The Fifth Dawn (23 page)

She emerged between two hovering nim that slowly turned inward to face her, claws clicking menacingly. Glissa willed the wings to carry her higher, which would buy her a few precious seconds to spot Ellasha.

The skyhunter was some thirty feet back from the chasm, awash in a sea of nim, and fighting with utter ferocity. The skyhunter was a gold and silver blur, leaping and twirling through the black mass of zombies with longknives blazing. Green ichor and necrogen steam sprayed in the air.

The leonin briefly made eye contact with Glissa. “GO!” Ellasha shouted.

Glissa’s sword arm began to tremble with rage and frustration. The flying nim below were almost close enough strike. Ellasha was buying her time, and the chance to save Bruenna, and the brave skyhunter was going to die in the process. Glissa might be able to save the leonin if she dove into the fray herself, but even then there were only two of them. Yert’s supply of nim seemed limitless. They would both eventually be overwhelmed.

“I’ll tell the loremasters,” she whispered. She turned and
willed the wings to take her onward to Bruenna. Bruenna, who could still be saved.

Glissa gritted her teeth, fighting back fresh tears. If Ellasha’s sacrifice was going to mean anything, she couldn’t lose it now. She wanted nothing more than to lay into the nim with every last ounce of her strength. Her anger demanded it, but she couldn’t waste the time.

Fortunately, Glissa found it was relatively easy to keep clear of the nim’s strikes, though she had a few close calls at points where the tunnel narrowed. Flying nim were a problem, too, but they were so clumsy in the air that she had little trouble avoiding them. But every nim turned and followed her.

The elf girl still had no idea what she was going to do when she found Bruenna, or even how she was going to get her out. But one problem at a time. They had to find the Neurok first. Glissa had been forced to remove Geth’s head from her pack and carry it along so he could guide her, which would be a liability as soon as she landed and had to turn and face the mob behind her. She would have gladly tossed the undead thing aside, but she still needed Geth to get them out, too. Still, if he didn’t lead her to Bruenna soon she might pitch him anyway. He smelled even worse than the nim, and she was beginning to wonder if Geth really knew where he was going.

“Wait, turn, turn!” the head shouted. “Back there, the branching passage!”

Glissa whirled and followed Geth’s direction. This offshoot was much narrower, but there were no nim, and dim light was cast by the occasional necrogen lamp.

“This way isn’t used much,” Geth said, as if reading her mind. “It’s the back way.”

“Not bad, Geth,” Glissa said. “It’ll also keep the nim from attacking us all at once. So why don’t I trust you?”

“Beats me,” Geth replied. “But trust that I want my body back, and I don’t see any other way to do it but help you. Now slow down, eh? We’re almost there.”

The tunnel ahead glowed brighter green, and appeared to open into a larger room. Glissa willed the wings to slow down, and she took a moment to turn Geth’s head so it was facing backward. “Nim?”

“I hear them, but can’t see them yet,” Geth said. “Could you turn me back around now?”

Glissa obliged, peering into the green glow ahead. She could make out a single shape in the mist-filled room, something like a statue on a pedestal. She stopped short and turned Geth to face her.

“Time for you to get back into your pack,” Glissa said. “I can’t fight with you in my hand.”

“See, you know you love me,” Geth cackled.

“I despise you, but you’re going to get me back out of here,” Glissa said. “Before I put you away, can you tell me anything else about that room?”

“Sure. It’s a room. There are prisoners. Looks misty. What do you want? I’ve been severed from my body for weeks,” Geth said. At Glissa’s scowl, he added, “Okay, there are cells lining the wall, five of them. Probably two guards.”

“Probably?”

“That’s what I would have posted. Can’t speak for Yert. Will you get it through your head I’m not in charge here?” Geth’s head smirked. “And that thing in the middle is the torture platform.”

“Lovely,” Glissa said.

