The Nightborn

by Isabel Cooper

  That time, Gedomir didn’t even bother to hit him. He just addressed the guard on the left. “Make it last awhile.”

  * * *

  For a wonder, the footsteps outside did go past the door, while Branwyn waited with bared sword and Tanya hid in the corner behind her. They slowly grew fainter. A heavy door opened down the hall, then closed, and Branwyn, even with her gift, could hear no more.

  “Can you walk?” she whispered, and Tanya nodded.

  Good, said Yathana. Things are moving here.

  “Moving how? I’m a Sentinel,” she added to Tanya, who was looking confused. “I talk with my sword.”

  “Oh.”

  Getting worse. A wizard could explain it better. A wizard could understand it better.

  “But?” Branwyn asked, opening the door. She glanced in either direction and spotted no threat, so stepped quickly out into the hallway, beckoning for Tanya to follow.

  But it has the feel of a tower ready to fall. Too much balanced on too little foundation, or too many supports knocked out. Could be both.

  Branwyn, who didn’t want to risk speaking now that they were in the hall, nodded and grimaced.

  More good news, Yathana added. Unless you saw a door that I didn’t, we’re going to have to go in that direction to get the child out.

  If silence hadn’t been important, Branwyn would have cursed. There was nothing to be done about it, though, nor would there have been if she’d known. Branwyn started down the long hallway, opening one door after another in the hopes of finding an exit and listening all the while to make sure Tanya still followed.

  The girl stuck close, walked quickly despite her long immobility, and kept as quiet as she could. Little weight and bare feet helped there. So, Branwyn suspected, did a childhood spent on the wrong side of the law at times, and not only when sheltering dangerous fugitives.

  None of the doors led outside, nor to another hallway. One room had chairs and tables draped with dark cloth, as carefully cleaned but as bare of activity as much of the rest of the wing had been so far. Another, equally lifeless, had a series of cords hanging down off one wall, limp and dark.

  That was how you called servants, said Yathana. Pulling on those would ring bells in their quarters, or make sounds through enchanted jewelry if your family was rich enough. House servants on the right, grooms and guards on the left.

  Branwyn closed that door slowly, feeling as though she were putting the lid back on a coffin.

  Finally she saw their salvation up ahead, obvious without her even having to open a door. The hallway branched into a lopsided T shape. A sharp right turn led down a long hallway, and a short stub of the path she was on ended in a thick set of double doors.

  They looked normal enough, those doors. Underneath them, though, and from the tiny crack between them, Branwyn could see dull orange light, faint but definite. Even if she hadn’t known better from what Yathana had said, she couldn’t have mistaken the light for flame, sun, or even more innocent magic—not the way it squirmed.

  Branwyn didn’t know what else might be beyond the doors, but the room was full of Gizath’s power. It leered at her from around the wood, only light but capable of knowing her, of remembering.

  Despite her gift, and although she was looking directly at the doors, it almost caught her completely off guard when they opened, and it was a genuine relief to see two human figures come out.

  One was a young woman in high-necked, long-sleeved white, likely one of Zelen’s sisters. The other was a tall man in dark clothing who drew a broad-bladed shortsword with admirable speed when he spotted Branwyn.

  He clearly knew what he was doing and had the strength to back it up. The sword would be more useful in close quarters than Yathana was, and Branwyn had used all of her enchanted knives on the demons at the ball. The sorceress would be a complication too.

  Still, Branwyn did feel relief, not only because they were mortal. In an instant she thought of the filth she’d crept through and the windowless room where the Verengirs had kept Tanya bound. She remembered the Rognozis, murdered in their own home, and gods knew how many children taken for sacrifice. Then she added Zelen’s pain and the wounds that had left her nearly dead. Branwyn gazed at the figures and the light behind them, and felt a grin stretch her lips as the transformation came over her.

  “Stay well behind me,” she told Tanya, “and stay watchful.”

  The man charged. Branwyn stepped forward to meet him, practically with a song in her throat.

  Sneaking was over for the night.

