Balanced on the Blade's Edge (Dragon Blood, Book 1) (3 page)

No.

Oh.

Light appeared ahead, lanterns hanging from
nails in wooden supports. The dirt and rock that had been heaped
against the walls in the area where the two men had accosted her
was cleared here, and iron tracks ran along the ground, with ore
carts here and there. More sections of track were stacked along one
wall, the route waiting to be extended.

Sardelle slowed down, sensing more people
ahead. Soon, the banging of carts and scraping of dirt reached her
ears. With lanterns lighting this section, sneaking past miners
would be difficult. That Tace had mentioned cages. Some sort of
lift or tram system? He had also mentioned a guard. A guard could
take her to whoever was in charge.

Someone jogged past an intersection ahead.
Sardelle leaned against the wall between two lanterns, hoping the
shadows hid her. Maybe she ought to wait in the darkness somewhere
until the shift ended. But no, that wasn’t an option. Sooner or
later, her two rash victims were going to stop scratching
themselves and seek medical attention, and she hadn’t passed any
branches in the tunnels.

She crept forward again. The bangs stopped,
and it grew silent ahead. Had a lunch break been called? Maybe she
would luck out.

Sardelle reached the corner and peeked around
it. It wasn’t an intersection, but an open chamber with lanterns
hanging from a high ceiling as well as from the walls. Two men
stood guard on either side of a metal cage on rails, a mesh door on
the front side. The rails, as well as a cable attached to the top
disappeared into a shaft angling upward at a diagonal. To the right
of Sardelle’s tunnel, at the back of the chamber, a big metal
contraption with wheels and pulleys was bolted into the stone
floor. A tram system. She had found her way out if she could get
past those guards, or should she try talking to them?

Based on their tidy hair cuts, shaven faces,
and clean uniforms—gray trousers with silver piping and navy blue
jackets—they
looked
more likely to be
reasonable than the thugs, but evil could walk in many guises. And
it made her nervous that she didn’t
recognize
those uniforms. They weren’t the dark
greens of the Iskandian Guard, the soldiers she had once worked
with to defend the continent. More than that, she didn’t recognize
their weapons. Oh, she had seen things like the daggers they had
sheathed at their waists and the studded maces on short chains
hanging from their utility belts, but they bore firearms as well.
Not the clumsy matchlock muskets she was familiar with—weapons many
soldiers eschewed in favor of longbows or crossbows—but sleek black
weapons the likes of which she had never seen. There was no ramrod
attached to the top, nor were the men wearing powder containers, as
far as she could see.

They’ve replaced powder
and musket balls with bullets that contain the charges within
,
Jaxi informed her.
Each rifle can hold six
rounds, and that lever on the bottom is for loading them into the
chamber. They can fire rapidly, one shot every half second or
so.

Sardelle was fortunate the guards were
talking to each other in low voices, and not paying much attention
to the tunnels that emptied into the chamber, for she had been
staring at them for a long moment. Even without Jaxi’s explanation,
the firearms—the
rifles
—would have told
her what she hadn’t wanted to believe. This wasn’t her century
anymore.

Sorry.

I know.
Sardelle blinked, fighting
back tears again. This wasn’t the time. She would find a place to
cry for her lost friends—her lost
everything
—later.

She was on the verge of stepping out of the
tunnel, when the guards stopped talking, one halting in the middle
of the sentence. They stared down one of the passages, not
Sardelle’s. There were men gathering behind a bend down there, but
she didn’t think the guards could see them from their position.
Were the miners up to something? She thought about warning the
guards—maybe that would buy her some appreciation from them—but she
was too late.

A boom came, not from the tunnel with the
men, but from one to the left of the cage. The ground shivered
beneath Sardelle’s feet. Black smoke poured from the passage, while
the men who had been gathering down the other tunnel charged from
around the bend.

