War Maid's Choice-ARC Read Online Free PDF Page A

back slightly as Chanharsa drew a deep, deep breath. Her shoulders rose as she filled her lungs, and then the stone changed .
    Bahzell had seen her do this over a dozen times now, yet he still couldn’t quite force what he saw to make sense. It wasn’t that it happened too quickly for the eye to see, although that was what he’d thought the first time he’d watched it. No, the problem was that the eye wasn’t intended to see it. Or perhaps that the mind hadn’t been designed to understand it...or accept it. The smooth, flat wall of stone flowed like smoke under Chanharsa’s palms, yet it was a solid smoke, a surface which continued to support her weight as she leaned even harder against it. A glow streamed out from her hands, spreading across the entire face of stone in a bright web of light, pulsing in time with her heartbeat, and that glow—that web—flowed away from her, sinking deeper and deeper into the smoky rock. In some way Bahzell would never be able to explain, he could see the glow stretching away from them, probing out through hundreds of cubic yards of stone and earth. He couldn’t estimate how far into the rock he could “see,” but the glow grew dimmer as it moved farther and farther away from him.
    A minute slipped past. Then another. Three of them. And then—
    Chanharsadahknarthi zoihan’Harkanath staggered ever so slightly as the stone under her hands vanished, and an abrupt, cool fist of breeze flowed over them from behind as air rushed up the tunnel to fill the suddenly created cavity before her. Her shoulders sagged, and one of her armsmen stepped forward quickly, taking her elbow and supporting her until she could regain her balance. She leaned against him for a moment, then inhaled again and shook her head, pushing herself back upright, and Bahzell heard a mutter of awe from the spectators...most of whom had seen her do exactly the same thing at least as often as he had.
    On the other hand, it wasn’t something a man got used to seeing.
    The tunnel had suddenly grown at least sixty yards longer. The tunnel roof was thirty feet above its floor, and the tunnel walls were sixty-five feet apart, wide enough for three heavy freight wagons to pass abreast. Its sloped floor was ballroom smooth yet textured to give feet or hooves solid traction, and two square-cut channels—six feet deep and two feet wide—ran the tunnel’s full length, fifteen feet out from each wall. Every angle and surface was perfectly, precisely cut and shaped...and glossy smooth, gleaming as if they’d been hand polished, without a single tool mark anywhere. The new tunnel section had freed a sizable spring on its southern wall and water foamed and rushed from it like a fountain, but Chanharsa had allowed for that. Another, shorter channel had been cut across the tunnel floor, crossing the first two at right angles, this one deep enough that none of the newborn stream’s water escaped into the first two as it flooded into its new bed and sent a wave front flowing across the tunnel to plunge gurgling and rushing into an opening in the northern wall. Two broad, gently arched bridges crossed the sudden musical chuckle of water—not built, but simply formed , as strong and immovably solid as the rock around them—and sunlight probed down from above through the air shaft piercing the tunnel roof. That shaft was two feet in diameter and over eighty feet deep, and patterns of reflected sunlight from the stream danced across the smooth stone walls.
    “Well, I see I managed to get it mostly right despite all that distracting chatter going on behind me,” Chanharsa observed, turning to give the hradani her best glare.
    It was, Bahzell admitted, quite a good glare, considering that it was coming from someone less than half his own height. It wasn’t remotely as potent as the one Kilthan could have produced, but she was twenty-five years younger than Serman, which made her less than half Kilthan’s age. In another fifty years