Nasty Little Witchling

Unlike in Tamil, the tree being used to push up through the ground and into the sewer wasn’t brimming with mana. That and the lack of guards standing outside might have been done to avoid it getting found. However, this may not have been their main base of operations, and I’d just discovered their lavatory for all I knew.

It was still a good start, and I was tired of being in complete darkness with barbed quills shifting in my back. Before anyone else decided to use the tree to come in or out, I hurried off in the direction of a wooden door.

Without having a map to guide me, I had to hope it was an exit the knights were stationed outside. Otherwise, someone might get upset that a masked stranger was in their basement and trying to steal from them.

Another group of people were in the way, forcing me to take a longer route to the door. How these knights would get past them without alerting everyone was luckily not my job.

The iron lock for the door sat in pieces across the floor and at the bottom of the channel, a long creak announcing my entrance into the stairwell beyond.

Without waiting to see if I’d alerted anyone, I started to climb. Glass crunched under my boots as I got to the top of the passage, a ladder waiting to take me the rest of the way up to a hatch.

There were at least five mages waiting beyond, and hopefully, they were the knights Faraya had promised.

None of the groups around had contained many mages, so I felt safe in that hope as I climbed up. Keeping my sliced finger straight while trying to climb was futile, and I had to use my wrist to secure myself. Rushing to get the climb over with was the only thing on my mind as I pushed up the hatch.

I recoiled from the bright light assaulting my eyes. Hands roughly grabbed under my arms, yanking me up the rest of the way. My feet dangled in the air a moment before I was slammed into a wall, an arm pressing on my throat and keeping me just above the ground. I stretched out my toes, unable to find a perch to stand.

The parts of the quills still sticking out my back were bashed in further. A lightning spell similar to what Barick had used on me tried to latch on where another hand was gripping my shoulder. I panicked and brought up my knee to get more space between me and my attacker.

I reached for the small blade Talia had placed on my ankle. It easily slipped out of its sheath, and I drove it towards the person’s side.

The blade smacked against and slid off metal armour. I went for another stab lower down. The resistance I met was less solid this time, and the grunt of pain confirmed I’d hit flesh.

The arm on my throat was pulled away as shouts to stop came closer from elsewhere in the room. I slid down the wall, pressing a hand over my throat, coughing and trying to gulp down air at the same time. My eyes watered as I tried to get them used to the sudden change from never-ending darkness, with a few pulses helping fill in what was happening.

A knight with a fresh burn across his face was trying to free himself from the grip of his comrades. It might have been the blurry vision, but I recognised Knight Bowfore from Kiteer's train ride. She was speaking into his ear, calming him down enough so he didn’t look like he wanted to punch me.

I swallowed the saliva I’d inadvertently turned venomous in the exchange. Biting into his neck or arm wasn’t something I was interested in, yet I was seconds away from doing just that if the knife hadn’t worked.

A door bashed open at the top of a staircase in the cellar we were all in. “What’s the point of an ambush if y’all stomp around like a herd of beasts?”

The captain looked at me slumped in the corner near some crates pushed to the side of the hatch. Then she turned to her knights, her mouth agape. “You attacked our informant?”

“Get off me,” my attacker grunted and pulled himself free to prod at the knife wound. “Ma’am, they didn’t ripple before coming up. I feel it was my duty to restrain them before someone else got burnt.”

There was no way I was going to let this mess be blamed on me when I couldn’t even use their ripple code. Maybe a knock could have sufficed in hindsight, but surely these people had been told to expect someone they couldn’t sense.

“I—

The captain rubbed her temples. “No one informed him when he got back from the healers?”

There was silence in the cellar.

It was on the larger side, with crates of fruit and vegetables stacked below the skinned legs of animals hanging from the ceiling. It must have been for a restaurant because there was no chance a family would get through all this before it spoiled, even with the room's cooling enchantments.

“Answer me, damn it. And get a healer down here.”

I tried to wave her off, except my hand limply hung in the air until I gave up and let it flop to the ground. Despite now knowing I’d been fighting a knight, I was still pleased about the hilt still sticking out of his side. I even felt justified in sticking my other two blades in him if I got the chance.

“No, ma’am,” they said sporadically. A knight ran up the stairs past their captain to get a healer and probably escape the situation.

“I don’t need to see another healer, ma’am. I’m sure Bowfore can patch me up.”