Sardelle opened her mouth to shout a warning,
but the guards were already reacting. They stepped back into the
mouth of the tram shaft for cover, then, each man facing toward one
threat, dropped to one knee, their rifles coming up to aim. Nothing
came out of the smoky passage, but the guard facing the advancing
men started firing. Sardelle, sensing the bursts of pain as the
bullets found targets, had a chilling demonstration of the
rapid-fire capabilities of the weapons. Even so, three of the
charging men reached the guards, and the skirmish switched to
hand-to-hand combat. The brawny miners wielded their pickaxes and
shovels with fury and power, but it soon became clear that the
soldiers were well trained. They kept the tram cage at their backs,
so their attackers couldn’t maneuver behind them, and they swung
the maces with precise, compact strokes, deflecting the picks and
shovels, then smashing the studded metal heads into ribcages and
jaws. The three miners soon lay unmoving on the ground.

Other people had crept toward the chamber
from the other tunnels, though nobody had come as close to it as
Sardelle had. They seemed curious and hopeful rather than
antagonistic. Harmlessly watching the show in case something
happened in the miners’ favor? A warning twanged her senses. They
weren’t
all
harmless.

“Look out,” Sardelle called to alert them to
a new assailant back in the direction of the smoke, the one who had
originally lit the explosive.

A long cylinder with flame dancing at the end
of a fuse sailed out of the tunnel, landing in front of the tram.
One soldier fired at the man who had thrown it while the other
stamped out the spitting fuse, as calmly as if he were grinding out
a cigar stub.

All right, so they probably hadn’t needed her
warning…

One of the soldiers knelt to check the
throats of the unconscious men. The other stared at her—she didn’t
try to hide, there being no point since she had given away her
position, but she didn’t step fully around the corner yet either.
She wanted to see what their reaction to her was first.

“What are you doing down here, woman?”

Not exactly a thank you.

Sardelle was about to respond, but the second
guard had taken out a knife and, without so much as a hesitation
for a prayer or apology to whatever gods the miners worshipped,
slit one of the unconscious men’s throats.

“What are you doing?” Sardelle blurted, even
as the soldier shifted to dispatch a second miner. “They’re no
threat now. Why kill them?”

The guard wielding the bloody dagger barely
glanced at her. The other soldier strode toward her. “You people
made your choice when you picked lives of crime, and these idiots
made their final choice just now. There’s no leniency here. We’d
have to deal with that kind of thing every day if we were lenient.”
He jerked a thumb toward the men—toward the
bodies
, their life’s blood flowing out onto the dark
stone. Unlike Tace and his buddy, these miners were thin—too
thin—with gaunt faces and hollowed cheekbones. They wouldn’t have
been a match for the soldiers under any circumstances.

Belatedly, his words sank in. You people. He
thought she was one of them, one of the miners. Sardelle braced
herself against the corner, ready to defend herself again if she
had to. Would he try to slit
her
throat,
as he had the others?

The soldier hung his mace on his belt and
carried the rifle at his side rather than aiming at her, so she let
him approach without reacting. She didn’t sense kindly thoughts
from him, but she didn’t get the feeling that he meant to hurt her
either.

“Come on, woman. You’re not supposed to be
down here. You know that.” He gripped her arm and pulled her into
the chamber, then frowned at her dress and sandals. “Or don’t you?
Did you come in with the prisoners yesterday? Didn’t you get the
orientation?”

Orientation, as if this were some educational
campus where people were directed how to find their classes and the
dormitories… But if it could explain her presence down here, she
would go with it. “No. No orientation.”

The second soldier stalked down one of the
tunnels, his dagger still in his grip as he went to check on the
people they had already shot.

The man gripping her arm shook his head.
“This way. Randask, I’m taking this one up to the women’s area.
I’ll report this mess to the captain, who can report it to the
general, who can sit in his office and drink his vodka and not care
a yak’s butt, like usual. You going to be all right down here?”

“Yeah.” The man walked back into the chamber,
his dagger awash in blood. Sardelle had a hard time tearing her
eyes from it. He walked into the opposite tunnel, though she could
sense that the man who had thrown the explosive was dead. “The
peepers have gone back to work.”

Yes, the watchers Sardelle had noticed
earlier had drifted back down their tunnels. Clangs started up
again in the distance. There wouldn’t be another attack for a
while. She wondered what had prompted this one.

Desperation,
Jaxi
suggested.
Misery. They have nothing to
lose.

