AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No. Zarion’s gone all out on his defenses for this base,” Damiel replied. “The fortress is protected against all magical intrusions—active and passive. That means no teleporting in.”
“Geez, Uncle Z is totally paranoid,” I said.
“Uncle Z?” Nero asked, his brows arched.
“Yeah, he was missing a nickname, so I gave him one. What do you think?”
“That ‘Uncle Z’ would kill you if you called him that to his face,” Damiel told me honestly.
He was probably right. Zarion had even less of a sense of humor than his brother Faris. If that was even possible.
“But, seriously, Zarion must be totally freaking out with fear if he’s worried about people teleporting inside this base,” I said. “I mean, how many people can even teleport?”
“Immortals can. And Zarion stole our artifacts,” Cadence pointed out. “He must realize that we want them back.”
“I guess.”
“Psychoanalyze Zarion later. It’s time to move,” Damiel told us.
I tightened the strings on my rain hood. “Let’s go.”
We managed to scale the wall without falling to our deaths. Damiel’s spray had actually worked. When this was all over, I’d have to ask him where he’d gotten it. That was no ordinary water repellent.
Then, after tackling the wall, it was a simple matter of avoiding all of the guards patrolling the inside of the compound, and then breaking into the treasury.
Ok, so maybe it wasn’t that simple. But one of the advantages of an anti-magic field was the guards didn’t have any magic either—oh, and that I got to impress Nero’s parents by picking the lock on Zarion’s treasury the old-fashioned way.
“So charmingly human,” Damiel said, his lips curling as the treasury door clicked open and I pumped my fist in the air in victory.
“Frankly, I’m surprised her tools didn’t snap,” Cadence told him. “They look so fragile, so mundane.”
Yeah, they were both totally impressed.
I stepped into the treasury, followed by Nero and Cadence. Damiel brought up the rear, closing the door behind us. There were a lot of clicking noises, like gears turning, then the hollow, metallic echo of a bolt sliding into place.
“Why do I feel like we’ve just been locked in?” I commented.
“It’s fine. We got in. We can get out again.”
I didn’t quite follow Damiel’s logic. After all, some tombs were easy to get into; it was escaping that was the hard part. But he looked way too confident.
“What do you know that I don’t?” I asked him.
“Our magic’s back,” he said with a slow twist of his lips. He snapped his fingers, and a halo of lightning electrified his whole body.
“This room must be specially shielded from the anti-magic field that’s affecting the rest of the fortress,” Cadence said, her eyes lighting up in the exact same way that Nerissa’s did when she was going on about some fascinating new magical-scientific discovery she’d just made. “Of course!” she continued. “It makes total sense. Zarion would want to be able to study the immortal artifacts free from any anti-magic interference. And the shield around this room activated as soon as the doors locked. I imagine that’s why the lock is automated. Nothing in here would work otherwise.”
“Ok, so what you’re saying is the lock is there to enable the magic shield that protects the artifacts, and not to lock in people who try to loot the treasury?” I asked.
“We’re not looting the treasury, Leda. We’re retrieving what Zarion stole,” Cadence replied. “But to answer your question, yes, I believe so. Zarion must think that the combination of the anti-magic field and his heavily-armed guards is sufficient to keep out anyone he doesn’t want to be here.”
“Yeah, that sounds like arrogant old Uncle Z…whoa!” When I took a step forward, all the lights in the treasury flared to life.
Actually, this treasury was more like a cross between a museum and a storage warehouse. The magical artifacts were arranged on metal pedestals, each one about waist-high. A trio of spotlights on a moving track shone down on each pedestal, like three orbiting suns.
“There have got to be hundreds of magical artifacts stored in here,” I said.
There were rows and rows of artifacts, arranged into clusters of ten. Each artifact cluster was separated by high bookshelves, saddled with sliding ladders and stuffed full of notebooks. The ceiling was high enough to park an airship inside.
