The Skylighter (The Keepers' Chronicles Book 2) (35 page)

“You need me,” she shrieked, flinging her head from side to side. A thorn grazed her cheek, opening a slash across her face, and blood dripped down her throat, splattering the leaves like red rain. “You don’t know all the secrets of the beryllium, of how the collars work.”

“In a few hours it won’t matter.” He parted the leaves with a gentle hand, holding the collar wide. “You can be my head slave, still in charge of your own little cadre of followers. And with you and the boy, no one will be able to stand against me.”

Vibora screamed one last time, and then the collar clicked shut.

The whistle sounded, and Johanna edged toward the tunnel’s mouth. A few passageways connected the pits beneath the road, but most of them had collapsed with disuse.

The mine Johanna had been assigned was the smallest, perhaps eight feet across at its widest point and five times as deep. Terraces supported by half-rotten framework disappeared into the darkness. The openings were unstable, the edges overgrown with long meadow grasses and crumbling inward under too much weight.

So far Inimigo’s cavalry had kept clear of the holes. One wrong step, and the horses and their riders would tumble over the side.

The sparkling light of a shield glowed behind Johanna’s position, barricading the road that led into Performers’ Camp and blocking access to the valley. Johanna and the people hiding in the mines were beyond its protection. Rafi couldn’t extend the shield that far, and hold it for long, without draining his strength.

She pressed her back against the mine wall and tried to get an angle so she could see over its edge. Rafi was too far away to see clearly, but he stood tall and brave at the center of the road, midway up the hill; it was the perfect opening to the epic she was already composing in her head.

Like a beacon, young Rafael faced the approaching horde. Solitary and brave, blue light dancing off his fingers, he repelled the evil armies of the Nata.

Her teeth sank deep into her bottom lip. Everyone she loved had been taken from her in one way or another. Telling him how much she cared in a voice laced with
essência
seemed the fastest way to curse herself, turning a sweet love story into a heartbreaking lament.

It was better to keep silent than to speak their story aloud.

The soldiers in glittering armor, silver except for the golden fist emblazoned on the center of their chests, trotted past her position. They spread across the field in uneven clumps, avoiding the mine openings that speckled the ground like oversize anthills. The ends of the line curved in an effort to stop another group from flanking them. They were prepared for an attack, but no one would be ready for the trickery Johanna had planned.

Rafi yelled, warning Inimigo’s soldiers to stand down or they would be killed. They rode forward anyway. On the trumpet’s call they raised their bows and released their arrows with a musical twang.

Johanna closed her eyes, too terrified to watch. She knew the shield was there to protect Rafi, but it seemed a flimsy thing compared with the razor tips of hundreds of soaring arrows.

They struck the glowing barrier with the wet thunk of a knife sinking into a ripe avocado. Her pulse raced in her ears as she waited for one of the Performers to tell her that it was over, that one of the arrows had struck home, that Rafi was gone. Instead she heard the muffled surprise of the soldiers and dared to peek over the mine’s lip.

The arrows hung in the air, frozen in the sky. Rafi was safe. Johanna sagged against the mine wall, sending a prayer of thanks skyward.

Despite the result of the first attempt, the second group of soldiers approached, their pikes leveled at the shield.

Their leader raised his hand, but before he could lower it, Johanna nodded to her friends and they angled long ironwood tubes toward the line of soldiers. “Now!” They each stomped on the end of a bulb attached to the tubes, and clouds of Storyspinners’ smoke blasted onto the field from all the open mines. The powder itself wasn’t harmful, but it hung in the air, a dense fog, blotting out the horses and their riders.

Now, Rafi.

A blast of lightning stabbed into the haze, setting the entire thing aflame. It became a hail of sparks, landing on skin and coat, armor and saddle. Horses reared and screamed; riders fell in a clatter of shields and crunching bones.

Johanna and her small crew waited, anxious and impatient, for the last of the sparks to fall, then dashed over the edges of the mines and into the smoking fray. Groups of Performers swarmed out of their holes, fading in and out of the miasma like specters in a nightmare. Each was supposed to take down one rider and return to the safety of the mine.