“They’re not for you, Alargan,” the captain said through gritted teeth, gesturing to me. “What happened? I was assured you would get in and out without being seen.”

“A peluda got me,” I said, then pulled out the sponge in my nose through my face covering when they looked at me weirdly. “I found their hideout without being seen.”

“The person we decided to give our latest and greatest stealth enchantment to got caught by that bumbling creature?” the captain sighed. “Ancestors give me strength.”

The knight that had left returned with another, who I guessed was the healer despite them looking like any other knight.

The one I’d stabbed had his chest plate off, and shirt pulled up. My dagger had already been extracted, the damage undone. The healer knelt next to me and looked over my body.

“Skin, please.”

It was a weird request, so I took a moment to understand that he needed contact to try to heal me. I offered him my injured hand. “Gently, please. And you’ll have to use an area-based spell with my, ah, enchantment active.”

He carefully slid my glove off and let my hand rest in his palm. “Tsk, you did it badly, so that’s double the work for me. I’m going to need to break this again and fuse it back properly.”

“Ah,” he continued, more awkwardly. “I don’t have a spell for pain relief without targeting…so unless you can turn off that enchantment, bite down on this.”

I felt entitled to complain about that bit of information, yet I wasn’t able to talk around the piece of leather stuffed into my mouth. I fully understood why Polem hated being equipped with that piece of tack and couldn’t imagine someone yanking on it while sitting on my back.

I tried to concentrate on the awful taste of dirt and varnish as the healer sliced the pinkish skin and smashed the bone into small pieces. I squirmed against the wall, drawing my legs in and kicking them out again.

It was quick for him to heal it again, and I soon held out my hand, curling it to a fist as a test. Behind the kneeling healer, the others laid out thin maps on top of one another to represent the different layers.

“Anything else?” he asked, unable to use a diagnostic spell on me.

“No, thanks,” I lied on both accounts, unwilling to get undressed for him to access my back, only to then have him yank out the thoroughly buried quills without pain relief. He helped me to my feet, held out my glove so I could slip my hand back inside, nodded, and left me with the knights crowding the maps.

“Captain Oteli,” she said, holding out a fist. “Apologies for the rough introduction. I can call you Eidolon?”

“Sorry?” I said, watching Bowfore clean off the blood from my blade.

“That’s the moniker we got given for you,” Captain Oteli said with a shrug. “I’ll call you whatever you want if you can point out where we need to go to root these people out of our city.”

Her finger was placed on where we were, and I lifted the top map showing the streets above to trace mine over the sewer route back to the tree.

“What kind of dugout have they made for themselves?” Bowfore asked, holding out the dagger for me.

I placed it back in the sheath and wondered if she recognised my voice. “There’s a ladder in a hollowed-out tree similar to those in Tamil if you know what they were like.”

“We were there with Captain Riker and Leonarda. They’ll know we’re coming if we have to brute force it, but they might not have many avenues of escape even if they do.”

Alargan was sent away and tasked with running between the different squads to spread the information on the location and start a countdown for everyone to close in on it.

“I could go down first?” I said, to my surprise. “They won’t notice, and I can try block off any exits.”

“Hmm, I was told you would be our recon for this,” Captain Oteli said. “But, if you think you’re up for it, that sounds like our best move forward as long as you don’t stop to pet the peluda again. When will you head out?”

My brief hope that she would deny me faded along with the added offence about the peluda, mostly because she wasn’t entirely wrong.

A part of me had enjoyed skulking around in the sewer, avoiding patrols and coordinating with the critters. The other part was battered and bruised from my bad choices while skulking around in the sewer. I'd be fine now that I knew not to interact with the peluda.

“Now,” I said, placing a hand over the pocket Bitsy tried to escape from. He’d slept through the whole encounter and was now only waking up to the smell of food.

“Ma’am,” the returning Alargan said from above. “Leonarda’s squad learnt of a similar entrance through a captured patrol. They’ll hit it with Captain Riker. Captain Yesof will come in from the south and Captain Gharo from the east on our entrance. Watch is setting up a perimeter. Fifteen—fourteen minutes till commencement.”

“Thanks,” Captain Oteli said. “You’ve got maybe ten before they realise we’re coming. Focus on not letting out the ring leaders; we don’t care if some minnows escape the net.”

The hatch was opened for me, and I disappeared down into the darkness again. This time, I was going down with one hand because of an eager rat rather than an injury.

