Bricrui (The Forgotten: Book 2) (21 page)

The Elders were planning on sterilizing the
Lost Ones? That was barbaric. Who knew how many descendants he had?
And Katya was bringing back the stone that would make this curse
unbreakable. Something needed to be done.

Lorcan broke into a run towards Hunter’s
cell.

*

Katya’s foot found a solid footing beneath
her and she breathed a sigh of relief. She tried not to look down,
but she couldn’t help herself, and her vision went fuzzy for a
moment as she stared at her foot floating far above the ground. She
yanked her sight upwards and focused on moving forward, carefully
testing the ground in front of her before putting her full weight
on it. She sent a prayer to the Three that the spell holding her on
the air would not suddenly disappear. She increased her pace as the
sounds of shouting behind her began to echo off cave walls and she
knew they must have made it through the maze of ledges and were now
close behind.

She threw caution to the wind and began to
run, her heart skipping a beat as one footfall was a hair lower
than the rest and she thought it had given way beneath her. As she
burst through the cave on the other side, she came out into a lush
field of corn with a path running through the center.

Rather than take this path, she cut off to
the side, trying to step around the corn so as not to make her
passage obvious by broken vegetation. Leaves slapped her face and
she ran blindly until she heard the voices stop echoing. Then she
stopped and squatted, controlling her breathing to an even low
tone.

The corn was planted in thick rows, and was
taller than her. She couldn’t see two rows beyond her, so she
listened. The guards had apparently correctly assumed she’d gone
into the corn, but must not have been able to see any sign of where
she went in. She could hear them moving in several different
directions, spreading out around and away from her. She could feel
probes of magic, their tendrils searching out into the space around
her and she quickly wove a spell of her own to help disguise her
presence.

She heard one that couldn’t have been ten
feet from her, their slow steps crunching the ground. Katya tensed
in wait. As they approached the row she was in, she squeezed
herself into the row itself and matched her steps to that of her
stalker’s, making her own noise that much more difficult for him to
detect.

The man stepped into the row with his head
turned the opposite way, a small miracle as far as Katya was
concerned, and she ducked into the one he had just come from. She
waited until she could no longer hear their movement before slowly
treading back to the pathway. She peered out through the corn to
see if they had left a look-out.

They had. So she moved back a few rows,
enough that the woman wouldn’t be able to see her and broke into a
run. It wasn’t long before she came to the end of the cornfield and
she squatted at the edge.

The labyrinth of caves and ledges seemed to
have led to up to the top of the mesa, where it appeared there was
another village. The cornfields were just the beginning. She could
see apple trees, rows of vegetable gardens, penned in animals and
many rounded structures. These she assumed were houses, made of
clay and stone into dome-shapes, as though mimicking caves, with
small windows and arching doorways. There was a well in the middle
of the village with a large blue stone perched on the tip of the
roof above it. Katya could feel the spell that drove it, like the
one that she had used out on the Plains to gather water to her. It
must be performing a similar task, pulling water up from the
streams below into the well for the village.

A couple walked by and Katya slunk further
into the shadows of the corn. They were talking and laughing
happily, and as the woman flung her hair over her shoulder Katya
was surprised to see that she had the mark on her neck! Katya
watched carefully, sure that she must have seen it wrong, but as
she sneaked around the village, she saw that more of them bore the
mark and there was no doubt that is what it definitely was.

What were they doing with a village of marked
people? Were there experiments going on up here on them? She didn’t
have too much time to ponder this as she soon spied what she had
come here for. At the far end of the village, there was a large
stone, suspended in midair by five strands of power, undulating in
electric waves. They all attached to a large circle of metal
standing vertically on the ground, with the five power points
coming out from the stone to small spheres attached to the
circle.

The whole thing was ringed by a bunch of
posts which were connected by a rope in a roughly square shape. She
crept into the area around this and examined the stone. It
shimmered and turned colors in the light – a moonstone as Kali said
it would be. It appeared that she would somehow have to disable
each of the five sources of power before she would be able to take
the stone.

Probably another puzzle
.

She ducked underneath the rope, and caught
sight of someone behind her. A woman had spied her and opened her
mouth in a silent ‘oh’ and her eyes grew wide.

“Don’t-” she began, but that was as far as
Katya heard as a wall of bright light sprang up from the ground
like blue fire and created an opaque barrier between her and the
village.

Katya raised an eyebrow and reached out
towards it. Her hand encountered a hard surface, impenetrable to
the touch. Then a deep rumbling started slowly, building up speed
and volume until the pebbles on the ground began to shake.

She eyed the ground warily.

Suddenly something burst through the section
directly in front of the stone, tearing out of the earth violently.
Dirt and rocks sprayed everywhere and Katya shielded her face from
it. A loud roaring broke through the air, and she peeked out from
under her arm. A gigantic worm wriggled half-out of the hole, its
blind head searching for its prey.

Unlike the normal worms Katya was used to,
this one had one large mouth with very un-worm-like teeth and
several smaller copies of the same. It also had sprouted tons of
tentacles coming out from around these mouths, pawing at the air to
draw things into them.

“That’s more like it,” Katya murmured softly,
sick of the frustration of the mazes and more than ready to take on
something a bit more tangible. Marak wound her arm in anticipation,
ready for action as well.

Unfortunately, the beast apparently had
amazing hearing to make up for its blind state, and it immediately
rounded on her, zeroing in with alarming accuracy.

Katya quickly bounded out of the way,
bringing her knives to the ready and feeling Marak slither down her
arm in preparation. She slashed at a few of the tentacles which
came a bit too close for comfort, and danced away.

