The Sylph Hunter (9 page)

They’d done a pretty thorough job of it as well. After a few minutes of walking, making their way over or around the wreckage, Devon and Xehm came at last to a place where the catwalk and all of the cages were simply gone. There was nothing but fifty feet or more of air between them and where the catwalk resumed on the other side.

Xehm looked nervously over the side, hanging on to part of a cage as he did. Devon didn’t blame him. He was hanging on to the closest intact cage himself. “I didn’t realize it would be like this,” the old man said, his voice echoing a bit in the emptiness. “Can there be anyone down there?”

“This wouldn’t stop a sylph,” Devon said. “There could be hundreds of them.”

“Are you sure? I know I suggested coming here, but perhaps we should go back.”

And ask a battle sylph to introduce them to his queen? Not a chance. “We go down,” Devon said, even as he wondered if it was possible. There didn’t look to be any way to climb safely.

I can carry you,
Airi said.

Devon shuddered at the thought. Airi was strong enough to lift
him and could even manage two people for short distances, but the experience was terrifying. Devon loved Airi and trusted her with his life, but his dread of heights…His dread of battle sylphs was worse.

“Okay,” he gulped. He turned to Xehm. “Airi will get us down.”

The old man looked puzzled, staring at him in confusion. Devon just took a deep breath, stepped to the edge of the catwalk, and raised his arms over his head.

Airi wrapped her winds around his arms, getting a good hold, and lifted him off the ground. Xehm yelped at the sight, but Devon had his eyes squeezed tightly shut, afraid to look as she carried him forward and then lowered him, dropping him down quickly as his shirt hunched up and air much cooler than that on the surface chilled his sweaty skin.

I’m going to set you down,
she told him.

Devon opened his eyes. He was near a stone floor, only a few inches above it as she waited for him to prepare himself. He braced himself and she lowered him that last little bit, setting him on his feet.

“Thanks,” he told her and her winds swirled around him, hugging him warmly before sweeping his head wrap off and spiking his hair into a single ridge from front to back. Giggling, she left to get Xehm.

Devon took the time to get his racing heart rate under control and look around. He seemed to be at the lowest level of the pens, the metal cages torn to shreds around him. A minute later he heard a nervous yelp from above and looked up.

Xehm was falling slowly toward him, though he seemed instead to be racing down an invisible hill as his legs churned madly, running in place while he kept his arms above his head in what looked like a victory salute. Devon had to hide a smile. It looked silly, but he knew how terrifying the experience was. It appeared that Xehm wasn’t any braver than he was.

Airi set Xehm down and he dropped to his hands and knees, panting. Devon hunkered down beside him, putting one hand on the old man’s bony shoulder. “Sorry about that,” he apologized. “It’s easier if you keep your eyes shut.”

“I was afraid she’d drop me!” Xehm gasped.

Never.

“Airi would never drop you. She hasn’t dropped me yet anyway.”

I dropped your grandfather once,
Airi admitted.
I was very young though and he was very drunk. He kept squirming. Your grandmother was unimpressed when he crashed through her roof. Then again, she wasn’t your grandmother yet.

Devon blinked and finally decided he really didn’t want to know. “Come on,” he said, standing again. “I think they must be this way.”

They walked across the scrapped remains where the cages had originally been bolted into the floor, heading toward a corridor clear of the wreckage on the other side. A dim light glowed down it, but Devon wasn’t entirely sure that meant there was a sylph down that way. A fire sylph in a central location could light up miles of tunnel using carefully placed mirrors.

“I’m not sure we’re going the right way anymore,” Xehm said uncertainly behind him.

Devon shook his head, not completely sure himself, but too curious not to look now. They’d come too far to turn back. “What do you think, Airi?” he asked.

I can feel a sylph,
she said.
I think
.

“Airi says there’s someone down there,” Devon said and walked into the corridor, small and nearly claustrophobic after the huge area where the cages used to be. The corridor was square and squat, with sharp man-made angles, but there were periodic areas of destruction along the walls and floor, spots no more than a few feet wide where the smooth stone was pockmarked. Devon walked around the strange holes, not sure what they were. Xehm just followed after him, his lips firm, and Devon wondered suddenly if the old man was frightened by the closed-in spaces.

Before he could suggest that they go back, despite his own personal curiosity, the passageway opened up again into another room. It wasn’t anywhere near the size of the cage room, but somehow, it was far more grandiose. The walls were covered in frescos of colored stone, showing hundreds of years of the subjugation of sylphs by the people of Meridal. The pictures didn’t present it that way, all of the sylphs depicted instead as being blissful with the chance to serve, but the rest of the room proved the lie to that.

In the center of the circular room’s marbled floor, an altar stood, the top flat and unadorned, though even from where they stood, they could see the surface was black from dried blood. Most sylphs were drawn through the gate by offerings of skill, but hundreds of women had been sacrificed on that altar to trap the battlers. Devon stood in the entrance, staring at the altar and the great circle imbedded in the floor around it, and felt as though the deaths of all those people were soaked into the place, reaching out to draw him in. The room even reeked of it, the acrid smell of copper strong in his nose. Airi pressed against Devon’s back, cold.

“This place is horrible,” Xehm whispered. “It’s nothing but death.”

