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I could feel neither the mage’s presence nor Beira’s in the wind but that only tightened rather than eased the inner tension.
If our magehadbeen tasked with finding the sword, there should have been some sense of him in the approaching storms. Of course, maybe it was simply a matter of me not beingcapableof finding him, especially if he’d taken steps to conceal himself. My storm-born abilities remained very raw, and the only real training I’d had was Beira’s quick tutorial on how to create “storm storage.”
That, and a warning not to call down the lightning again until I had a means of heat dispersal.
“Is there a problem?” Cynwrig asked.
“No.” I hesitated, my gaze drawn skyward again. “I’m just wondering if we’re being watched.”
“By shifters?”
“By anyone. I’m not sensing anything untoward, and that’s worrying me.”
“Would you sense a shifter on the wind?” he asked.
“I have before.”
“If wearebeing watched by a shifter,” Lugh said, “we can’t do anything about it.”
“Actually, Icould.” And it would give me the greatest of pleasure to catch the shifter with a sliver of wind and toss it across the country. But I had no sense of a flighted watcher. No sense of anything atall.
And it just felt wrong.
“Surely our main problem will be the mage,” Mathi said. “If you can’t sense him, maybe he’s simply not around. It’s not like he can fly in at a moment’s notice, is it?”
I gave him my best “don’t be daft” look, which only increased his amusement. “If one can control the wind properly, one can ride it.”
“That will be a handy skill if you ever get a handle on your own abilities,” Lugh said. “It’d surely beat spending hours driving from one location to the other.”
“As the librarian noted a number of times, I’m a godling not a god. I might never achieve the level of control needed for that sort of thing.”
Not to mention the likelihood that even if Ididmanage to gain some level of control, my strength would probably fail at the wrong moment, and we’d plunge to our deaths from a very great height.
Pessimism, thy name is Bethany.
“Control is learned not gifted,” Mathi said, in a solemn tone totally voided by the deepening amusement in his eyes. “Practice is the key to all talents, though I’d suggest that in this case, you do so somewhere that provides a soft landing.”
“Except for the fact that, if the velocity is high enough, a ‘soft’ surface will probably do as much damage as a hard one.”
I didn’t wait for a reply. I just slung my pack over my shoulder and headed down the gravel path toward the quarry’s basin. The wind played through the trees, rustling the barren branches and teasing the evergreens. There was no sign of anyone else in the area, even though this was something of a tourist spot, and still no indication that anything was wrong.
Yet the conviction that somethingwasgrew.
I flexed my fingers and resisted the urge to draw my knives. As much as I’d feel better with their weight in my hand, knives were a poor substitute against guns. If theywerewatching us, they’d most likely be armed this time around. Given how wrong previous attacks onmehad gone, I suspected they wouldn’t risk confronting three large and very capable men without a weapon.
We finally reached the base of the limestone rock formation that was the Chimney. I stopped near its base—which had been shored up with rocks after what looked to be either erosion or storm damage—and scanned the nearby cliff face, looking for the crooked slit that marked the cave’s entrance. After a moment, I spotted it behind a curtain of green.
I struggled up the steep and very wet grass slope, the cliff face looming above me, gray against an even grayer day. Rocks littered the slope as we neared the cave’s entrance, though I had no idea whether the rockfalls were recent.
I swung my pack off, pulled out the flashlight, and turned it on. It didn’t really illuminate much more than a few feet inside the cave, but that was enough to reveal the rough and ready nature of the walls. This crooked fissure was natural, not man created.
“Well,” Mathi said, peering over my shoulder. “That’s going to be fun to get through.”
“I can widen it if necessary,” Cynwrig said. “But it’s only the first sixty feet or so that’ll be tight. It opens out after that.”
I glanced at him. He had one hand against the limestone cliff face, his expression distracted and gaze inward as he listened to whatever the earth was telling him.
“Any indication there’s a forge inside?” I asked.