Do we?

I can’t speak for you,
but I live in hope that my situation will improve. At the very
least, perhaps some new books will be dropped off in the prison
library.

“This way.” The guard ushered Sardelle into
the cage, then shut and latched the door. He hadn’t let go of her
arm yet, as if she would run off and return to those awful tunnels.
She suffered the grip, though couldn’t help but dwell on the fact
that yesterday—no, three hundred years ago—few men or women would
have presumed to touch her without invitation, even some of the
military commanders she had worked with for years. It wasn’t so
much that she was aloof or in the habit of reprimanding people who
did so, but the ungifted had always regarded the gifted with
respect—or, in some cases, perhaps more than she had realized, fear
and wariness.

The second soldier walked over to the machine
and pulled a lever. Clanks sounded, and the cage started moving,
being pulled up the rails into darkness. Sardelle twisted her head
to squint up the track. A distant light waited, little more than a
pinprick. As the cage rose, she could feel herself being pulled
farther and farther from Jaxi. Their link was strong enough that
they could communicate across a lot of miles—since being joined
with the soulblade, she had never been far enough away to truly
test their range—but the symbolism made the problem feel more
dramatic than it was. Nothing was truly changing, and yet… she felt
like she was abandoning her only friend left in the world.

Don’t worry
, came
the dry response.
You wouldn’t be going
far.

Right, Jaxi had said this was a prison.
Walking out the front door or gate or whatever they had up there
wouldn’t be an option. She trusted that she could evade whatever
security they had and escape though.

Not unless you’ve learned
to fly. The Ice Blades are as high as they ever were, and the road
over the pass was destroyed when these people’s ancestors took down
half the mountain. Also… the first snows of winter have
come.

Oh.
But the guard
had mentioned new prisoners arriving.
How do
these people get in and out?

Weather permitting, they
fly.

They
fly
?
Sardelle was glad for the darkness, so the soldier
wouldn’t see the way her mouth had dropped open.

They have ships that sail
the airways, held up by giant balloons, and they also have small,
maneuverable mechanical craft designed after the dragons of eld. As
I’ve been telling you, the world has changed.

“How’d you get down here, anyway?” the
soldier asked, disturbing the images she had been trying to
form.

Sardelle shrugged. “Just came down.”

“Huh.”

She caught a hint of irritation in that
single syllable. A point of pride? Since she had implied she had
somehow gotten past him, or perhaps one of his fellow guards? They
did
seem a competent bunch; she could see
where a suggestion of laxness would rankle. So long as he didn’t
start thinking of magical reasons she might have slipped past.

The tram seemed to be making decent speed,
with a hint of cold fresh air whispering into the cage, but they
had only made it halfway up. Sardelle wondered how deep into the
mountain their tunnels reached. Maybe there was some way she could
convince them to angle toward Jaxi’s resting place. With pickaxes
and shovels, it would probably take ages, but… she had to try.

“You mentioned taking me to a women’s area,”
Sardelle said, “but I actually need to see the person in charge.”
She hoped that wasn’t the vodka-swilling general he had mentioned.
“Can you take me to him or her?”

The soldier snorted. “The general doesn’t see
prisoners.”

“Ever?”

“Ever.”

Sardelle stepped out of the cage and stopped
so quickly the soldier nearly tripped over her. Icy wind buffeted
her, whipping at her dress and raising gooseflesh on her arms. She
gaped at the black stone fortress around her, around the tiny
valley where merchants had once sold cheese and crops in the summer
and where a wide road and bridge had led over the river and to the
back gate leading into Galmok Mountain. The Goat Peak River was
still there, half iced over as it meandered through the large
courtyard within the fortress walls, but there was nothing inviting
about it or the valley anymore. The crenellations and cannon-like
weapons on the walls were as forbidding as the Ice Blades
themselves, the snow covered peaks rising in all four directions
around the valley, scraping the sky as they towered another five
thousand feet above the already lofty valley. Most of the peaks
hadn’t changed, but Galmok… She stared in horror. It looked like a
volcano rather than the majestic mountain it had once been, its
upper walls slumped inward with a misshapen bowl where the peak had
once been.