Skybuilders (Sorcery and Science Book 4) (2 page)

He slashed forward with one blade, and when she evaded, he slapped her on the rump with the other.

“You have a sword, Ariella. Use it.”

She was not about to tell him her arm was still throbbing from his last attack. She hopped back.

With a martyred sigh, Silas cut around another tree. Ariella continued to back up.
That’s right. Just a bit closer.

She swung her sword at him two-handed. He defended with nothing but one of his knives and a relaxed grin.

Who even does that?
Ariella wondered as tremors split down both her arms. She managed not to snarl at him. It was a monumental effort.

Oh, to hell with it.

Ariella struck a final time. Silas lifted a knife to defend, but his smirk melted into bewilderment as her sword’s blade bit into the red bark of the tree.

“Temper. Temper,” he chuckled.

Ariella jumped back as the overhead net tipped over, dumping a few hundred apple-sized pinecones onto Silas’s head. Her parents were going to kill her for disturbing one of the collection nets, but it was absolutely worth it to see Silas Thorn, the tough and unflappable Phantom bodyguard, hop and scramble amongst the falling pinecones like a drowning man.

Once the shower was over, Ariella extended her hand down to him, reaching through the blanket of pinecones. As she pulled him to his feet, green needles and brown spiky balls rolled off of him.

“Are you quite through fooling around now?” she asked, inhaling the fresh earthy scent. “May I remind you that I am not a Phantom? You don’t need to play these ridiculous dominance games with me.”

Whenever two Phantoms met, they both felt the sudden urge to drop everything and establish who was higher in the pecking order. Usually, that meant cold piercing stares. Often, blows were even exchanged. If all involved were lucky, no one died. Phantoms were crazy like that.

Silas dusted off his hands, then glowered at her. “That hurt.”

“So does clashing blades with you. Remind me never to do
that
again,” Ariella countered, shaking out her arms. She trod over a carpet of pinecones to get to the tree that held her sword, then wrapped both hands around the hilt and gave it a solid heave. Wood splinters rained down as the blade burst free from the trunk.

Slowly, a smile replaced Silas’s grimace. “It’s good to see you again, Ariella.”

“Likewise.” She gave him a wicked grin in return. “I’m still trying to decide whether I preferred the sight of you flapping your arms uselessly under a barrage of pinecones, or that of you with your rear end planted in a pile of them.”

“Careful,” he warned. “You wouldn’t want to bruise my ego.”

“You can handle it.” She punched him in the shoulder, which truth be told hurt her more than it did him. “After being magnetically stuck to a tree by your entourage of knives, I don’t think you
—
”

“Emperor Hayden Selpe and his brother Ian are missing,” he cut in. “They’re presumed dead.”

CHAPTER TWO

~
Missing ~

526AX August 18, Sundrop Loop

SILAS MET ARIELLA’S wide-eyed stare and waited. The rustle of shifting pinecones beneath his feet and the faint hum of the crickets’ dying song were a cacophonous symphony of sound compared to her shocked silence.

“Could you say that again?” she finally said.

“Hayden and Ian Selpe are missing.”

“Didn’t we rescue them just last week?”

“The Selpe Advisory Council presumes them dead.”

“And didn’t we already fish out the traitor on the council? Again, just last week?”

Silas shrugged. Ariella hadn’t been around long enough to realize that it was never over until you were dead.

“Start from the beginning,” she sighed, kicking a melon-sized pinecone at a tree. It bounced off the red bark and nearly hit a squirrel square in the face.

“After we exposed Lady Cassandra as the traitor who conspired to assassinate the late Emperor Ambrose Selpe and abduct his sons, Hayden appointed Lady Rosalind
Sappheiros as her replacement on the Selpe Advisory Council.”

“A wise choice,” said Ariella.

Silas had to agree. He didn’t care much for most of the Selpe men and women who professed themselves noble, but Lady
Rosalind at least possessed some semblance of a moral compass. She’d helped them unravel Lady Cassandra’s conspiracy, and given her past ties with Ambrose Selpe, Silas knew she would look out for the best interests of his sons.

