Five of the eight Dellorans were left. Tyvian tried to stab one of them before he rose, but the ring shot a lightning bolt of pain up his arm and he was forced to drop his sword. The Delloran in question—Black Eye himself—tackled him by the legs, and the two men were left to rolling down those damned cobblestone stairs in an awkward wrestling match. Black Eye had strength and size, but Tyvian knew a few dirty tricks. Chief among these was biting, and he dug his teeth into Black Eye’s nose as though it were a massive wedge of Leventry cheese. The guard responded with a few kidney punches that made Tyvian let go, but not before he took a chunk of nose with him. “Kroth-spawned tit,” the Delloran growled. “Messin’ up my face.”
Another thunder-orb went off, blowing Black Eye and Tyvian up against the front stairs of a house. Tyvian felt his shoulder pop out of joint, and Black Eye cracked his own head on a stone and fell unconscious on top of him. Between his wounded shoulder and Black Eye’s bulk, Tyvian was trapped. From his vantage point underneath Black Eye, he could see that the battle, such as it was, was nearly over.
Hacklar Jaevis had lost his hurlant and was fighting against the monstrous Gallo with nothing but his thin, curved saber. Gallo had a weapon that looked like a cross between spiked brass knuckles and a machete, and he used it in much the same manner. All of Jaevis’s artistry with his curved blades was irrelevant against the hacking, driving blows Gallo delivered to the bounty hunter’s guard with mechanical rhythm. Each block Jaevis made seemed to drive him back half a pace and sent shockwaves of force through his body to the point where he looked scarcely able to defend himself. Gallo pressed on until, eventually, Jaevis was forced to his knees. Gallo’s armored paw seized the bounty hunter by the hair, hauled his head back, and laid his blade against Jaevis’s throat.
“Say good-bye to your bounty hunter, Tyv,” Hendrieux said softly. He was crouching next to Tyvian’s pinned body, a long thin dagger in one hand. “I just want you to see this last ridiculous ruse of yours fail before I stuff a knife in your eye myself.”
Gallo looked over to Hendrieux. His ruined voice betrayed no sign of fatigue or pain. “Now?”
Hendrieux held up his hand. “I’m glad it will end this way, Tyv—your body found beaten, dead, and dirty, pinned by a stinking oaf in some dirty Freegate side street. I bet they’ll think you were mugged. Won’t that be funny?”
It was then that Gallo was knocked across the street and slammed into the second story of a carpenter’s workshop by some unseen force. Hendrieux stood up bolt straight. “What the—”
Tyvian had never heard Hool roar before. It was, in a word, terrifying. The volume and timbre of the bellow that escaped her lips was sufficient to make Tyvian’s bowels watery, and he at least knew Hool had no intention of killing him.
The two Dellorans closest to Hool saw her copper eyes glinting in the dark and watched, open-mouthed, as she rose to her full height. Her bulky silhouette towered over them in the dim light of the street. In her hands was Gallo’s heavy maul, which she had just used to propel the massive man through the air like a croquet ball.
Sahand was said to pay well, but apparently didn’t pay that well. The men dropped their swords and fled into the night.
The last remaining Delloran stood quavering before the mighty gnoll’s advance, longsword extended. He called to Hendrieux, “Orders, captain?” Hendrieux, though, was long gone. The lone Delloran glanced around him, saw he was alone, and then ran off in the direction the others had gone. Hool dropped the heavy maul as the man vanished from sight and began to sniff the air carefully, her ears rigid and upright.
“Hey!” Tyvian yelled. “Hey! Help me up!”
Hool vanished from sight, darting down an alley at the speed of a galloping horse. Tyvian was left pinned and alone in the cold and dark. “Hool? HOOOL! Dammit, gnoll! I’m stuck!”
A minute or two later saw the weight of Black Eye suddenly lifted from Tyvian’s body. The smuggler looked up to see Hool standing over him. “Hool!” He coughed, “It’s about bloody time! What are you doing here anyway—you were supposed to be in the Blocks.”