  Chapter 37

  Without letting go of Zelen’s hand, Nislar pressed the point of a small knife right against his carotid artery. “Hold very still,” he said tonelessly, leaving off any title.

  “I assume you’ll kill me if I don’t,” Zelen said dryly. All the same, he didn’t move. He had the usual foolish mortal combination: the body’s reluctance to move against a certain threat, and the mind’s speck of idiotically persistent hope that death would become less certain if he waited.

  Searching him and taking him to the lake would also take longer than simply killing him, and that would give Branwyn and Tanya more opportunity to flee. He wished that more of his obedience had been that selfless but, really, the other factors flooded over his will.

  The new guard pulled Zelen’s sword from its sheath and tossed it to the floor. It clattered loudly. Obviously none of them were worried about discovery, and why should they be? Nobody would come to Zelen’s aid.

  “Won’t it look odd if I drown myself with an empty sheath?” he asked.

  “We’ll give you the sword back,” said Nislar. “After.”

  “Good thinking. Very well planned. Whatever my brother’s paying you, he should double it, especially since he’s damned you.”

  “Shut up,” said Nislar, but without any anger in it. His voice, like his gaze, stayed flat.

  The other guard searched Zelen with a probing, efficient thoroughness, starting at the feet and working upward. Two boot daggers joined the sword on the floor. Zelen guessed they wouldn’t bother replacing those, or the knives in his sleeves, though they’d likely put back his eating knife.

  Suddenly he saw an image of himself: cold, blue, and beginning to be waxy, as drowning victims generally were, with the guards sliding weapons back onto his unresisting corpse. Zelen’s throat closed up. If it hadn’t, he might have started begging then, knowing that it wouldn’t help at all.

  Then the new guard, patting Zelen’s chest, slapped his palm against the teardrop amulet. “Here, what’s—” he began, and pulled it out by its silver chain. The onyx and rubies glimmered up at him, brighter than they should have been in the dim room.

  The flicker that had been in his eyes earlier returned and stayed. “Nislar,” he said, glancing back toward the closed door. Suddenly he was confused, hesitant, and yet more there than he’d been before, like a sleepwalker roused. “What’s…”

  “Best drop it, Hidath,” said Nislar. He stayed less emotional, less present, but even he hesitated. “It’s probably not important. Leave it.”

  The amulet thumped back against Zelen’s chest. The guards became almost as they were, but now Zelen realized how little of that state had come from training, payment, or a natural lack of morals.

  “Binding spell, hmm?” he asked, as Hidath stepped back. “The Traitor and his servants do have interesting definitions of loyalty. Here I always thought it didn’t count if you forced it, but…” Zelen shrugged. “Clearly I haven’t heard from the right sources.”

  “Doesn’t matter what you think,” said Nislar. Lacking the passion that would have made it a threat, it was only a statement of fact. What Zelen thought didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. “Come on, Hidath. We have our orders.”

  Hidath took one of Zelen’s wrists again. Nislar was too much of a professional to lower the knife
as he went for the other, but Zelen, watching him with all the focus he’d learned from drawing and healing, glimpsed the slight relaxation there, the dropping of his guard, if only minutely. The prisoner was disarmed. Whatever he tried would be little use against two armed men.

  If Zelen had a chance, this was it.

  “Can I wipe my face?” he asked, looking between the guards. “I give you my word, by all of the four gods, that I won’t try and hurt you.” Now he tried to reverse all the arrogance he’d displayed on his way in and to sound humble, shaken, and fearful. It wasn’t nearly as difficult. “I–I don’t want to die with blood running down my chin. Please.”

  Nislar took in Zelen’s split lip and swelling eye, then Hidath’s grip on his other wrist. “Fine. Be quick.”

  And Zelen was.

  His strength was only human, but the chain around his neck was ornamental. One desperate yank and it broke, releasing the pendant into his hand. He was spinning as he pulled, going toward Hidath, which neither of the guards expected and which used the other man’s grip against him. Zelen might have been able to break free then. He didn’t test it.

