by Barb Hendee
“Get away from him!” he shouted.
Rodian’s mind went numb. He’d thought il’Sänke was the cause of all this, and that the black-robed man would surrender once his accomplice was put down. Wynn’s earlier words echoed in his head as he ran to aid his men.
You’re not hunting a living man! And you’ll never stop it through your usual means.
Garrogh swung as Rodian tried to get in front of the black mage.
The figure reached back and caught Garrogh’s blade. The sword halted instantly, as if no more than a child’s stick. Garrogh’s eyes widened as Rodian swung at the figure’s front.
His longsword passed straight through the cloak and robe. Meeting no resistance at all, Rodian almost lost his balance.
In that brief instant the black one twisted. His other hand struck Garrogh’s face . . . and passed straight through.
Horror closed Rodian’s throat.
Garrogh’s grip released his sword’s hilt, and he crumpled.
The lieutenant’s face turned ashen in the pattern of a hand overlying his slack features. When his knees hit the cobblestones his legs folded, and he fell backward with his eyes locked open.
The black figure finished its full turn back to Rodian with Garrogh’s blade still in its grip.
Rodian backed up a step.
“Don’t let it touch you!” Wynn cried, but her voice now came from behind him.
He retreated another step as the figure opened its hand. The blade didn’t slide along the cloth-wrapped palm. Garrogh’s sword dropped straight down, right through the hand, and clanged upon the street.
Rodian heard a loud snort and hammering hooves. Snowbird was coming. She would kill—or die—for him, but he couldn’t afford to look back for her.
“No!” he shouted. “Snowbird, stay!”
Still he heard her hooves.
“Shade, go!” Wynn cried.
Rodian quickly glanced sideways.
Wynn’s wolf bolted past him at the black mage, still limping on one foreleg, and began snarling and snapping. Rodian snatched Snowbird’s reins as she tried to follow the wolf. He jerked her away and turned around. Wasted moments were foolish, but he couldn’t let her be hurt.
Wynn’s wolf harried the black-robed man, yet seemed hesitant to stay close for too long. It hopped about, staying out of reach, but in turn the black figure flinched each time the wolf made a lunge.
Rodian jerked Snowbird’s head aside and shoved on her neck.
“Back!” he commanded. Then he turned and closed behind the wolf.
He had no idea how to fight this man if his sword couldn’t connect. Instead of swinging, he feinted and jabbed. His blade tip slipped through the figure’s whipping cloak, and whoever hid within the cowl never took notice. When the blade came out, there wasn’t even a tear in the fabric.
The figure lashed out at him.
Rodian saw the hand of wrapped black cloth coming for his face and jerked his head aside.
Searing cold spread instantly through his shoulder.
He cried out as if frostbite had erupted inside his muscles. Searing cold strangled a cry in his throat as pain ran down his arm and up his neck. Fear struck him as hard as the cobblestones when he toppled.
Rodian vaguely heard the wolf’s snarl, its claws scrabbling on the street, but he couldn’t lift his head. He was going to die, and all he could do was lie there, waiting to see the empty cowl appear above him.
Someone leaped over him from behind. He caught only the sight of a whipping brown cloak.
“Shade, hold!” someone rasped, as if too hoarse to speak clearly.
Rodian struggled, curling up to pull his knees under himself. A tall man with jagged red-brown hair, wielding a longsword, held out his free hand toward the snarling wolf. He and the wolf shifted about, keeping the black figure between them. Of all strange things, the figure remained stuck there, hesitant to turn its back on either of them.
Something about the pale-faced man was familiar, and he appeared to have no fear of getting near the robed one.
What was happening here?
Rodian’s pale protector lifted his booted foot and kicked Rodian in the chest. As he tumbled across the street, he heard someone whispering, and then . . .
“Chane, run!” Wynn shouted.
The man in the brown cloak glanced once to wherever Wynn called from. His face filled with alarm. With effort Rodian rolled the other way, lifting his head.
Wynn was supporting il’Sänke with her shoulder and gripped the staff in her other hand. A trickle of blood ran out of the Suman’s hair and down his forehead, but he stayed on his feet.
The Suman sage was chanting in a breathy whisper.
Rodian heard an angry snort. Despair took him as Snowbird began to charge again.
Ghassan pulled away from Wynn. He summoned a pattern before his sight and focused on the white horse. He could not allow the animal to break his sight line to the wraith. He filled the horse’s sight with the image of a stone wall ahead of it.
The mare’s hooves tapped a staccato as she halted frantically, whinnying and thrashing her head about.
Chane had served his purpose, but Ghassan could not wait for Wynn’s companion to find cover. Weak, injured, and shaken, he fixed upon the wraith.
He had to destroy this thing and keep its truth from surfacing.
