We came barreling around a corner only to run almost directly into a party of dark shapes. There were yells and bullets and spells, with one of the last exploding against Pritkin’s shields, popping them like heat on a soap bubble. “Run!” he snarled in my face. I heard rumbling, like distant thunder, and then the ceiling came down with a roar that consumed the world.
Chapter 2
It took me a few seconds to realize that I still wasn’t dead. I was in a crouch, my hands protecting my head, expecting an attack, but the corridor was as silent as the tomb it was. The only people besides us were cemented into the walls or buried under the pile of rubble that their own spell had brought down on their heads. I collapsed back against the floor, breathing raggedly, and tried not to scream.
After a minute, I felt around for the flashlight and my hand closed over a cool plastic cylinder. I clicked it on, relieved to find that it still worked, and saw Pritkin lying on his side. He wasn’t moving, and he had blood smeared through the stubble on his chin, bright and frightening. Murphy and his little law can go to hell, I thought furiously, shaking him frantically.
“Would you kindly stop doing that?” he asked politely.
I stared. I wasn’t entirely sure, but a polite John Pritkin might be a sign of the apocalypse. “Did you hit your head?” I tried to move closer to get a better look, and my knee accidentally knocked a shower of stone pebbles onto the oozing gash on his forehead.
“If I tell you I’m all right, will you stop trying to help me?” Every muscle in my body relaxed at the familiar tone, all ruffled feathers and crisp impatience. That was better; that was solid ground.
“So, still alive?” I croaked.
“Damn right.”
He just lay there, though, so I shone the beam around, giving him a minute. It took a few seconds to realize exactly what I was seeing. Pritkin had apparently gotten his shields back up, because they glowed blue and waterlike, rippling slowly in the yellow beam. But the cave ceiling wasn’t above them anymore. Or, to be more accurate, it was there—it was just no longer attached to anything.
Huge, half-quarried blocks, some still bearing ancient chisel marks, lay on top of the suddenly very thin-looking shields. Every time they flexed, small showers of rubble and grit slid along the top and trickled down the sides, making soft shushing sounds in the quiet. The larger pieces had nowhere to go, but they moved enough to make it obvious that they weren’t anchored to anything. Even the smaller, cobblestone-sized chunks would hurt like hell if they fell on us, and I didn’t have to wonder what the larger ones would do. Two mages were giving gory proof of that barely a yard away.
I could have reached out and touched them, where they lay caught between the shield and the cave-in. Their bodies were oddly contorted, trapped in the stone and rubble like ancient fossils, their open eyes shining in the reflected light. Except that fossils don’t usually come complete with evidence of how they got that way, at least not in Technicolor brilliance.
The red-streaked white of newly shattered bone stood out starkly against the mellow gold of the older specimens. One hand rested against the blue of the shield, caught in a gesture of defense, as if human strength could stand against the weight of a mountain. It made me wonder for an insane moment if it would leave a red outline, if the next time Pritkin raised his shields, it would manifest, too.
The air suddenly felt a lot heavier in my lungs. Despite the large number of impossible things that had happened to me lately, my brain couldn’t quite seem to deal. It was loudly insisting that huge slabs of rock that weighed maybe a ton each didn’t just hover in the air and that we were both going to die any second now.
I made a small, choked sound, but managed to swallow the bubble of hysteria before it could tear loose. If Pritkin had been a second later getting his protection back up, there would be four new bodies entombed down here instead of two. But there weren’t. We were safe. Sort of.
Pritkin had rolled onto his back and was staring at me, hard and intent. “This is exactly why I told you to go home.”
“I have a devastating comeback for that,” I informed him with dignity. “Just not right now.”
“Do you want to give up?” I blinked. I could count on zero fingers the number of times he had asked my opinion. “Because there are almost certainly more of them back there.”
I remembered the ghost saying that there were twelve mages all together. Which meant that behind the rockfall, ten more were still hanging around, unless they were caught somewhere I couldn’t see. Or unless they’d left, assuming that the cave-in had killed us. But no, I wasn’t that lucky.
“You know what’s at stake,” I reminded him.
“I thought you’d say that.” Pritkin levered himself to his knees with a grunt. The rubble shifted along with him, enough to bring another large slab crashing down. The jagged underside landed only a few feet away from my face.
Pritkin’s voice, laced with its usual impatience, cut through my panic. “Let’s go.”
“Go?” It came out as more of a squeak than I’d intended. “How? Because I can shift us back home but I can’t shift us beyond this. I don’t know what’s on the other side or even where the other side is—”
“Just stay close.” Before he’d even finished speaking, his shields had changed from fluid waves to hard crystal, reflecting the cave-in through a hundred sharp facets. A few more rocks fell off, allowing more to rain down from above, striking off the new, rigid surface with dull thuds. Pritkin started crawling forward, and his shields went with him, almost scooping me off my feet before I got with the program and moved up close behind him.
It wasn’t until I saw the body of one of the mages slide down the side and roll behind us that I completely realized what was happening. Our small bubble was plowing through the rocks and dirt like a crystal mole intent on making a new burrow. We hit a wall once, looking for an entrance that wasn’t there, but we found it a few feet to the left and burst through, the cave collapsing in on itself behind us.
Pritkin dropped his shields with an audible sigh, and the dust we’d dislodged in our escape flooded in, almost blinding me. We forged ahead to get away from the choking cloud, which had no way to disperse in an area without wind or open air. But before we’d gone ten yards, we ran into what felt like another cave-in.
Once I blinked the dirt out of my eyes, I realized what I was seeing. A narrow tunnel stretched out in front of us, filled halfway to the ceiling with what looked like a mile of bones. Pritkin climbed on top of the broken human mass, flashing the light around. “There’s a hole in the wall up ahead. It probably leads to another tunnel.”
I eyed the pile of bones uneasily. Anything kept in close proximity to a person’s aura eventually imprints with a psychic skin. I’d experienced more horror stories from inadvertently brushing up against a strong trigger than I could count. And I couldn’t think of a stronger trigger than an actual body part.
“Hurry, damn it!” Pritkin thrust a hand down to me as the sound of voices echoed dimly from the corridor behind us. Somebody had heard our exit.
I hefted myself up gingerly, before I could think about it too much. The bones were old and dry, and crunched sickeningly under my weight. Many splintered, sending little knives into my palms and tearing my jeans, but there were no psychic flashes. Moving them must have ruptured any imprints that had formed.