  As Hidath yelled his alarm, Zelen brought his hand up, palm first. The blow itself was light, no more than a slap, but what hit the guard’s forehead wasn’t just Zelen’s skin. It was the pendant, shining red and black, that pressed into the space between the guard’s eyes.

  “Help me, please,” Zelen said quietly, and not to the men at arms.

  The grip on Zelen’s wrist dropped away. Hidath stood entranced a heartbeat. Then he screamed.

  He didn’t stop. The sound kept coming while he stood there. It was high, wavering, strange from a large man but not womanly or childlike so much as inhuman, the noise that metal or wood might produce just before it snapped if people could hear it.

  How long, Zelen wondered, had the man been making that noise inside his own head?

  That horror didn’t bear contemplating, not least because there wasn’t time. Zelen dove, barely ducking Nislar’s clumsy, half-stunned grip, and grabbed his sword from the floor. He kicked out as he rolled up, catching the guard in the ankle, but didn’t take him down. The other man was a professional. He stayed on his feet, alert enough even to take a swing.

  Zelen blocked hastily on the way up. His sword stopped Nislar’s, a heavy but keen-edged short blade, an inch away from his neck.

  Once more, Zelen struck out with the pendant, but missed Nislar’s forehead. The guard blinked, then slapped Zelen’s hand away, sending Letar’s sigil clattering to the floor. Zelen used his sword for momentum and pushed himself hastily backwards.

  Hidath was still screaming.

  Around came Nislar again, sword slashing down as Zelen leapt sideways. A chair splintered beneath the blow. Zelen took a step back and found himself against the desk. “We could always not do this, you know,” he said, sidling along its surface. “You leave, find a nice tavern, come back when all the evening’s festivities are over. I’ll put in a good word for you if the subject arises.”

  He blocked another swing. This one didn’t come as close, but he still felt the strength in it. Nislar’s face was blank, intent, and the pendant was gone.

  That meant Zelen had a free hand.

  A second of groping on the desk brought his fingers into contact with the largest of the cat statues, a white marble piece the size of his palm. Zelen backed away from a thrust, grabbed, and threw the thing directly into Nislar’s face.

  It hit him in the nose. Zelen the healer heard the sound of rupturing cartilage, noted the spray of blood, and winced in sympathy, knowing precisely how much trouble and pain it would cause to fix that. Zelen the swordsman saw his moment and took it: a step inside Nislar’s range, a slash to the inside of the sword arm that cut a tendon, then one to the back of the leg, and the man was down on the floor, groaning and bleeding.

  “I’m sorry,” Zelen said. “I can’t stay and fix those.”

  Sword bared and dripping blood, he turned and ran out of the room. He didn’t know where Gedomir had gone, or where the other guards were, but with Branwyn and Tanya both likely still in the old wing, he didn’t want to take any chances.

  * * *

  Compulsion, Yathana said after the guard’s blade had met Branwyn’s. The man had shifted his stance to work with the close walls, taking advantage of his shorter weapon. He was good, and thus still alive. On him, not her.

  Yathana’s speech was faint, a sign of the effort she was using to hold on to the world after Branwyn’s transformation. Been on too long for me to undo it in battle.

  That was just what Branwyn needed to hear: a reason to try to leave the man alive. She growled. It was pure frustration, but the guard, who’d evidently heard a few things about Sentinels, gulped.

  “Fine,” said Branwyn, and swung inward, grabbing the guard’s arm with her other hand. She’d use the swords as a lever, dislocate his shoulder while she kicked his legs out from under him, and then be on the sorceress before she got clever.

  That was the idea. The guard was too smart by half for a man under compulsion, though. He dropped his own arm as Branwyn moved, sending her weight further forward than she’d wanted, and slammed a fist into her kidney. It hurt his knuckles—he cursed practically in her ear—but it hurt her more, despite her metal form.

  Mercy had very few rewards.

