by Barb Hendee
“No,” he whispered behind Wynn, lightly squeezing her shoulder. Then he spoke openly to the high premin. “We do not wish to be a burden and will seek arrangements in the city.”
“There is no need for that,” Aweli-Jama countered. “Journeyor, please bring your companions. We will find all of you some comfort.”
The metaologers eyed each other. Both stepped forward, with the woman positioning herself behind the premin and the man to his left. Two guards nearest to each side column stepped forward to the edge of the street.
This might have looked like they’d made room for the visitors to enter, but not so to Chane. When Shade growled again, Chane slipped his free hand up behind Wynn to close it on the longsword’s hilt.
“Osha?” he rasped without looking back.
“Yes,” came the firm answer from behind and off to Chane’s left.
He knew Osha had nocked an arrow and would cripple the left-side metaologer first. He disliked assaulting sages, but there was a hidden danger here, and Wynn came before all else.
Chane pulled gently on Wynn’s shoulder as he slid his left foot back.
Shade pulled out of Wynn’s grip and sidestepped in front of her.
“There is no need for this,” Aweli-Jama insisted with a tinge of desperation. “If you will simply—”
Wynn dashed around behind, startling Chane, but he kept his eyes on the high premin. All four guards drew their curved swords. The male metaologer’s lips moved as if speaking, though Chane heard nothing.
“Osha!” he rasped.
“No!” Wynn shouted. “Don’t hurt them.”
No arrow struck either Suman metaologer.
In panic, Chane froze over what to do. He would not hesitate to disable or even kill armed soldiers, most like city guards, but sages were another matter. At one guard’s advance, Shade inched forward a matching step, and her hackles rose with her snarl.
Chane was about to order everyone to run when that first guard paused while looking beyond him. A puzzled frown formed on the man’s face.
“Chane, duck and cover!” Wynn cried.
He almost turned—and then her staff thrust out around his left side. The long crystal at its top end was unsheathed, and he swore under his breath.
Chane spun away as he whipped up his cloak’s hem to shield his face.
* * *
Osha stalled at Wynn’s order contradicting Chane. With an arrow drawn back, he had shifted his aim to the darkly robed man with a raised hand. He did not wish to harm a sage, but neither would he allow anyone to harm his Wynn.
The premin’s face twisted with alarm as her staff’s crystal lanced out around Chane’s side.
“Chane, duck and cover!”
Osha froze, knowing what would come next but not what to do about it. And too much happened all at once.
Chane whirled away as he jerked up his cloak. All four guards drew their swords. One made a rush forward quicker than the others. Shade lunged to intercept the man.
Osha heard Wynn’s harsh whispers. He did not understand her words, but he knew what they meant. He barely scrunched his eyes shut as her staff’s crystal flashed. Brilliant light, like a sudden noon sun, made his eyes sting beneath his eyelids.
“Run!” Wynn shouted.
Amid the sound of running feet, and just before Osha opened his eyes, he heard Chane utter a grating hiss. Wynn rushed for the packs nearby as Chane snatched up the chest, and Osha saw Shade ram a startled guard in the chest with her forepaws. That man went down, but . . .
The male sage in dark blue still had a hand raised and outstretched. Unlike the others, that one did not blink his eyes in trying to clear his sight. He fixed on the dog.
“Shade!” Osha shouted and released the bowstring.
The dog wheeled, racing away after Wynn, as the arrow hit. It struck directly into the sage’s dangling sleeve. Force jerked the man’s hand aside, and he stumbled back in fright and shock.
As the fallen guard struggled to get up, the other three, the other sage in dark blue, and Premin Aweli-Jama were all trying to clear their vision from the flash of Wynn’s crystal.
Osha spun as Shade raced by him. Only one of the packs he had dropped remained on the street stones. Grabbing its strap, he slung it over his shoulder and ran along the wall after the others. Then he heard the premin shouting in his people’s guttural tongue.