It was a simple task to make it back to the tree and ask it to open up for me, the lack of dense mana making it far more malleable. It was a tight squeeze after I let it close again. Groves had been formed into the wood with just enough depth to fit my fingers and the toe of my boots.

I widened them on my way down, sure the knights that’d follow behind me would also appreciate it.

Bitsy poked his head out of my pocket and quickly retreated when I informed him how long the drop was. He was a little annoyed with me for not letting him out in the cornucopia of food and then bringing him to this place. Guilt-tripping him about abandoning me at the peluda only worked until he reminded me that he had tried to sound the warning bells.

When I was almost at the bottom of the long descent, I stopped when I noticed a mage guarding the open exit.

A few rungs above me was a thinner section of stone that the tree’s growth had cracked all the way to open air. Mages tended not to notice my manipulations, but in this case, I wanted to be abundantly cautious. I moved the wood and bark out of the way and slowly widened the crack to let me slip through into slightly less darkness.

The tunnel was rough and jagged in stark contrast to the smoothed stone of the sewers. The stalagmites and stalactites ahead looked like jagged teeth with light and echoed voices coming from beyond them, making it seem like I was in the mouth of a giant creature.

The air was stale and uncomfortably hot, especially in my layers of wrappings. My left had a cave-in with boulders blocking off what may have been a tunnel heading to the surface. My right sloped down to a steep rock wall that dropped into the cavern.

I forgot which stala-thing spiked up from the floor and crept up to hide behind one. The most eye-catching thing in the hollow space was a stone table laden with alchemy equipment. The rounded flasks, condensers, and boiling tubes carried liquid and gasses past the hands of two women efficiently working around each other.

Neither had mana, and one was much older than the other, reminding me of when my Mother and I used to work together.

The resulting alchemical solution was set aside for cotton to be dipped into and stirred. Off to the side, the same dipped cotton was drying in trays on another table—a line of people with gloves on compressing and packing the finished product into glass jars, some full of water.

Other sections of the cavern that had been flattened out had hammocks, mattresses, a tent and cooking stations where most of the people sat. The few mages around all seemed to be busy on guard duty by the other three tree entrances or producing the lighting for everyone. Besides them, a few dozen more people milled around, chatting, eating, carrying crates and the finished jars of dragon’s breath.

“Hey,” someone stumbling out of a different tree trunk shouted. “Where’s Oleza?”

“Finally sleeping. Don’t wake her, for all our sakes.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. What about Pennie?”

“Here,” Pennie said, approaching the man from out of my sight. “What is it?”

She’d changed her hair since the last time I’d seen her with Zara, yet it was definitely the same person.

“The watch is setting up right above us, and one of our supply runs didn’t make it back,” he said, huffing and gesturing mildly.

The tent flap was thrown open, and Oleza, pulling a shirt over her head, stormed out to the growing crowd. “Those idiots might have just got lost. What streets are the traitors in?”

There was more back-and-forth to the point that the alchemists stopped working to see what was going on.

“Mages, prepare to delay an attack as long as possible,” Oleza said to conclude their talks. “Everyone else, pack up the essentials. Load up the majority of dragon’s breath on the minecarts and start moving it out to the forest base. We can easily walk out and detonate what’s left if they start to breach, so work smoothly, don’t panic when handling that shit.”

“I’ll be leaving first, then,” the older alchemist said in a croaky voice. “Our agreement didn’t include being captured. My apprentice can finish up the last batch and you’ll put her on the next cart out.”

Oleza didn't look happy but waved her off. The woman walked through the chaos with people avoiding her path. She talked with her apprentice at the alchemy station before moving to the side where rails exited a tunnel. On those tracks were metal carts and two flatbeds with an angled rod and a handle on each side.

She rounded up two people carrying dragon’s breath to the carts and shooed them up on top of the flatbeds. Then, she held out her hands for them to pull her up.

“Get on with it then,” she said, making herself comfortable sitting on the back.

The two started pumping the handles up and down, moving the cart slowly into the darkness. As much as I was amazed at how that worked, I’d let what looked like one of the main perpetrators get away and wasn’t about to sit around and wait for them all to disappear.

With Annalise being one of the people coming down in a few minutes, letting them set up the dragon’s breath around the cavern also wasn’t an option.

I took a last look at the path I could take around the cavern to the tracks without being seen and made my way to the steep drop. It took a moment to find an outcrop for my foot, so I made my own to get down quicker.