“You’re not kidding,” Geth replied. “It’s amazing. I got it from a vedalken slavemaster who told me he used it for ‘motivation through pain’ on
all
his stock. It looks like a simple table, but I had it enchanted to transform into eighteen different
configurations. And of course it changes size to fit the occupant. That slavemaster knows his—”

Glissa stuffed the head into the pack. “Quiet,” she said, squinting into the green light. The pedestal must be the torture table, which made her think that was probably no statue. She couldn’t make out anyone else in the room. No nim, no vampires, no Yert, nothing.

It was an obvious trap. But Glissa had to walk into it.

No, not walk into it.
Fly
into it. That was at least one advantage. Still, she decided a cautious approach might be warranted. The nim were some distance back down the narrow tunnel, her ears told her. She could afford to move deliberately this time instead of charging head first—her usual opening tactic, and one that of late had been meeting with mixed results.

Yet as Glissa closed the distance and she could see more clearly into the mist-filled, brightly lit green room, she became even more confused. She saw two cell doors open and facing her, empty. The torture table did indeed appear to be nothing more than a table. But the statue was no statue. It was a person.

Bruenna stood atop the table, wrapped up to her nose in corroded iron cable that held her suspended like an insect in an arachnid’s web. Hollow tubes were jammed here and there through the cable into Bruenna’s abdomen and back, with one appearing connected to the base of her skull. At first Glissa thought that the tubes were pumping necrogen into the Neurok, but as she drew nearer she saw the tubes were glowing with soft blue light.

The mage’s eyes goggled when she saw Glissa, and the elf girl could detect the faintest shaking of her friend’s head.

Glissa entered the room, keeping one eye on Bruenna and using the other to scan the torture chamber. It was smaller than she’d expected, but then torture could be a very private matter.
All of the cells were empty, as were most of the shackles hung on the walls. A few of those still held the skeletons of luckless prisoners.

If this was Yert’s idea of a trap, it wasn’t a very good one. She threw stealth aside and zipped over to Bruenna, descending to stand on the table in front of the hapless mage.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Glissa said. “Can you hear me?”

Bruenna gave the faintest of nods, and winced.

“I have to unhook you from these tubes. Can I do that without hurting you?” Glissa asked.

Bruenna began to shake her head again, wincing with each tiny movement, but refusing to stop.

“At least I can get you out of these cables. Let’s see …” Glissa said, searching for a loose end she could use to unravel Bruenna’s iron cocoon. Nothing. Whoever had wrapped Bruenna in this painful-looking cable had been thorough. “All right, if I can’t unravel it, I can cut it.”

Glissa’s sword flashed, and the two cables holding the mage upright snapped. The elf girl caught Bruenna as she fell forward, and she saw that the cable was beginning to loosen on its own. It was all one piece—that was why she couldn’t find a loose thread.

Gently, Glissa began to unwrap the Neurok mage. The nim were getting closer, but with luck she wouldn’t be here when they arrived. Bruenna gasped as Glissa pulled the thick cable away from her mouth.

“No!” Bruenna cried as soon as she’d drawn breath. Suddenly the mage disappeared in a flash of blinding azure light, forcing Glissa to—

—raise her arms to protect her eyes from the glare. She tumbled backward and landed hard on her back, and something jabbed her painfully in the lower back. A yelp told her that she’d also landed on Geth, who let out a long stream of muffled invective aimed at her parentage. “Shut up, Geth,” she mumbled.

Glissa blinked against the glare that filled the air above her and hadn’t gone away. She couldn’t see a thing, in fact, not the rest of the room, not the torture table …

She did see razor grass. Lots and lots of razor grass, disappearing into infinity wherever she looked. Glissa was in the Glimmervoid. But how? She rolled over onto her belly, then pushed off the ground—

“Ow!” Glissa yelped, and jerked back, rolling into a crouch. She turned her hands palm upward and blinked, trying to focus in the sweltering glare. Her hands were green with blood welling from several fresh, thin cuts. “So it’s real,” she muttered. “How in the name of every last god in the Tangle did I get here?”