Hool ignored the question and skipped straight to criticism. “You are very stupid, Tyvian Reldamar. You are lucky other humans are also stupid, or you would be dead.”
Tyvian crawled painfully to his feet. “Yes, Hool, thank you for the valuable critique.”
“Hendrieux got away again—another magic door. You said those things were expensive, but he has three of them now.”
Tyvian tried blowing his nose, but all that came out was blood. He reasoned that, at the very least, the shirt he was wearing couldn’t get any more ruined. “He hasn’t got three, just one—a door that magically connects to other doors. It’s called an anygate.”
“Where is it?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Tyvian said, but the ring pinched him for it, and hard. Fortunately, the rest of him was in enough pain that the effect was largely masked. “Where’s Jaevis?”
Hool pointed toward a different alley. “He snuck away when I hit the big man with his hammer. I can track him. He doesn’t use filthy cheater magic.”
“Not now, Hool, thank you,” Tyvian said, limping over to the piles of bodies now littered around the street. “Speaking of the big man, what did happen to Gallo, anyway?”
“He should be dead but he isn’t. I don’t know why,” Hool observed, cocking her head and listening. “He is close, but he’s leaving.”
Tyvian nodded. The man had to be life-warded beyond any life ward Tyvian had ever heard of—nobody survived a thunder-orb to the face and walked away, particularly not when they were knocked through a building immediately afterward. He made a note to avoid frontal confrontations with Gallo for the foreseeable future.
Tyvian found the second Artificer lying underneath one of the Dellorans killed by the initial thunder-orb. “Here—is this one alive?”
Hool nodded. “He is bleeding, but he will probably live if nothing catches and eats him before he gets home.”
Tyvian sighed, which made his bruised ribs complain. “Ugh . . . well, that’s something. Here, pick him up and bring him to my flat.”
Hool’s ears flattened against her head. “Why?”
Tyvian shrugged; the gesture made his dislocated shoulder scream, but he kept his desire to wince to himself. He doubted Hool was sympathetic to physical pain. “I want to make sure he isn’t caught and eaten, of course. Now hurry, or all this will have been for nothing.”
Hool hoisted the unconscious Kalsaari onto her back while Tyvian snatched up the hurlant where Jaevis had dropped it, then they both headed for home. Altogether, Tyvian decided it had been a rather productive evening.
He tried not to think about how much of it had relied on pure, dumb luck.
CHAPTER 4
CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR
Myreon did not sleep, yet she was too tired to do much of anything else. She lay on the plush mattress with the downy quilts bunched around her and stared at the ceiling.
Artus was almost certainly dead by now. The thought of it made her want to cry, but no tears came. The poor young fool—came this far, followed Reldamar every step of the way, only to be cast out and murdered in some Freegate alley for no discernible reason.
He had been a good person, too—Myreon could tell just by looking at him. In her time, she’d seen a lot of bitter, desperate children gathered in the wretched alleys of Saldor and Galaspin, eyes dull and hard as shale. They were the progeny of ink-thralls and prostitutes, raised with the lash and taught to expect nothing. Artus hadn’t been like them, though. He had an easy smile and an honest way about him. He spoke like a boy who had been loved once and perhaps still was somewhere. He could have made something of himself, if not for Reldamar’s meddling. The tragedy of it chilled her bones.
Myreon wondered how many people like that—good, innocent fools
—had their lives ruined by Tyvian Reldamar. She thought of a flower girl in Ihyn who Tyvian had employed as a lookout for his safe house, killed by accident when she threw herself in front of the Defenders advancing to capture him. She remembered a young Akrallian enchanter who had trusted Reldamar with sensitive documents and, as a result, was rotting in an Akrallian dungeon to this day. Everywhere the man went, people suffered.
