A glyph [https://i.imgur.com/ZLENX3y.png]

The pit door slid open and the two men backed toward it. Both streamed with blood; loose flesh dangled from one’s face where Andra had ripped him.

Andra and Cara drew together in the middle of the pit. Each breath was a sharp stabbing pain in Andra’s side. Her mouth tasted of blood. Cara’s broken arm dangled uselessly.

Cara panted. ‘What are they doing?’

‘Running,’ Andra said. ‘Others will come.’

Over their heads, the crowd howled and thumped, hands and feet pounding an urgent rhythm. The noise buzzed in her ears, babble without meaning. Their faces blurred into an indistinguishable mass of gaping mouths and staring eyes.

Her hands shook.

‘What do we do?’ Cara asked.

To wait for fresh attackers was to die. There was only one way out of the pit, and it was in front of them.

Andra bared her teeth in a soundless growl. ‘We fight.’

She launched herself after the retreating guards. The one with the torn face turned his back and ran. She crashed into him. He dropped to his knees, pawing at her as she dug her claws into his neck.

The pit trembled. The man lurched beneath her, tipping forward. The other man stumbled; Cara slashed at him with her knife.

A rock hit Andra’s head. She rolled away from the blow. More fist-sized rocks thumped into sand which shifted under her feet. Dust hazed the air. In the distance, men screamed and shouted.

From below came a deep and terrible rumbling, like an avalanche. The walls of the pit shook; the sand sunk and shivered and flowed like water.

Cara had backed off from her opponent. The two guards clung to each other, and behind them, the pit door still stood open, though the door beyond that was closed. If she and Cara reached it before the humans, perhaps they could force their way out.

The roar of shifting rock was deafening. Andra staggered toward Cara. Behind her, the wall of the pit bulged and burst. Rocks flew outward.

Andra fell to the sand, shielding her head with her arms. Cara cowered. The two men ran through the doorway and hammered on the closed outer door.

The earth no longer shook, but where the wall had been was a gaping, ragged hole. Loose stones tumbled from the roof and sides of a new tunnel. A small dark-haired human strode through the hole and jumped down into the pit.

Andra stared. ‘Sam?’

He grinned. ‘Hey, Andra. You’re a mess. What are you doing here?’

The rags of the green robe clung to him. He didn’t appear hurt, though the debris about his feet glowed red; Andra felt the heat, even at a distance. Flames flickered in the tunnel. Screams and yells echoed from the far end.

Cautiously, she stood. ‘What are you doing?’

At the edge of her vision, Andra noted one of the guards had given up on escape through the pit door, which remained closed. He was circling around the walls, perhaps hoping to reach the new tunnel.

Sam smiled. ‘Hey, is that your sister?’

‘Yes, that’s Cara.’

Cara glanced between them, hearing her name but unable to understand the conversation.

‘It’s good you found her,’ Sam said. The guard sidled along the wall to Sam’s right, edging toward the hole in the wall. Sam eyed him. ‘Who are these guys? Did they hurt you?’

‘Bad men,’ Andra said. She was tired and hurt and confused and didn’t know all the human words to explain. ‘Yes. Hurt us.’

Sam turned to face the man, who froze against the wall. ‘Well, that won’t do.’ He raised his hand.

A rock rose from the sand. It spun lazily in the air.

The guard dashed for the tunnel. The rock punched into the back of his head, sending blood and brains spattering against the wall. His body slumped to the sand.

The other guard, the one with the torn face, beat frantically on the outer door of the pit. Sam gestured. The man didn’t scream; he had no time. His bones cracked as if he were squeezed in a huge invisible fist.

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Both guards were dead. The balcony above the pit was deserted. Yells and shouts came from above, where the audience must be scrambling to escape. Shrill human screams echoed down the new tunnel.

Sam grinned at her as if none of this was in anyway unusual. ‘I let the animals out,’ he said. ‘They have a lot of cages down below. The animals don’t want to be in cages, do they?’

‘Sam,’ Andra said. ‘We must get out of here.’

‘Already? This is fun.’

She frowned at him. This was certainly Sam; it looked and smelled and sounded like Sam and the soul behind his eyes was Sam’s soul, not something else. Yet it also wasn’t Sam.

‘Cara is hurt,’ she said.

Cara crouched against the wall, huddled round her broken arm. She cringed when Sam stepped toward her.

‘Why is she afraid?’

’She doesn’t know you,’ Andra said. ‘She thinks you are angelae.’

‘An angel?’ Sam peered into Cara’s face. ‘Maybe I can fix her.’ He reached for her broken arm.

She flinched from him.

‘Let her be,’ Andra said. ‘Let’s get out, Sam.’

‘I think I could fix her arm.’ Sam straightened. ‘I can do anything. It’s great. Watch this.’ He gazed at nothing, a dreamy look on his face. The ground rumbled and trembled under their feet. Fine dust and small stones pattered down from the roof. ‘She doesn’t have to be scared anymore. No one will hurt her.’

