Page 126 of Heir

“If you wanted them alive,” R’zwana snarled, “you shouldn’t have killed so many, Martial.”

J’yan knelt beside the man but shook his head. “I can’t wake him. I’d need a Khind to heal him first,” he said. “We’ll have to wait for him to wake up on his own.”

R’zwana took out a pair of brass beaters from the pack slung across her chest. “Stand aside.”

“No.” Quil turned his body so she couldn’t get at the Kegari man. If they didn’t get answers out of this pilot about the war camp and the Tel Ilessi, this entire operation would have been for nothing. Quil didn’t have time to argue with her about interrogation methods.

His magic, quiet for so many weeks, stirred.It’s the only way, it seemed to whisper.

“I need you to leave.” He looked at the three of them. “All of you. Burn the Sails.”

“You don’t tell me what to do out here, Martial—”

“Go,” Sirsha snapped at her sister. “Or I’m going on without you. You can’t track. You won’t be able to find us.”

R’zwana looked at Sirsha with revulsion, but something else, too. Fear, perhaps. She took a branch from the fire and stalked off, J’yan and Sirsha following.

Quil settled himself in front of the unconscious pilot, considering. He could ponder every consequence of what he was about to do. Or he could just do it.

He lifted his hand to the man’s forehead and let a trickle of magic flow through him, hoping Sirsha was too distracted to sense it.Show me the camp.

Quil had never made a request like this of his magic. But all Sirsha’s talk of emotion and element had made him wonder in the past few weeks if he’d been asking the magic for memories without even realizing it.

Please, he added.

His magic flared, and images filled his head. The man walking out to a flat expanse of earth, the ocean crashing in the distance. Getting into the seat of a large Sail as crewmen loaded the weapons chutes.

The man pushed his arms through two sleeves, the fingers of his right hand dipping into a bowl with a hunk of hard white metal at its center.

As soon as he touched it, it turned to liquid, shooting along the pilot’s skin and through the hollow reeds of the Sail, bringing it to life. The liquid seemed to bond with the man, becoming not just part of the Sail’s structure but part of the pilot’s.

An engine hummed, and the pilot was aloft, spiraling up, the ground dropping away. Quil caught a glance of coastline, a large inlet with a huge arch formation beyond the beach, and an estuary splayed to the south of it.

Now, Quil thought,the Tel Ilessi.

Abruptly, he was shoved out of the man’s mind. He found himself back in the ravine, his blade loose in his hand. The Kegari man’s eyes were open, bloodshot.

“Rue la ba Tel Ilessi!” The man thrust out his jaw, as if even thename of his leader gave him strength. “Kill me if you must, Martial,” he growled in Ankanese. “Kill us all. But we will not betray our Tel Ilessi.”

The pilot lunged forward. R’zwana had failed to tie him up properly, and Quil had been too enamored with his magic to check. He snatched the dagger at Quil’s belt and plunged it into his own throat. Quil pressed his hands against the wound to stanch the bleeding. But it was useless. The man was dead—along with any chance of learning more about the Tel Ilessi.

35

Sirsha

From a rise in the prairie where the grasses hid them, Sirsha and the others looked down at the Kegari war camp, a sprawling mess of tents and fires, clotheslines and supply wagons. The sky-pigs had erected it in a shallow bowl of prairie about a half mile from the Thafwan coast. The top of the bowl was littered with boulders and scrub and rocks—which meant plenty of places to scout from with no one the wiser.

The only part of the camp that wasn’t haphazard was the airfield on a swath of cleared land north of the camp, where hundreds of Sails lay in neat pools of canvas and reed, awaiting riders, and, Sirsha suspected, the liquid metal that gave them life.

It looked like any other military camp. Not a hint of anything supernatural.

But Sirsha felt the killer in the nausea that plagued her, the vaguely unpleasant stench in the air. The murderer lurked like a family secret somewhere in that muddy labyrinth, along with the Tel Ilessi. If Sirsha wanted to find her mark, she’d have to get closer.

Sirsha glanced at Quil crouched beside her, the fading light silhouetting him in gold. He said he’d persuaded the Kegari to tell him where the encampment was. But Sirsha suspected otherwise. She’d felt a twinge of—something—from Quil’s direction during the interrogation. When she dug for it again, it was gone. And when she’d asked the elements for help, they’d shown her the monster’s path instead, fixated on her mission.

“The moment you kill the Tel Ilessi, get out,” she told Quil now. “Get to the horses and we’ll meet you.” She looked to J’yan and R’zwana,whispering to each other a few yards away. “J’yan should be able to keep us hidden all the way in.”

“How long will the binding take?”

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