“Lady Rosalind didn’t waste any time settling into her new position. Before the coronation after-party was over, she had already landed Marin a prestigious airship research exchange post at the Hellean floating city of Oasis. It seems Marin had impressed her.”

“She’s the only person who has ever made an airship land and take off again inside the Elition Wilderness,” replied Ariella. “You know how much I loathe all those technological doodads, but even I understand that Marin’s accomplishment is no small one. And it goes without saying that I don’t like that the humans can do this now. I’m just waiting for the day that they start transporting hordes of soldiers to areas that were once inaccessible to them.”

Most of Elitia was covered by the Wilderness, an area where electronic devices failed to function. That meant no computers and no vehicles. Airplanes that flew over the Wilderness fell right out of the sky. For years, this had protected Elitia from Selpe or Avan attacks. Humans did not get on particularly well without their technological gadgets, and that went double for the world’s two large empires. Even if they’d wanted to, they couldn’t have mounted an invasion. And they very much wanted to.

“Lady Rosalind remained concerned for the boys’ safety, so she arranged for them to accompany Marin to the floating city when she left two days after the coronation. They were to spend two weeks there, which Rosalind considered sufficient time to root out any additional threats to them while keeping them at a safe distance. She is experienced and efficient. I have no doubt two weeks would have been enough time for her.”

“But things did not go as planned?”

“No. On the second day of their visit, there was an explosion in the lab where Marin was working. All three of them are unaccounted for.”

“You said the Selpes presume them to be dead?” Ariella asked.

“Yes, but no bodies have been found. The entire section of the city is still closed off for repairs. The Helleans don’t even know how long it will be before they’ll be able to get in there.”

“Silas
—
”

“They’re not dead,” he declared.

She set a hand gently on his shoulder. “I had a foresight. I saw Aaron Pall being crowned emperor.”

“Aaron Pall?”

“And I saw…” She choked up on the words. “I saw Isis being wedded to him.”

That made far less sense. “Was she being coerced?”

Ariella tossed her head, and the tip of her ponytail bounced off her shoulder and swung across her back. “I don’t know. But she must have been.”

Silas pushed Ariella’s foresight from his mind. It would
not
come to pass. Not if he had anything to say about it. “Foresights can change.”

“Not mine. Not usually,” she croaked out.

“I’m going after them,” he told her.

She sighed. “I knew you would. You are too stubborn.”

“I
must
go. This is all my fault. I should have been there with them.”

“Didn’t Hayden Selpe force you to take time off?”

“Yes. Paid time off. He thought I needed it. I refused. He insisted. When I refused again, he said if I didn’t take a vacation, he would assign me to one week on the Blue Plains, training the latest batch of recruits to the Imperial Guard.”

“Sounds important.”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s an old man’s job, Ariella.”

“You are an old man, Silas,” she replied, the hint of a smile on her lips.

He frowned. There was no way she could know how old he really was.

“I wanted to be there with Hayden,” he said. “I
should
have been there to pull him out of danger.”

“And what could you have done against an explosion? You would have died too.”

“They’re not dead. Someone is only trying to kill them,” he insisted.

“But my foresight
—
”

“Do you know of the Crescent Order?” he cut in.

“The order of assassins?”

“Yes. They are the world’s most famous order of assassins and the most expensive
—
if you don’t count Jason Chanz’s order of one. The Crescent Order is an unusual order. Their members are either rogue Elitions or humans. They are a well-coordinated team that uses both magic and technology to devastating ends. I have seen them in action, and I can tell you I would not want to take them on alone.” He paused for effect. “And they were seen flying up to Oasis. I’ve learned they were contracted to go after Hayden and Ian Selpe.”

“Then the boys are as good as dead. And Marin too,” she added sadly.

“The Crescent Order’s plane was seen flying up to Oasis
after
the explosion,” he clarified.

Ariella’s eyes lit up, and she began tapping her sword against her leg. “They’re not dead yet.”

Silas nodded. “Whatever happened in the explosion, it didn’t kill them. The Crescent Order has been sent in to finish the job. And with your help, I’m going to make dead certain that they don’t succeed.”

“I see you’ve volunteered me for this suicide mission.”

