Magic slid around me, dripping from the walls, creeping just inside the floor, a revolting miasma, like decomposing body fluids.
It didn’t feel right.
The magic sensed me. The nearest stream curved, angling toward me. The entire wall around the portal was covered with it. It poured out like a foul waterfall. I took a few steps away from it.
The revolting magic bubbled up through the gap in the floorboards and touched me.
The world swam. Blood pounded in my ears. I couldn’t catch my breath. I gasped, but there was no air. Black circles crowded at the edge of my vision.
My stomach jerked.
I slapped the side of my helmet. The faceplate and the respirator retracted in a flash, and I vomited onto the floor. A horrible stench bathed me, a cloying, sickening odor of decay, and mold, and rotting wood, like the inside of a grave. I planted my broom into the floor, clung to it, and retched.
The magic spiraled around me, clamping at my feet, trying to get at my soul. I reeled. I had to get out of here. This was wrong, so very wrong. I had to get away! I had to—
Sean caught me by my shoulders and pulled me to him. Gradually his voice penetrated the haze, calm and steady. “You’re okay. I’ve got you. Breathe.”
I sagged against him, shivering. The magic pooled at my feet, and more was coming, rushing toward me. It veered around Sean and went straight for me. Despair rose from it like a tsunami and dragged me under. Spasms rocked me, and I cried.
“Take your time. It will be okay.”
This was so much worse than the corruption I had felt in the dead ad-hal. This was something deeper, more obscene, more horrifying, worse than anything I had ever experienced. Worse than the baby inn dying, worse than…
Sean clamped me tight. “Does it hurt?”
I tried to answer, but only sobs came out. I felt so sad. All I could do was grieve. I shook and shuddered, but the tears wouldn’t stop.
Sean turned me and stepped toward the portal.
“No,” I managed.
“You’re going back.”
“No—”
The wall to the right burst open. Two corrupted ad-hals rushed at us. Sean fired. The weapon whined, spitting a stream of supercharged plasma. It took the first ad-hal in the chest. The creature shrieked, throwing its clawed hands in front of it, trying to conjure a barrier.
I had to help. I forced myself upright and stabbed my broom into the floor. My magic swelled inside me.
A slimy, rotting tendril burst out of the wall behind me, caught my waist in its loop like a lasso, and dragged me back. My feet left the ground. I flew backwards, through the house. Sean spun toward me. I saw his face, bleached with alarm and shock, and then walls snapped closed between us one by one, as the tendril carried me through the rooms, right, left, right, ripped the broom out of my hands, and hurled me into darkness.
I tucked my head in as I fell, rolled across the floor, and came up to my feet. The practice sessions with Sean paid off. I’d have a few bruises, but nothing was broken.
I was in a small room. The lights came on, the same nasty blisters. A trail of smashed fungi and moss darkened the floor where I had fallen. My broom was nowhere to be seen.
I wiped the nasty smudge off my cheek with the back of my hand and turned. A doorway formed in the wall in front of me, a rectangle of blue-green light.
This was an inn. I was sure of it. The rotting corpse of one, but still an inn. Somehow it was here, inside the Dominion’s mining facility, slowly decaying, decomposing into sludge.
Who would do this? This was monstrous.
Magic spilled from the walls. The floorboards sweated it out in large beads. It streamed to me. I understood now. I was an innkeeper, and this wretched abomination of an inn knew it. It was beyond healing, but it was reaching out just the same, like a dying dog, crawling to a human for one last pet on the head. Dragging itself, battered and broken, for just one more cuddle to ease the pain.
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.