All heads turned to her.
"Go on," I said.
"A Templar was pursuing a lurker through its warrens deep underground and stumbled into a leyworm nest." She grimaced. "Even baby leyworms are quite large."
"Tell me about it," I grumbled, remembering the one I'd freed from Dash Armstrong's lair. He'd been using the leyworm to power an arch and all sorts of other crazy equipment.
"The baby apparently thought he was food and swallowed him," Meghan continued saying. "And then threw him back up."
"How the hell did he survive the teeth in that thing?" I asked, thinking of the jagged shard-like teeth I'd seen in the full-grown creatures. The term "worm" was a misnomer despite the outward appearance of the giant beasts. Technically, they were dragons of some sort, sans legs.
"His Nightingale armor protected him from anything too grievous," she said. "But while he was inside, he was exposed to raw aether."
"Raw aether?" I said. "Um, isn't it all raw until we use it?"
She shook her head. "The aether carried by ley lines might make your hair stand on end, but it certainly won't harm you. The worse that could happen is you get sick if you draw in too much. Leyworms, on the other hand, are named so because they have a peculiar relationship with ley lines."
"They eat the aether," Bella said.
Meghan shrugged. "I don't think they eat it, exactly. We know the creatures eat flesh and even stone."
"All part of a well-balanced diet," Shelton said.
"My point is," Meghan said, giving him a flat look, "the quality of the aether inside a leyworm is quite different than what we usually use for magic. It soaked into the Templar's body, giving him something akin to radiation poisoning."
"Were you able to treat him?" I asked.
She nodded. "The solution was simple, but it took time to set up." Her image vanished, replaced by the image of an intricate rune carved into stone.
"A drain ward," Bella said, clapping her hands together. "How simple and exquisite!"
"Thank you," Meghan said. "Diagnosing the man's precise issue took time, but once I studied it from every angle, I decided a drain ward might be the only way to leech the magic from his body." Her body appeared in the hologram again. "Due to the sheer volume of aether, however, I had to anchor the ward in a ley line, or the siphoned energy would simply form an invisible but harmful cloud."
"Exactly right," Bella said. "I am working on such a ward myself."
Meghan raised an eyebrow. "You planned to use one for the children?"
"Not exactly," I said. "We were planning to trap Ivy with it."
"Ah." The healer touched her chin with a hand, as if in thought. "Adam and I will come to the university. It sounds like you need all the help you can get, Justin."
"Would you, really?" I asked, my hopes lifting.
"Of course."
"Justin, I believe I have made a startling discovery," Cinder said.
"That you're a robot?" Shelton said with a snort.
The golem gazed at Shelton for a long moment with a bland expression. "Ah, you were attempting humor. Unfortunately, I am not familiar enough with the concept to know if your attempt was funny or not." He looked at me. "Was it Justin?"
I burst into a laugh. "No, but you are."
"Tis a sad world when a ruddy golem is funnier than a human," MacLean said, chuckling.
Shelton blew out a breath. "Whatever."
"What is this startling discovery?" I asked Cinder.
The golem retrieved an ASE and spun it on the table. Beams of light crisscrossed each other in a patchwork of colors until a three-dimensional image of the university filled a large portion of the table. "While I was cataloging some of the old ASE videos Zagg gave me, I realized the audio portion was damaged."
"Yeah, that's the way most of the old ones are," Zagg said.
"Despite this damage, I was able to read the lips of those speaking, so long as I had a clear view," Cinder said. "I believe this video was not meant for public consumption." He tapped the air, and the video flickered on, showing a group of men in a very familiar room as they carried on an animated conversation.
"Isn't that this room?" Bella said, looking at the wood paneling on the walls.
"Well, at least we're doing something right," Shelton said.
I shushed them. "What are they saying?" I asked Cinder.
He paused the playback, pressed his hands together in the center, and spread his hands. The three-dimensional image spread like a long poster, flattening to reveal a panoramic view of the entire room. It was rather disconcerting to watch since the men sitting around the table now all seemed to be looking directly at me instead of each other.
"I will speak for each person in turn," the golem said, and resumed playback.
