Breaking Silence Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  BREAKING

  SILENCE

  A NOVEL OF

  THE SERRATED EDGE

  MERCEDES LACKEY

  CODY MARTIN

  Breaking Silence

  Mercedes Lackey

  NEW ENTRY IN THE SERRATED EDGE SERIES FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR MERCEDES LACKEY AND CODY MARTIN.

  When Staci was first shunted off to the backwater town of Silence, Maine to live with her alcoholic mother, she thought her life was over. Silence had none of the amenities a typical teen in the twenty-first century considered essential: no cell service and barely any internet connectivity. But Staci soon learned that Silence was more than a town left behind by progress. The first family of Silence, the Blackthorns, liked the town that way. The Blackthorns were dark elves who fed off the misery of the residence of Silence.

  But now, all that's changing for the better. With the help of Staci and her friends, the Blackthorns have been all but defeated. Industry is returning to Silence, and Staci's mom is improving with each passing day. There's even a cute new busboy at the diner.

  But evil dies hard. And Staci, now a mage-in-training, senses that the Blackthorns have not yet given up the. The soul of Silence is on the line, and it is up to Staci and her friends to fight back against the encroaching darkness.

  BAEN BOOKS by Mercedes Lackey

  BARDIC VOICES

  The Lark and the Wren

  The Robin and the Kestrel

  The Eagle and the Nightingales

  The Free Bards

  Four & Twenty Blackbirds

  Bardic Choices: A Cast of Corbies (with Josepha Sherman)

  The Fire Rose

  The Wizard of Karres (with Eric Flint & Dave Freer)

  Werehunter

  Fiddler Fair

  Brain Ships (with Anne McCaffrey & Margaret Ball)

  The Sword of Knowledge (with C.J. Cherryh, Leslie Fish & Nancy Asire)

  Bedlam’s Bard (with Ellen Guon)

  Beyond World’s End (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Spirits White as Lightning (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Mad Maudlin (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Music to my Sorrow (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Bedlam’s Edge (ed. with Rosemary Edghill)

  The Waters and the Wild (with Rosemary Edghill)

  THE SERRATED EDGE

  Chrome Circle (with Larry Dixon)

  The Chrome Borne (with Larry Dixon)

  The Otherworld (with Larry Dixon & Mark Shepherd)

  Silence (with Cody Martin)

  Breaking Silence (with Cody Martin)

  HISTORICAL FANTASIES WITH ROBERTA GELLIS

  This Scepter’d Isle

  Ill Met by Moonlight

  By Slanderous Tongues

  And Less Than Kind

  HEIRS OF ALEXANDRIA SERIES

  by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint & Dave Freer

  The Shadow of the Lion • This Rough Magic

  Much Fall of Blood • Burdens of the Dead

  THE SECRET WORLD CHRONICLE

  Invasion (with Steve Libbey, Cody Martin & Dennis Lee)

  World Divided (with Cody Martin, Dennis K. Lee & Veronica Giguere)

  Revolution (with Cody Martin, Dennis K. Lee & Veronica Giguere)

  Collision (with Cody Martin, Dennis K. Lee & Veronica Giguere)

  Avalanche (with Cody Martin, Dennis K. Lee & Veronica Giguere)

  BREAKING

  SILENCE

  A NOVEL OF

  THE SERRATED EDGE

  MERCEDES LACKEY

  CODY MARTIN

  Breaking Silence

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-9821-2434-2

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-752-0

  Cover art by Larry Dixon

  First Baen printing, February 2020

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lackey, Mercedes, author. | Martin, Cody, 1987- author.

  Title: Breaking silence / Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Publishing Enterprises, [2020] | Series:

  Serrated edge

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019050949 | ISBN 9781982124342 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.A246 B74 2020 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050949

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  BREAKING

  SILENCE

  A NOVEL OF

  THE SERRATED EDGE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The worst thing about bugbears wasn’t so much how horrifying they looked. It was how bad they smelled. Take equal parts hot garbage, wet dog, and rotting fish, marinate it in sewage, and let it simmer for a day on high heat, and you have roughly what a bugbear smells like. It was Staci’s first clue that she wasn’t alone in the woods surrounding the ruined Blackthorne Manor. She had known that there would be guards of some sort, though she wasn’t expecting them this soon; she was still a half mile from the mansion’s walls, and had been proceeding slowly on foot so as to maintain some semblance of stealth. Bugbears weren’t terribly smart, but they were tough and vicious. If she kept her wits about her (and didn’t throw up from the stink), she should be able to sneak past the sentries.

