Horsemen's War (The Rebellion Chronicles #3) - Steve McHugh Page 0,99

around the city. Then there was silence. I don’t think they’re human anymore. I think Arthur and his people did something to them. I had to work up on the surface for a few moon cycles, and I made buildings that were empty except for runes all over them. Elven runes. I don’t know what they did; I wasn’t allowed to study them.”

“Humans locked up and experimented on,” I said. “And elven runes in empty buildings.”

Dethian nodded. “I don’t know what they have planned, but I know it’s a kind of evil that most people can’t comprehend.”

“Tens of thousands of humans,” I said, mostly to myself. “Nothing good comes from that. Thank you for telling us.”

Dethian nodded. “And bracelets,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“We were forced to make a lot of things—buildings, roads, weapons—but we also made bracelets. They’re made from the same black stone as the buildings. I don’t know what was done with them.”

“Sorcerer’s bands?” Irkalla asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, concerned that there was a lot more going on in Atlantis than I’d first considered.

“Thank you, Dethian,” I said. “Go rest; we’ll get you all out of here as soon as we can.”

Dethian turned to walk away but paused. “If you see Arthur, kill him. He shouldn’t be.”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” I said, and Dethian slowly made his way to the side of the cavern.

“And Lucifer?” Judgement asked.

“There’s a tunnel back there,” Irkalla said. “There were more dwarves in there in stasis. Elves too.”

Tarron set off at a sprint that caught me by surprise, and I found myself running after him. I stopped as the entire place shook.

“What the hell was that?” I called back to Irkalla.

“No idea,” she shouted back. “It did it a while ago.”

I turned and continued on after Tarron, adding the shaking foundations of an underground prison to the list of problems I needed to go deal with.

I stopped when I entered a room with a deep blue-and-purple glow. There were thousands and thousands of hatches on the ground, and Tarron stopped by one of them, dropping to his knees and rubbing away the frost on the glass window. He gasped and began to weep.

“Tarron,” I said, my voice echoing around the chamber.

“My people,” he said softly. “My people.”

I placed a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get them out.”

“Yes, we will,” Lucifer told me. “I just don’t know how.”

“These are a mixture of dwarven and elven runes,” Tarron said. “They’re a modified version of what was used to keep me in stasis. I’m staying here to help deal with this.”

I nodded. “Get these people out of here,” I said. “I’m not leaving the realm without them.”

Tarron looked back down at the hatch, stood, and walked to another, then another, until he was hundreds of feet away from me.

“How many?” I asked Lucifer.

“Each hatch is atop a cell that is several dozen feet deep,” he said. “I think there are about a quarter of a million people here. There’s a second and third chamber to the end, both with a similar number of hatches as this one. They kept their slave labor on ice until they needed it.”

I turned and marched out of the chamber just as Remy ran toward me. “Mordred and Judgement left,” he said.

“Wait, what?” I asked.

“The shaky thing,” Remy said. “Apparently, it might be Merlin trying to bring the prison down on top of everyone in it.”

“Of course it is,” I said and started to run back toward the main prison. “Where’d they go?” I asked.

“Back to the lift,” Irkalla said.

“Stay here; help get everyone out and back to the realm gate,” I said. “Tarron and Lucifer found a lot more down there. No one gets left behind.”

“And what are you going to do?” Diana asked me.

“I’m going to go find Arthur and kill him,” I said. “And then I may have a bucketful of whiskey.”

“I could go for a whiskey,” Remy said. “Or just pure ethanol at this point. With a little umbrella.”

I turned and looked at him.

“Because I’m classy,” Remy said with a smile, and I turned to leave.

I was halfway up the lift shaft when the tunnel above my head started to collapse, large pieces of rock striking the top of the lift and disengaging it, flinging it forward into the abyss a hundred feet above the ground. I was launched out of the front of the lift and used my air magic to latch on to the side of the shaft before swinging myself across