Her tone was cold, but Silas could read the fire in her eyes. Foresight or not, she would not let those boys fall without a fight.

“Be sure to bring your sword.”

She laughed. “I’ll even bring a real one this time. The Crescent Order, ugh. Couldn’t they have sent the White Ravens again?”

“I take it you’ve heard about Lady Cassandra’s escape?”

A dark look crossed Ariella’s face. Apparently not then.

“She escaped her prison cell during the coronation party.”

“Where did she go?”

“No one knows, but she probably scuttled back to her Avan allies.”

“So she is behind this?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps not. The Selpes aren’t making any effort to ascertain whether Hayden and Ian are alive. So we can forget any help from them to get past the barricaded sections of Oasis. However, Lady Rosalind privately encouraged me to ‘kill the miscreants’. I assumed she meant the Crescent Order assassins, though perhaps she was referring to her Selpe colleagues.”

Ariella paced back and forth a few times, then stopped in front of him. She sheathed her sword, then extended her hand to him. “All right, Silas Thorn. I will help you. It’s not like I had any real plans for my month off anyway.”

He shook her hand. “Good.”

She chuckled at his curt response. “I suppose you have a plan for getting into the blocked-off part of the city?”

“Of course. My plan is Leonidas Chase.”

Ariella frowned. “Have you forgotten that he betrayed us last time?”

Technically, the Selpe spy hadn’t betrayed them so much as neglected to tell them that he’d played a part
—
however small
—
in the abduction of Hayden and Ian Selpe. Since their job had been to uncover the Selpe conspiracy to murder Ambrose and kill his sons, Silas hadn’t taken his omission well. He would have ended him right then and there had Marin not pleaded with Ariella to keep him safe. Marin and Leonidas had known each other since childhood, a relationship that seemed to entail her being teased and left behind at every opportunity. Silas didn’t get it. But he knew Leonidas would want to protect Marin too.

“When we tell him Marin is in danger, he’ll help us,” Silas assured her. “Now where is Leonidas?”

Ariella had neglected to tell him where she was sending the spy. He knew only that he was imprisoned somewhere in Elitia, far enough out of reach should any of his Selpe coconspirators decide to tie off that loose end as they had so many others. Perhaps with Lady Cassandra exposed, it was an unnecessary precaution. Then again, the former Lady of Seadusk had escaped almost immediately, which seemed to hint that she still had friends within the Selpe ranks. And considering Leonidas had betrayed the current emperor of the Selpe Empire, he was better off far away anyway.

“Precipice,” Ariella told him.

Precipice was the only school and temple in the Peaks, a small kingdom along the northeastern coast of Elitia. It was about as remote as you could get without tailing off to the Western Continent. That made it the perfect spot to incarcerate a disgraced Selpe spy hunted by his own people.

“What, was Winter’s Gate full?” he teased.

Ariella wrapped her arms around herself and trembled with suppressed shivers. “Thank goodness we don’t need to go there. With summer coming to an end, it should soon be getting really cold on the Tundra. They might even have snow already.”

“If you like it warm, you’ll be pleased to know that Oasis is over the Emerald Sea, between the Avan eastern and southern continents.”

“That is something at least,” she said. “Precipice was actually Isis’s doing. She went to school there before transferring to Rosewater. On our way out of Evergreen, I asked for her help in finding a suitable spot for Leonidas. She suggested Precipice, and she talked to them to make it happen.”

“Have you heard from her recently?”

“No, I took the portal out of Orion before the coronation party was over. Why?”

“I went looking for her as soon as I decided to go to Oasis,” he said. “I thought she would want to help. But she wasn’t around.”

“Am I to understand that you tried to recruit Isis before me?” A mischievous grin spread across her face. “And here I thought I was your favorite blonde.”

“She was closer,” Silas said. He tended to be more practical than sentimental. “Or so I thought. But I suppose Hayden forced her to take time off as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if she used the opportunity to arrange a clandestine meet with her new assassin friend.”

“Ah, so you noticed that too.”

What wasn’t there to notice? They had spent the entirety of their time on the airship and the assassin’s stay in Orion making eyes at each other. There was enough tension there to melt a glacier.