There was no way to stay hidden as they crossed the plains toward the abandoned village, so they didn’t try. If the carvers had placed sentries to guard against their return, they were invisible. Sienne hoped the carvers believed they wouldn’t be so stupid as to return after being routed once. If they could catch the carvers unawares, so much the better for the success of their plan.
Once they reached the village, they moved more slowly, taking advantage of the broken foundations as best they could. Alaric was never going to be stealthy, no matter how soundlessly he moved, but he still took shelter where he could. When they reached the collapsed smithy, they paused for Dianthe to look around. “Nothing moving,” she said. “I’m not assuming not seeing them means they aren’t here, but I don’t hear or smell anything.”
“Smell?” Perrin said.
“They have a rancid odor, like rotten meat,” Dianthe said. “It’s very faint, but still noticeable.”
Sienne hadn’t noticed it, but Dianthe had skills that were beyond her. “I think they were partly visible, and we just didn’t realize it,” she said. “I felt we were being watched. I don’t have that feeling now.”
“I had that feeling as well,” Kalanath said. “Now there is nothing but the silence.”
“We’re nearly there,” Alaric said. “I think it’s time for that blessing. We shouldn’t talk once we’re on the road to the keep.”
Perrin nodded and tore a paper square with a smudge of pale pink on one corner free from the others. “Stand in a circle around me,” he said. The others clustered in close. Perrin held the blessing high over his head and muttered his invocation. The paper burst into pink flames, licking Perrin’s hand. Nothing else happened.
Perrin lowered his hand as the fire died away. “That was—” He shut his mouth abruptly. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Dianthe said. Her eyes grew wide. “Oh, that is strange.”
“What is?” Sienne said. What is? echoed inside her head, a strange doubling of sound as if she had spoken with two voices, half a second apart. “Is it supposed to do that? That echo?”
“I do not—” Kalanath began. An unexpected smile spread across his face. “I like it.”
“I don’t hear—” Alaric said. “Oh.”
“I have no idea what it means,” Perrin said, “save that such a doubling might make controlling someone under that influence difficult to control. That is a supposition.”
“Let’s take it on faith that it works, and keep going,” Alaric said. He held out his hand. “Good fortune to us.”
One by one, they put their hands together in the center of the circle. Sienne tried not to think of it as a farewell. They were going to survive, damn it, no matter what they found inside that keep.
They walked up the road of rounded stones Sienne still couldn’t help thinking of as tiny skulls toward the keep’s front door. No one leapt from the shadows to attack them with a terrible curved knife or a spell cast without a book, something that still unsettled Sienne. The frieze over the arched doorway looked no different, though Sienne couldn’t help wishing the Figlari dukes had put their family emblem there instead. So much easier if they had.
They huddled inside the arch while Dianthe listened at the closed door. She shook her head. Too thick to hear anything, or maybe there wasn’t anything to be heard. Alaric nodded. He pushed on the door, which opened as readily as it had before. The carvers hadn’t barred it against them, so either they weren’t expecting their return, or they weren’t worried about the five humans as a threat. He slipped through the narrow gap as quietly as he could, followed closely by the others.
Once again, the entry hall was empty. Sienne looked carefully at the walls and the gallery above. No sign of anyone concealed there. Alaric gestured for them to follow him. Sienne moved into position behind Dianthe, who with Alaric would be first through the door. Then Sienne, then Perrin with his shields, and finally Kalanath.
Alaric held up three fingers. Folding them away one at a time, he counted down to zero. He flung open the door to the great hall and, roaring a challenge, ran through. Dianthe followed him, and Sienne, taking a deep breath, clutched her open spellbook and dashed forward.
12
They’d caught the carvers napping. Sienne had time to observe them stirring from where they slept on the sunken floor or slumped against tables before she was across the room and darting up the steps of the dais. The carver wizard wasn’t there, for which Sienne thanked whatever avatars watched over them. So much the better if they didn’t have to face her, and never mind about Alaric’s personal revenge.
“Help me push the table!” she cried to Perrin. Kalanath was right; once you got used to it, the doubled sound was pleasant. They grabbed both ends of the table and hauled it close to the wall beneath the stone falcon. Sienne climbed atop it and slapped her left hand as high as it would go on the wall, which was about three feet from the bottom of the falcon stone. She raised the spellbook to eye level and spoke the syllables of the transform.
The wall went spongy in an instant. Her hand, pressed flat against it, sank a fraction of an inch. Dampness rose from the smooth, hard, cold surface. The yellowish-gray stone around her hand turned brown and oozed between her fingers. The brown color spread outward like water soaking into a cloth.
She shrieked with delight and turned her head to look at Perrin, who had his back to her. As she watched, he tore free a blessing and chanted an invocation. A pearly gray hemisphere sprang up around them seconds before a pair of carvers crashed into it, knives raised.
