picks beneath him. Taniel frowned. Something was off about this. He sent Ka-poel back to let the others know they could come forward. Nothing moved on the mountainside. Far below, the Kez camp glittered with campfires. Taniel heard the crunch of rock beneath well-worn boots as the others joined him.
They were on the road just above the entrance when one of the donkeys brayed behind them. Taniel felt his heart leap into his throat. He dropped to a sitting position, the barrel of his rifle resting on his foot so he could sight down the mountain. He waited for a Kez head to come into sight, for shouts of warning and then the trumpet of a general alarm.
A few minutes passed. He looked back at Bo and Gavril. Gavril’s face was unreadable; Bo looked annoyed.
Bo signaled to Taniel, and then touched a finger to the middle of his forehead. Taniel nodded.
Taniel opened his third eye. The brief dizziness passed and he turned his attention to his surroundings. The chalky, colored residue of sorcery covered the entire mountain like spatters of whitewash on the ground beneath a freshly painted fence. It was all old magic, though, and had begun to fade. He looked toward the tunnel.
What he saw there was not old, and it had certainly not begun to fade. Twin streaks of color passed through the ground, under his feet, and up the mountain. Taniel closed his third eye and scrambled down the rocks to the tunnel, Ka-poel right behind him.
“What…? Taniel!” Gavril whispered. Taniel ignored him. He climbed up above the tunnels, and dropped down to the ground at their entrance. Above him, Ka-poel clicked her tongue. He checked for enemies before gesturing to her. When she jumped down, he caught her and set her on her feet.
Two gaping holes faced him on the mountainside. The darkness was too deep even for a Marked’s senses, but he suspected what he might see. A pair of tunnels, each about a foot taller than a man, bored out completely by sorcery as if by a gigantic drill. He sighted along the tunnels, up the mountainside, and guessed at their destination.
Bo and Gavril joined them after a minute.
“There’s no one here,” Gavril said, bewildered.
“Thanks for pointing that out,” Bo snapped.
“Shut up,” Taniel told Bo.
“Where are all the sappers? Where’s the Privileged?” Gavril said.
Taniel lifted a hand. “Up there.”
“You mean they’re finished?”
“Yes.”
“And they come out…?”
“Above the Mountainwatch,” Taniel said. “Up on the ridge. Last night I thought I saw something up there. I dismissed it as a trick of the moonlight. Now I don’t think I was seeing things.”
Gavril stared up toward the ridgeline far above them. “The sorcery required to carve these…”
“Julene,” Bo said. “And probably half the Kez Cabal along with her.”
“Then why didn’t they attack yet?” Gavril said. “The northeast pass is barely guarded. There’s not even a watch on that wall half the time. They could have hit us from up there with a thousand men and there’d have been little we could do about it.”
“She doesn’t care about the Mountainwatch,” Bo said. “Never has. What she cares about is getting to the top of the mountain.”
“It still doesn’t make sense,” Taniel said. “She could have destroyed Shouldercrown and then headed up the mountain. Unless…”
“She’s in a hurry,” Bo finished. He stared up toward South Pike’s peak through the darkness for several moments. “I’ve heard stories floating around the cabal, as old as Kresimir, that the most powerful Privileged could use the auras of other planets, the moon, the stars, and the sun to amplify their sorcery. She needs the summer solstice.”
Taniel felt sick to his stomach. He took a shaky breath. A quick hit of powder helped. “But,” he said, “even if she’s in a hurry, why didn’t she tell Field Marshal Tine about the tunnels? How could she hide them even from him?”
“I think there’s more going on in the Kez camp than we know,” Bo said. “Julene is using the royal cabal, for certain. Perhaps not Tine, though.”
Gavril scratched his chin. “How could she hide this? And if she didn’t tell him about it, why two tunnels?”
“She hid it from us,” Taniel said. “And I think this is a backup plan. If she can’t summon Kresimir, she still wants to be able to take the Mountainwatch. I don’t think she banked on us just walking down here to find it.”
They stared at the tunnels in silence for a few moments. “Can she really summon Kresimir?” Gavril