A rock tumbled off as I put my weight on it. I regained my footing as it bounced, then stilled it in the air and put it down without another sound.

I scrambled the rest of the way and was soon on an outcrop slightly elevated with a wall of rock for cover from the rest of the cavern. I waited, no one seeming to care about the crack of a rock falling.

Despite the group's collection of masks, I didn’t think there was a way to make my current outfit fit in, so I elected to go with not being seen at all. That involved getting down on my hands and knees to crawl towards the tracks.

My elevated position sloped down towards it and I was almost there when another load of dragon’s breath was dropped off. I dug my face into the stone, relying on the shadows and rush of the people to keep me hidden.

They left as soon as they placed the jars down. I checked for any watchers before standing to walk casually into the tunnel, no eyes on me as I entered its shadow.

I moved over the iron tracks further into the tunnel before even considering collapsing it.

The voices faded to echoed whispers, so I felt it was time to stop and consider how to bring the tunnel down around me. As far away as I could manage, I held out an arm and concentrated on the stone ceiling. It took far more mana than I was used to for stone, and after precious seconds, a small slab cracked and fell to the ground.

I tried pulling the walls in next, yet that was even more mana-consuming. The stone at this depth was either stupidly dense or the pressure from above made it harder to move. I carried on trying to the point that my arm felt numb, and I had to switch. After all of that I had a few broken slabs on the tracks that could be stepped over and cleared in moments.

The iron tracks stopped me from making anything beyond a small protrusion between them from the floor, taking too much mana to efficiently block the tunnel from mages.

A second plan had occurred to me, but that felt like a bad idea after my last experience with dragon’s breath. However, from the continued activity behind me, it might have been my best option.

I snuck back to the entrance, waiting for another load of dragon’s breath and the crates to be dropped off before ducking out behind a cart. They’d started filling it with the jars, and I slowly peaked over the edge to take some of the ones filled with water out.

“Oi, who the fuck are you?” “Whya unloadin’ that?”

I looked up to see two people, arms laden with more goods, staring at me over the cart. There were still two jars left of dry dragon’s breath inside. I barely felt comfortable using one, but as we locked eyes, waiting for someone to make a move, I decided I was fine with two.

I started to push the metal cart from where they couldn’t see my hands. It didn’t move, so I was forced to speak and buy time to figure out why. “She…asked me to separate the dry and wet. Don’t want an accidental explosion, right?”

There was a lever protruding from one of the wheels that I placed my foot against, still looking at them.

“Why the full mask?” “Have I seen ya around before?”

I leant my weight into the lever, jerking forward when it suddenly gave way. The cart started to move, and I got behind to push it.

“Oi.” “Hey!” “We need help here!”

They dropped their goods while one screamed for help, and the other chased after me. His hand reached out and closed around the back of my shirt. Using the cart for leverage, I kicked out, my foot sinking into his stomach.

I tried to distance myself and the closing mob as much as possible. However, doing that with a rusted metal cart that needed an entire tub of grease dumped into each nook and cranny made that difficult. I was gaining momentum and lifting my feet to glide along, giving my legs a moment of rest.

I leant down over the cart's edge and bashed one of the jars with the hilt of my dagger. Given how I planned to ignite the stuff, I hoped exposing it would allow me further away from the blast.

I had no interest in the dragon’s breath left behind also detonating, so when I got more distance, I let the cart go and stumbled to a stop.

Bringing out the crystal wrapped in silver Jeremy had given me for an emergency, I got on the ground and sent an intense burst of mana into it. The mana travelled around the silver in two multiple loops before hitting the crystal and kicking out a wave of mana with no meaning to it despite my uneasy feelings when imbuing it.

When nothing happened, I lifted my head from where I’d dug it into the ground behind a small stone wall I’d made between the tracks.

I smacked a fist into the ground, scolding myself for waiting too long to trigger the dragon’s breath. Or, I’d just completely misunderstood the interaction between the stuff and mana. The iron tracks might have also disrupted it, and I needed to get closer now.

With people catching up behind me, I started to stand when a wave of air sent me ducking for cover, the accompanying boom forcing me to cover my ears.

The ground rumbled, and dust fell from the ceiling. The wave had blown in from my cart’s direction, with only panicked shouts coming from the cavern, so I silently cheered for not potentially sinking half the city into the ground.