Lark Ascending (11 page)

“Tamren,” I said—nothing. “Tamren!” I shouted more sharply.

His eyes refocused, blinking. “Miss Lark,” he said, voice thick and rusty.

“Did you hear what I said?” I gave his arm a squeeze, the one not covered in scratches from the pixie needles. “I said I'm going to stop them.”

Tamren nodded. “I believe you, Miss Lark.” But then his eyes slid away again. “She—she'll save us.”

I lifted my head again, letting myself focus back on Eve. Even I could feel the power behind her voice, the confidence and grace and charisma. People were standing taller, breathing easier. The fear was ebbing.

“With your help,” she was saying, her white eyes sweeping across the crowd, bathing everyone in the gentle warmth of her smile, “I can protect us. Stay at my side. Have faith.”

I tried to concentrate, to sense whether she was actually
doing
anything, but I couldn't perceive much beyond the general flare of magic writhing within her. “She's going to stupefy them into standing here while the pixies come,” I said, heart sinking.

Tamren didn't answer, but I wasn't speaking to him. I turned toward Oren—or toward where I had expected him to be, at my side. He was gone. Heart suddenly pounding, I scanned the crowd until I spotted him, standing with the others, listening to Eve speak.

“I will go with you,”
said a crystalline voice by my ear.

“Nix,” I whispered. “What's going on?”

“I believe she offers them something they cannot resist,”
Nix answered.
“Not even that one.”

“What?”

But Nix only thrummed thoughtfully, wings fluttering and stirring my hair.

I checked Tamren's bandage again, but there was no sign the gash was bleeding through. So I stood and made my way back to Oren, reaching for his arm. He turned as soon as I touched him, and I tried to see from his gaze whether he was as muddled as the medics. But it was too hard to read him.

“Let's go,” I said, keeping my voice calm with an effort. “The pixies came in through the same entrance we came through, the one Tamren was guarding. If we go now we might be able to stop them before they find their way to the Hub.”

Oren nodded slowly. But when I started to turn away, my hand still in his, he resisted. “I'm going to stay here,” he said.

My hand went limp. “What?” I whispered.

Oren tilted his head toward Eve, who was now addressing individuals in the crowd, smiling and reassuring them. “If the pixies get past you, these people will need someone to help them.”

“You mean Eve will need someone to help her,” I said. I couldn't hide the bitterness in my voice, and as soon as I heard it my heart shriveled.

But Oren only shook his head, his mouth twitching into a smile, grim as his voice was. “Lark, it's me. I wouldn't stay behind if I didn't think it was right. But you heard Nix, there's nothing I can do against these pixies. You've got the magic; you can fight them. But if they break through, Eve will need as many level heads here as possible to evacuate the people. I can help there.”

If they break through,
I thought,
it'll be because I failed, and I'm dead.

Oren had never once left me to fight alone. I tried not to think of it as abandonment, tried to see it as the compliment it was. That he believed I could win, that I didn't need him looking over my shoulder. But instead I could only see the way Tamren's eyes glazed over as he listened to Eve. Nix buzzed quietly on my shoulder, for my ears alone. Not even Oren, Nix had said, could resist whatever Eve offered.

I could lose everyone and be fine. I could lose Tamren, and Kris, and my brother; I could lose every person here, and I'd be just as strong. But I couldn't lose Oren.

He must have sensed my turmoil, because he turned to face me properly, pulling me in close so he could dip his head and brush his lips against mine. “You've faced so much worse than this,” he said softly. “If you trust me, believe me when I tell you that you don't need me.”

It was true there was little he could do to help me in this kind of fight. But I wanted him anyway. I always wanted him. His faith in me made mine stronger.

I wished I could believe his decision was only logic and had nothing to do with the woman in white on the dais, murmuring gently to the crowd. But I nodded and stepped back. His arms fell away.

“Good hunting, Lark.”

The darkness in the tunnels closed in around me as I retraced my steps back toward Tamren's exit. I could have brought a lantern, but I didn't know whether these upgraded pixies were like Nix. If they had eyes, like it did, then they'd be able to see the light.

