Horsemen's War (The Rebellion Chronicles #3) - Steve McHugh Page 0,8

too. While you were in there with Poseidon, I sent Chloe to go retrieve them, bring them here. I think it would be best if we got off this ship sooner rather than later.”

Everyone apart from Chloe and Diana sat in the living room of the suite, taking a breather. Diana was on the balcony, scanning for possible siren attacks. She’d smell them well before they got to us.

“Tarron is busy making a large elven realm gate,” I said. “Fortunately we found a lot of sirens so used their blood to make it more powerful.”

Tarron was, to anyone’s knowledge, the last remaining shadow elf. His entire people had been turned into monsters who called themselves blood elves.

“How’d you get on board with so many sirens there?” Zamek asked.

“Viv,” I said. “We dropped into the ocean, and she masked us from their view. Turns out Poseidon’s friends aren’t quite as good at being guards as he’d like to believe.” Viv was the daughter of the Lady of the Lake, who had been murdered by Merlin centuries earlier. She’d helped Mordred retrieve his sword, Excalibur, although I noticed he wasn’t wearing it.

“Excalibur?” I asked, pointing to Mordred.

“It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I wanted to bring with me,” Mordred said. “If Poseidon had seen it and contacted Arthur to tell him, we might be sailing into a shitstorm.”

“Also, you still don’t like it,” I said.

“And there’s that,” he agreed.

“So is there a second part of this plan?” Remy asked. “Just curious, because I don’t remember the plan involving Nate stabbing the guy with a blade of lightning.”

“How is Poseidon even alive after that?” Hel asked.

“He’s a water elemental,” I said. “A powerful one. Lightning and water don’t mix all that well, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t kill him.”

“So you didn’t know for certain?” Hel asked. “I like how so many of our plans revolve around just seeing what happens.”

“Sometimes we just have to wing it,” Mordred said cheerfully. “Zamek, this bit is all you, my friend.”

Everyone turned to Zamek, who smiled. Things were about to get geeky.

“So, summoning circles,” Zamek started.

I tuned out. We all knew what they were, we all knew how they worked, but Zamek was someone who found realm gates, summoning circles, and basically anything that the ancient dwarves had been responsible for fascinating. He tended to allow his enthusiasm to bubble over to everyone in the vicinity, and while what he was saying was important, I’d already heard it three times. Once was enough.

The long and short of it was that summoning circles allowed two people to talk in different realms. They were both set up to only work for the people using them, and both parties had to agree for the link to be made. They were dangerous and easy to disrupt. Feedback would kill both involved, and that was only if they were lucky. They’d fallen out of favor, as they took a lot of power to use, and frankly people hated them, but we’d discovered Merlin and his people had begun to use them again.

“How did you know there was a summoning circle here?” Diana asked from the balcony, drawing me back into the advanced lecture on runes and their uses.

“Oh, that was easy,” Zamek said. “We knew that whoever was here was in contact with people somehow, and a lot of Avalon people don’t like technology all that much. Odds were good it was a summoning circle.”

“So you didn’t know for certain?” Hel asked.

“No,” Zamek said. “Not until I just saw the summoning circle in the room next to where we put Poseidon. I can’t hack it, before anyone says anything. It’s literally coded to Poseidon. No one can use it but him, and if they try, they only do it once.”

“So we came here to hopefully figure out what is going on?” Remy asked.

“We came here to stop the sirens and rescue anyone here,” Mordred said. “Discovering that this is all Poseidon is a bit of a bonus. Now we just need to get him to tell us what we need to know and get off this ship.”

“And sink the ship,” Remy said with far too much glee. “Never sunk something this big before. Not even sure how.”

“Is that a good idea?” Diana asked.

“Not much choice,” I said. “The sirens here are in numbers I’ve never seen before, and this ship has been made into a floating sirens’ nest. I’d rather that nest was sat on the bottom of the