Esom straightened his cracked spectacles, and nodded. “Yes. You want me to use it so we can get back into the mortuary without anyone knowing we’re there?”
“Will that work? Can you get past Ardan?”
“I… think so. I know I can hide myself and one other person, reliably.” Esom hesitated, his expression uncertain. He admitted, “Ardan was always distracted when I tried the spell inside his tower.”
“I can distract him,” Rift said. He bristled his spines uneasily as everyone turned to stare at him. “He’ll listen to me.” He looked at Moon. “You know he will.”
Behind them, Stone shifted to groundling. Esom flinched and cursed, Karsis just stared in fascination. Stone folded his arms and regarded Rift thoughtfully.
Rift threw him a frightened look but held his ground. Still focusing on Moon, he said, “You know it’s true. He wants me back, doesn’t he? He’ll talk to me.”
Moon let out his breath. Yes, Ardan wanted Rift back. Moon just wasn’t sure what Rift wanted. “If you tell him about Esom’s spell, what we’re planning—”
“You’ll kill me, I know.” Rift glanced around at the others, spines lowered. “I didn’t mean to hurt your court. I thought the colony tree was abandoned forever. If I’d known you were coming back—”
“That’s not the point.” Stone’s voice cut across Rift’s, silencing him immediately. It was the first time Stone had spoken directly to him. “That colony tree is our court.”
Rift flattened his spines but said, “A court is Aeriat and Arbora, not the empty shell of a tree. For all I knew, your court had died out and I was doing the tree a favor, letting it die so it wouldn’t live forever alone.”
Stone grimaced, equal parts irritation and disgust, probably because Rift had given him an answer that was hard to argue with.
Moon asked Rift, “What do you want in return?”
If Rift said “Nothing,” Moon wasn’t going to believe him. Rift wasn’t the self-sacrificing type, even if he did feel sorry about the colony tree. But Rift said, “When you find a way to leave the leviathan, take me with you. I want to go back to the forest Reaches. Ardan may want me back, but he’ll never trust me again, and I can’t trust him.” His scales rippled uneasily. “And I’m sick of this place.”
Moon thought it rang true, but he didn’t quite trust his own judgment when it came to this. The others watched Rift with varying degrees of skepticism, doubt, and even a little sympathy. Moon looked at Balm. She studied Rift carefully, her eyes narrowed. She caught Moon’s gaze, and gave him a grimace of doubt and a slow reluctant nod.
That summed up Moon’s feelings accurately. He told Rift, “All right, we have a deal. Don’t make me regret it.”
Moon and Rift crept up the tunnel, climbed through a doorway that had been knocked out of the wall and into the edilvine chamber. Making their way silently past the stinking barrels, Moon saw there were now three blue-pearl guards in the passage. Most of their attention was on the upper part of the passage, as if they were expecting someone to try to come in through the smugglers’ entrance. Which made it easy when Moon and Rift barreled in among them and knocked them flat.
Moon kicked a dart gun away from the one that was sprawled on the ground but still conscious, and told him, “Go tell Ardan that Moon and Rift want to talk. We have something he wants. Say that to him.”
The man scrambled back, shoved to his feet, and ran.
Then they waited, Moon still and Rift pacing and lashing his tail. “What if he doesn’t—” Rift began, and Moon hissed at him to be quiet. If Ardan didn’t take the bait, he had no idea what they were going to do.
He heard the groundlings coming back, at least six of them. They approached cautiously up the passage, one carrying a small vapor-lamp. Another craned his neck, trying to see the two men still lying unconscious in the shadows. Moon said, “They’re alive.”
The guard stared, startled. Either by the fact that the Raksura hadn’t killed and eaten the men as a matter of course, or that Moon had thought the other guards would care. The one in the lead said, stiffly, “The Magister will speak with you.”
The others moved back against the walls. Moon walked past them and Rift followed. Moon caught a whiff of fear-sweat, but no one pulled out a dart gun at the last instant. As he and Rift went toward the passage into the mortuary, he heard the guards move to collect the unconscious men.
Esom and Stone would be waiting down in the edilvine tunnel, and would follow them under the concealment of the spell. Esom could only make the spell big enough to conceal Stone in his groundling form, but Moon hadn’t thought there would be any possibility of Stone sliding the dome’s door open without Ardan noticing. But if Ardan tried to turn on them, Stone would be there. And Moon wasn’t leaving without Jade and Flower.
They reached the doorway, where more nervous guards waited, and went past them, down the steps into the huge chamber. Moon had asked Rift if Ardan would have been able to make more warden-creatures by this time. Rift had said that even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to let the creatures run loose with his guards here. Moon hoped he wasn’t lying.
Shadows still clung to the upper half of the room, concealing the vaulted ceiling and the tops of the huge pillars, but more vapor-lamps had been lit. Moon spotted Ardan immediately. He waited under a lamp stand, about fifty paces from the doorway, with a large group of his guards spread out behind him. Beside Moon, Rift twitched uneasily.
Moon couldn’t see the dome from here. It was somewhere past the shadowy outline of the undead waterling’s tail. He couldn’t see the spot on the far side of the chamber where Ardan had made the floor dissolve, either.
He started across the wide expanse of pavement toward Ardan, and tried not to look as if he was thinking about it disappearing under him at any moment. He and Rift stopped ten paces away from the sorcerer.
Ardan said, easily, “Rift, it’s good to see you well. I hope they haven’t treated you badly.”
Rift twitched again, uncomfortable. He couldn’t seem to meet Ardan’s gaze. “No. Not… No.”
Ardan turned to Moon and assessed him cautiously. “I didn’t expect to see you alive.”
It was nice of Ardan to admit it. “We’re hard to kill,” Moon said. “But it turned out for the best.”
Ardan’s mouth tightened. Moon thought, he guessed we were responsible for the jolt, but he was hoping he was wrong. Ardan said, “I felt the leviathan’s distress. I take it that was something you did?”
“I don’t think the leviathan was distressed. I think it was relieved.” Moon hoped they were right about what the crystal piece did. If Ardan laughed in his face at this point, they were going to be in a lot of trouble. “The thing that was telling it what to do is gone.”
Ardan’s self-control wasn’t quite perfect, and Moon could hear the tension in his voice. “What thing?”
“The metal piece with the crystals. The one down there, in the pillar that cuts through the leviathan’s hide. The one that lets you use the power in the seed to send the leviathan all over the sea, anywhere you want.”
There was an uneasy ripple among the guards, but no one seemed surprised or appalled—as if they suspected Ardan had been lying to the whole city but didn’t like to hear it mentioned aloud.
Ardan’s expression hardened into annoyance. He glanced at the guards, and said, “You’re wrong, of course, no one can steer the leviathan. But that device, the leviathan’s bridle, is almost a legend. I’ve seen drawings, but…” With grim urgency, he said, “This creature could decide to sink at any moment. You could kill us all.”