Skybuilders (Sorcery and Science Book 4) (8 page)

“What makes you believe there was smoke? Or do you simply think that’s the only way to get out of a room? There are others,” Silas said.

Glass clinked against the table as Leonidas dropped a shard onto it. It was a large shard that did in fact resemble a piece from a bowl, and the glass was tinted purple.

“That is hardly proof,” commented Silas. “But your explanation is the most reasonable given what little evidence we do have. Continue.”

Ariella bit back a smile. Considering Silas’s distaste for Leonidas, that was high praise.

Leonidas led them through the doorway into the second room. He swung the door partially closed, just enough to see its back side.

“Once here, Marin and the boys locked the door,” he said. “And piled desks and chairs against it.”
 

His finger traced shallow nicks in the door, then he squatted down to do the same to the floor. Tracks of superficial scratches in the wood indicated that heavy objects had been dragged across the floor. He led them back through the door.

“Considering that the door opens the wrong way for barring it
—
opening in the direction of the first room, not the second
—
it appears they had a different idea in mind.”

Leonidas shut the door, then pointed to the hinges. Ariella craned her neck to follow his gaze onto the bottom pin of the upper hinge. A tiny indent and several scratches marred the otherwise shiny part.

“The Crescent Order assassins, clever fiends that they are, removed the door from its hinges. This is a fairly simplistic door, meaning they had only to push the pins of the lower and upper hinges out.They might have used a key or other sturdy object to do it. An Elition maybe could have done it by hand.”

At that, he looked at Silas, who nodded smugly. Ariella had a hard time imagining such subtlety from a man who ran around with fifty knives strapped to his body. On the other hand, she could very clearly picture him tearing the door off its hinges and throwing it overhead through the window, all the while bellowing out a blood-curdling war cry. She swallowed a giggle, which erupted as a snort. Silas shot her a hard, knowing look. Ariella responded by batting her eyelashes innocently at him, wondering just how much of that amusing image he’d caught from her head.

“Once they had the pins out, I think they were in for a real surprise,” Leonidas said.

He tapped the toe of his boot against a long slender depression in the floor panel. Its shape matched that of the door handle’s edge perfectly. The door had hit the floor like a pancake. Ariella smirked. Marin knew they would remove the door and had engineered an avalanche of office furniture.

“Idiots,” grunted Silas, and even he looked amused.

Leonidas opened the door again and took one step into the next room. It was nearly identical in size to the first room. The only difference was the glass door set inside a glass wall at the far end.

“Ok. By the time the assassins dug themselves out, Marin and the boys had retreated to the third and final room.” He pointed toward the glass wall. “As you can see, that wall is not much of a deterrent to an attacking party. Not only would bullets pass relatively unhindered through the glass, its transparency does not allow one much privacy for setting up clever traps. Knowing Marin, she would have filled this second room with a gas that made any encroaching aggressors pass out.”

He crouched down to tap two punctures in the floor. They appeared to have been made by two heavy-duty blades. Maybe a Wing knife or even a Crescent sword, which had once been the weapon of choice for members of the Crescent Order.

“The first two assassins rushed in and abruptly tripped and passed out, their drawn blades denting the floor. At which point, the rest of the assassins withdrew back to the first room.”

Leonidas took two steps back, then turned toward a door on the side wall. He opened it up into another lab, the exact mirror image of the one they’d been investigating. Leonidas walked through the empty lab until he reached the back window, Ariella and Silas following closely behind.

“Some of the assassins went this way.” He fingered the window handle. “They climbed out through here and shimmied over to the window of the adjacent lab.”

Leonidas retraced his steps, leading them back through the rooms until they stood before the glass wall. He paused to stare for a moment, then passed through the door and continued on toward the back window.

“Marin must have seen the assassins coming from the outside,” he said, biting his lip in thought.

He pressed a button on the wall. Water and soap squirted out from all directions, covering the outside pane. Large wiping blades swept across the surface, cleaning the fluids away.

