Sensational Six: Action and Adventure in Sci Fi, Fantasy and Paranormal Romance

by Sasha White

  On the far side of the kitchen were long tables with bench seats. More visiting scholars occupied those than the reading chairs in the other rooms, as if it had been the culinary delights offered by Galetha and Cael, and not Murdis’s library, that had brought them.

  Perhaps it had been. In the empire’s towns and cities, patrons at a tavern or inn had to pay for their meals. Never here; Murdis’s beneficence provided beds and sustenance for any who came to study or to help with the never-ending work of transcription.

  Releasing Kord’s arm, she crossed to Galetha’s side and looked into the big pot. “That smells divine,” she said. “Is it soup, or stew?”

  “Call it what you will,” Galetha replied, showing her snaggle-toothed grin. “If I had two more hares, I’d definitely say stew. As it is, something in between. Stewp, perhaps.”

  “You’ve always been good at making do, Galetha.”

  “Comes from practice, dearie.”

  Elin’s mouth watered, but her gaze sought out Kord. That, she had a feeling, could easily become habit. When it landed on him, though, she realized that he was tense, the muscles of his powerful back and shoulders bunched and rigid. He was looking toward the serving tables.

  Steam from the pot clouded her view so she stepped away from it and regarded the guests. Two guards, a man and a woman she had known since her first day with Murdis, sat at the end of the nearest table. At the next were a group of scholars she had seen many times; as ever, they were arguing over some arcane philosophical concept about which she had no opinion or interest. Beyond them, a trio of quiet men tore into the bread Cael had already served up. One of them dunked a bird-shaped loaf, head-first, into a bowl of Galetha’s stewp, then decapitated the sopping thing with his teeth. In the farthest corner sat a pair of female scholars, together yet separate, each immersed in her own book.

  The only strangers to Elin were the three men so busily eating. They were dressed like any of those the scriptorium served, and she saw nothing about them that should have put Kord on edge.

  But he was. Though she didn’t know him well, she could see that.

  A few more moments passed, and then he turned away from the tables and started toward the door, seemingly oblivious to her presence. For some reason, that bothered her.

  She hurried to his side. “Kord? Don’t you want to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry,” he said, brushing past her.

  “But a minute ago—”

  “I’m not hungry.” He spoke those words with a flat, declarative tone that left no room to argue. But she was, now—famished. And perhaps, she thought, watching Kord go, not just for food.

  ###

  After she had eaten, Elin looked for Kord again. From the corridor near Murdis’s study, she heard the old scholar suffering another one of his spells.

  He’d cough until he was dizzy and his gown was flecked with blood and bits of tissue from his lungs. Then he’d grow faint, and if he were fortunate and there was somebody nearby to help him, he could make it to a chair or a bed before he fell down.

  He was less and less fortunate as time went on, and some of the worst falls had resulted in cuts and bruises to his head, which left him dizzier still. So when she heard him start to cough—not the light coughing she knew would quickly pass, but the core-deep, brutal hacking she’d come to fear—Elin always hurried to his side, no matter what else she’d been doing.

  Now she wanted desperately to question Kord, to learn what he had seen in the kitchen that had so disturbed him, but Murdis was barking and wheezing and from the sound of it, would be on the floor at any moment. She rushed into his private study and found him bent over double, hand over his mouth. When she entered, he looked at her with panicked eyes that seemed not to recognize her. He lowered his hand and she saw wet blood on it and more around his lips and staining his teeth.

  “Sit!” she ordered. “I cannot understand why you don’t sit whenever you feel this coming on.”

  “It . . . it’s just—”

  “You hate to show weakness, is what it is,” Elin said. “Even to me, who has only ever cared for you, and will only, whether strong or weak, sick or well. As you would for me.”

  That hadn’t always been true, and she was fairly certain Murdis knew it. But though she’d originally come here seeking his knowledge—and later, his power—she had first found his respect, and kindness, and even tenderness. She had not lost sight of her goal—was closer to it now than ever—but even so, she could do no less than repay his affection in kind.

  She took his arm and led him to the chaise against the only wall of the study that wasn’t packed with books.

  “You are too good to me,” Murdis said, the thinness of his voice betraying his frailty.

  “I know,” she said. “Now lie back.” Elin enforced her command with a gentle shove against his shoulder. He allowed her—not that she left him any choice—to press him down. With the hem of his own gown, already stained, she wiped his face, glistening with sweat and damp with blood. She ignored the skeletal body exposed by her act, so different now than the one she had once enjoyed so thoroughly.

  His coughing subsided. She sat beside him, stroking his brow and whispering phrases that had long since lost any meaning: “You’ll be fine,” “There, there,” “Don’t worry, darling,” until he had fallen asleep again.

  When he had, she covered him with a thin blanket and left him there to rest. He would be fine until he awoke.

  She hoped.

  In the meantime, Kord was around somewhere, and he had questions to answer.

  Elin padded, barefoot and silent, through the arched doorways and high-ceilinged rooms of the scriptorium. Some scholars looked up from their books as she passed; others, more deeply immersed, remained unaware of her presence. Finally, she heard voices from a rarely used hallway that led to a supply room, and recognized the low rumble that was Kord’s among them. By the time she was near enough to make out words, though, another man was speaking. She froze, around the corner and out of sight.

