by David Weber
“You’ve been lied to,” Wencit said levelly, the words drifting in puffs of vapor in the icy chill radiating from the shadows. “Your power here is less than you think. You’re overmatched. Be gone or die!”
The shadow continued its silent advance. The metal rod traced an intricate pattern, its tip glowing like a dull ember that left a brief, sullen line of flame in its wake. Wencit’s glowing blade moaned a sub-audible shriek that grated in the bones of Kenhodan’s skull like the howl of a hunting animal, but the wizard made no move.
Ruby light spat suddenly from the tip of the rod in a quasi-solid pencil that lashed at the wizard with the speed of thought, but Wencit’s sword flashed up. It parried the light with a sweeping gesture and red sparks flew, burning through Kenhodan’s jerkin. Wencit’s blade wailed hungrily, and the wizard twisted his wrist, wrapping the light about his weapon like a cord. He jerked, and the rod snapped from the shadow’s grasp. It bounced into the sawdust with an unnatural ringing sound, as if it had struck stone.
The shadow leapt forward as its rod flew free. Its scimitar scythed at Wencit’s torso, but the wizard spun on his toes in a graceful dance that carried him out of the blade’s path and behind its wielder. The shadow lurched silently forward, committed to its attack. Its free arm flailed as if for balance, and the shadow head snapped silently towards Wencit.
The wizard continued his swirling motion. He grasped his hilt two-handed, lowering the blade to waist level, and completed his circle. Eldritch steel smashed squarely through the shadow, cleaving it into unequal halves that tumbled grotesquely to the floor. This death wail was louder and more vicious, and the bits of shadow didn’t dissipate. Instead, white fire blazed through them, tearing at their darkness, flaring bright and hot. It seemed to last for minutes, but it couldn’t have been more than a handful of seconds before those flame dwindled once more, taking the shadow’s broken pieces with them in a stink of burning sawdust and something worse.
The remaining shadows snarled as the stench of burning rose, and scimitars lifted in the firelight. Kenhodan gripped the wizard frantically, dragging him back into formation. There was something ominous in that snarl from their hitherto silent enemies, and dread burned through his rage as he fought to reposition Wencit. But the wizard was badly out of position, and he’d barely begun to move before the charge began.
Only Bahzell seemed unconcerned as the shadows gave tongue. He simply leaned sideways, peering intently into the rain beyond the shattered door. And then, as the shadows surged forward, his left hand snapped like the idle flick of a whip. The hook knife hissed from his fingers into the outer darkness, a short, bubbling scream erupted, and the shadows halted, frozen in mid stride. As Kenhodan watched in amazement, they faded slowly and the flames of their fallen chieftain sank back into smoldering sawdust.
“I’m hoping I’ve not violated etiquette,” Bahzell grumbled calmly, “but it’s in my mind yonder wizard wasn’t one as worried his head over the rules for wizards’ duels, Wencit. If he’d no wish to bother with such as that, why, I’d no reason not to be obliging him.”
* * *
Wulfra of Torfo cursed as the haze of Wencit’s masking glamour filled her crystal with a gray and silver mist her strongest spells couldn’t pierce. Alwith must be dead or dying, and with the cord of his thought went her ability to breach the wild wizard’s defenses.
She sighed and sat back in her exquisitely comfortable chair, massaging her delicate brows. The outcome was hardly surprising, much though she might have wished it otherwise. Still, Alwith had been grossly overconfident. Even a direct order might not have stayed his hand, so she’d made a virtue of his arrogance and given him the spells for which he’d asked. He’d thought Wencit was overrated, had he? That the old man was “past it” and sinking into decline? Well, he knew better now—whatever hell he was in. Yet she had to admit he’d come close…very close. Without the hradani and the unexpected red-haired stranger, he might have succeeded after all.
She frowned thoughtfully, then leaned over the crystal again. She retained two servants in the area, and if Harlich was weaker than Alwith, he was also more cunning. Forewarned about Wencit’s allies, he might prove more fortunate, especially since he possessed the madwind incantation.