Its power was greater than his, and he had not been able to find or touch a mind within it. But how much did it depend upon feeding to sustain its presence? How much of its power had it used up? Perhaps centuries had passed since this thing last faced open opposition.
And since the city guards had assaulted it, the wraith had not blinked away again.
It was weakened. Perhaps it feared it might not be able to remanifest if it faded. It was fighting to remain within reach of Wynn.
Ghassan had to hold it long enough for Wynn to ignite the crystal and burn the figure out of existence.
Wynn tried to shut out the sight of bodies and dead horses and il’Sänke’s battered and bleeding state. Time was running out, but Chane was in her way, and she couldn’t light the crystal with him standing there.
Il’Sänke’s chant grew from a whisper to a weak murmur.
Rodian’s horse suddenly pulled up short from its charge, but did il’Sänke have the wraith bound at all? And how long could he hold it?
Wynn caught sight of the Upright Quill across the street. Its window hadn’t been repaired from the night that the wraith had wrenched a folio through the glass. But the shutters were closed. Were they clasped or barred from the inside?
Chane shifted around the wraith, both of them taking furtive swings as the other flinched away. Shade always whipped around behind the thing, harrying it from the opposite side.
“Chane!” Wynn shouted. “The scribe shop . . . the window . . . go!”
Wynn didn’t know if he’d seen il’Sänke or the crystal or her. But his face, normally a shade too pale, looked sickly gray under the street lanterns.
“Go!” she shouted again, and gripped the staff with both hands.
She leaned the crystal out into her sight line upon the wraith. Chane turned and ran for the scriptorium.
The pattern’s first lines appeared in Wynn’s sight as she heard the domin’s murmur falter. The wraith swung away from Shade, and its hood turned straight toward Wynn.
She began to whisper, hearing wood splinter and break at the scriptorium, as the wraith rushed at her.
“Mên Rúhk el-När . . . mênajil il’Núr’u mên’Hkâ’ät!”
From Spirit to Fire . . . for the Light of Life!
The wraith jerked to a halt, as a spark filled the crystal’s heart.
The long six-sided prism flashed like an instant sunrise.
Wynn forgot to shut her eyes as the world was smothered in blinding light.
She heard Shade’s sharp yelp as everything turned black in her sight.
A screech filled the street, nearly deafening he
r, and she took a few steps backward.
Even in the dark she held on to the pattern needed to keep the crystal ignited. Then she noticed that the darkness was only ahead of her, like a circle of black. At its center she saw the long crystal, aglow but muted. Everything at the sides of her vision was as brilliant as daylight, or even brighter.
Wynn remembered she was wearing the spectacles.
They’d darkened so suddenly, shielding her sight, and slowly they lightened only a bit—until she made out a wavering black form.
Il’Sänke was somehow holding it in place! Keeping it from vanishing again.
Wynn had never taken pleasure in the death of anything. But for the first time she might have felt what Magiere had when a murdering undead’s body burned to ash.
The shadow shape in her spectacles’ dark circle began to fragment. Pieces of it spread like smoke in a whirlwind. Its illusory body began to break up as its scream continued to tear at her ears.
A black flash erupted before Wynn. The wraith appeared to burst apart in the night.
All sound ceased, and the sudden silence made her flinch.
It was gone. All she saw through her shielded sight was the crystal, almost too bright to look upon, even wearing the spectacles.
Wynn wiped the pattern from her mind—and the crystal winked out.
Pure blackness came. She couldn’t wait for the spectacles to readjust, and she clawed them off her face, keeping her gaze fixed ahead.
There was nothing where the wraith had stood.
Farther out, Shade groveled on the cobblestones, rubbing her eyes with her forepaws. Rodian’s horse backed away, thrashing her head, and her rump hit a shop’s porch post. She was snorting in panic, her eyes blinking and wild.
Wynn turned around in time to see il’Sänke collapse.
Rodian gasped for air and couldn’t see clearly. His sight was washed with colored blotches left by the sudden light from the crystal atop Wynn’s staff. When his vision began to clear, he saw her.
But the black-robed mage was gone.
Rodian began to remember what Wynn and Nikolas had spoken of. That the murderer was . . .
What—some malignant ghost? How could he accept that?
He gasped for air again and could only watch as Wynn ran for the scriptorium. The wolf limped after her, weaving as it shook its head.
Rodian’s shoulder burned and yet felt icy within. The figure had barely touched him, but he felt so weak he couldn’t even try to stand. A scraping sound caught his attention.
Il’Sänke dragged himself up. The Suman looked terrible, pale even for his dark skin, and he glistened with sweat in the street’s dim light.
“It is all right, Captain,” il’Sänke said weakly. “It is over.”
The sage had been working with Wynn—not with the black figure—but it didn’t matter.