  “ . . . interested to know you’re here and not rotting inside some alligator.”

  “Bodies rot in the ground,” Kord answered. “Or in open air. In the belly of a beast, they don’t stay long enough to rot.”

  “You know what I mean!” the first speaker snapped back.

  “You did not know I was here,” Kord said. “So you haven’t come for me. That means—”

  “What we came for is none of your concern,” another man’s voice said. “Traitorous dog.”

  Kord ignored the jab. “You’re here for the Hand, then.”

  Elin heard the distinctive metallic rasp of a blade being partly drawn from its scabbard. “Try to keep us from it, and we’ll—”

  “Keep you from it?” Kord asked with a laugh. “My ambush plan was a disaster. Seeing that, I knew it would take a miracle to get back into Antrem’s good graces. A miracle . . . or the Hand. Since I know old Murdis, I decided that would be easier to arrange.”

  “You’ll take it for yourself.”

  “And try to escape the swamps alone? With Antrem’s force and Puell’s army both after me? I did not escape the battle just to embrace suicide.”

  “Where is it, then?”

  Kord hesitated, and Elin’s breath caught. Did he know? He couldn’t. Elin had been at Murdis’s side for years, ever since whispers of him collecting his own soul-shards had begun circulating among a certain crowd. Understanding the power that would be his when he was finished, and maybe even before—that would be contained within the Hand, the vessel in which Murdis’s soul would be stored—she had made her way to his side, and, after his wife Kenaris had died, to his bed.

  Elin had watched him amass the shards over time, watching how it pained him to extract them from Kenaris, knowing all along that she would not survive the effort. But to possess one’s entire soul, every last fragment of it, was among the rarest feats of man. Kenaris had understood, and willingly offered the many shards she pos
sessed, though the agony of removal grew with each extraction. Anything to see him succeed in his goal.

  And succeed he had. But he had hidden the Hand too well. And now she wasn’t the only one after it.

  “I’ll find out,” Kord said.

  “We’ll find out. Twenty minutes with us and the old buzzard will be begging us to take it from him.”

  “No, that won’t work.”

  “What, torture? Always has before.”

  “You don’t know Murdis. Even sick, he’s the toughest man you’ll ever meet. And he’s close enough to death that he’d choose that over giving in.”

  “I say give me a chance, and—”

  “No,” Kord said firmly. “I know him. I can find it.”

  “When?”

  “Give me . . . give me five days. I’ll get the Hand and bring it to Antrem’s camp.”

  “Three days. And you’ll meet us in the swamp, just at the end of the paved walkway. We’ll all go to Antrem together. Or the three of us will go, bearing the Hand and your head.”

  “Three days, then,” Kord said. “Now go, before you bring the old man’s suspicions down on me. One only has to talk with you for an instant to know you’re no scholars.”

  “We’ll go,” the first voice said. “But not far. You have three days.”

  Elin went back the way she had come until she reached the first doorway. She stepped through it and waited in the shadows until the false scholars had passed. Kord came by a minute later, and Elin stepped into the hall behind him.

  “You bastard,” she said, her voice low and angry. “How could you?”

  Kord turned slowly, and she didn’t miss the flexing of his hand, as though his first instinct was to reach for a weapon. But his face, when she could see it, was relaxed, and his blue eyes were calm. Guileless.

  “You heard them, then.”

  “I heard you.”

  Something not so calm flashed across his eyes then, though it was so fleeting she couldn’t identify it. Fear? Anger? Regret?

  “Then you heard me doing my best to keep those louts from storming in and flaying the flesh off of the frail bones of your lover. My old mentor.”

  “I heard you plotting to steal the Hand from him,” she replied with equal heat. But she found herself hesitating. He had convinced them not to hurt Murdis.

  She gave herself a mental shake. Why did she want to believe him so badly?

  Kord frowned.

  “More like buying time to find a way to save it—and Murdis—from Antrem. You think a man like that has any use for a place like this? The first thing he’ll do when he gets the Hand is reduce the scriptorium to rubble. And he won’t care who’s inside it when he does.”

  Elin had heard of Antrem, of course. In a way, he was part of the reason she was here, him and all the others who sought to overthrow Puell and put Celaeus—or themselves—in his place. The thought of one of them getting his greedy clutches on the Hand after all her work to find it—and what they might do with it—was unconscionable. She couldn’t let that happen.

  Even if it meant trusting a man she’d just met. One who already made her feel things no other man ever had, Murdis included.

  She reached out to pull him into the room behind her, not wanting to continue the rest of this discussion in the hallway, where any passerby might hear. As her hand touched the bare skin of his arm, a sudden musky scent overwhelmed her, both strange and tantalizingly familiar.

  She gasped at the power of it, and might have stumbled if Kord had not reached up with his other arm to catch her and pull her close. From his face, she could tell he couldn’t smell it himself, and she understood then that it was her totem animal reacting to something she could not perceive with her own human senses.

