Cas crawled outside herself, and she stood and wiped the gritty, damp dirt from her knees.
Zev came into sight first, wearing his usual grin. He was Rhea’s younger brother, and he looked the part; he was just as absurdly tall as his sister, his skin the same warm brown shade, his closely-cropped hair the same raven-wing black, and his eyes the same big, beautiful hazel green that Cas imagined Rhea’s had been before blindness had clouded them and crinkled their edges.
But unlike his sister, he had been born with the mark of one of the Marr on his palm—the middle-god of Fire and Forging, specifically. He’d fashioned the staff that Rhea carried himself, sacrificing his own blood in a ritual to enhance it with Fire-kind magic. But otherwise, he kept that mark covered and rarely made use of the divine magic that coursed through his veins. He preferred his bow— it was the safer option in this empire, certainly—and he was the one who had taught Cas to shoot well enough to spear a rock viper in free-fall.
“Were you napping on the job in there?” Zev asked, peering into that cave behind her.
“Hardly,” she replied. “I was just waiting on your slow ass to finally catch up with me.”
“Shall we get on with it?” The terse suggestion came from Laurent, who had just appeared. He walked past them both without waiting for their reply, his lithe body moving as silently as Silverfoot’s. After bidding goodbye to Rhea, Cas and Zev fell into step behind him, making rude faces at his back—faces that Laurent likely wouldn’t have cared about, even if he had bothered turning around to see them.
Cas explained the path that Silverfoot had found, and then she took the lead and led the other two up that steep trail Rhea had detailed for her.
After a strenuous climb, the trio came to a section of stone that jutted out over the better-established path far below. There were loose rocks stacked along this section’s edge in a way that resembled the enclosing battlements of a castle; Cas made her way to one of the openings in this natural parapet and leaned forward, and she saw that the more-established path below them came to its terminus some twenty feet in the distance.
She saw the Oblivion Gate that Rhea had described. Saw the emblem of the death god glinting wickedly in its center. A strange rush of cold energy overtook her for the second time that night, but she gripped the stone beneath her more tightly and made herself focus and continue to observe.
She counted three soldiers in black. They walked a steady path back and forth in front of the wide gate, occasionally glancing to the mists on the other side.
They seemed…expectant, she decided.
But why?
Those mists were as Rhea and so many others had described them; like a rolling sea of darkness that occasionally pulsed with a silvery-blue light.
The rain had stopped, Cas realized suddenly; the wind was whipping the storm clouds away from a nearly-full moon at a furious pace, and more and more moonlight poured down into those dark mists. But no matter how bright that light became, she still couldn’t clearly see the ground beneath that canopy of fog. It was as if the energy of Oblivion was simply drinking up that moonlight and diminishing it even as she watched. Or scattering it, perhaps; maybe that was where the pulses of silverly light came from?
Cas was starting to grow restless when she noticed something moving beneath that moon-drinking sea—a shadow that looked vaguely human.
And then she saw another.
And another.
The figures swayed in a way that reminded her of the undead she had fought. She leaned forward, trying to get a closer look, and her hand slipped against the stone; Laurent grabbed the hood of her coat and jerked her back before she could tumble too far. He was always pulling her back before she tumbled too far, it seemed like—usually after Zev had goaded her into going there in the first place.
“Did you see something?” he asked, crouching beside her as she shrugged off his grip.
Zev joined them a moment later. The three of them stared together until Cas was certain enough of what she saw to whisper, “Is that…are there…people under those clouds?”
No sooner had she uttered the word people when something decidedly inhuman looking moved beneath that ominous canopy. Cas thought she caught a glimpse of a slender snout and two wickedly sharp, curved horns—or were they curved ears? It was hard to make out much more than a blurry outline.
“People or monsters,” Zev said, voicing her own concerns.
“An army’s worth of people or monsters,” added Laurent, his usually placid voice betraying a rare bit of concern. “Look at the way the mist is moving so strangely in the distance there—I’m betting that there are even more…bodies of some sort hiding further beyond the gate.”
They studied it all in awed, disturbed silence for several more minutes, until Zev said, “Well…it looks like proof that something weird is going on to me.”
“We can use an Air-kind crystal to capture that proof,” Laurent suggested, his concerned tone giving way to his normal business-like one.
“But we aren’t going to be able to capture a particularly clear image unless one of us gets a clear look at what’s happening under there,” Cas pointed out.
“And Lord Merric seems like the type who would refuse to pay based on what he deems blurry proof, doesn’t he?” muttered Zev. “So whoever is going to use this crystal needs to get a clear look at things and they’ll need to press these things into the crystal very quickly.”
It was one of the limitations of the Air-kind crystals—the older an image or memory was, the less clear it would be when pressed into a message. An innate wielder of this magic might not face these same limitations, but the crystals contained only traces of the real power of that lesser-spirit.
There was a murmur of agreement after Zev’s words, a pause for consideration, and then Laurent readjusted his mask and drew the hood of his coat more securely around the damp brown waves of his hair. “I’ll go,” he volunteered. “So long as one of you has a crystal we can use.”
“Cas?” Zev glanced at her, one eyebrow raised expectantly.
She sighed.
Another expensive crystal, turned to dust.
It broke her heart a bit to hand it over to Laurent—at least until she reminded herself of how much money they would be gaining if they successfully pulled off this mission. The Lord of Stonefall’s pockets were deep indeed. And he was not a generous man, but he was a desperate one, and Cas had found that both sorts of people were equally as capable of filling her purse with silver.
“Try to do a decent job of covering me this time,” Laurent drawled. “I don’t need a new set of stab wounds to go with the ones I got the last time I relied on you two for cover fire.”
Zev rolled his eyes. “Okay, firstly: It’s not like you died from those wounds.”
“Secondly,” Cas put in, “the incident at Castle Grove was a one-time thing, and you know it.”
“Let’s hope so,” Laurent said, and then he was off—once again without looking back.
“Is it just me, or does it seem like he still thinks we’re grossly incompetent?” Zev whispered.
Cas watched Laurent as he walked away, silently feeling his way along the rocks to find a section he could use to climb down to that path below, and then she shrugged and said, “Well, one of us is kind of grossly incompetent, in all fairness.”