So, that’s how the Helleans cleaned the outside windows of their floating cities. Ariella had often wondered. Considering the substantial drop down into the middle of the ocean, she couldn’t imagine anyone venturing outside, clinging to the walls as they cleaned.

“Interesting,” Leonidas commented, leaning so close to the window that his nose nearly pressed against it.

“Black residue?” Ariella wondered, coming in for a closer look at the dark particles sprinkled across the glass. They were nearly invisible.

Leonidas considered the residue briefly, then broke into a smile. “Marin. She mixed up some concoction and squirted them with it. I’d imagine something that burns. She likes that sort of thing.”

Ariella nodded. That sounded just like Marin.

Leonidas pushed once on a square metal panel mounted to the wall, and it popped out. Inside was a compartment just large enough for a few spoonfuls of soap
—
or Marin’s burning solution. It seemed to be what fed the window cleaning sprinklers. That’s how Marin had gotten her spray to its targets.

“During this time, the assassins past the glass door must have been trying to distract Marin and the boys.”

Leonidas pointed at the desktop. Five bullet-sized craters had been filled in. It was a clean repair job, but still noticeable in the harsh direct sunlight streaming in through the window. Leonidas ran to the glass wall. Ariella looked over his shoulder as his finger passed over another five patched holes.

“The assassins took five single shots into the room. They didn’t want to risk killing their targets, which means their contract stipulates that they bring them in alive,” he decided.

“Good,” Silas said. “It means we can still save them.”

Leonidas turned and darted once again through the door, heading back to the first room. He seemed to be following the flow of his thoughts, racing to wherever they brought him. His eyes scanned back and forth across the floor as he walked. He stopped close to where Silas had found the bloody ponytail, then bent down to brush his fingertips against the floor. Ariella caught the faint after-scent of pepper as he lifted up his red-powdered index finger.

“Marin had the Selpe brothers continue to spray the assassins outside the window, while she opened the door just long enough to throw chili pepper bombs at the assassins approaching from the inside. She always did love those chili pepper bombs. She thought she was being so clever.”

Ariella remembered Marin’s chili pepper bombs. She’d used them at the Solstice Games to infect five people with a chronic case of sneezing, causing them to drop from the treetops. Since those bombs had saved her and Silas from poisoned bolts, Ariella actually did find the trick quite clever.

Leonidas rose and indicated the black hair on the table. “But it looks like at least one of the bombs was more potent than Marin had intended.”

Ariella nodded in agreement. Marin might have enjoyed the thrill of the Solstice Games, but she definitely preferred amusing pyromanic displays to dealing actual damage. She would have made the chili bombs to incapacitate, not wound or much less kill. She must have been so rushed that she mixed one overly strong. Ariella guessed the bearer of the purple-black ponytail, clearly an Elition, had probably survived. But she didn’t want to think about how much it hurt to go around with bits of her scalp hanging off, at least until the injury had healed.

Leonidas had already returned to the back window, and Ariella followed. Silas stood with his back to the wall, his eyes sliding across the room from window to door, taking in everything around him. Ever the threat seeker. Ever the bodyguard.

“And this is where the trail of clues effectively ends,” declared Leonidas as he stared at the window.

Ariella noted the frustration on his face. Now they were getting to the perplexing part.

“Marin and the Selpe brothers just disappeared.”

“Surely, you have just missed
—
”

“No,” he interrupted her, pointing at the window. “Look there. The assassins were attempting to cut a hole in the glass to get inside. The start of the hole is jagged, as though the cutter had been frequently interrupted in his work. That would be the burning window spray. But then see that? The last third of the cut is neat and smooth, work completed without any such interruptions.”

Ariella took a closer look at the patched hole. Leonidas was right. And if the assassins inside had captured Marin, there would have been no need to continue the tedious task of cutting into the window. They could have just gone back the way they’d come.

“Marin and the Selpe brothers disappeared. Suddenly.” Leonidas began to pace. “As though the floor opened up and swallowed them whole.”