“How fast?” he asked.
Sienne looked back at the wall. The shield’s top was only inches from her head and hugged the wall, making Sienne wonder if it continued through it and was visible on the outside. The dark stain spread nearly a foot from her hand, unimpeded by the shield. “Faster than I thought,” she said.
Perrin nodded and turned his attention to the carvers slashing at the shield. Sienne closed her spellbook and opened it again, this time to drift. The wall was starting to drip, if you could call huge gobbets of mud “drips.” Mud covered Sienne’s hand entirely and slid down her wrist. The stain was two feet in diameter now, and the wall looked like a child’s sandcastle eaten away by the oncoming tide.
She glanced away to see how her companions fared. Kalanath had taken down the two who had been hacking at the shield, but three more had taken their place. He and Dianthe stood back to back, fending off attackers. Alaric had repossessed his enormous sword and cut a swathe through the carvers who’d been sleeping at the tables. His blade was gory with pink blood.
Sienne shuddered and turned her attention back to the wall. The dark, wet stain had nearly reached the stone. Sienne readied her spellbook to cast drift on the stone as soon as it began to slip down through the mud. An artifact should be able to withstand falling ten feet to the table underneath, but—
Sienne gasped. Artifact. That was what was wrong. The falcon stone had no magic on it.
She watched the dark stain spread to the stone and around it—and begin turning the rounded ridge of the falcon stone’s edge to mud. She yanked her hand off the wall, flicking drops of mud everywhere. The spread of mud stopped immediately. One edge of the falcon stone sagged and dripped. She wiped her hand on her trousers, heedless of the mess, and stared through the gray shield at the stone. It wasn’t an artifact. It was clearly what they’d been sent after, but an artifact wouldn’t have been affected by mud.
With a silent pop, the shield vanished. “Sienne, take care!” Perrin shouted. She ignored him. Hopping off the table, she grabbed one of the tall chairs and lifted it to the table top, then climbed on it. It gave her enough height that she could barely touch the muddy edge of the stone.
She looked around wildly for something else to climb on. It was just in time to see the door swing open and the carver wizard enter the room. She moved as gracefully as ever, but more rapidly than before, as if she were in a hurry to dispose of them and ge
t back to whatever she’d been doing. Alaric saw her, and booted away a carver trying to disembowel him. He advanced on the wizard, sword held at the ready.
The wizard, seeming unconcerned about the oncoming threat, looked directly at Sienne. Sienne blinked, caught by the force of those blue eyes. She hopped down from the chair and jumped to the floor, flipping pages from drift to force. Alaric couldn’t be allowed to hurt the wizard; this was all just a misunderstanding—
Perrin gestured, and something that blazed with orange light hit Sienne in the face like a pillow, soft and hard at the same time. She blinked. Two images were overlaid across her vision. In one, the carver wizard crouched in terror before a monstrous Alaric, and Sienne’s heart went out to the woman. In the other, the wizard stared at her, willing her to attack her friend. Sienne shook the images away. Force, yes, but against the bitch who’d hurt Alaric.
“Sienne!” Perrin shouted. Sienne screamed as a carver with a sharp, bloody knife rose up before her and slashed at her throat. She stumbled backward, and Perrin dove between her and the carver. A second later, a gray shield sprang up around Perrin’s arm, blocking the carver’s second blow.
“Sorry!” Sienne cried.
Perrin looked up at her. “So am I,” he said. Sienne gasped. Bright red blood soaked through his vest and down the arm of his shirt. She let her spellbook fall to her side and knelt beside him, searching for the wound.
“Don’t worry about me,” Perrin gasped. “Get the stone.”
She almost told him the truth—that they’d risked their lives for nothing. But if Tonia Figlari couldn’t sense magic, they might still give her the stone and get the knife. Sienne ran for the table, opening her spellbook as she went, and cast fit on the chair. It grew instantly, shaking the table, and she leaped on it and could easily reach the stone. Feeling dizzy from too much spellcasting, she turned to sculpt and read off the transform, swallowing the now-cloying sweetness of the spell.
She dropped the spellbook in its harness and plunged her hands into the stone surrounding the falcon. Kneading and shoving with both hands, she pushed the now-pliable stone away from the round edges of the falcon stone. Carefully not touching it, she reached behind it and scraped more soft stone away from its back. The falcon stone slid.
Faster than she’d thought possible, she had the spellbook open to drift. The falcon stone was falling by the time she finished reading the transform, but slowed in its fall before it was halfway to the table, and landed atop it with barely a thump.
Sienne jumped off the chair and picked the stone up. It weighed almost nothing, though that wouldn’t last long. She didn’t have the reserves to keep casting drift unless she felt like ending up in the condition she’d been in the last time they ran from this place. She took advantage of its current feather-light state and shoved it off the table to drift to the floor. It didn’t lie flat, but canted as if it were raised on the back as well as the front.