And yet . . . no. There was no “and yet.” Tyvian Reldamar was a spinefish—colorful, interesting, even beautiful, but if you touched him you wound up dead or hurt. To him, there was nothing beyond himself. That ring could torture him all it wanted, but it couldn’t torture him into believing in something good or noble. It couldn’t force him to be selfless. Myreon suspected that Tyvian believed that Good and Evil were arbitrary distinctions made by those who wished to control other individuals through the creation of some kind of moral code. To him, they had no more true meaning than any other baseless superstition. He thought of them as the crutches leaned upon by the stupid, the ignorant, and the weak.
He was wrong, though. She knew what true nobility and true selflessness was. She had seen it in her father. She had even seen it in Lyrelle, Tyvian’s mother—a woman so selfless that, though she had it in her power to seize her son and bind him to her will, she did not do so. As Magus Lyrelle had often remarked, “Each of us must be allowed to make ourselves as we intend. For others to fashion you in their image—even with the best of intentions—is the commission of a grave violation.”
Myreon dragged her thoughts away from the Reldamars and back to herself for a moment. Her room had no spirit clock, no way to judge time. It was late, at any rate. A storm was rolling in, blotting out the moonlight and dropping a pall of fog over the dirty Freegate streets. Assuming her message had been received, how soon could she expect a rescue attempt? She tried to estimate timetables—how long it would take to verify the veracity of the rescue message, how long it would take to get a team together, how to sneak it into Freegate without the city watch noticing? “Gods,” she grumbled, “a long time.”
The best she could hope for, she realized, was for a rescue party to be on the midday spirit engine tomorrow. If she had to do it, she would bring ten men disguised as guild apprentices and journeymen. Watchmen would be all over the spirit-engine berth, tattlers and all, but if the Defenders scattered to various sections of town while disguised, no one would likely notice or care. Equipment would have to be shipped separately, as parcels—crates to be delivered to whichever warehouse would serve as a rally point. The operation required to muster them all would take hours. Tomorrow night, then. She could be rescued from here as early as tomorrow night.
She had the sinking feeling that wouldn’t be soon enough.
Thump!
A sound through the wall, muffled but clearly audible. Myreon bolted upright in bed and cocked an ear.
It had come from Artus’s room. Gods, she thought, the specters are removing the body. She felt ill. Her tongue, dry and sour, seemed to swell in her mouth. Her eyes watered. “Reldamar, I am going to . . .” She couldn’t summon a curse suitable enough, so she just let the dead silence swallow her rage for a moment. She shook her head, thinking of the smuggler’s mocking smile. “Somehow.”
Another thump and then a crash. The sound of broken porcelain—it had to be the blue-and-white Hurnish vase on an end table by the door in Artus’s room. The specters must have knocked it over as they carried out the corpse.
Except that serving specters never did anything like that. They were existentially incapable of breaking household objects or anything in general—you had to get specially constructed ones that were able to break eggs, let alone accidentally break vases. So, if they didn’t break it, then that meant somebody else was in Tyvian’s flat. But who?
Myreon stood up and went to the wall, pressing her ear against it.
Silence for a long moment—only her breath and racing heart to mark the time.
“Unnnhhhhh . . .” It was the faintest of moans, barely verbal, but Myreon heard it. It was like a spike of fire in her spine.
Artus was still alive.
Myreon was numb with shock. She kept listening, her face pressed so hard against the wallpaper it was probably making a permanent imprint.
“H-Help . . .”
“Oh Gods!” Myreon leapt to the door, trying the handle though she knew it was locked. “Hey!” She pounded on the door. “Let me out! Let me help him! He’s fallen out of bed! Please!”
It was pointless. One did not argue with specters—they were not intelligent beings. They did what they were supposed to and nothing more. Reldamar had them set as housekeepers and cooks and improvised jailors—nothing else interested them. They were probably cleaning up the broken vase around Artus’s fever-wracked body at that very moment, never imagining they might help . . .
Wait.
“That’s it!” Myreon snapped her fingers. She cast her glance around the room, looking for something to spill. Her water pitcher was empty and had been for hours and no other liquid given to her. That liquid, however, hadn’t just vanished entirely; the chamber pot sat in the corner, not yet emptied.