“No, not the floor. A portal,” said Silas.

Except that portals did not randomly appear out of nowhere and suck people inside. Portals were permanent. Ever present and always in the same place.
Peek-a-boo portals would not provide a very useful form of transportation, now would they?

In response to her unvoiced protestation, Silas added, “There are tales of vanishing portals, Ariella. Portals that appear only every few hours or even days.”

She cringed. Perhaps, he’d read the skepticism on her face, or perhaps he’d just read her thoughts. She hated not knowing which.

“Those are old stories, Silas. Just whimsical fairy tales.”

“Perhaps.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps not.”

“No one has ever seen one of these vanishing portals. No one can even create any sort of portal anymore. It’s a magic long since gone from this world.” And the last time she’d seen someone try, it hadn’t ended well.

His face remained set. There was no question of what he believed.

Ariella sighed. “The Helleans have been around only since about a decade after the Xenen expulsion, right?” she asked Leonidas.

“Yes. They showed up around the same time as the Avan and Selpe empires were formed. It was a busy time.”

“That was over five centuries ago, which is nearly another two centuries after the Elition portal system was formed. Seven hundred years,” she stated. “No new portals have been created since then. No one knew how to do it. Do you see where I’m going with this, Silas? You’re speculating that someone created a highly unusual and never before seen type of portal in a floating city that was built two centuries after the only person who knew how to create portals died. Died in the process of creating the portals, I might add.”

“Actually, the floating cities didn’t start popping up until just over a hundred years ago,” Leonidas pointed out. “It’s a fascinating tale. Packed with plenty of action and espionage, of course.”

His eyes drifted upward in an expression of blissful contemplation that reminded Ariella of Marin. She always looked like that whenever she was prattling on about some technological doodad or another.

“Ok, then six hundred years after the creation of our portals. Better yet,” she said, arching an eyebrow at Silas.

“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe possible,” was his cryptic reply.

Ariella certainly didn’t doubt that. “But have you seen a vanishing portal? Or have you seen anyone create a portal recently?”

He said nothing. That answered that then.

“We still have two minutes,” Leonidas said, checking his watch. “Maybe I can still get some answers out of that man outside the room.”

“You are asking the wrong questions,” Silas spoke suddenly, his eyes whitening as he looked at Ariella. “What you should be asking is why this window hasn’t been repaired when everything else was.”

“Actually, I was wondering just that,” said Leonidas. “Enlighten us.”

“A lure. Something to keep us standing here, contemplating the nonsensical. Something to…”

“Silas?” Ariella asked.

She extended a hand toward him. Not only had his eyes gone white, but his face flushed pink and his chest heaved, as though he were breathing the thin air of a mountaintop terrain. Except he was an Elition Phantom. And he was Silas. Silas Thorn was never flushed, and he was never out of breath.

“Silas, what’s going on?” she asked.

“It’s been so long,” he grunted, holding onto the wall for support. The plaster split and crumbled between his fingers. “It’s happening.”

Leonidas rolled his eyes. “Well, that’s not vague at all.”

“Enough,” Silas spat through clenched teeth. “Look.”

Ariella turned, gasping as she saw it, a ripple in the air. It was a distortion that twisted everything around it, like looking through a pool of thick soapy liquid. Silas’s shoulders drooped, as though the weight of a building sat upon them.

A moment after Ariella saw it, she felt it—not a weight but a dizzying whirl of screeches and colors. She stumbled and would have tumbled to the floor had Leonidas not caught her arm.

“What the hell is going on here?!” he shouted at them.

Ariella closed her eyes, and the next moment the vertigo vanished. A familiar—yet unfamiliar—jolt shot through her body. She knew what she would see
—
or not see
—
before she even opened her eyes.

The lab had vanished. Silas was right. She looked at him long enough to receive a cool stare, then turned around to take in the scenery.

In place of the sterile lab, they stood in the middle of a forest of trees so tall and thick that they blocked out most of the sunlight. She tried to place the plants, but they were all unknown to her.