The Firesword nearest Johanna lit his sword, and a steady flame licked along its length. He held it out to her, and she lit the tip of her tar-soaked arrow. “Go!” he shouted, slashing the nearest animal along the hamstring. Johanna’s arrow found its target, puncturing through layers of steel and into the man’s belly.

Her crew crept forward, running, leaping, tumbling across the field, using their agility to avoid contact with the disoriented soldiers. They dropped into a mine before the smoke cleared and their enemies could follow.

She prepared the next round of powder and prayed her diversion gave Jacaré the time he needed.

Jacaré always called it battle fever. It struck him moments, sometimes hours, before a fight was expected to happen. His heart thumped, blood rushing to his extremities, fueling the muscles that would hack and slice and destroy.

For some soldiers battle fever became battle frenzy, an uncontrolled fury that turned their vision red and made them susceptible to mistakes.

But Jacaré didn’t make mistakes in battle. The fever pulsed out of his veins before the fighting began and was replaced by something colder and infinitely more honed, dedicated to sharp, precise actions. His emotions, his anger, his horror, were buried under layers of crystalline ice. He could see what he was doing—cutting cleanly across one man’s midsection, continuing a spin to block a sword, snapping his elbow into an unprotected nose as he hurried across the field—but it was all part of a well-rehearsed dance. It was something he
did
. Not something he thought about.

He focused on his objectives: get behind enemy lines and find the Nata’s source of power. They had to weaken Sapo enough to defeat him. It would likely mean killing innocent people if Jacaré couldn’t remove the collars by himself, but it was the only way.

Across the field he saw Johanna drop into an open mine and disappear. The next blast of powder would come soon, and Jacaré had to be well on his way to the edge of Sapo’s shield.

Sticking close to the ground, he scurried through the trampled meadow and past the indentations of closed mines, heading northwest, cloaked in a twisted bit of light. It reflected the weeds around him, turning him into one more patch of windblown grass. The ruins of Roraima were on his right, the Citadel looming behind it. Sapo’s shield was centralized at the middle of his line of soldiers. The leader was hiding there somewhere, but he wasn’t visible.

Jacaré choked down the rush of heat, the need to cut off the head of the monster. But that wasn’t Jacaré’s assignment. At least not yet.

Rafi didn’t know what he was doing. He knew how to make a shield. He knew how to throw a lightning bolt and a fireball. He knew how to make the wind blow from the east, if it suited his purposes. Jacaré assured him he was doing well with so little training, but Rafi knew it wasn’t good enough.

It was just as Jacaré had said. Rafi was holding an impeccably crafted sword and had only the barest knowledge of what could be done with it. He could stab and block, but there was a significant difference between knowing those things were possible and mastering the best way to do them.

Sapo was a master.

Every single bolt of lightning, ball of flame, and harpoon of ice was pinpointed, smashing directly into Rafi’s shield or at its ever-shrinking edges. A blast of wind had blown away the smoke from Johanna’s second powder trick, and though the enemy’s numbers had been cut down by a third, they continued to advance.

Rafi had magical might, but his might couldn’t stand against Sapo’s mind.

“Lord DeSilva.” It was Ursu again. He pointed to one of the open mines. “Look.”

A group of bowmen had dismounted and formed a tight circle around the pits and fired their arrows into its mouth.

It was the mine Johanna and her friends had slipped into. Rafi tried to divide his power to maintain his shield and send a bolt of lightning toward the bowmen, but his control slid through his fingers. He shook out the tension in his hands, as if he’d actually held the power in his palms instead of in his mind, and flexed his knuckles before trying again.

As the soldiers planted a flag into the ground, Rafi managed to direct one more blast of lightning without dropping his shield. Four men fell to the field, smoke rising from their bodies, but it was too late. The purple banner flapped in an unnatural breeze; a trumpet blared. The bowmen all rushed away from the mine’s edge, dove to the ground, and covered their heads. An instant later the pit slammed shut, closing like a mouth, swallowing the Performers who were inside. And burying Rafi’s heart with it.

