Free The Fifth Dawn by Cory Herndon Page A

replied, “The way I’d kill anyone else that was trying to wipe out everything I know and love.”
    “That not an answer,” Slobad said.
    “All right. I don’t know. Is that what you want to hear?” Glissa said. “I can try magic, or this ‘sword.’ Maybe I’ll just talk him into taking a flying leap into the Great Furnace. But we’ve got to do something. I don’t know what doing that—” she jerked her thumb in the direction of the clattering wreckage that still unhung suspended in midair behind them—“takes out of me.”
    “Slobad can see,” Slobad said. “You still on fire, huh?”
    Glissa looked down at her clothes. A few wisps of persistent greenish smoke still clung to them, and she batted at it with one hand.
    Glissa suddenly felt very weary. “I can’t keep doing this. I feel so drained,” she confessed. Her voice echoed down the tunnel, rebounding around the tube and coming back to her strange and altered.
Drained. Drained. Drained …
    That wasn’t her voice. The slippery tones rang ominously in her head, a stranger who hadn’t been invited. The words slithered through her consciousness, whispering, pleading, threatening and inviting.
Drained …
    Glissa shook her head, and the sound faded. Odd. She rubbed her ear with one thumb and jogged to catch up with the goblin.
    “Did you hear something?” She asked.
    “No, but echo crazy in here,” Slobad replied. “Hey, something making no sense, huh?”
    “What’s that?”
    “The levelers, the aerophins, all of it,” Slobad explained. “Why attack you on the surface, when this tunnel is wide open? Why not send levelers up the other way, too? Slobad no general, but even I can see that just bad strategy. No need to attack from so far away when good tunnel right here.”
    “Flare, that hadn’t even occurred to me,” the elf said. She wished she had an answer.
    “Hold up,” Glissa said, eyeing the distant end of the lacuna. She could see the swirling anti-color of the mana core crackling at the center of Mirrodin, but nothing else. She had no way of knowing what might be on the other side. The lacuna appeared empty, but Glissa was a hunter. Appearances could deceive.
    “What you think, huh?” Slobad asked.
    “Flare!” Glissa swore and clenched her fists in frustration. “That’s it. So, so stupid.” She slapped a hand to her forehead. “They weren’t chasing us. They were herding us. He wants me to find him.”
    “Why? You wanna kill him, huh?” Slobad said. “Why he want you to find him?”
    “Because I think it’s a trap, and we dropped right into it.”
    “So why chase Slobad, huh?”
    “I don’t know,” Glissa confessed. “Maybe because you’re important to me.”
    Slobad blushed, blood flushing his greenish face a rusty crimson.
    “But he played with us either way,” Glissa continued. “He couldn’t lose. The levelers—and the aerophins—were sent to either chase me back here, or kill me. Damn Yulyn! If he hadn’t taken us in, we could have made sure Memnarch was dead. This might all be over now. We gave Memnarch time to regroup, and he took it.”
    “But crab-legs blew it, huh?” Slobad said in a transparent attempt to brighten her spirits that failed miserably. “No way to get the spark. The moon was the only way, right? Right?”
    “Yeah, sure,” Glissa replied, but she wasn’t. “Now he just wants me dead. I hope.” She slapped a hand on Slobad’s shoulder. “Well, what do you say? Should we go check out this track, or try to get back up through that floating deathtrap?”
    Slobad cinched up his belt, puffed his chest, and grimaced. “One second,” he said, then reared back and released a long, lingering belch that echoed through the lacuna. “Sorry. Ate too much elf food,” he said when he saw Glissa’s incredulous look. “Onward, huh? Don’t want to stick around here.”
    “Slobad, I can’t imagine why you lived alone when I met you.”
    “That nothing, huh? You stop by the Feast