And if he proved equally unfortunate, well, tools were made to be used, and sometimes they broke in the using.
* * *
Bahzell raked the metal rod through the sawdust with a cautious boot, studying it thoughtfully before he turned to Wencit.
“Well struck, Wencit,” he said formally.
“You weren’t so bad yourself, Mountain,” Wencit retorted with a grin. “But the shadowmage was outclassed.” He bent over the rod and lifted it cautiously. “I’ll take care of this,” he said more sharply. “See to your lady, Bahzell. Kenhodan and I can finish here.”
“Aye.”
Bahzell turned quickly to the stair, sword still in his hand, and Kenhodan watched Wencit draw the rod slowly through his fingers. The wizard’s lips moved silently, his eyes flared briefly, and then answering light burst from the rune-graven metal. As Kenhodan watched, it glowed bright and fierce, and when Wencit opened his hands the enspelled metal curled upward in a thin stream of stinking smoke and vanished.
Kenhodan raised an eyebrow, and the wizard smiled faintly and dusted his hands on his tunic. Then he turned to the door, and Kenhodan followed, standing at the wizard’s shoulder and peering out into the night. Rain blew into their faces through the shattered door and windows, but the lightning had ceased and the wind was falling away at last.
“And now there are three.…” Wencit murmured.
“What?” Kenhodan turned to look at him, and Wencit shrugged.
“Now there are three,” he repeated, gesturing to a sprawled body just visible in the light spilling from the open door. Bahzell’s knife stood in the dead throat, surrounded by a thinning pool of rain-diluted blood.
“That was one of Wulfra’s allies. Now there are only three: Wulfra, Thardon, and Harlich. I suppose we should consider this a good start, so early in the game, but they shouldn’t have found me so quickly.”
Wencit sheathed his weapon and straightened. The sword’s dangerous light had vanished, and Kenhodan wondered how it could look so normal one moment and burn with arcane fury in the next. There was something frightening about a weapon like that, even when it fought on his side. Then he realized his own madness had vanished just as completely, and the parallel chilled him. He was going to have to come to grips with that blind rage, and the thought of it was far more disturbing than Wencit’s blade.
He shook himself and sought a lighter note.
“It seemed less than crushing for a wizard’s attack,” he ventured.
“You think so?” Wencit turned to him, his voice thoughtful. “No attack’s crushing once you defeat it, but what about that score on your shoulder? What about the gash on your cheek? The cold that nearly crippled you?” Kenhodan blinked, startled by the wizard’s ability to catalog his hurts, but Wencit gave him no time to consider it. “A second later ducking, an inch to the side, a moment earlier with no counter spell ready—then what? And for each you or I killed, Bahzell took two. Don’t underestimate our enemies, Kenhodan. Consider what would’ve happened if they’d surprised us in the open, alone, with no warning. Not so easy to beat them off then, eh? And remember—the most deadly fighter’s still mortal, and the clumsiest foe can kill him with one lucky blow.”
“I take your point.” Kenhodan knelt to examine the sawdust where the shadow had burned. “What were they, anyway?”
“Shadows of another world. Much the same place demons and devils come from, actually, although shadowmen are far weaker than those are. That’s the reason they can flow through the cracks and escape notice so much more easily on their way through. It’s not difficult to search the worlds that might have been for the fighters you seek. Transferring them, especially in numbers great enough to make them truly dangerous to someone li
ke a wizard lord or a champion of Tomanāk, takes power and a willingness to dabble in sorcery as foul as Krahana herself, but the technique’s simple enough.”
“For some, no doubt,” Kenhodan said dryly.
“True. And even though shadows lose much of their intelligence when they’re ripped from their rightful places, they still make deadly foes. That cold is the cold of the void they cross to come here. If you’d felt it without the protection of my wards, your heart would’ve stopped instantly.” Wencit shrugged. “They have other powers, too. They aren’t truly of this world, and its presences are, to them, the shadows they are to us. But they also have limitations, because the shock of crossing the void destroys their wills and leaves them little more than extensions of their summoner. They can’t remain if his will is—” he gestured the body “—withdrawn.”
