Page 145 of Fortune's Blade

If the Pythia was going to do anything, it had to be soon.

“Almost there,” she muttered, and her left arm disappeared up to the shoulder.

I jerked slightly in surprise, because there was no wound. No blood or torn flesh, no sign of damage at all. Her arm simply stopped and the sleeve along with it, as if part of her had been erased from this world.

“What the hell are you doing?” Marlowe demanded.

“What you asked for. Shut up.”

And to my surprise, he did, perhaps because those pale eyes had gone distant, as if she was seeing something other than the carnage all around us, and was no longer listening. She was still talking, however, although it didn’t make a lot of sense. “Gotta be here some—there! No, that’s the other one. God, she looks like shit.”

“Who does?” I asked worriedly, glancing around, but saw no one. Not even the redhead, who was still on the rocks above us, calling the storm. But the Pythia didn’t reply.

“Okay, Louis-Cesare is carrying her, so that must mean—no, damn it. That’s a pixie.”

“Oh for—let me see,” Marlowe snarled. And the next thing I knew, he was in her head. And he must have taken me along for the ride, because I was suddenly seeing a familiar party pelting down a shaking corridor that seemed weirdly lopsided, dodging bursts of flame from the duergars’ forges, and having a ceiling partly collapse on top of them.

“Dragons,” the Pythia said, before we could ask. “Attacking the capitol. Radella went back to—look, there she is!”

The queen appeared at the end of the hall, where the duergars’ area gave way to that of the trolls, and she had a group of her tiny guards with her. She looked terrified, furious and lethal, all at the same time, to the point that our party paused for a second as she raced up to us. I thought she was going to barrel straight through, but then a scarred, male pixie flew up, holding out something that stopped the queen in her tracks.

She just hovered in the air for a second, her small wings whirring, before diving at him and snatching a small bundle out of his arms, which she frantically checked over. “It’s okay,” someone said. “He’s fine. We got there in time.”

That was Ray’s voice—I’d know it anywhere—and it caused a wash of pure relief to go through me. He was alive! He had survived!

I wished I could see him, but the angle was off. He was out of my field of vision, mostly hidden behind a tall man with bulging muscles and a short brown hair cut. And then obscured even further by a swarm of pixies, who came from behind us and started talking all at once.

The queen waved them off. There were tears in those huge eyes of hers as she finally finished her inspection and hugged her son hard against her. Enough that he protested with a tiny squeak.

“You saved him,” she whispered, staring in Ray’s direction. “You saved my son.”

“Dory saved him,” he said, “and almost died as a result. She killed Steen—”

“That bastard!” Rage suffused the miniature features. “I would have liked the chance myself!”

“—but his people are still going wild and we can’t get the shield up—”

“It was damaged in the crash,” the muscle man said. He was unarmed and had his palms facing upward to show that fact, something that did not stop every pixie in the queen’s party from abruptly drawing swords on him.

“Everybody calm down!” Ray said. “He’s a dragon, but he’s with us.”

“Antem-Rael, son of Regin-Lar,” the man said. This meant nothing to me, but it must have to the queen, who called her people off. “I was sent by my father to restore the shield, but ran into some of Lord Steen’s men—”

“Just Steen,” the queen spat. “He deserves no title.”

“—but the mechanism cannot be easily repaired, and worst of all, your duergars tell me that the well that powers this city was cracked in the attack—”

“Well?” Ray repeated, sounding worried, probably because of the look on the queen’s face. “What well?”

“The city is powered by a well of energy from a ley line sink,” the queen answered, hugging her child. “The various communities that live here came together, siphoned it off, and created wards to contain it some years ago. It’s what allows us to move about and hide as we do.”

“It is a marvel of magical engineering,” someone else put in, but Ray wasn’t listening. Ray was flushing puce.

“Siphoned? What do you mean ‘siphoned’? Like gas?”

“I beg your pardon?”

But Ray was on a roll and wasn’t stopping. I had seen this before. “You’re telling me you siphoned ley line energy like you would gas from a pump, then just . . . drive around with it? Is that what you’re freaking telling me?”

---