And so I stumbled along, trying to do what Eve had done in the memory-dream that we'd shared. She'd somehow managed to see using magic, casting it out in an arc before her and reading the way it bounced back from the stones. Between my half-blind groping and Nix's help, I managed to pick up my pace with only a few scrapes on my knees and one barked shin.

My pounding heart sent the blood rushing past my ears, roaring like the waterfall at the summer lake. There I'd been running from the shadows. Now I was running
to
the pixies. I tried not to dwell on the fact that I was pretty sure I'd prefer shadows. At least they were something like a real opponent.

“Wait,”
Nix buzzed into my ear.
“Stop.”

I skidded to a halt, shoes sliding in the muck lining the floor of the tunnel. I wanted to ask the pixie what it had heard, but my whisper would carry. I waited, tingling.

“Tamren's door is just ahead,”
Nix thrummed.
“They haven't broken through yet. But they're close.”

Now that Nix had alerted me, and my own footsteps were no longer masking it, I could hear the faint pinging and grinding sounds. They were trying to cut their way in. I hurried forward until I reached the door, stopping just short of it. I ran my palm down its surface. I closed my eyes, reaching out with my magic, trying to get something, anything, even a hint of the shapes swarming around the exit. Nothing came.

The sounds were growing louder, and I risked a whisper. “I can't get to them through the door,” I gasped to Nix, feeling sweat beginning to form at my temples, along the nape of my neck. Despite the clammy chill of the tunnels, my skin burned.

“You'll have to open it to fight them.”

I shook my head, leaning against the door. The metal vibrated against my skin, quaking under the efforts of the swarm beyond trying to get inside. “I can't tell how many of them there are. There could be three of them—there could be three hundred.”

“They will get through that door,”
said Nix.
“Wouldn't it be better to be ready?”

Fight them on my terms. It made sense—except there was no way to be certain I could handle what was on the other side of the door. I leaned in close, pressing my ear to the cold metal. If my magic couldn't sense what was out there, maybe one of my other senses could.

I could hear them out there, whirring and grinding and clicking, testing the seams of the door and slamming against the hinges. The wheel-lock was too heavy and too tightly sealed; they were trying to break their way in. At least one at the top of the hinges; one at the bottom; one at the lower edge of the door, where I could hear that incessant, shrieking grinding sound. At least three. No, four. There was a whining whir that buzzed from top to bottom; five. My ears continued to adjust, and I picked out a sixth, a seventh, an eighth distinct sound. My heart sank more and more with each new sound.

Maybe if I waited, Eve would come. If I stood guard here and held my ground long enough, perhaps she'd come to help me. Nix thrummed impatiently. “I'm thinking,” I snapped.

Then a new sound broke through my indecision. A quiet, metallic pinging came from somewhere over my head. It was too dark to see, but I'd thought there was only stone overhead, nothing that could make a metallic sound.

The tone of the pixies beyond the door shifted. The grinding stopped, and then the hammering at the hinges too. One of them gave a whining buzz that reminded me of Nix when it got overexcited. It came again, a little further along; it was moving, whatever it was.

Abruptly a memory flashed into my mind. These had once been sewer tunnels. When Basil taught me how to navigate the tunnels near our apartment and the school, he'd taught me to look up—the tunnels were all the same, but for the network of pipes that ran overhead, connecting all the buildings to each other and to the water main.

The pixies were in the pipes.

I leaped back, eyes trying frantically to focus without any light. It was so dark I couldn't tell whether my eyes were open or closed. But one thing had changed: the pipes were made of copper. I could see now.

The instant I called on my second sight I could see them. Overhead, through the copper, was a line of tiny machines, glowing with magic, crawling along a narrow section of pipe that led straight back toward the Hub.

“Lark—”

“I see them,” I hissed.

The shadow lurking inside me swelled, alerted by the adrenaline coursing through my system. Finally, here was prey I'd let it have. I reached up, grasping at the magic of the pixie in front, and gave a savage twist. It was barely more than a drop to the vast desert that was my inner shadow, but the pixie overhead went dark.