The wizard paused, scuffing a boot through the scorched sawdust, and his brows knitted thoughtfully.
“But the shadowmage bears thinking on. Shadows aren’t normally drawn from among the great and powerful of their worlds—people like that are too deeply rooted in their own time and place to readily answer the summons of anything short of a deity. Yet the shadowmage was a wild wizard in his own world. It takes a very powerful wizard to wrench someone like that across the abyss, and the guardians who prevent that sort of thing should have seen the shadowmage coming. Unlike the others, he was powerful enough to stand out clearly and be intercepted. Bringing him through at all would have been difficult enough. Bringing him through undetected and with enough power to strike with the art once he got here…?”
His voice trailed off and he frowned.
“So it must’ve taken a wizard more powerful than this Wulfra? Is that what you’re saying?” Kenhodan asked slowly.
He didn’t care for the implications of that thought, and he cared still less for Wencit’s slow nod. Wind gusted through the broken door, touching them with rain and muddying the sawdust. The old wizard sighed resignedly and reached for his poncho.
“Let’s go take a look at Alwith.”
Kenhodan followed him into the dying storm. Rain soaked his hair and trickled down his face, but it lacked its earlier fury, and Wencit knelt beside the body and rolled it over. The knife hilt described an ominous arc and Alwith’s dead eyes looked glassily into Kenhodan’s.
“He looks surprised,” he observed.
“No doubt he was.” Wencit examined a charred staff that crumbled to ashes he touched it, then scraped its ruin distastefully into the bubbling gutter. “Alwith preferred to avoid physical combat. He probably forgot the lightning might pick out—give Bahzell a clear target.”
“He won’t make that mistake again.”
Kenhodan wiped rain from his face and looked back at the tavern. Perhaps Alwith might be pardoned for his misjudgment, he thought, for there were clear targets and then there were clear targets. Bahzell’s knife had traveled twenty yards through rain-filled darkness to arrive exactly on its mark…thrown left-handed. He raised a thoughtful eyebrow and wrenched the heavy blade from the grisly ruin of Alwith’s throat.
“No, he won’t be making any mistakes again,” Wencit agreed, sitting back on his heels in the rain, but his expression was…not precisely worried, but perplexed, perhaps. “There should be something more than the ash of his staff, but I don’t see what.”
“How could you expect to find it if you don’t know what it is?”
“Are you a wizard?” Wencit asked patiently, and Kenhodan shook his head in quick disavowal. “Then don’t ask me to explain the art on a moment’s notice.” He puffed his lips and Kenhodan had the definite sense that the unseen eyes behind his witchfire gaze had just rolled. “You can’t imagine how many times someone’s asked me to do that! But my point at the moment is that I just can’t believe the shadows were all Wulfra sent with him. Her henchmen could’ve managed the earlier attack alone, with her to coach them and provide the information they needed to target it. But she clearly realized it might fail, which is why Alwith was ready to follow it up, and I can’t accept that she gave him and the other two no special aid beyond the shadows! I was hoping for a clue to whatever else she might’ve given them. If I’d found it, I would’ve recognized it.”
“Suit yourself.” Kenhodan shrugged.
“It doesn’t suit me a bit. Something’s missing, and that bothers me as much as whatever’s behind her new tactics. There’s been an addition or change, and I want to know what it is and how it happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“If anyone had asked me, I would’ve said it was impossible for her to summon something like the shadowmage even with her students’ power joined with hers. On top of that, it’s not like her to give such a weapon to another. Especially not someone like Alwith, who might turn on his teacher. It worries me to find her doing unanticipated things.”
“Don’t most wizards know about these shadows? How can you be sure it’s beyond her strength?”
“The art isn’t a campfire you build higher or lower with a stick of wood!” Wencit turned suddenly snappish. “Someone—Alwith or Wulfra or one of the others—must’ve rummaged through the shadow lines for our opponents. You never know what you’ll meet out there, and moving something like the shadowmage increases the odds of attracting some very powerful entities between the worlds. Some of them, like Tomanāk, would simply obliterate someone like Wulfra with a thought. Others would take their time devouring her soul one inch at a time.” He shook his head. “Taking chances like that isn’t like the Baroness.”
