“Because they’re being crushed from above by a few thousand tons of rock!”
The older balding man had slipped to one side and was trying to pull himself up on shaky arms, but they kept collapsing. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’ll be all righ’,” he slurred. “’N a minute.”
“The longer you’re in stasis, the worse it gets,” the redhead told me as her friend collapsed into her arms. “What’s the date?”
I told her and she nodded with no visible reaction, but the war mage gripped my arm. “You’re lying!”
“Yeah, because that’s what I feel like doing when a mountain is about to drop on my head!” I told him, exasperated. “Lie about trivialities!”
“It isn’t trivial. If you’re telling the truth, I’ve been in here for over six months!”
“And you’re going to die in here if you don’t move your war mage ass,” the redhead told him. The corridor was shaking pretty much continually now, the situation deteriorating every second. It seemed to do more than her words to convince him, and he staggered to his feet.
The balding man was also up, although he looked like death—gray faced and slack-jawed. But he stumbled over to a cell and started working on it.And the Asian woman was already on her feet and working furiously beside the redhead.
“If the way is blocked, how did you get in?” the war mage demanded, starting on a nearby cell.
“I’m Pythia.”
He blinked, taking in my damp, ragged outfit—now liberally smeared with dust—and my frazzled hair. “What happened to Lady Phemonoe?”
“The same thing that’s about to happen to us! Minus the crushing thing. Does it matter?”
“No, no.” He looked confused. “I apologize, Lady. I didn’t realize who you were. Peter Tremaine, at your service.” And he actually bowed.
I stared at him. A courteous war mage. The world really was coming to an end.
And then Pritkin ran back around the corner followed by half a dozen groggy people. He glanced at the cells that still had to be emptied. “You aren’t done yet?” he demanded.
The world righted itself.
“Commander!” Tremaine came to a pretty good approximation of attention, considering that he was still swaying on his feet. “We are proceeding apace with the extrication, sir!”
I blinked at him and then looked at Pritkin. “Commander?”
“Later. Get the rest of them out!”
“We’ll be done in a minute,” I told him. Half of the freed prisoners were now lucid and working on the cells.
“We don’t have a minute!”
“Find a way to get us out of here and leave the prisoners to me!” I said, exasperated.
“The prisoners are the way out.” He gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, where half of the wildly swinging lights had now gone dark, and then his gaze shifted to the floor. “The upper levels are gone; we’ll have to go lower. And to do that, I’m going to need magic users—strong ones.”
“And then what?”
“And then we blast a hole through the floor. With the outer wards down, the only thing standing between us and the next level is a ton or so of rock.”
“And you can move that much in the next few minutes?”
“I can move that much in the next few seconds, with the right people.”
“Point them out to me.” We went down the corridor, pausing at each cell, Pritkin muttering under his breath about this one or that one. I got the impression from a few of his comments that most of the people I was releasing weren’t in Tremaine’s category. Pritkin was looking for power, not politics or moral persuasion. I only hoped he could control them.
“That should do it,” he finally said as I shifted out with the last one. Which was good, because I was about to have to tell him that no way could I do even one more jump. I was having trouble just focusing my eyes. Fortunately, Pritkin had something else to worry about. “We can’t do this and shield all of you as well,” he said.