The others paused for a moment, processing the unexpected, instantaneous death of one of their number. Then, as I gathered myself for a second strike, all hell broke loose.

As one, the pixies in the pipe rushed downward with so much force that the soft copper tore from its socket. And like water from a broken dam, the pixies were free. They surged outward in a wave, filling the air with flashes of light and sound. Razor-sharp wings buzzed my face; something tore at my hair; I opened my mouth to scream, and one of them grabbed at my lip.

I swatted it away, flailing out in darkness, senses and magic battling for dominance. In every way except my magic I was blind, but the pixies were moving so quickly that my magic couldn't track them. I tried to strike out at a glowing streak just above my head, but by the time my darkness found it, it was already gone.

A metallic scream somewhere in front of me told me that Nix was waging its own battle, fighting against its brethren. Something crashed to the floor and shattered, and I knew at least one of the pixies was down. I couldn't tell how many there were—dozens, at least. And we'd only killed two.

Something slid in under the collar of my shirt and then went racing down my spine, a thousand needlelike legs stabbing into my skin. I gasped and threw myself back against the wall with enough force to daze myself, hearing the crunch of delicate mechanisms between me and the stone. The pixies were everywhere, swarming in my hair, against my face, crawling up the legs of my pants. One landed on my hand, and even as I tried to shake it loose, I felt it prying at my fingernails, trying to rip them away.

“Nix!” I screamed, unsure if my only ally was even still alive—that crashing pixie earlier could have been my friend. “Help—”

But if Nix was out there, it was too busy to come to my aid. I gathered up all my magic in a knot, letting it build and build until my ears sang with the pounding of my heart—and then I let it explode in a wave, knocking the pixies away.

For a moment, I could see everything. As the magic I'd just released ricocheted back to me, it was like dropping a torch down a bottomless well—the light rippled through everything and then vanished again. But I had what I needed. The pixies moved too fast to catch with my magic, but I could still target something that wasn't moving.

I spun and sprinted back down the corridor toward the Hub. My blast of magic had only bought me a few precious seconds, but a few seconds was all I needed. The pixies were faster than I was; I could hear them gaining on me, screaming the mad, vindictive whine that I'd heard only once before, a sound that still haunted my nightmares. This time there was no Wall to escape through, no leap of faith I could take to leave them behind.

Then the ground crumbled underneath me and my foot rolled on a loose cobblestone. “Nix, get clear!” I had no idea where my ally was, but I had to trust it could get out of the way. I threw myself forward, hitting the cobblestones and rolling. As soon as I slid to a halt I lashed out with my magic; out, and
up.

There came a loud groaning of earth and stone, but for a moment nothing else happened. I pulled with all my might, seeking out a weakness in the arched, cobbled ceilings of the tunnel. Then something splashed heavily into the muck and a handful of sand pattered against my face; and then the entire ceiling was caving in.

I curled into a ball, lifting my arms to cover my neck. I'd been aiming for the ceiling halfway down the corridor, but the whole tunnel was coming down, and rocks pelted my arms and shoulders, the force knocking me half unconscious when one ricocheted against the back of my head.

Then, as abruptly as it began, the cave-in was over. For a long moment I couldn't move, and my panic surged. I was trapped. I was buried alive, and no one would find me, they'd all stay wrapped up in Eve's magic and no one would ever know what happened to me—

But then the adrenaline faded a little, and I found I was merely frozen, fear and shock turning my limbs to iron. Slowly, I willed the feeling back into them and managed to push up onto my hands, sending pebbles and dirt cascading onto the rubble around me. Behind me, the entire tunnel was a solid pile of rock now. I reached out with my magic, trying to find any signs that there were pixies unharmed.

There, a flash of magic. I turned, focusing in on it, letting the shadow out.

“Lark, don't!”

I reeled back, trying to rein in the hunger. Then another streak seared across my brain, and I whirled. There was one pixie left, flying straight toward the Hub. I cast out, hoping I could substitute raw power for precision just once more—and plucked the pixie out of the air.