With the specters’ cleaning function in mind, Myreon tore off the lid and hefted the heavy porcelain bowl in both hands, the stink of her own urine burning her nostrils. She aimed at the door to her cell and dumped the contents on the floor so it would leak under the door and into the living room. She didn’t have to wait long.
The door was flung open and a floating towel dropped on the puddle on the threshold of her cell. Myreon leapt over it, brushing past something invisible. The specter did not grab hold—it was cleaning the filth from the floor first, and its companion was busy cleaning the mess Artus had made. She had a few seconds to dart into the living room, up the short corridor, and duck into Artus’s room.
Artus was facedown on the floor, sweat-soaked and panting. On his back, the bandages Myreon had placed were black with dried blood. She immediately crouched and grabbed him under the armpits. “I’ve got you! Are you all right?”
Artus’s head rolled back. His eyes were bloodshot but surprisingly clear. “Hey . . . how’d I get on the floor?”
Myreon lifted him—he was heavier than he looked—and dragged him back into the bed. She was out of breath by the time she was done. “You’re . . . you’re alive!”
Artus lay back weakly on his pillow. “Yeah . . . sure . . . Tyvian saved me . . .”
“No he . . .” Myreon frowned and felt his forehead. He was cool to the touch. She felt around to his back and pulled the bandage away—the wound was healed. Practically gone. “How in hell’s blazes did Reldamar—”
“Oh Saints! That’s right!” Artus’s eyes popped open wide. He moved as if to get up again, but Myreon pushed him back down. “Lemme go! I gotta talk to Reldamar!”
Myreon still couldn’t quite figure out what had happened. She found herself staring at the boy for a moment before finally gathering her wits. “Artus, you nearly died—you have to stay in bed!”
He nodded slowly. “Okay, Ma. Sure . . . sure thing . . .”
Myreon felt a force seize her by one arm and begin dragging her out of the room. She struggled against it. “Artus, what do you mean Reldamar saved you? What did he do?”
Artus, though, seemed to be drifting away again. “Saints, this is a swank place, huh? Nice . . . nice curtains . . .”
Another specter had its hooks in now, and Myreon felt her feet sliding on the floor. “No! Somebody needs to take care of him! He needs water! He needs something to eat!”
The specters made no comment. She was slowly dragged from the room and into the hall, cursing the whole way. She considered trying to dispel them—a relatively simple maneuver, typically—but that would tip her hand early. She was saving what little energy and strength she had regaine
d for the moment when it would be most necessary. So instead she wove a small portion of her power into a small telekinetic push that knocked a vase off the mantelpiece in the living room. This prompted one specter to release her immediately and, moving faster than Myreon might have believed, catch the vase before it hit the floor.
It was the opening she needed, however. She yanked against the other specter, and though it didn’t lose its grip, it did slide across the floor with her, unable to find purchase with whatever eldritch process gave the thing traction. Dragging it along, if slowly, might be enough—she only needed to make it to the front door of the flat. Once she crossed the threshold, the things would have no further power over her.
Her heart pounded in her chest as she forced herself against the living room floor, step by labored step. The specter had replaced the vase on the mantel and again she felt the cold, formless force of the thing join its companion by grabbing her under her other arm. She was stopped in her tracks and dragged backward half as far as she had come. It was only by propping herself against a pillar that she managed to stop her backward progress. “Dammit!”
She created a bigger distraction then—this time a telekinetic burst at the fireplace, stirring ash, soot, and fiery sparks across the floor. One spark landed softly on the armrest of great, high-backed chair. The specters released her immediately, fetching brushes and dustpans from distant closets and flying to the rescue of Tyvian’s upholstery with all the speed of falcons in flight.
“Ha!” Myreon bolted for the front door. She had no staff, but she was strong enough to possibly work a few spells to get her to safety. Any reward she could offer the city watch for her safe return would probably outstrip whatever funds Tyvian could offer to bribe them. She had to hope.
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