This was where the sylphs were supposed to be gathered to celebrate their victory? In this place? Devon didn’t see any sylphs. He saw the same large pockmarks on the floor and walls as in the corridor, and something else that he didn’t recognize until he forced himself to walk forward and take a closer look.

What he saw made him jump back in horror. The blood wasn’t just on the altar. There were pools of it scattered everywhere on the floor, so thick in spots that it still looked to be tacky, and when he moved close, his stomach roiled at the stench of it. Devon stared at the blood and felt his gorge rise, even as Xehm stepped up beside him and gasped. Suddenly, he wished he still had his boots on, so that his bare toes wouldn’t be so close to it.

“What did this?” Xehm gasped. “The battlers?”

Not the battle sylphs, Devon thought. They could destroy things, but they blew up their target and everything around it. If they’d done this, the blood would have been splattered, not pooled, and there would have been a lot more damage to the room itself than the odd hole. Something inside of him screamed that this was done by something else entirely and he had a suddenly incongruous wish that Zalia was there with him, just so he could assure himself that she was all right.

“Airi?” he whispered. “Are there any sylphs here?”

The little sylph pressed against his back, easily as terrified as her master. She didn’t flee though. Not even though she could have grabbed him and raced back the way they’d come, out into the fresh air of the city. Neither of them knew if it was any safer up there anymore, not after what they’d seen only the night before last at the harbor.

“Airi?” he repeated.

Yes,
she said at last, shivering against his back.
I can feel one. She’s hurt and so frightened. She’s hiding. I wouldn’t have felt her at all if I weren’t so close.

Devon frowned. Why would an elemental sylph hide? Back home, any of them who were in danger screamed for the battlers. They certainly hadn’t seemed too concerned outside. Perhaps they’d already dealt with the problem, though if they had, why was she still hiding? Why would she hide at all if the battle sylphs were the cause of all this blood?

“There’s a sylph here,” Devon told Xehm. “Airi says she’s hurt somehow. Maybe she can tell us what happened.”

“I don’t think I want to know,” Xehm whimpered. The old man was pale, his brown skin tinged with gray, and he shivered where he stood. Devon didn’t blame him. He also didn’t agree.

“I don’t want to have whatever did this do it again,” Devon argued and turned completely to face his sylph. He couldn’t see her, but he could feel little kisses of air on his face. “Can you talk to the sylph?” he asked her.

Yes,
she said and flitted away.

“Make sure we can see you,” Devon called after her. He didn’t want any more surprises.

Sand on the floor, blown even to these depths from the surface, suddenly lifted, caught in a tiny whirlwind, and formed the outline of a skinny human girl. It was easier for Airi to make those kinds of shapes than to actually become solid, and right now, probably felt safer for the little creature as well, even if that safety was an illusion. She crossed the floor to a corner far from the corridor they’d come in by, to where a gouge in the floor was nearly five feet deep, though only two feet across. Airi hovered on the edge of the pit, looking down.
She’s down there.

“Did she do this?” Devon asked, indicating the pit as he walked up to the edge.

No. I think something tried to dig her out. Oh, Devon, I’m scared.

“So am I,” he murmured.

“What is it?” Xehm asked, stopping beside him.

“I don’t know yet.
Airi, do you?”

I don’t want to know. I’m scared.
She dived down, fading back to invisibility as the grains of sand that made her up splattered against the ground beside the dark circle of what looked like a much smaller hole, right in the center of the pit. Left on the rim, Devon had the sudden feeling that Airi did know what was going on.

Airi did indeed have a suspicion of what was happening, though the thought of it made her want to grab her master and fly for home, fly until her pattern gave out on her. It wasn’t anything she’d ever encountered herself, but her home hive had stories. Stories of disappearances and deaths, and the scars of outright attacks still marred the outer layers of her birth hive itself, even after centuries, left as a reminder of what could happen to even the most prosperous of hives.

Airi shuddered and made her way down the narrow airhole that the earth sylph had left. If she was right in her suspicions, then an earth sylph was the only type of elemental with any hope of surviving it. It was only their walls that could hold the monsters out and she’d taken an incredible risk leaving even such a tiny way in.

The reason why she’d done it became apparent a moment later, as Airi flowed into a hollow in solid stone, bored nearly fifty feet below the chamber. The edges were rough, the entire thing obviously formed in a few bare instants of strength and panic, leaving the sylph herself too weak to get back out. Or rather, too weak to get her master back out.

A man lay insensate on his side in the hollow, the marbled form of his sylph lying embraced with him, though the stone of her couldn’t have been warm for him and the hollow itself was very cold. Airi cautiously fluttered down, afraid of what the older sylph would do, but her pattern was hurt as well as exhausted. She’d been just fast enough to live, but not to keep from injury.

Go away,
the earth sylph breathed, unmoving.

I can’t,
Airi told her.
I have to help.

She drifted closer, studying the earth sylph’s pattern. She was from a different hive, but unlike Ocean Breeze, she wasn’t even an air sylph. Airi didn’t feel as though she had any way to relate to the other sylph except for in the one similarity they both shared.

My master is above,
she told the sylph.
He wants me to help you. My name is Airi. My master is Devon. What’s your name?
The earth sylph was silent.
What’s your master’s name?

There was a long pause.
Gel,
the sylph said at last.
I’m Shasha. I…can’t get him out.