  The scent strengthened as Kord’s arms encircled her and she moved unthinkingly closer to him. She couldn’t look away from his eyes, which had lost any pretense of calm. Her breath quickened and she could feel her heart racing beneath the thin cloth of her robes. As she breathed in his nearness, she realized belatedly that the musky odor emanated from him.

  And that she recognized it, though she had never encountered it before. Like a wanderer lost in the desert, blind and deaf, yet still inexorably drawn to the promise of water somewhere beyond sight or hearing.

  It was the scent of Panther—very nearly the same one she exuded when she dreamt of her own Pantheress totem, but deeper, somehow. Sweeter.

  Irresistible.

  She jerked away from him, and he dropped his arms, the answering intensity she’d glimpsed in his eyes quickly hooded over. She pushed away the pang of regret she felt when she saw it; she had a job to do, and she couldn’t afford the kind of distraction Kord’s embrace promised.

  But she trusted her totem, and knew now that she had no choice but to trust him, as well.

  “Come,” she said, glad her voice did not waver as she motioned him through the doorway. “If we’re to find the Hand before they return, we have much to discuss.”

  ###

  Kord followed her into the small, unlit alcove, struggling to swallow the bitter and entirely unexpected disappointment he’d felt when she pulled away from him. He’d gone from being ready to talk his way out of her wrath to wanting to talk himself into her bed in the space of a few breaths, and the suddenness of it unnerved him.

  As did the quickness with which she had appeared to change her mind about him. He wasn’t sure he could trust the about-face, but what choice did he have? She clearly knew more about the Hand than he did, and his best chance of finding it was working with her. And if there was a part of him that thrilled to that thought for reasons completely unrelated to Antrem or Murdis…well, he was only human, wasn’t he?

  Inside, she turned to face him again, her voice low and even and her eyes hidden in a slant of shadow. “What do you know of the Hand?”

  “Not much. I know that it’s powerful, a vessel for soul-shards. I know that Murdis has long sought it, and Antrem wants it. And that’s all I need to know to want to make sure he doesn’t get it.”

  Elin cocked her head to the side, as if considering her next words. The movement placed her face even further in shadow and Kord found himself wishing he could see her eyes.

  Silence stretched out for several long moments before Elin finally responded, and when she did, Kord almost wished it had remained unbroken.

  “Not just for soul-shards—though it confers more power with every one collected, and so would be valuable for that reason alone. No, the Hand is much more than that. It’s a vessel for an intact soul. Specifically, for Murdis’s intact soul.”

  Kord closed his eyes at the words, trying to wrap his mind around the terrifying implications.

  Most people shared shards of their souls with others, usually their families and friends, but sometimes with people unknown to them—people who, many scholars theorized, were meant to be in their lives from the start, but whose destinies had taken them away from those who shards they’d been born to share. Sometimes they even shared shards with certain animals, which more learned minds than his claimed was the origin of the totems that guided them.

  Rare indeed was the man or woman born with a fully intact soul—rare, and powerful, and usually completely insane. It was said that no one person could hold that much power for long without losing both his humanity and his mind. That Murdis, the man who had taken Kord in and treated him as a son, might finally be close to amassing such power, was almost more than he could grasp.

  And for another to seize that power—the power of an intact soul belonging to one strong enough to claim his own—well, that was unheard of, in Kord’s experience. Presumably it would confer the soul’s power to he who had taken it.

  He had known the Hand was powerful. He had not understood just how powerful.

  Or how powerful it would have been, had it, in fact, been complete. But only he and Murdis knew the truth of that.

  He opened his eyes to look at Elin, only to find that she�
�d shifted, and her face was no longer wreathed in shadow. Her dark eyes regarded him intently.

  “What does he intend to do with it? Heal himself?”

  She gave a small, delicate shrug.

  “If that’s all he’d intended, he would have done it already. No, I’m sure he has something much grander in mind, but whatever it is, I haven’t been able to learn.” Her lips compressed a fraction and Kord forcibly pushed away the thought of kissing them back to fullness. “Nor have I been able to discover where he keeps it. But you knew him before me—better than me, probably. Maybe you can help me find it.”

  “And what do you intend to do with it?”

  Elin’s lips curved into a wry smile, and her eyes sparkled in a way that only made Kord want to kiss her more, and he found himself biting the inside of his cheek to stay focused.

  “The same as you. Keep Antrem from getting it.”

  “And after?”

  She gave a husky, amused laugh.

  “I guess we could wrestle for it.”

  Before Kord could get lost in that vision, she stuck out her hand.

  “Partners?”

  He didn’t hesitate.

  He reached out and clasped her hand in his, and though it should have been just a momentary touch, neither of them let go.

  “Partners,” he said at last, wondering just exactly what he was committing himself to.

  ###

  Kord had been honest when he’d told Antrem’s men that physical intimidation wouldn’t work on Murdis. Now that he knew the old man’s power was more profound than he could have guessed, he was even more convinced of that.

  Trouble was, that would have been his first instinct, too. He had made his way with his sword and his strength for so long, he sometimes forgot that he was more than either; he was also smart, and had been well-educated.