She tiptoed around the worm, keeping one eye
on it while examining the mechanism that held the stone. It
appeared that the spheres themselves focused the energy into the
beam that held the stone, and were not simply physical anchors for
a spell. The power was probably fed through the metal circle around
it, and would just continue around if a sphere was damaged and
break the connection to the center stone.

She cart-wheeled over the worm’s wriggling
body as it glided over the ground, leaving behind a trail of slime,
and took aim at the first sphere. She leapt forward with her knife
outstretched, pulling her arm back at the last second and jamming
the butt of the knife into the sphere.

It cracked and the beam of power crackled,
but still it held. A wet tentacle slapped her in the back and
another wrapped around her ankle. She slashed at the one holding
her leg and scored. The worm made a hideous screeching noise and
pulled its wounded appendage close to it while whipping several
others in her direction.

More than one of these hit their marks and
she was rebuffed by blow after blow. She felt welts raising up
where they had connected. One hit her hard against her temple and
she grew dizzy momentarily; long enough for another to get a grip
around her waist.

The thing pulled her in towards its many
mouths tantalizingly slowly. The gaping maws opening and closing
with globs of spit dangling from the pointed teeth. She cleared her
head quickly and stabbed away at the tentacles snaking around her
body, tighter and tighter.

Marak was frantically biting each, but his
poison seemed to have no effect. Seeing as how they were only tiny
portions of a much larger creature, Katya did not find this
surprising. It was unfortunate, however, as his help would have
been greatly appreciated right about now.

She finally got enough of them to at least
loosen their grip that she was able to squirm free, just before
being stuffed into the worm’s largest mouth. The smaller ones
snapped at her on the way down, one of them grabbing a mouthful of
her tunic which ripped free.

As soon as her feet hit the ground she
sprinted to the metal circle and picked up a rock from the ground
below. She pounded it against the already cracked sphere until the
object finally gave way, the crack enlarging into a long gash
running along the length of it. The power beam from it to the stone
wavered and died, the magic continuing to flow around the circle,
as Katya had guessed, harmlessly.

The giant night-crawler had reoriented itself
towards her and was wiggling its body in her direction, the huge
pink blobs flopping over one another. Katya vaulted over one and
rammed her knife into another, then dodged the resulting blows as
she gave away her position.

She led the worm away from the stone circle
and then sped away from it back towards it, using the time it would
take it to realize where she was to break another of the spheres.
The second beam died just as the tentacles slapped at her feet and
she once again danced away.

In a trial of patience, she repeated this
process; drawing the beast away and closing in to finish off
another of the focus points until all five of them had been
destroyed. As the last beam was reabsorbed into the circle, the
stone in the middle fell to the ground, ready for the taking. Now
all she had to do was finish off the monster…

She turned her full attention to it now, and
watched for her opening. It turned its massive head and opened it
mouth to let out a fearsome roar and Katya let loose her knife,
embedding it in the soft flesh of the creature’s throat.

But that wasn’t enough to kill it apparently.
It gurgled and grunted a few times, then swallowed hard, her knife
disappearing into its belly. She drew the sword she’d fortuitously
swiped from one of the guards below, and avoided a questing
tentacle. She lunged forward and slashed across the brute’s
midsection, creating a large gash. She hopped backwards out of its
reach as it reacted to this blow, then dove in again to hack away
at the same section. With similar patience as breaking the stone
free had just required, she slowly but surely hacked away straight
through the creature’s slimy exterior.

The two halves writhed around and lay still.
She sheathed her blade and turned to retrieve her prize. Searching
the ground, she soon spotted it amongst a patch of taller grass off
to the side. She moved to picked it up.

A wet slurping sound filled the air behind
her and Katya stopped mid-step. Turning slowly, she was appalled to
see that the two halves had drawn themselves up and now both were
coming for her. The shorter section hobbled along, using the
tentacles to pull it forward, while the longer, headless section
wobbled about, its grotesque gory stump spattering insides as it
flung itself from side to side, searching.

Abandoning the stone again for now, she
looked around for another means to dispose of the giant worm.
Rather than immediately rush forward to attack, she observed it for
a few moments, noting that it seemed not to want to stray too far
from the dirt from whence it came and the head section was shying
away from the flaming wall that separated them from the
village.

Katya spared a thought for what she was going
to do when that barrier was released, if it was released. The
townspeople could just send in one monster after another until she
was finished off, creating some morbid entertainment for their day.
But the worms were getting closer, there was no time to ponder that
fate quite yet.

As the creature moved, it left behind the
disgusting slime trail, but she also noticed that it lost part of
its slimy texture as it did so. It was growing drier. And just as
an earthworm may die if trying to cross a rock that was too long in
the hot sun, perhaps this worm too might die if it was dehydrated
enough.

Katya reached for the power and directed the
heat of the flaming wall towards the beast. This left her somewhat
vulnerable as she needed to concentrate on the spell rather than
watch for the waving tentacles, but she was done playing with the
monster. She needed to be on her way.

The heat started to dry up the beast’s slimy
hide, but it wasn’t enough. Katya suddenly had an idea. She tapped
into the spell that fed the well in the town and diverted its
questing to finding water from the worm rather than from the
surrounding area. It was tricky to keep the probes directed at the
thing. They kept trying to slip through her magical ‘fingers’ and
back to where the original spell had sent them, but she persevered.
It was working! Redoubling her efforts, she focused all the
tendrils of the spell that she could on it, until it had dried up
into a cracking husk.

Katya dropped her control over the other
spell with a sigh. The wall of fire around the square sputtered and
died, and she walked quickly over to where the stone had
fallen.

“Katya,” said a voice behind her, and she was
surprised into pausing her motion. She turned to the man who spoke,
ready to defend herself, but he was simply standing behind her
serenely. “Please,” he beseeched her, “take the stone if you must,
but hear what I have to say…”