Chapter 2: Part 10 - Sabotage

The pain Jean felt at letting Vasha out of his sight was almost physical. It sat in the middle of his chest, a dull ache of longing and despair. There was nothing to be done about it, though. The whirlwind of activity that engulfed them the moment they escaped the ice prison was inevitable.

It didn’t surprise Jean that Auri had been the one to break open the ice. She was a true master of fire – he’d known that since she was a child – and Yinn’s trap didn’t have a hope of withstanding her power. The floor of the hidden room was now ankle-deep in slush, whilst great slabs of ice lay in the entrance, where she’d first broken through.

Outside, the scene was even more chaotic.

Auri, Oska and Marissa hadn’t been the only ones to find him and Vasha. As far as Jean could tell, his family and the Marauders had arrived at the same time. A confrontation had threatened to ensue, only to be halted by – most surprisingly of all – Marissa’s pragmatism. She’d declared they could all fight later, but only after they’d retrieved the missing members of their teams.

There was no fighting now, though. Auri had been the one to warm Vasha up, whilst the norn ranger – Gullveig, Jean thought her name was – went inside to search the room. She returned with a sodden leather pack, just as Vasha finally stopped shivering enough to speak.

“That’s what I was reaching for,” she said, with a glance at Jean. “That’s what triggered the trap.”

“Then, that’s what Yinn didn’t want us to find,” Marissa said crisply. She held out a hand expectantly.

Gullveig didn’t move. “What makes you think you have any right to see inside?”

Marissa’s eyebrows rose in an expression Jean knew all too well; it meant she was feigning surprise, because she knew she was about to win. “Why, I thought that was obvious. Without us, your little engineer would be dead.”

“Together,” Vasha said, cutting in before an argument could ensue. “We’ll take the next step together.”

Gullveig grunted and tipped the pack upside down. Only two things fell out: a small black notebook, now hopelessly sodden – and a glass bottle bound in what might have been strips of bark.

It rolled in Oska’s direction, and he scooped it up. “Hylek,” he said, with a note of surprise. “The sort of thing they keep their potions and poisons in.”

“There are hylek not far from here,” Gullveig said, tossing the empty pack aside. “They have a settlement at Hunting Banks.”

Oska tossed the bottle from hand to hand. “Shall we, then?”

There were several heartbeats of silence. This time, it was Jean who broke it. “We’ve all come this far. Let’s see it through.”

They made a strange procession. Five humans, two norn, and a charr who barely seemed to know the rest of them were there. Jean found himself walking at Roan’s side and glanced nervously that way several times. The charr looked subdued, though, his previous aggression gone. He certainly wasn’t acting like the forceful leader who’d challenged Marissa, refusing to allow the Marauders to form an alliance.

They took a circuitous route, or so it felt to Jean. Gullveig headed their party, though, and no-one questioned her decisions. Across the frigid waters of the river, then up a hillside that Jean thought should have been crawling with grawl, but was still empty. There was no sign of the asura, Primm, either; perhaps she’d given up her investigations. There was no trail to follow, only a rocky mountain pass, which they scrambled up one side of – and there was the hylek village. The valley fell away sharply on the other side and Jean could feel warmer air on his face, a welcome relief. The hylek settlement was at the foot of the hills, a circular enclosure dotted with globular structures.

It was also empty.

Jean was starting to feel somewhat unnerved by the desolation of Timberline Falls. There had been the norn camp at the foot of Krongar Pass, true, but beyond that the area felt abandoned. No grawl and now no hylek. Could this truly all be Yinn’s doing?

The rest of the party seemed equally unsettled. “Was it the krait?” Gullveig muttered, as they descended the slope. She seemed to be talking to herself, but Jean wanted to know more.

“Was what the krait?” he asked, hurrying to keep up with her long strides.

“The Eztlitl hylek of this village have fought against the krait for years,” Gullveig said, apparently forgetting she was talking to a rival. “They might have been driven out…”

But there was no sign of a struggle, which became more apparent as they got closer to the village. The place was pristine, every building neat and tidy, the grass kept short, the walls of the compound uncluttered by overgrowth. The hylek seemed to have made an orderly retreat.

“What about the grawl above Guilty Tears?” Jean asked Gullveig. “You must have noticed they were missing.”

Gullveig gave him a thoughtful look. “I thought I was the only one…”

“You weren’t. I even met an asura scholar on the riverbank. She was just as puzzled.”

Gullveig shook her head, which Jean took to mean she had no more answers than he did.

There was no gate on the hylek compound, allowing them to walk inside unimpeded. The place was eerily quiet, the high walls blocking out even the incessant wind. A path wound around the outside of the village, gently sloping down to a central pool, into which a narrow waterfall fed. It would have been idyllic, Jean thought, if it wasn’t so empty.

“Just like Belldron’s Guardholme.” Vasha stood a few paces away, a blanket pulled tight around her shoulders. Jean could see her shudder. “How does Yinn keep doing this?”