“Johanna.” He breathed her name. Frantic, his eyes scanning the field, he sought a specific Performer dressed in black.

Was she in there? Was she trapped?

Reaching a hand toward the pit, he tried to force the mine to reopen. A geyser of rock shot into the air, pelting the nearby soldiers, but the effort to move that much earth was grueling.

“Ursu!”

A hand landed on his back, then another and another. Rafi felt a small burst of energy, and he opened the mine’s mouth to half its earlier circumference.

An earthquake rolled, men and horses falling. Like a whip cracking, it followed the line of the road, smacking into Rafi’s shield and knocking him and his helpers off their feet.

The bright blue light wavered, but Rafi managed to regain control of the shield before it fell completely.

His hands shook. His heart thudded in his chest, but it was a slow, heavy beat, like the footsteps of an exhausted man.

Where was Johanna?

Six guards. Two at the tent door. One at each corner. Pira stepped over the bodies of the half-conscious slaves. They barely fluttered an eyelid at her passing, except for Críquete, who shifted to pillow her head more comfortably on her arm.

All the slaves were exhausted, their power being drained to fuel the battle raging beyond the tent doors. All of them except Pira. Her mind was unencumbered by Vibora’s—or worse, Sapo’s—presence. Her body and power were hers to control.

In the last moments, when Vibora could have used the dregs of her slaves’ power to make one last attempt to fight off Sapo, she had let Pira go. The other slaves who were connected to Vibora lay on the tent’s floor, sometimes thrashing as if against a bad dream, their eyes shut and their breathing shallow.

But Pira was free.

It’s some twisted sort of self-preservation,
Pira convinced herself as she crawled to the edge of the tent.
Vibora’s a slave now, and if she expects me to free her after everything she’s done, she’s dead wrong.

Ignoring the flash of guilt, she surveyed the soldiers’ shadows against the tent walls and tried to determine the fastest way to get past them.

“Good luck,” Críquete whispered. “Did you bring the hammer handle?”

Stricken by a sudden sense of dread, Pira froze, her hands trembling on the canvas’s edge. “I left it with Leão.”

“Oh, Pira.” The Seer gave an exhausted sigh. “Go to him. Now. Retrieve it. You’ll need it.”

Pira knew she was a good fighter, but she’d be pitting herself against very uneven odds. Perhaps it was weakness to give in to her fear; still, she asked, “Will we survive the day?”

“I know this,” Críquete answered, her voice small and tremulous. “If you go into battle with fear in your heart, you’ve already given the enemy an advantage.”

A sense of calm washed over Pira at the familiar words. “Jacaré used to say that.”

“He learned it from Tex.” Críquete’s eyes closed. “He was a wise man.”

Reaching back, she touched the Seer’s arm. “I’ll come back for you.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, I hope you will.”

“I
will
.” Pira took a deep breath, forcing the tension out of her limbs, finding the clearheadedness she’d lacked under Vibora’s control.

A guard stood with his feet spread wide and his back almost flush against the canvas. Pira slipped under the material, coming up directly behind him, and looped her arms around his neck. He was dead before he even registered her presence. She took one step back under the man’s sudden weight and brushed the tent wall.

The vibrating material alerted the guard at the next corner. “Hey!” He stepped toward her and whisked his weapon out of its sheath. “Stop!”

Pira slipped a dagger from the dead guard’s belt and threw it into the space between the approaching man’s breastplate and chin strap. He grasped the blade and tumbled forward.

A ball of condensed lightning slammed into the shield that stretched across the camp’s length. The sudden brightness nearly blinded Pira to the next soldier’s attack, but her affinity had returned. She ducked under the sword raised to run her through and came up inside her assailant’s guard. Her right elbow obliterated his nose, and her left fist knocked his teeth down his throat.

She shook the blood off her fist and smiled. Light, it felt good to be free.

Six fireballs smashed into Sapo’s shield, revealing for a moment its careful meshlike design and leaving it unaffected.

Lord Rafi’s attacks would never succeed while Sapo’s shield held, and Pira knew the quickest way to tear it down.

She turned toward the wagons and ran.