“First things first,” Geth said from the pack on her back, which must have flapped open. “Who’s attached to those boots?”

Glissa turned around, shielding her eyes against the bright sky. She followed the black boots until they met unfamiliar metallic blue armor, and on up to a familiar face.

“Glissa,” Bruenna said warmly, a soft rasp in her voice as she
broke into a grin. The mage offered her a hand up, and Glissa got a good look at her friend in the bright light of the moons. All five were over the horizon, which explained the heat and glare, with the yellow, sun-like moon (or moon-like sun, if you were a leonin) directly overhead. There was a strange symmetry to the moons. The last time she’d looked the green one was the only one in the sky.

Bruenna’s voice and the weird blue armor weren’t the only things that had suddenly changed. The mage’s face was drawn and angular, more than a little careworn. A jagged white scar emerged from the collar of Bruenna’s armor and disappeared behind her left ear. As Glissa released the human’s hand she noticed Bruenna wore something that looked like a gauntlet, but with three too many fingers and an extra thumb.

The mage noticed Glissa staring at her hands and raised the bizarre gauntlet, twiddling the digits, and shrugged. “Took it off a vedalken patrol. The vedalken won’t be needing it anymore. Besides, they owed me a hand.”

“What?” Glissa managed. “Vedalken? Bruenna, what happened to you? Why did you say—how did you—some kind of teleportation spell, right?”

“Plenty has happened to me,” Bruenna replied, furtively casting a glance over her shoulder. Glissa, still half-blinded by the bright moons, tried to make out what she was looking at, but saw only what looked like a distant, blurry, dark-colored wall. “But now isn’t the time. The nim will be on patrol today.” Bruenna raised two fingers to her lips and emitted a series of short whistles and clicks that reminded Glissa of several different avian species native to the Tangle.

In response to Bruenna’s call, a pair of long necks rose cautiously over the grass, several paces away. The zauks bobbed their heads from side to side for a second then stood, smoothly rising from a sitting position with a peculiarly clumsy avian grace. The
pair of flightless birds, both unsaddled, trotted over to the mage and her perplexed companion. One began to poke its beak at Geth’s pack.

“Hey! Shoo! Not food!” Geth squealed. Glissa gently nudged the zauk away and closed the pack tight. “Mank moo,” the head said.

“Bruenna, take your time. I mean, nim? We’re in the middle of the ’void, in broad daylight. We’d see them coming a mile away.
What’s going on?”
Glissa asked, still squinting at that black wall. No, not a wall.

The Mephidross. They were at the swamp’s edge, or close, anyway. Glissa couldn’t understand why the mage had transported her here. Taj Nar or anywhere else, except a few choice locations in the Dross or the interior, would have been better. Until she got an explanation, though, she decided to keep her mouth shut. Complaining about the exact location of her rescue seemed petty.

“What are the last things you remember?” Bruenna asked and cupped her hands into a stirrup, helping the baffled elf girl clamber onto the patient zauk’s bare back. Glissa took the reins the Neurok woman handed her and patted the zauk’s neck softly. The bird cooed and flicked its glittering silver headcrest.

“But you were just there.”

“Humor me.”

“Well, the last thing I—ow, sorry, there, fella—the last thing I remember, you shouted ‘No,’ then everything went white,” Glissa said. “In the Vault. I was trying to free you. Then I was here, getting poked by razor grass.”

“Do you remember Ellasha?” Bruenna asked.

“Of course,” Glissa said, “She—she died so that I could get to you. She held back the nim, while I—wait, you never met Ellasha.”

“You’re mistaken,” the human replied, pulling herself onto
her mount with practiced ease. “Ellasha eventually fought her way through the tunnels and found me. Was able to free me, since the trap had already been sprung. But she
was
killed in our escape. Noble Ellasha died five years ago today.”

Glissa reined her zauk to a halt.

“Five
what
ago today?”