  Branwyn spun back around, striking out with her fist in a punch that hit the guard in the shoulder and carried him a clear foot back down the corridor. He fell onto his back, arm at an angle that didn’t bode well for his chances of using it in the future.

  The sorceress took a few paces back as well. Her eyes were wide with fright. They looked very much like Zelen’s, but Branwyn couldn’t care. It was the setting that mattered, not the gem. Branwyn saw the woman’s fear, grinned, and went after her.

  At her first step, the stone of the floor reached for her. Fleshy tendrils coiled around her leg, gray like the stone they’d been but with the coiling litheness of serpents.

  “Now you learn, abomination,” the sorceress said. “Your masters aren’t the only beings that can reshape the world.”

  Behind her, the light pulsed in rhythm with her words. Branwyn, alternately kicking and slicing at the tentacles, couldn’t be sure, but she thought that it might be brighter—if brighter was the term.

  You’re not wrong, said Yathana. It was almost a moan now, as Branwyn had heard from wounded soldiers calling out for water or Mourners or simply an end to pain. She feeds it. Tears the world. I don’t know. It’s worse. She’s making it worse.

  “Of course she is,” said Branwyn.

  The tendrils were persistent, but yielded easily enough to her feet or Yathana’s edge. While Branwyn dealt with them, Zelen’s sister showed a speck of good sense and darted back toward her room and her god. That was fine. Once they got Tanya out, Branwyn would come back with a pack of priests and deal with them all. The Verengir girl could run while the running was good, and it warmed Branwyn’s heart to know that her fear earlier had been as much reality as ruse.

  “Come on,” she said to Tanya. The guard was getting up, his arm still dangling uselessly. Branwyn still didn’t feel any need to confront him again, not with the sorceress at his back and the whole place now resting, if she’d understood Yathana correctly, on a magical house of cards. “Let’s—no, dammit, go back!”

  Footsteps, at least four sets, were running toward them from down the hall.

  Tanya, who’d started forward, yelped and made a dive for the back hallway again. “What do we do?”

  “Back down the way we came,” Branwyn said quietly. “You’ll find stairs.” The guard was moving toward her again from one side. From the other came another man with a sword, two other figures—one with a pitchfork, wonderful—and a fourth behind them that she couldn’t see clearly. The mage was doubtless up to no good in her room
too. “There’s a broken window. Knock out the rest of the glass, then get to the tree outside.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  Branwyn glanced to either side of her. She was metal. She was armed. There was a wall at her back.

  “I think,” said Branwyn, “a bright girl like you can draw some conclusions.”

  Chapter 38

  “Halt!” one of the oncoming figures actually yelled. He was carrying a fireplace poker—they were becoming a constant in Branwyn’s fights, which she supposed was what happened when she went around battling cultists in cities—and doing so with no confidence whatsoever. Branwyn suspected that he was a footman who’d gotten dragged into the fight with no notion of what his employers were doing in this part of their house.

  “You first,” she replied, and had no chance for more.

  The real guard among them was on her, then. He looked uneasy, likely at her shining metal skin, the uncanny light, or both, but that didn’t stop him from charging and chopping at her knees with a hard blow. Branwyn hastily sidestepped. She’d had enough broken knees for one lifetime.

  Moving to the side put her in jabbing range of the pitchfork, which the probably groom stuck straight through her tunic. It made a ting as it hit the metal skin against her ribs. The groom stared. Branwyn yanked the pitchfork away and threw it down the hallway at the guard with a broken arm. He ducked easily. At least it was a distraction.

  She turned back, leapt over another slash of the guard’s sword, and kicked the groom neatly in the ribs on her way down. He fell back into a slump against the wall. Branwyn couldn’t tell whether he was bleeding from the mouth or not, but she didn’t try very hard. There was only so much effort that she could put into sparing her enemies, under the circumstances.

  The footman with the poker moved up to occupy the vacant space in the hall. He’d learned his lesson, since he didn’t hesitate at all before trying to smash her skull in. It was admirable, in a way. Branwyn blocked the poker with Yathana.