“I don’t know,” Jean said, thinking of Scholar Primm. The game’s teams weren’t the only ones who’d noticed what Yinn was up to; surely this would have consequences. And if it didn’t… “But I intend to find out.”

Vasha looked at him sharply but didn’t speak. She certainly didn’t look admiring, but Jean thought there was a touch of approval in her gaze.

Abruptly, Oska gave a shout. Jean looked up in time to see two shadowed figures making for the open gateway at the other end of the compound. He reached for his sceptre, but Auri was quicker. Rock surged from the ground, blocking the gate in the space of a heartbeat, leaving the two figures nowhere to go. They spun back, searching for a way out, but by then the two teams were already spilling down the curved road. Whether the two strangers were Yinn’s lackeys or another team, they were caught.

Jean found himself sandwiched between Marissa and the other norn, Haki, as they all skidded to a halt. Eight of them, against the two figures now standing quite casually in front of the blocked gateway. Their greater numbers weren’t necessarily an advantage, as far as Jean could see. If it came to a fight, they’d foul each other as often as hitting their foes.

Which was perhaps why the strangers – an asura and a norn – looked so calm. The norn warrior was one of the biggest Jean had ever seen; even the two rangers of the Marauders didn’t come close. She stood a step behind the asura, whose golden eyes were luminous and unblinking. An asura and a norn. Jean’s heart began to race. That sounded awfully familiar.

The asura folded her arms. “Well, you caught us. It’s about time.”

“You were in Harathi Hinterlands,” Marissa said. She was the only one of the two teams who hadn’t armed herself, but Jean knew that didn’t make her any less dangerous. “You got into the ruins before anyone else.”

Jean heard Vasha suck in a breath, before she said, “You’re the ones who stole our prize?”

The asura’s eyes narrowed. “That’s quite an accusation to make – and quite an assumption, to suggest we wanted your ‘prize’ in the first place. We simply had a job to do.”

“What job would that be?” The rumbling voice – Roan’s – made Jean jump. He’d been starting to think the charr was almost catatonic.

“What makes you think we’d reveal anything of that nature? We have an agreement with our client. Confidentiality comes first.”

The norn warrior made an unhappy noise and leaned forwards to touch the asura’s shoulder. “Amber…”

Amber – assuming that was the asura’s name – shook off the hand, but some of the tension fell from her shoulders. “Oh, very well.” She sounded exasperated. “Our cover is blown, anyway.”

The norn straightened and looked directly at Vasha. “You’re right: we took the prize you were expecting to find. We were paid to do so.”

“By another team?” Jean guessed.

Amber snorted. “By Yinn, of course. I thought you’d worked that out already.”

A dumbfounded silence fell. These two were working for Yinn? Why would he sabotage his own game when the Marauders had been so close to winning the first round, out of nothing but their own skill and guile?

The norn scratched the back of her head, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Perhaps we should start at the beginning. My name is Erin. This is Amber. We’re from the guild Light’s Memory. We were hired by Yinn to accomplish certain tasks as part of his game. Our first job was to travel to Harathi Hinterlands and retrieve something from the Ruins of Holy Demetra. We knew it was one of the prizes, but we thought Yinn had changed the objective of that round. We were just fetching something no longer needed.”

“But it was needed,” Marissa said. Her fingers tapped on her crossed arms; Jean could see she was thinking furiously. “That was the prize we were after. What was it, incidentally?”

“Nothing more than a clue to travel to Lornar’s Pass,” Amber put in, “which Yinn elected to reveal to all the teams at the same time. No-one received the time advantage the clue was supposed to confer.”

“That wasn’t what we expected to happen,” Erin said, spreading her hands. “We would never have taken the job if we’d known it was going to interfere with the real teams.”

“Yes, I’m sure it’s all terribly distressing for you,” Marissa said dismissively. “Why would Yinn hire you at all, though? What’s his aim?”

“To keep things interesting.” Amber was looking at Marissa; Jean had a feeling the asura had latched onto the woman she saw as her intellectual equal. “The Marauders reached Harathi Hinterlands too easily. Every time Yinn thinks the game is getting too uninteresting for his observers, we enter the fray. We shake things up. That’s what we were hired to do.”

Marissa blinked several times, the only sign of her surprise. “What ‘observers’?”

Erin shook her head, visibly unhappy. “That’s another thing we didn’t know. Yinn told us this was a treasure hunt for his own amusement, with a prize for the winning team. A few days ago, we found out there are bets taking place on your progress, from a number of wealthy individuals. You’re being watched, every step of the way.”

Jean shuddered. The conversation flowed on around him, in increasingly angry tones. He didn’t hear any of it. They were being watched? Did that extend to his meeting with Vasha in the stone room above Guilty Tears? Were his earnest questions and Vasha’s honest answers being pored over by watchful eyes, even laughed at by those who’d bet on their teams all along?

He looked up, sound intruding again – just in time to hear his sister speak. She sounded brittle and tense, her fury suspended just below the surface. “They can watch all they damn well choose,” she said, throwing her head back. “We’ll give them a show they won’t soon forget.”