeah.” Zirkander looked dazed, but he
pushed the snow out of his hair and recovered enough to point at
the slide area. “We have more men under there?”

“Yes, sir. Several others were up on the wall
with you and—”

“Then don’t stop digging, man. Get them
out!”

“Yes, sir!”

The soldiers turned to consider the wide
expanse of snow… and hesitated. One spun back toward Sardelle. “She
knew where the colonel went down.”

“That’s right. Did you see any others?”

This drew Zirkander’s attention to Sardelle
for the first time. She considered how helpful she dared be—how far
would they believe her mathematical model? But then she shook her
head. People’s lives were at stake. To put her own safety ahead of
theirs would be cowardly. She already had Bretta’s death on her
conscience.

Sardelle closed her eyes, seeing beneath the
snow with her other senses, judging who had the least air and
needed to be dug out soonest.

“One went down over in that area.” She walked
over and scraped an X in the snow, then backed away, happy to let
them shovel. She glanced down at one of her palms. She would have a
few blisters to heal when nobody was looking.