  It took her another hundred feet of walking in quick little rushes, pausing to listen intermittently, before she finally saw what she had been smelling. There were two of them; from a distance, they looked like mangy black bears standing on their hind legs. Once she got closer, the differences were very clear. Both had shoulders that were hunched forward in such a way that they didn’t look like they were really meant to walk upright. Heavyset and barrel-chested, their skin was covered with coarse and filthy dark fur; leaves, mud, and worse were matted into it. She realized that if either of the creatures were to lie down, they would probably blend into the ground almost perfectly. The hands were as big as dinner plates and ended in cruelly curved black claws. The absolute worst part of the bugbears were their faces, however. All similarity to bears ended there. Instead of a snout and close together, ursine eyes, their faces were flat and vaguely human. The jaw was broad and square, with broken and yellowed tusks protruding from the top and bottom lips. The nose consisted of two slits, constantly sniffing the air and dripping with mucus. Then there were th
e eyes; wide set and disproportionately large, they gaped wide open and had blood red irises.

  The bugbears hadn’t noticed her. As much as Staci wanted to be invisible, that was out of her power. She had done as well as she could, though, with the next best thing. Her clothing was all close-fitting without anything that could snag on branches, and was colored in earth-tones that fit the season and the area that she was in. Most of her skin was covered: a brown and green long-sleeved cotton turtleneck shirt that she had gotten off a website that specialized in “natural” and “forest camouflage” clothing, ending with a pair of thin leather gloves. The rest of her gear was cotton cargo pants and a leather belt covered with various pouches, along with a pair of dark brown, all-leather hiking boots. Maybe it was her imagination, but wearing stuff made of all natural materials seemed to work better with magic. For her, anyway.

  She hadn’t used any face-paint to cover up with, or any natural foliage to break up her outline; the shape of a person is one of the most recognizable things in the world, especially when contrasted against a natural backdrop. Instead . . . she had used magic. It was a spell that Tim, her mentor in all things supernatural, had taught her. Invisibility was far outside anything that she could do. There were some creatures that could do it, and rumors and legends of certain people achieving it, but nothing beyond that was known to Tim. What her spell did was good enough, though. It basically made it so that people (and other things with eyes) didn’t want to look at you. It was an entrancement spell wrapped with a minor illusion; it suggested to someone that there were other places that they wanted to look. If they did happen to look at you, they would either see you as someone utterly forgettable, someone or something they expected to see there, or something fuzzy and hard to pin down if they really tried to search for you. It didn’t work on everyone, and she couldn’t do it indefinitely; the spell was constantly draining energy from her. If she let it go on for too long, she wouldn’t have enough “juice” to power any other spells, and would be almost magically defenseless.

  The two bugbears weren’t making a circuit or patrol of any sort, or if they were they had come up short for some reason. Staci couldn’t afford to wait all day to get to the mansion; she had to move, and going around the sentries would cost her time. She was standing tight against a tree, barely peeking around the edge of it to observe her quarries.

  Just need a little bit of a distraction. Nothing too flashy.

  She reached into one of the pouches on her belt, producing a small tuft of rabbit fur bundled with a bit of twine string. Clasping her hands around it, she concentrated for a moment. Her mind’s eye swam with formulae, incantations, and the shining power of her own will. She sent all of it into the fur between her gloved hands. The fur and twine collapsed into dust, sifting through her fingers. A moment later, there was the sound of a rabbit’s distress cries in the distance; the opposite direction she was in. The bugbears both immediately perked up, then seemed to confer with each other for a moment before setting off at a stumpy jog towards the noise. Again, bugbears were not very smart, and tended to think with their stomachs. They were probably thinking that not only could they make a meal of that “rabbit,” but if they were quick enough, they could feast on whatever had attacked it, too.

  Yeah, that’s right; Staci could do magic. Not sleight of hand—though that was a skill that often helped with magework—or party tricks, not stage magic. Real deal, turn-reality-inside-out magic. She hadn’t always been able to. Not even a year ago, she was just another normal, utterly average teen. Plucked from her home of New York City and essentially dumped by her father in the town of Silence, Maine, she had been torn free from everything and everyone that she had ever known. Silence was a quiet fishing town, and devoid of nearly everything that made modern life bearable for a young teen; no internet, spotty and unreliable cell phone service, and no shopping worth mentioning. Stuck with an alcoholic and not entirely stable mother, she had thought she would die of boredom in Silence.

  Until she got caught up with elves. Not the kind that come on the packages of cookies, and not nearly as nice as the ones in Tolkien’s books. Fantastic beings that lived for millennia and wielded magic as easily as a teenager used cell phone apps. Staci had discovered that, somewhere in her family line, someone had intermarried with an elf. So, she had some elven blood in her, giving her inborn magic potential. Learning that fact, and that magic, elves, and even darker and more dangerous creatures existed had brought her here; an apprentice mage to the town’s local bookshop owner and mage-in-hiding, Tim.

