Page 169 of Quicksilver

I sobbed as I tried to sit up in the gentle waves that lapped at the lake's shore; my body felt broken. Some of my ribs were shattered for sure. When I tried to expand my lungs, it was as though I was being lanced in the side with a dagger. “Where's...Carrion?” I wheezed.

Mercifully, Lorreth didn't seem to be injured at all. Soaked to the skin, his hair plastered to his back, the fighter stood at the water's edge, his eyes scanning the dark. I couldn't see anything at all, but that was probably because my head was splintering apart.

“There. I see him,” Lorreth panted. “Wait here. I'm going back for him.”

Hah! Where thefuckdid he think I was going? I fell back against the shore, tiny, sharp rocks biting into my skin. The sky was choked with clouds so thick that they cast the world into darkness. I could make out very little at first. And then, as the pain in my chest lessened a little and my eyes adjusted to my new surroundings, I made out the looming cliff face that punched up toward the sky behind me.

The rock was black obsidian, slick as glass. And it was at least a hundred feet tall.

“Fuck,” I panted. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” A lot had happened in the last three minutes. I'd been standing in the library, and out of nowhere, my friend had crashed through a table. Then, I'd been launched up into a shadow gate, fallen eighty feet into an ice-cold body of water, and nearly drowned. None of it had been fun.

I was slowly sitting up when Lorreth re-emerged from the lake, dragging Carrion behind him. The thief wasn't standing on his own two feet, which wasn’t a good sign. My worry intensified when Lorreth dumped him onto the rocks, and I realized his eyes were closed, and his lips were blue.

Pain forgotten, I shoved myself up onto my knees. “Why isn't he waking up?”

“He's swallowed a lot of water,” Lorreth said tightly. The warrior dropped down and knelt beside Carrion, too. I flinched when he struck Carrion in the center of his chest. The blow would have knocked the wind out of even the biggest fighter's sails, but it didn't stir a response from Carrion.

“Come on,” Lorreth muttered. He hit him again.

Still nothing.

I was too scared to blink. “Carrion Swift, if you don't wake up right now, I'm going to tell all of your asshole friends back in the Third that you were a shitty lay.”

Lorreth dealt another blow to his solar plexus.

“I mean it!” I cried.

Carrion jolted like he'd been struck by lightning. He rolled toward Lorreth and vomited up a lungful of lake water, hacking and sputtering. Oh, thank the gods. I fell back, landing heavily on my ass, trading a relieved look with Lorreth. When he was done puking, Carrion flopped onto his back and fixed me with narrowed eyes. “You wouldn't...fucking...dare.”

It was just the three of us.

Renfis hadn't made it.

The general had boosted Lorreth up into the shadow gate and yelled at him to go.

“I felt it suck me in as it was closing,” he said, as we gathered ourselves. “If I'd jumped a second later, I think the damned thing would have cut me in half.”

He’d had a split second longer than me to process Layne's warning about the water. When he'd started to fall, he'd quickly realized what was happening and tucked himself in tight to prepare for the impact. Carrion had had no warning at all. He said he thought he'd hit the water chest first, and I kind of thought I had, too. It would explain why neither of us could fucking breathe without hissing.

Lorreth fished around in his sodden pockets and took out a small leather bag, cinched shut with a draw string. WhileCarrion and I struggled to our feet, he dug around inside the bag and produced a bundle of leaves, which he shook dry as best he could and then offered us each two of them. “Chew them a bit and then put them under your tongues,” he advised. “Whatever you do, don't fucking swallow them, though. You'll be shitting yourselves within five minutes.”

“What is it?” Carrion asked.

“Widow's Bane. It'll deaden your pain for a couple of hours. Completely deaden it, mind you. We carry it on us at all times in case we need it in battle.”

“Why the cheery name?” I made a face when I bit down on the leaves. They were bitter as hell.

“Because they're highly addictive and make you feel like you can take on an army of feeders. Plenty of warriors take them once to dull the pain of an injury. But then they keep on taking them. And then they die.”

“Ahh. Good to know.” I was very careful not to swallow once I'd chewed the leaves. Popping the mash I made of them under my tongue, I could already feel the plant's numbing properties taking effect.

My mind started to clear a little. And then it started to sharpen.

Where the hellwerewe?

I looked around and did not like what I saw. We were on a beach of sorts, inside a small cove. To our backs, cliffs rose up like a line of jagged teeth. They buttressed the beach, enclosing it so that there was no way around them on either side. There were two ways off the beach. The first—reentering the lake and swimming around the cliffs—was obviously impossible sinceneither Carrion nor I could fucking swim.Which left us with only one other option: up. The three of us stared up at the wall of obsidian, and each of us blanched.

Falling out of a shadow gate and hitting water had been bad enough. But falling from a cliff face and being impaled on a bunch of sharp rocks? That sounded like a great way to punch a one-way ticket to the afterlife, and I wasn't ready to go just yet.