Page 134 of Fortune's Blade

The shield was in the palace, which would have been great except that the massive structure was currently teetering over an even more massive chasm. Or part of it was. A huge statue of a bearded man cracked and splintered and fell into the void as we approached, causing Antem to have to pull back to avoid being swept along with it.

He halted in the air near a decorative fountain of a type I’d never seen before, which had a stream of water leaping between pretty, flower covered islands on top of a bunch of descending pillars. Or at least, it had in the past. The delicate little thing had already lost two towers and a third was looking questionable.

As a result, the water was now flying off and hitting Antem in the face, who was too busy dodging falling stalactites to notice. And then apparently deciding that inside the crumbling edifice was safer than out here, where there was no cover of any kind. Because he darted through the main doorway, even as the statue guarding the other side of the entrance cracked down the middle with a sound that would have been deafening, except that everything was!

Louis-Cesare was yelling something as we hit a hallway large enough to fly through, but I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear him in my head, either, if he was trying that, because the chaos was drowning out everything, including my thoughts. The only things that registered were crashes, screams and explosions, the latter mostly from outside, although whether because more limestone teeth were clamping down on the city or because of the fireballs the dragons were spitting, I couldn’t tell.

And I didn’t care, as my body suddenly hit the ground when my former ride transformed in an eyeblink, rolled to his feet and went sprinting down a hall.

Louis-Cesare and I sprinted after him, through a maze of oversized corridors which Antem must have known well, as he was navigating them despite the fact that they were currently collapsing onto our heads. And there was a lot to collapse, with ceilings so high that darkness swallowed them, giving us no way of telling what was coming until a chunk was already falling. But I could see ominous cracks everywhere, and—

And there was another one, I thought, as Louis-Cesare took a hit, jumping in between me and a shattering wall, allowing the half ton stones to break on top of him instead of crushing me into a puddle of blood and bone. Then he swept me up and put me on his back, because we were going to lose Antem otherwise, who was not waiting for us.

Normally, I was almost as fast as Louis-Cesare, but with the dust billowing everywhere I couldn’t see basically anything, and doubted that he could, either. He was following the dragonkind by nose, although how he could in all this, I didn’t know. But that’s what being a first-level master gets you, I thought, right before he had to pull his final trick out of the bag, despite the fact that we’d been in here for less than a minute.

But there was no other choice when a dragon burst through a wall practically on top of us, and we burst into the vague, hazy world of the Veil, where the creature’s human form was hunched and waiting. And then unconscious and falling, as Louis-Cesare punched him with the force of a dozen men. I didn’t know if he recognized him as one of the enemy or was just being cautious, but I saw the dragon’s human form collapse, and his dragon side abruptly reappear in the Veil to protect him.

And then we were haring back out into real space just ahead of a burst of fire, and sliding down a collapsing staircase on our butts before catching up with Antem by skidding into him.

He paid us no more mind than the hundreds of screaming, pelting civilians clogging this artery, trying to get anywhere else. And then skewing and falling, like a fleshly waterfall, as the corridor abruptly tilted twenty degrees. People were screaming and scrambling, packs of belongings were spilling and rolling, and I was tripping and being thrown into a wall hard enough to wind me.

Louis-Cesare grasped my arm a second later, as we’d gotten separated by the jolt, and we stayed pressed flat against the wall for a moment, breathing hard. Until I spotted a smaller, mostly empty corridor down the hall a little way, and we made for that. I looked around for Antem, who had disappeared, thinking that he might have dodged in here, too, but didn’t see him.

“Damn it!” I yelled. “Where is he?”

Louis-Cesare just shook his head; he didn’t know, either. And I doubted that even a master’s nose was up to following a single line of scent through so many scared, sweating, people. I watched them stream by, half running, half falling, and wondered what the hell we did now.

And then my sister tore out of a room near the end of the hall, wild eyed and as naked as the day shew as born, followed closely by—

“Ray!” I screamed, loudly enough that he actually heard me and turned his head. And fell over because he was trying to put some trousers on and run at the same time and it wasn’t working.

He hit the carpet, his butt in the air, and Dorina sprinted away, although she sprinted poorly. The floor was no more level in here, although that shouldn’t have bothered someone of her abilities. But it was bothering her, with her hitting the wall, clawing her way off of it, trying to run again, and then sliding back down.

It looked like she was blindfolded or drunk or something—I didn’t know, and didn’t know what to do first.

But Louis-Cesare did. “Help him; I’ll get her!” he yelled, and ran after my sister.

Leaving me with Ray, who had fought his way free of his trousers and was sitting down, trying to pull them back on when he looked up and—

“The fuck?”

We stared at each other for a startled second, before I grabbed him and shook him and hugged him and—

“Why aren’t you dead?”

“Why do you look like you are?” he demanded, finally getting the damned trousers on and standing up. “What happened to your face? Or your hair?” He grasped my chin, turning it to get a better look at the swelling and the colors and the partly-shorn head, which was only now starting to fill in some gaps from a previous disaster. “I leave you alone for a few weeks and this is what happens?”

“Why. Aren’t. You. Dead?” I screamed, and then hugged him again, hanging on tight because I was afraid if I let go, he’d disappear.

That was fair since he’d already done it once, getting ripped to pieces by a bunch of Svarestri in the service of their queen, and then being swept away into Faerie with Dorina when she was initially kidnapped. I hadn’t seen him since, and had obviously assumed the worst. Because there was no way in hell he had survived something like that!

“You should stop underestimating me,” Ray said, as if he’d heard me, and then Louis-Cesare was back with Dorina, who he was trying to put his shirt onto but she wasn’t cooperating.

“Why is she naked?” I asked Ray, and then a thought occurred. “Wait. Why were you naked?”

“It’s not what it looks like,” he said, seeing my expression change. Because my sister, who was now fighting Louis-Cesare, looked drugged, and he looked—

I didn’t know, because Dorina took that moment to clock me upside the head.

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