"She will find it otherwise," Cinder said in time with Ezzek Moore, the founder of the Arcane Council, though I noticed Moore's lips didn't quite synch with Cinder's, like the bad dubbing of a kung fu movie.
Alexander Tiberius shook his head. "No, there's a way to hide it. Tell him, Sydow." His gaze went to a creepy-looking man with short black hair, apparently another of the original Arcane Council.
Sydow glanced to the left, presumably at Moore, though the flattened perspective made it hard to tell. "We hide it in between. Neither here, nor there."
Moore held up a hand palm out. "Say nothing more. She is brilliant, and more powerful than I could have believed. She knows we have it, and could be listening."
"You're being paranoid again, old man," said Tiberius.
"Perhaps," Moore said with a nod. "But there is no reason to chance it." He turned to Sydow. "Do what you think best. Either it works, or she will have what she wants, and god help us all." He bowed his head, eyes closed. "My journey is almost to its end, and I do not wish to leave behind a legacy of death and destruction."
"Oh, stop with the theatrics," Tiberius said, rolling his eyes. "One can hardly blame you for sleeping with—"
Cinder abruptly broke off. "From this point, the council meeting devolves into Tiberius bragging about the concubines he once had during the Roman Empire, and Ezzek Moore sighing a lot. I do not think it contributes to the discussion at hand."
Zagg bolted to his feet, face lit with wonder, and said, "I know where the Cyrinthian Rune is."
Chapter 37
Huh?" I asked, feeling like a complete buffoon.
MacLean slapped a palm against his forehead. "Of bloody course. That would explain it."
My head snapped to him. "Explain what?" I said, feeling like an English major in a calculus class.
"The rune is between realms where Daelissa can't find it," Zagg said. "It's caught in a loop 'neither here, nor there'."
"You're making even less sense now," I said, my mind desperately scrambling to reach the same answer everyone else apparently had.
"Ah," Bella said. "How very obvious and clever"
Shelton's mouth stretched into a knowing grin.
"I see the direction the logic is leading," Cinder added. "I was, however, converting their speech from Latin to English, so it is possible I lost something in the translation."
"What did you figure out?" I shouted above the din of all the stupid know-it-alls.
Zagg raised an eyebrow. "Huh? Oh, the rune. It's in the arch you and MacLean found."
Neither here, nor there. "Oh," I said, dragging out the word for several seconds to indicate just how idiotic I felt.
"It's so bloody powerful, it's poisoning anyone who gets near it," MacLean added.
Bella gave him a concerned look. "Does that mean it's dangerous to handle?"
"I do not believe so," Cinder said. "I also restored the damaged video in several other council meeting videos which occurred chronologically after the one we just viewed. There is no mention of aether radiation in any of them, nor mention of hazards associated with handling the rune."
I chomped on a slice of pizza with more savagery than necessary, and chewed it for a moment. "Maybe it wasn't dangerous at first. Maybe centuries of being inside the arch caused a reaction."
"Possibly," Zagg said.
"We should go get the bloody thing right now," MacLean said.
I almost choked on my pizza. "Are you kidding? That thing needs to stay where it is. I say we close the wall back up, and interdict the place so it never sees the light of day."
"There may be a problem with your solution," Cinder said.
I met the golem's emotionless gaze. "I'm all ears."
His eyes wandered across my body for a moment before he said, "Ah. Another idiom. Perhaps you could define this one so I may file it away—"
"What's the problem with my solution?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.
Cinder's eyebrow rose slightly, though whether he was mimicking me, or expressing genuine emotion, I couldn't tell. "When one enters an arch, it is much like looking through a telescope at a far-off location, and quickly traversing the space between through the telescope."
I nodded. "Good description. What's your point?"
"In truth, you are actually speeding at tremendous velocity through a traversion tunnel. If the other arch were sealed off somehow, you would reach the end, and ricochet back toward your origin."
"I wouldn't splat against the other end?"
He shook his head stiffly. "The magical properties of the tunnel would simply reverse your course, while slightly increasing velocity to your trajectory."
I nodded, feeling a bit more in my element with the magical equivalent of physics. "So they put the rune in an arch, and sealed up both ends to trap it. All these centuries it's been bouncing back and forth at higher and higher speeds."