The only word Osha understood was “journeyor.” There was only one person the high premin wanted caught.
Wynn and Shade ran on ahead with Chane following, the chest in his arms. On his longer legs, Osha knew it would not take long to reach them—but even while carrying the heavy orb, Chane was just as fast.
Osha hated working with—fighting beside—Chane, as if it was acceptable for that undead thing to be in Wynn’s company. There was no other choice—he would always put her well-being above all else, no matter what it took.
Osha heard running feet coming behind him.
* * *
Wynn couldn’t believe—or understand—what had happened as she ran, panting, along the outside of the low wall. She carried her own pack and one of Chane’s. Hopefully Osha had been able to grab Chane’s other pack.
She’d clearly understood what the high premin had shouted to the guards.
“Get the journeyor! I do not care what happens to the others, but bring her back alive.”
The premin wanted her taken prisoner after she’d mentioned Ghassan il’Sänke.
What had happened here and what had the domin done?
Glancing back, she saw Osha and Chane closing rapidly on her as Shade sped out ahead. Back along the wall, the four guards were coming with swords drawn. Chane would kill any one of them if necessary. And then what?
She and her companions would be “wanted” by local authorities, if they weren’t already. All of Chane, Osha, and Shade’s overprotectiveness had pushed everything out of control. If they’d only given her another moment or two, she might have salvaged an opportunity for their greater needs—but no.
The “boys” and her “sister” had done it again.
Fright and fury pushed Wynn faster. When this was over—if they got out of trouble—she’d put all three back in their places . . . again. And she couldn’t let herself be captured, not even to save one of them.
She had to find Magiere, Leesil, and Chap. To do so, she had to find Ghassan il’Sänke. He was the key to everything.
“Valhachkasej’â!” she swore as she ran. “Where are you, Domin?”
* * *
In truth, Ghassan was uncertain what kept drawing him back to survey the guild grounds. Still, he watched its inland wall and the street along it in both directions. This place was now a danger to him.
If a member of the guild or the city guards spotted him, he would be taken at any cost. Still, he could not rest idle. He returned here again and again, as all other avenues in his search had revealed little to nothing. And he had no choice but to keep out of sight.
A moon ago, he had been arrested, dragged before the imperial court, and faced the imperial presence of Prince Ounyal’am himself, the remaining heir to the empire’s throne. In that moment, Ghassan had not known how many of his secrets had been uncovered.
“Is your high premin correct?” the prince had demanded before all present. “What is this I hear of a hidden sect among the metaologers, including you . . . Domin? Is it true that all involved but you are dead?”
The questions had shocked him more than being arrested. Too much was becoming openly known by too many, and it was all true.
Ghassan had been part of a secret sect—a subset within his own order.
It was also true that Prince Ounyal’am knew this long before he had asked.
Conjury was preferred among Suman metaologers versus thaumaturgy in the guild’s Numan and Lhoin’na branches. Ghassan was well versed in conjury and soundly knowledgeable in thaumaturgy; the opposite could also be said of metaologers elsewhere. But that did no
t account for what else he had learned, starting half a lifetime ago.
He had been taken in by a few secreted among his branch’s metaologers. Among them was a third ideology of magic resurrected for desperate reasons, though its practice was feared and reviled throughout the known world. This sect feared discovery to such a degree that it had no name, for to name it would make it something to be known, sought, and found.
As Ghassan had stood before the imperial prince, he’d known suspicion of “sorcery” was at the heart of everything, including why he had been arrested. For an instant, he wondered if the prince had betrayed him. No one else present knew that the imperial prince was an allied confidant of the sect.
Ghassan decided the prince’s question was not a betrayal.
Prince Ounyal’am was trapped as well, and in danger of discovery; his question was a warning.
All had been lost, and the prince himself could do nearly nothing to help. Further revelations and something more shocking had followed. By an amulet gifted to the prince for his protection, Ghassan heard the prince’s warning thoughts telling him to escape by any means necessary. And so he had.