  It was funny how life could take you to the strangest of places, especially when you least expected it.

  Not wanting to be around when two disappointed bugbears returned, Staci waited until they were out of sight before she continued on. It didn’t take her long before she caught sight of the Blackthornes’ mansion, or what was left of it. In only six months, since she and her friends had last been at the estate, it had fallen into ruin. The grounds were unkempt and wild, with waist-high grass over the lawns and grass and weeds sprouting in every crack and crevice, and all of the stonework and masonry was half-buried under vines and behind bushes that seemed to have grown at an unnatural rate.

  She could feel the magical pulse of the object she was looking for. It was like a warm heartbeat, rhythmically thumping against her skin. Whatever it was, it was deeper in the manor, somewhere near the center. Staci licked her lips, working her way through the trees until she was nearly to the outer wall. Memories flooded back to her; clearing the wall with Dylan, being attacked by dark elves and worse creatures, the Gate . . .

  Give your head a shake, girl, she heard Tim saying in her mind. She couldn’t get lost in the past; she had a job to do.

  Effortlessly, she gripped the edge of the wall and pulled herself up high enough so that she could see over the top of it. I’ve gotten stronger in the last few months, that’s for sure. If she had thought the exterior looked bad, the interior was worse. What had once been well-groomed and maintained yards and gardens was now gone completely to pot; wild flowers, weeds, and what had been carefully confined and well-tended plants had sprouted everywhere, the grass now grown to well over waist height, with the hedges and bushes that had made up the maze or dotted the yard now unrecognizably overgrown. There were hints of broken furniture here and there, covered by the weeds. The swimming pool was full of stagnant water, scummy and so thick with algae it looked like pea soup, and there were invisible things in it, making ripples on the surface. Probably bugs and frogs, but you couldn’t tell with all the algae and duckweed.

  The important thing that stuck out to Staci was that she didn’t see any guards. That was . . . odd.

  There should be something, someone here protecting the manor. Other than those bugbears, I haven’t seen anyone.

  She felt goosebumps rising on her neck and arms. Something wasn’t right. But she was so close! With a quiet grunt, she heaved herself up, settling on top of the wall in a low crouch. She couldn’t stay up there for long; even with her cloaking spell, she would eventually stand out enough for someone to get suspicious. Reaching into her pouch again, she pulled out a bit of glass about the size of a silver dollar. It had a hole in its center, which she held up to her eye while breathing incantations. Just because I’m cloaked, doesn’t mean that someone else isn’t using the same sort of trick. With any luck, this will reveal them. It didn’t take her long to complete her survey of the immediate area; there wasn’t anyone cloaked by magic, as far as she could tell.

  Staci dropped down off the wall on the inner side, and immediately knew that she had screwed up. She had felt ambient magic in the air, and just assumed that it was emanating from what she was after. As soon as her feet touched the ground, she felt a surge of magic and saw it racing lines through the tall grass and weeds. Alarm spell! Immediately she rolled to her right from the crouch she was in; a trio of spikes appeared out of nowhere, embedding themselves in the wall behind her. She dropped most of t
he enchantment spell, leaving only the part that would help her in combat; she was still blurry to the unaided eye, and would be harder to pin down. She started running, a hard sprint for the object. She drew on her magic, making her strides a little bit longer, her speed that much faster. She dodged and weaved randomly; arrows and spears fell from everywhere and nowhere, trying to find her. It took her a moment to realize that the projectiles were driving her somewhere, intentionally pushing her in a certain direction. Away from the mansion.

  Staci faked to her left, her right, and then her left again. There! She found a gap to her right side between a pair of spears and slipped through them, turning her body sideways at the last second. Now the arrows and spears were falling in earnest; she had to duck several times in quick succession to keep from having some new and lethal headgear. She was getting closer; she could feel the pulses of magic coming from the unknown object much stronger now. They were waves crashing and breaking against her, guiding her. She only had a half-dozen strides left until she was inside the house, safe from the arrows, safe from the spears. If only she could get her hands around it—

  Her sight had been attuned for magic when she hit the tripwire. A simple physical tangle trap wrapped itself around her ankle, bringing Staci down to the ground hard. She almost landed on her face, throwing her arms up just in time to prevent breaking her nose. The cord around her ankle tightened the more she struggled; she had to get it off if she wanted any chance to make it through this. She flipped over, reaching for a knife on her belt. Before the blade even touched the cord it was struck by an arrow, knocking the grip from her hand. She reached for it—another arrow, pinning it to the ground. She tried to roll out of the way, but three more arrows planted themselves in the ground, expertly placed to catch a bit of her pants with their points. Now she was pinned, as well. Before she could start working the arrows free, a large shadow loomed above her, and she felt a sharp pain in the center of her chest as she was knocked to the ground.