“Or that she’s already gone through the gate, if that is the magic we sense.”
“If she’s gone through, the Raziq would have her.”
“If they did, I daresay we would know.”
I frowned. “How? It’s not like we’re in constant contact with them.”
“No.” He paused, squeezed through a particularly nasty narrow section, scraping both his back and his chest in the process. “But Yeska would inform us. He has a predilection for flaunting his victories.”
I snorted. “The more I learn about the Aedh, the more their reputation for being unemotional beings bites the dust.”
“They are unemotional, at least in the sense that humans view emotions. Love, desire, caring – they are unnecessary states in the minds of the Aedh. Hence the reason they do not live in family units.”
“So how come they developed a completely different mind-set to the reapers? I mean, you’re both energy beings, so I would think you’d both have a similar evolution.”
“Just because one comes from the same source does not mean evolution will follow a similar path.”
“True enough.”
It was my turn to squeeze past the tight spot. The stones that had torn into Azriel’s back now tore into mine. I winced and tried sucking in my gut in the vague hope it would also suck in my breasts, with little success. Thankfully, my sweater bore the brunt of the damage, the stones snagging the fleece and tearing several large holes into it. I guess I should be thankful I wasn’t overly endowed in that area, because the damage would have no doubt involved a lot more skin.
The tunnel continued to narrow, making me wonder if anyone else but hellhounds actually used this. The Razan Jak and I had seen in the other tunnel certainly hadn’t been thin, and yet he’d had none of the scrapes on his body that we seemed to be collecting. Maybe he’d been using a special oil or something that allowed him to slip through.
“The end is nigh,” Azriel said, after a few more minutes.
“I hope you’re talking about the tunnel and not anything else,” I muttered, and yelped as a particularly nasty stone caught my left breast. I rose on my tiptoes, squeezing past it without damaging my other breast, then sighed in relief as the tunnel immediately widened.
We finally came out into a cavern that had been hacked out of the stone and earth by something other than nature itself. The floor was mainly stone, and in the middle of it stood two massive stones. They were more than eight feet tall and a good four feet in diameter at their base, but rising to an almost needlelike point at the top. Unlike the stones we’d discovered in the other tunnel, which were mostly gray, these two glowed as brightly as a harvest moon. The flames of the two swords sparked the quartz within the stones to life, and sent rainbow-colored flurries across the earthen walls. These stones, like the others, were etched with symbols and markings. It was a form of cuneiform, and an ancient and powerful language that people from a long dead civilization had once used to call the Aedh to Earth.
My gaze swept the cavern’s floor. Surprisingly, these stones weren’t guarded. Not by a protection circle, at any rate.
“Perhaps not,” Azriel said, “but there is some form of magic active here.”
He took a cautious step forward. Energy trembled across my skin, its touch light and yet oddly distasteful. “Azriel —”
“I know.” He raised a hand. Sullen orange sparks danced across his outstretched fingertips as he moved to the left, feeling out the barrier’s dimensions. Predictably, it ringed the two stones completely. “I cannot feel any sort of break in it.”
I crossed my arms. “Unsurprising given neither of us knows much about magic. Do you think she’s already been here?”
He stopped beside me. “No. There is no lingering resonance in the air, and there surely would have been had these stones – positioned as they are on a major ley-line intersection – been used.”
I frowned. “So where the hell is she? I mean, she has to know we’re onto her now. You’d think her first port of call would be these stones and the gray fields. Surely she’d want that gate opened before we could stop her.”
“That is presuming, of course, she has created only one gate.”
I glanced at him sharply. “What makes you think she’d have more than one gateway?”
“Because, in many respects, it would make sense to do so.” He cupped my elbow and tugged me over to the far wall, away from the tunnel’s entrance and out of the immediate sight of anyone who might enter. Not that, I suspected, he actually expected anyone to enter.
“Why? I mean, creating gates that size” – I waved a hand toward the two stones – “has to take a lot of power, even if it is standing in the middle of a ley-line intersection.”
“Yes, but does it not seem odd to you that we found this building very easily? It’s not as if a great deal was done to conceal its presence.”
I frowned. “Well, it wasn’t exactly easy. I mean, the paper trail alone was hell —”
“Yes, but if she really wanted to hide it, she could have done so magically. Also, neither Ilianna nor the witches could find any great energy output coming from this area.”
I sat on my haunches and leaned back against the wall, even though my feet itched with the need to move, to do something other than just sit here. “Which was explained by some sort of spell restraining any visible output.”