Now alone in hiding and searching, he feared for the safety of his people . . . and his prince.
Not long before his arrest, he had been away on a journey and had returned to learn that a “prisoner” of his sect had escaped. It was from this prisoner, long held for many decades, that the sect had recovered sorcery.
That had cost many lives and much sanity along the way.
And Khalidah had escaped his long captivity.
Once of the triad of the Sâ’yminfiäl—“Masters of Frenzy” during the Forgotten History and later known to a few as the “Eaters of Silence”—Khalidah was now as invisible as a thought. His own flesh had been lost in death centuries before. If one met him now, outside of the ensorcelled sarcophagus of his prison, it would be in one’s own thoughts.
It would be too late to escape him.
That “specter,” for lack of a better term, had killed almost everyone in Ghassan’s sect. A monster of a past age, what some would now call a “noble dead,” was loose among—and within—the people. The nights were the time to fear it most.
Khalidah could survive daylight only while within a living host, but so many days and nights had passed since his escape. Deaths in the capital attested to his continued survival, though there were not enough reports in the empire’s greatest city to raise suspicion. As the last of the sect, only Ghassan knew the signs—or lack of such—in a victim.
And the specter could be within anyone—could be anyone while hiding in flesh, even someone within the guild or the imperial court.
Despite the sect’s precautions to protect the prince, until he replaced his withering and corrupt father, Ounyal’am was in more than just mortal danger.
Ghassan had come to the guild’s grounds tonight hoping to attempt infiltration, but how could he enter without anyone knowing? A compound full of sages, including metaologers, was well beyond blanking the mind of one beggar or a handful of patrolling guards.
City guards stood watch at the grounds’ main entrance and all smaller locked ones. They patrolled the short wall’s inner side at random intervals. They could be managed in small groups with enough foresight, but Ghassan feared conjured protections had also been set in place.
He would not discover those until too late.
The majority of metaologers in the branch had not been part of his sect; this did not mean they lacked skills or power. He could not afford to be caught, especially by them, and a hint of despair took him. Would he truly learn anything of use here, or had he simply grown this desperate?
And again, for the second time this night, a noise disturbed him.
At the sound of running feet and distant shouts, he cared little for a fleeing pickpocket running from a city patrol. Still, he peeked out of the cutway and around the corner of a shoddy tenement . . . and froze. He had seen many astonishing things in his life, but none had stunned him as much as what he now saw.
Wynn Hygeorht, in a midnight blue short-robe, rounded the compound’s far corner in a headlong run behind her big black wolf, the majay-hì called Shade. The crystal atop her staff that Ghassan had created for her was fully exposed. She barely hung on to the packs flopping against her shoulders, and their bouncing, swinging weight kept making her swerve and right herself.
Chane Andraso shot around the far corner next, carrying a chest in his arms.
Ghassan almost stepped out and then hesitated. Why were they in flight?
A tall white-blond Lhoin’na appeared next, running after the other three.
Ghassan fixed on that one with a bow in hand and an arrow held to the string. Before he could tear into the elf’s mind, four city guards rounded the corner in pursuit.
Ghassan could not stop a hissing groan.
Who else but Wynn Hygeorht could cause this much chaos any time in any place? But by what, why, and how was she here in his city and homeland? Before he regained composure, both Wynn and Shade flew past. As Chane and the Lhoin’na archer followed, Ghassan quickly looked behind into the cutway for anything of use. He grabbed up a scrap of broken pottery and flung the shard across the street at the guild grounds’ wall.
There was little time for a proper incantation, even in thought. Glowing symbols, shapes, and signs flashed quickly across his sight as his gaze flickered from the tumbling shard to the top of the wall. The pottery shard struck there, and its fragments scattered over the wall in the grounds.
The lead guard skidded to a stop and turned toward the noise.