From above came screams.

Sam stood smiling. ‘There’s a lot of bad men here. Don’t worry. I’ll get them.’

Andra watched him. He was Sam, certainly, but something was wrong—and not just the new powers. His eyes were bright and restless, his words quick. He was like a small child over-excited by a new toy, or a man who has drunk human fire-water. But most of all — she didn’t think the Sam she knew would have smiled as he killed two men.

L glyph [https://i.imgur.com/2vwU4yB.png]

They reached a junction. Paet stopped. ‘This is the place.’

They had travelled a couple of miles, Lorie thought, though not in a straight line, and they were in the undercity, but not a part she knew. The passages were wide, unpopulated, gas-lit. ‘This is where you brought Sam?’

‘Not me. But this is where we bring them.’

‘And then what?’

‘Men meet us. I don’t know what happens after.’

‘So you just handed them over,’ Lorie said. ‘And never asked what they did with them?’

Paet shifted uneasily under her gaze. The stone beneath her feet shivered. Thunder rumbled in the distance, low and deep.

Lorie clutched at the wall, and it twitched under her hand like a live thing. ‘Earthquake?’

The shaking continued. The flames in the gas-lamps leapt and flickered. Lorie steadied herself: whatever was happening, it didn’t seem to be getting any worse.

‘Which way?’ she asked.

‘We should get out. This isn’t safe.’

‘My brother’s in there,’ she said. ‘Which way?’

He pointed. She strode past him. The ground shook, not badly enough for her to lose her balance, but each step felt uncertain. Dust drifted in the air.

After a few strides, Paet followed. They reached the next junction, and still the rock trembled.

‘I don’t know—’ Paet clutched her arm. ‘Lorie!’

A large creature padded down the corridor toward them. Wolf-like, shoulders bristling with shaggy hair, twice the size of any dog. Seeing them, it stopped, and growled.

‘Dire-wolf,’ Lorie said. She’d seen them dead, dragged into Sark by hunters. They looked smaller, dead.

Burn it.

Lorie summoned fire to her hands. It came without effort now, almost without thought, like breathing. She smoothed the flames into a ball.

The wolf snorted. Flames reflected in its golden eyes. Tensely, they both waited for the other to move.

‘I don’t know what you’re doing here,’ she said. It flinched at the sound of her voice. ‘But if you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you, right?’

She took a step, and another. The wolf cowered against the wall. Paet, she realised, was gone — he’d fled while she was distracted. No matter. He’d guided her as far as he could anyway.

The floor shivered underfoot. The wolf slunk past on the far side of the corridor and once clear, it loped away. She walked on. The wolf had come from somewhere; perhaps the same place Sam was.

Briefly she considered snuffing out the fireball, but decided to keep it. The warmth was reassuring, and besides, she might need it.

The tunnel she had been following opened into a pit: a round, deep, rock-walled pit floored with black sand, occupied by three people. One of them was Sam. He faced away from her, wearing a green robe that hung sack-like from his narrow shoulders.

Lorie stepped over loose rubble from the mouth of the tunnel, down into the pit. Her feet snagged on something — the crumpled body of a man, his head smashed to pulp. She grimaced. On the way here, she’d seen a lot of bodies.

Beside Sam was a young woman, covered in blood, her dark hair matted and tangled. She turned, and with a dull shock, Lorie realised it was Andra. Another woman, a girl really, crouched against the pit wall. She looked like Andra—down to the matching face tattoo—but even wilder and filthier and practically naked.

‘Sam,’ Lorie said. ‘What’s going on?’

He turned. ‘Hey. Lorie — what are you doing here? Look, Andra’s here too, and her sister. Is everyone here? Is Dad coming?’

‘No,’ she said patiently. ‘Are you all right? What happened—’ She waved her hands at the tunnel and the dead man. On the way here, the signs of destruction had been everywhere. She’d navigated a maze of rubble and collapsed passages, people dead and injured and fleeing in panic, animals likewise — most just trying to escape, but she’d had to defend herself more than once. And now she reached the centre of the devastation, here was Sam grinning stupidly and saying hello as if she hadn’t waded through hell to rescue him.

Perhaps she shouldn’t be surprised. Wherever there was trouble, you could usually count on Sam to be in the middle of it.

‘I can do magic,’ he said brightly.

‘You what? How?’

‘The Master did this ritual. He was trying to summon a demon, I guess, but now there’s this voice in my head and I can do stuff. Isn’t it great?’

‘No.’ Her brain stuttered like the ore-mill at Sark when a rock stuck in its works. A dead man lay at her feet, and Andra gazed at Sam with the same baffled terror as she’d seen in the eyes of the wolf, and Sam said he could do magic. It was all too much to deal with. ‘This is not great, Sam.’

He scowled. ‘Oh, I see. It’s all right for you to do magic, but not for stupid Sam?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sam. This is serious. You’re coming home with me, right now.’

‘Am not.’ He crossed his arms. ‘I have things to do. Anyhow, you can’t make me.’