“Don’t look so glum,” Lord Logar said cheerily as he came around one of the vehicles. He surveyed us all as he spoke. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get out of here and back to civilization. I don’t know about you, but I missed breakfast to get here so early, and intend to make up for it with a hearty lunch.”

“Yes, sir,” Elnos said, and the rest of us followed suit. Normally, I jumped at any talk of food, but at the moment, my gut churned at the very thought of eating anything. There were animals still down in the labs—mice, rats, and rabbits—that didn’t deserve to die. But Iannis had decided freeing them would be too risky, since an unknown number of these rodents carried deadly diseases, and Lord Logar had agreed.

As Iannis’s apprentice, I was enlisted to help prepare the spell—after all, it was a rare and dangerous one, a good opportunity to learn. There was an air of suppressed excitement about the Osero mages, who seemed eager to put in practice a technique they only knew from magic textbooks and history volumes. Even Elnos looked excited to participate, despite his melancholy about Noria.

My part in the spell was simple and yet complicated. Lord Logar pulled out pouches of black stones and had several of us place them in a grid-like pattern around and inside the entire complex of buildings. Each stone was smooth and polished, about the size of my palm, and had a rune carved into it. There were four different runes in total, and Iannis explained to me that each rune stood for a different element. Each time I pulled a stone from the pouch, I spoke a Word to activate it. The rune would glow a bright, otherworldly color, and I would place it on the ground before moving onto the next location.

It was eerie, walking so close to the corridors of the underground labs as I placed my stones. The place was empty of all human life, but even from outside, I could still scent decay and despair beneath the antiseptic, and my heart clenched at the thought of the animals yet inside. My boots echoed against the paved yard as I walked above the laboratories with their rows of steel tables laden with glass beakers and cruel-looking instruments. According to Fenris, some of those tables were equipped with leather straps, clearly meant to hold down the children they kept here as they were poked, prodded, and injected. Had they killed any before we arrived, in those experiments? It seemed all too likely. I was relieved that the surviving victims had been taken away. If I had been in their position, coming out of a nightmare of being tortured and experimented on, I would not have been able to gain any peace of mind until I was as far away from this place as possible.