“But would it be impossible for her?” Kenhodan asked.
“Whatever she may have told the world, she practices blood magic,” Wencit said grimly. “That means she could raise the power, but controlling it—that’s something else entirely. It’s her will I question. She’d have precious little margin for error, and if her will wavered even for an instant there’d be a smoking crater where her castle stands. That means it took more courage than she normally displays.” He stood and frowned. “No, that’s not really fair. She’s willing to take risks if she has to, but she’s cautious. She wouldn’t take such a chance unless she thought she absolutely had to. That’s what’s so strange about it.”
They reentered the tavern, wiping rain from their hair, and Wencit leaned over the bar for a squat bottle and two glasses. He poured pungent, cinnamon spiced Belhadan rum and handed one glass to Kenhodan, who sipped the strong spirits thoughtfully.
“So how do you explain it?” he asked finally.
“I can’t.” Wencit leaned one elbow on the bar and frowned. “At least not in a way that makes sense and doesn’t scare me.”
He sipped slowly, then shrugged.
“I see two possibilities. Either she thinks our confrontation justifies extraordinary risks—which isn’t like her, when she can’t yet know exactly what I’m up to—or else she’s found a way to augment her power. To be honest, I like that answer less than the first. Increasing her power would certainly lessen her risk, and I’m afraid I can think of at least one way she might have done it, but I hope to all the gods I’m wrong!” He frowned again. “But unless I can learn more, I can’t be sure what she’s done. Still, I’d have taken an oath that she didn’t have the nerve for that, either.…”
“Well, something must’ve happened,” Kenhodan said carefully as the wizard’s voice trailed away in thought.
“Obviously.” Wencit shook himself. “Well, of the two, I have to vote for the second possibility, much as I’d prefer not to. Wizards don’t change their styles easily, but they can gain power in a number of ways—not all of them pleasant.”
“Aye, I’m thinking I’ve heard that tale before.”
Bahzell’s voice startled them, and Kenhodan blushed slightly as the hradani eyed the glass in his fist with a twinkle. He and Leeana had entered the taproom silently, a nightgowned Gwynna riding sleepily on her father’s hip. The immense direcat padded in behind them and sat gracefully, then convulsed in a violen
t sneeze.
“You heard?” Wencit sounded unsurprised.
“Aye. It’s sharp ears hradani have—and noses, come to that.” He sniffed loudly at the rum and chuckled. “Best be pouring out two more glasses, Wencit, seeing as you’ve made so free with my stock.”
“Of course,” Wencit said courteously. He filled a fresh pair of glasses and handed them to his host and hostess.
“So your friend Wulfra’s not performing as expected?” Bahzell rumbled. “And you’re not liking the smell of things overmuch, I take it?”
“No.” Wencit shook his head, then grinned. “On the other hand, wizards seldom perform as expected. Or so I hear.”
“I’ve not known one as did, any road,” Bahzell agreed pleasantly.
“I thank you.” Wencit bowed to him, then turned to Leeana. “I see you suffered no mischief, Leeana.”
“Only three of them got as far as the bedroom, and they could only come at me one at a time,” she said simply.
“And young Gwynna?”
“Slept through the whole affair,” Bahzell chuckled.
“Did not!” the girl protested sleepily.
“Did so,” Leeana corrected, touching her nose gently.
“Well…maybe,” Gwynna admitted with a grin.
“As well for the shadows, I’m thinking.”
Her father smiled, easing her onto the bar, and reclaimed his knife. He wiped it before clicking it back into its sheath.
“At least wizards’re after having honest blood, though I’m thinking it’s the only honest thing as most of them do have. No need to be wiping shadow blood from a blade.”
“Yes, they were very considerate,” Kenhodan agreed guilelessly.
Bahzell eyed him suspiciously, and then chuckled and clouted his left shoulder so hard he staggered. He opened his mouth, but the direcat went into a fresh sneezing fit before he could shoot back a smart remark.