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It hurt so much.
I wiped my tears. I would find whoever did this. I would rip them apart with my bare hands.
And I would have to find them. If this was an inn, someone was controlling it. They would never let me get to Sean. My best chance was to locate the innkeeper and kill them.
I took my whip out of its strap and walked through the doorway. A big domed room spread before me, lit by a blue cube caught in a network of robotic arms that formed a pillar between the floor and the ceiling. Ahead the rotting boards ended in a ragged semicircle, leaving a bare polymer floor. The rotting walls went up about one third of the way up, and then fell short, mirroring the boundary defined by the floor. The rest, the walls, the high rounded ceiling, was transparent material, and beyond it, olive nothingness spread.
The cube pulsed. A pearlescent wave passed through the glass-like dome. It took me a minute to put it all together. We were under Karron’s ocean, and the base was running a short range forcefield generator to keep the planet at bay. Someone had brought an inn inside the mining facility, but it couldn’t thrive here. It was poisoned, corrupted, and dying, so weak it couldn’t even claim this room all the way.
High-tech instrument consoles lined the perimeter of the dome. The lights still blinked. If I was right, the cube was a zero-point energy generator siphoning power from a microscopic dimensional pocket. I had seen one before, powering an artificial wormhole. The Tuhls had no respect for the universe, but occasionally their gadgets worked. This was one of those rare times their tech was stable. No wonder Kosandion was sure the mining facility was operational. The cube would power it nearly indefinitely, running all support systems and keeping the force field bubble around the facility so Karron couldn’t touch it.
And right now, the robotic arms were blocking my view.
I walked forward. The magic followed me, chasing after me, pooling in my footprints. I stepped off the boards onto the high-tech floor. The magic swelled behind me, unable to follow. More and more of it flooded in like a tide, desperate to keep touching. Every contact with it hurt like watching a loved one take their last breath.
“I’ll be right back,” I whispered.
The magic tide shivered, emanating so much distress I stumbled.
I walked across the floor to the far end of the dome, rounding the pillar.
To my left, in the open, Wilmos stood frozen in a column of light, caught in a stasis field.
He must’ve come to after they brought him in, because the werewolf inside the column was in the wetwork shape. Big, with a shaggy dark mane streaked with gray, Wilmos looked ready to leap, his arms raised, his mouth gaping, the sharp fangs daring an attack.
My pulse sped up.
I stood very still, listening and looking. Wilmos was bait.
The dome lay empty.
“Daughter of the Wanderer…” a male voice said behind me.
I turned slowly. A creature stood on the polymer floor. No, not a creature, a man. An innkeeper in a dark robe, tattered and torn, with his hood up, holding a white broom. The robe flowed, shifting color from tar black to mottled gray, and black again. Its frayed hem flared above the floor, moving, sliding, melting into nothing and regenerating.
The tendrils of the innkeeper’s power slithered to me. It touched me. Ice washed over me in an electrifying wave. My skin crawled.
The robe wasn’t fabric. It was the corruption, the source of the darkness inside Michael, my brother’s best friend, and the ad-hal I had crushed out of existence at Baha-char. He was clothed in corruption. It was pouring out of his body. He and the robe were one.
And he knew my father.
“Your father is a problem.” He had a terrible voice. It faded as he spoke, brushing against my skin like cold slime. “Your mother is a problem. Your brother is a problem. Now you are a problem.”
“Is.” He said “is.” My parents were still alive.
Everything in me wanted to lash out at him. No innkeeper could see that putrid husk of the inn and not want to disintegrate the one responsible. He was an abomination. But I had to talk to him. If I didn’t, we would never know why any of this had happened.
The man turned his head and looked at the olive ocean outside. I could just make out the narrow sliver of his jaw. It was an odd color, a kind of slightly purple tint, like a Caucasian body frozen in mid-livor mortis.
“There are two of us. You and me.”
Okay, we established he could count.
“Did it hurt when the seed died?”
How did he know about the baby inn? Should I answer?
I took a shot. “Yes.”