Nothing was all right.
Garrogh was dead, and Rodian didn’t know if Lúcan had survived. And he still had to explain everything to the city minister and the royals of Malourné.
He had to explain it to himself—and he didn’t want to.
What could he possibly say?
Something solid bumped his shoulder with a snort. Rodian was still looking at the haggard Suman as he gripped Snowbird’s halter, needing something solid and real to hang on to.
Wynn rushed the scriptorium window, staff in hand, and grabbed the sill. She stood on tiptoe to see through the broken shutters.
“Chane!” she called.
The scriptorium’s front room was too dark, or perhaps her eyes had suffered too many sudden changes of light. Either way, she barely made out the counter’s dull shape and the darker hollow of the workroom’s open door.
Had Chane taken cover in time—or had she burned him again?
A whine made her look down.
Shade hopped closer, limping as if her right shoulder hurt. Wynn dropped down, holding on to the dog. For such a young majay-hì, Shade had done so well—like her father, Chap.
“Here,” a hoarse voice rasped.
At the sound of Chane’s voice, Wynn ran for the shop’s front door. It was unlocked, but as she stepped in with Shade hobbling behind, Chane had already retreated to the counter and slumped against it to the floor.
Wynn hurried over and knelt beside him. Only a bit of light from the street reached through the open door, and his face wasn’t clear to see.
“Are you hurt?” she asked. “Were you burned?”
Chane groaned as he pushed back the cloak’s hood. “No, not burned.”
The earlier burns on his face were almost healed, but he didn’t seem well at all—weaker than she’d ever seen him.
“The wraith?” he asked.
“Gone. Domin il’Sänke held it somehow. Its form broke apart . . . dissipating in the light. It was fully gone when I put the sun crystal out.”
He only nodded with effort.
“The guild is safe,” she added, expecting some response. “And so are the texts.”
Chane said nothing to this.
Wynn guessed the pain in his eyes had little to do with his injuries, visible or otherwise. His hand with the ring was braced flat on the floor no more than an inch from hers, but she didn’t reach for it.
What would become of him now?
He was a killer, a monster—aside from a wishful, would-be scholar—and one of the few here whom she could trust with her life.
“Chane, I’ve been thinking . . . about the scroll’s poem . . . and about—”
“Journeyor Hygeorht . . .”
Wynn raised her head at a masculine, hollow voice beyond the counter.
“Move away from him!” the voice added in a slow, even demand.
She scrambled to her feet, disoriented, and Shade began to growl.
Someone stood in the doorway to the scriptorium’s back workroom.
His head was covered by a large round object that seemed darker than the room, and his form was draped in black cloth.
“No!” Wynn breathed, pointing the staff’s dormant crystal at it. “You . . . you’re gone! You were burned to nothing!”
The dark figure stepped forward. Heavy boots clomped against the shop’s wood floor.
A ribbon of dim street light slipped sideways across his head as he neared the countertop’s flipped-open section.
Master Pawl a’Seatt gazed at Wynn from beneath a wide-brimmed hat.
Shade’s growl was tinged with a pealing tone, as if she might howl again, but wasn’t certain whether she should. It was the same confused tone Wynn had heard in the guild hospice as she sat with Nikolas—as Pawl a’Seatt had appeared there with Imaret.
The scribe master pushed aside his cloak’s edge and braced his left hand on the counter’s edge. The wood creaked under his grip.
Chane struggled up, dragging his sword in one hand. As he stumbled back toward the open door, he grabbed Wynn’s shoulder and jerked her along.
“Get out!” he rasped.
Pawl a’Seatt flipped the cloak’s other side.
Wynn glimpsed a sword hilt protruding above his right hip.
It was too long, too narrow for any sword she’d ever seen, as if the blade’s tang had been directly leather-wrapped instead of first fitted with wood for a proper hilt. The pommel was too dark for steel, even in the room’s night shadows.
“What’s happening?” she asked, about to look to either Chane or Shade.
Pawl a’Seatt lifted his hand from the counter and pulled on his blade’s hilt. “I said get away from that thing . . . journeyor.”
The strange blade slipped free.
“Undead!” Chane rasped. “Wynn, get out!”
She glanced at him, but what little light crept in only silhouetted him from behind. She couldn’t see his face.
“Listen to Shade!” he urged. “Listen to her!”
“Move away,” Pawl a’Seatt repeated coldly, and stepped through the counter’s opened top.
At first Wynn t
hought she saw a long war dagger in his hand, like the one given to Magiere by the Chein’âs, the Burning Ones.
But no, this blade was larger, longer, almost the size of a short sword. Where Magiere’s was made of the silvery white metal of Anmaglâhk weapons, the one in Pawl a’Seatt’s hand was nearly black, as if made from aged iron.