Ghassan ducked back, barely peeking around the corner with one eye.
“What?” a second guard snapped, stalling near the first.
“Noise . . . over the wall,” answered the first as the final two guards slowed.
“Could one of them have gotten over and inside?” asked a third guard.
And the first began cursing as he glanced up the street.
Ghassan waited no longer to see how they might split up. His own quarry was running wild in the streets and would likely lose him in trying to lose the guards. He crept down the cutway and ran north along the back alley, heading in the general direction that Wynn had to have led the others. He could not help cursing as well.
Wherever Wynn went, there came trouble as well. Better to have her under his watch than arrested or loose to get in his way. And why was she even here? By the time he reached the silent marketplace, he heard running feet, and too many to be only guards. He veered across the market into a cutway on its far side, hoping to get ahead of his quarry.
Wynn and Shade shot past the cutway’s far end, and he sped up to lean out just as Chane rushed by.
“Wynn!” Ghassan whispered, loud and sharp.
The Lhoin’na spotted him, dropped the pack he was carrying, and drew the arrow held fitted in the bow.
Ghassan stepped a little farther out, holding both hands in plain sight. He carefully brushed back his hood as he repeated as softly as possible, “Wynn!”
By then, she had stopped, as had her black wolf, and her eyes widened at the sight of him. She did not hesitate and ran to him. Slowing as she approached, her eyes were still wide.
“Domin?” she said on a breath.
Shade rounded in front of her with a quiver of jowls as the Lhoin’na lowered his bow in puzzlement. Chane’s expression was beyond cautious, bordering on dangerous, as he stepped in, but Ghassan could not be bothered about some overprotective vampire.
The sounds of shouts and pounding feet echoed from the direction they had come.
“In here, quickly,” Ghassan whispered, backing into the cutway.
The instant Wynn hurried in past him, the others had no choice but to follow her.
Ghassan remained near the cutway’s mouth as he whispered, “Be still and silent.” When he peeked around the corner, only two guards came running up the street.
“Look in all cutways and all
ey mouths,” one said to the other.
Ghassan blinked as the first guard neared. In the dark behind his eyelids, strokes of light spread into shapes, sigils, and symbols. Words sounded with greater speed in his thoughts than by voice as . . .
He finished that brief blink. The glowing pattern overlaid his sight of one guard drawing near, who looked directly at him. The guard blinked as well, slowed, looked more carefully, and then sighed in disgust.
“Nothing here,” he called to the other, and then he was gone, rushing on in his hunt.
Ghassan waited, shifting his envisioned pattern to the other guard. That one passed by even more quickly than the first. And everyone within the cutway remained silent until all sounds of pursuit faded up the street.
Turning slowly, Ghassan cast another small ensorcellment, this time upon himself. As the darkness in the alley grew brighter in his sight, he took in the small group he had just rescued, finishing upon Wynn.
“Well,” he whispered, “this is unexpected.”
* * *
Wynn had no idea what to think. Moments before, she’d been desperate to find Ghassan il’Sänke, and now here he was. Had she somehow conjured him with whispered words during flight? Ridiculous. She had simply been living in desperation and uncertainty for too long.
“Domin,” she began softly, still wary that roaming guards might hear her. “Where did you . . . How did you . . . ?”
He flipped a hand and shook his head, as if such a thing mattered little. “A better question would be, what are you doing here?” He ignored Chane but fixed his gaze on Osha. “And who is this? Not a Lhoin’na, now that I have a closer look.”
Wynn glanced back and up at Osha. Most people would never recognize that he wasn’t from this continent. Ghassan il’Sänke was not most people.
“This is Osha. He’s from the eastern continent,” she explained, and then rushed on, putting aside a couple of odd things that had just happened. “We’ve come to find Magiere, Leesil, and Chap, who I sent to find you, but . . . Why are you dressed like that? Why are there guards on the guild? Where are the people I sent to you?”