“You have no idea how much I hate to say this,” she said slowly, “but I think we need some outside help.”
The king frowned. “You mean send a message to an ally country? Get your spirit-whatever to send more wizards? But that will—”
“Take too long, I know.” Miranda stood up. “That’s not the kind of outside help I had in mind.” She looked over at her companion. “Gin?”
The ghosthound glanced up from his grooming. “If you’re asking what I think you’re asking, the answer is yes, back the way we came.”
“Good.” She walked over and began pulling herself onto his back. “Let’s be quick about it, then. We’ve wasted too much time already.” She settled herself on his neck and patted the fur behind her. “Climb up, Your Majesty, time is wasting.”
The king looked at the hound in horror. “Climb?”
The word was barely out of his mouth before the ghosthound lurched into action. Gin moved like lightning, plucking the king off the ground with a long claw and tossing him in the air. He landed in a heap on the hound’s back, and Miranda righted him just in time as Gin set off through the woods at a full run. The king clung to the shifting fur, yelping in terror as the trees flew by, too busy trying not to fall off to ask where they were going. That suited Miranda just fine. As hard as this was for her, it was going to be ten times worse for him. Better to explain it when they arrived and he couldn’t get out of it. She grimaced and gripped Gin’s fur tightly. No matter how she sliced it, this was going to be some bitter bread to swallow indeed.
The sun had dropped to the horizon by the time the rock spit Eli, Josef, and Nico in a tumble on the dusty ground. Nico landed gracefully. Eli landed on top of Josef.
“I don’t believe it,” Josef grunted, shoving Eli off. “That was your great escape plan? Hide inside a rock?”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Eli snapped back. “Besides, do you have any idea how hard it was to convince that boulder to hide Nico in the first place? Before the other nonsense sent it into a panic?”
“Maybe if it wasn’t such a stupid idea to begin with, you wouldn’t have had so much trouble pulling it—ow.” Josef snatched back the fist he’d been hammering on the ground to make his point. “What the—?”
Nico took his hand before he could mangle it further and deftly pulled a long, glass splinter out of his palm.
“Where did that come from?” He glared at the glass, then at Nico. Nico just shrugged and nodded over his shoulder. Josef turned, and his eyes went wide. The forest, the piebald grass of the clearing, the injured soldiers, the broken weapons, the arrows—they were all gone. The three of them were at the center of a smooth, black dust bowl that bore no resemblance at all to the clearing they had left just a few hours earlier. The dust lay in undulating patterns, ground so fine that the slightest breeze stirred up a miniature tornado. Other than their rock, nothing else remained, not even the natural slope of the ground.
A hundred feet back from its original position, the forest started again, but the new tree line was unnaturally straight. Some trees were missing limbs; others had entire sections of their trunks ripped away. The damage was surgically clean, as if some giant had taken a razor and simply cut away a circle of the forest using their rock as a center mark.
“I take it back,” Josef muttered. “The rock was a great idea. How did you know it would be the only survivor?”
“I didn’t,” Eli said, leaning in to examine the stone’s face.
The boulder itself looked worse for wear. Long, sharp-edged gashes pitted the stone’s surface. When Eli brushed his hand over them, a shower of glass dislodged and toppled to the ground, raising a sparkling cloud that sent them all into painful coughing fits.
When he could speak again, Josef asked, “What was that thing, anyway?”
“A sandstorm spirit,” Eli wheezed.
“I’ve never seen a sandstorm that could do this.”
“Normally, it couldn’t,” Eli said, covering his mouth with his hand. “But this one wasn’t in its right mind. Did you see that Ronald guy drop the sphere?”
“Renaud,” Nico corrected, casually pulling glass splinters out of her coat.
“Whatever,” Eli said. “That ball wasn’t a gem or anything you normally store a spirit in. It was the spirit. He used his will to overpower the sandstorm, like a bully crushing ants together. He forced it to press itself down into that tiny ball, and what do you get when you put sand under high pressure?”