Page 118 of House of Embers
The vault was empty.
Well, notcompletelyempty, but compared to how Zina had described it, this place was a ghost town. There was gold in chests and jewels on shelves but no magical artifacts, certainly not hundreds of them in a ballroom.
“Gods,” Kerrigan said as she stepped across the hard stone floor. “Bastian cleared the place out.”
Fordham cursed under his breath as he stalked the length of the enormous room. “We need to check everywhere just in case.”
“Do you think he’d take all the magical artifacts and leave the metal crown? It was in the book. Even if he didn’t know what it did, he’d take it.”
“Then he already has it. Would you prefer that?”
“No.”
“Then keep looking.”
Kerrigan moved through the space. It was massive. It must have been made for truly spectacular treasure back in the day. The fact that Bastian had completely emptied it gave her a foreboding feeling.
Alura had been the one to tell them that Bastian was buildinga magical artifact arsenal. It was Clover who had located one of the warehouses where it was being kept. They had assumed it was out of the mountain because keeping all their weapons under a mountain in a magic-suppressive room while planning a war just wasn’t practical. But Kerrigan had assumed that he hadn’t moved outeverything.
She’d been wrong.
They all had.
Bastian was two steps ahead of them, as he had been all along. Kerrigan had been the one to get him access to the vault in the first place. Of course he would seal it all up so she couldn’t get anything from it.
“He knew,” Kerrigan said as Fordham strode back toward her empty-handed. “He must have known.”
“How? Do you think we have a spy?”
“I don’t know who. Dozan is ruthless.”
“He always has been, but we had that slip with Barron,” Fordham reminded her. “Someone in the inner circle knew about our plans.”
“It could have been anyone. Dozan cleaned the place out after that. He only put people he trusted in the House of Shadows, and he has a dozen people in Draco Mountain as well, besides Alura, who did not know this had been cleared out.”
“It could be Audria.”
Kerrigan shot him a look. “Why? Because of Roake?”
He shrugged. “Maybe she does love him.”
“I don’t want to second-guess our allies. Who can we trust if we start doing that?”
“The fact of the matter is that our circle is no longer small,” he said as he rummaged through a chest. “When we got the dragons, it necessitated becoming larger. It could be anyone in Bryonica, Concha, Venatrix, or any number of other houses.” He threw aside the jewels that dumped out of a chest as he kicked over another, letting coins clatter to the ground. “It could be my own people. It could be the dragons for all we know.”
“We’re too big to be thinking like this.”
Fordham kicked over another chest in anger. “Fine. Let’s just use the crystal to check for the crown and then get out of here.”
Shadows bloomed in Fordham’s hand, and he reached into a pocket of the nothing and grasped a chunk of white crystal the size of his palm.
“Show-off,” she grumbled. She still hadn’t been able to make the Ollivier trick work for her even though Wynter claimed it was easier than jumping.
“Parlor tricks,” Fordham said with a shrug.
When Kerrigan had come back from the plane and told Fordham all that she had learned, he’d realized that they had this crystal in the House of Shadows. He hadn’t even known it was tendrille.
They’d toyed with it for a while to try to get it to work, and after much back-and-forth, they discovered that they could power it with some magic. It didn’t make much sense because tendrille negated magic, but the tendrille at the Holy Mountain held Ferrinix’s memory.