Leaving it to lie there, she ran to Perrin, who lay semi-conscious beneath a shield two carvers were slashing at. It looked like it might fail at any moment. Sienne grabbed him and said, “You need to heal yourself!”
Perrin nodded. “Find…the right blessing,” he murmured. Sienne had seen him invoke healing blessings often enough that she knew which one he needed. She snatched it up, and he took it with a bloody hand. Just then, the shield popped, and the carvers stepped back, startled. Sienne whipped out her spellbook, frantically opening it to scream.
Alaric came out of nowhere, sweeping his greatsword at the carvers. Pink blood flew as he took the head of one right off. The other backed away, snarling silently. Sienne turned the page to force, but Alaric put himself between her and the carver. “Get the stone,” he said, poking it with his toe.
“Time to—watch out!” Sienne shrieked. It was all she had time for before the carver wizard, her face a bloody mess, strode forward and put a hand to Alaric’s forehead.
Alaric stopped. His eyes closed and his mouth opened in an agonized howl. Sienne scrambled around to where she could force-blast the wizard, but Alaric shook himself like a dog coming out of deep water and threw himself at the wizard, blocking Sienne’s shot. He wrapped his arms around the woman and bore her to the ground.
“Never again,” he snarled, took her head between his hands, and snapped her neck.
Sienne gaped at the suddenness of it. Alaric dropped the dead wizard and rose, gathering up his sword. “Time to go!” he shouted.
Sienne tried to lift the stone, but drift had worn off, and she had to work at getting it off the ground. Then Alaric was there, sheathing his sword. He picked the stone up as easily as if it still weighed almost nothing.
A bloody hand on her arm startled Sienne. “You guard our retreat,” Perrin said. He sounded as if he’d never been injured. Sienne took up a stance with her book open, though the words danced on the page and she wasn’t sure she could cast spells. The carvers didn’t know that.
Kalanath was suddenly beside her. “We will walk backwards together, you and I,” he said, and slammed the steel-shod end of his staff into a carver’s chest with a sickening crack. Sienne nodded and took a step, then another, hoping her friends wouldn’t let either of them fall.
She nearly did stumble over the steps leading up from the sunken floor, and only Perrin’s guiding hand kept her from falling. The carvers followed them as they had the night before, their eyes glittering—Sienne felt dazed for a moment, then remembered she shouldn’t meet their eyes and focused on their hands instead.
She squeezed close to Kalanath so they could both fit through the door out of the great hall, and heard his heavy breathing in rhythm with her own. Then they were out of the entry hall into the bright sunlight. How long had it all taken? Not half an hour, probably much less. It felt like forever.
“Excuse me,” Perrin said, stepping in front of Sienne and Kalanath.
“What are you doing?” Kalanath exclaimed. “You will block us.”
“I have determined what this blessing does. One moment.” Perrin took a blessing marked with rosy pink on one corner. “My thanks, o Lord, and if you will, stop being a cranky bastard and be useful for once.”
Rose-colored flames played over his hand. Perrin jerked backward as if punched, nearly falling into Kalanath. And the massed ranks of carvers, considerably diminished from the night before, lurched and fell like puppets whose strings had been cut.
Perrin regained his footing. “We should run,” he said, and took off down the road toward the village. Sienne, startled, jerked into motion and ran after him, surrounded by her friends.
“What was that?” she gasped. “And why didn’t you do it sooner?”
“Later, when we are not running for our lives,” Perrin said.
They ran without speaking then, though Sienne glanced back once and saw no pursuit. It wasn’t a risk she wanted to take. Beside her, Alaric was breathing easily despite the burden of the stone. She remembered it wasn’t an artifact, and the thought made her angry and bewildered all at once. If Tonia Figlari had set them up to die out here… but surely she couldn’t have known carvers had taken over the Figlari keep. Or was the story of the falcon a myth, and Tonia had been fooled as much as any of them? She concentrated on running, and on being grateful they were all still alive.
They reached the ford and swam across without waiting for Sienne to cast fit on Alaric. Dripping and shivering, they collected Button and his nameless companion and trudged to the nearest copse, where they started a fire and settled in to dry off. Dianthe handed around hard biscuits and apples for a noon meal. As she gave Perrin his food, she said, “So—what was it?”
“It was a blast of mental communication—in this case, the word ‘fall,’” Perrin said. “Though it is not a compulsion, and likely I could have used any word. I believe it is a mental form of scream. As to the latter, its use occurred to me as I was dying of my injury, and I was rather preoccupied. Not to mention that its efficacy is heightened when the enemy is
grouped in that manner, again like scream.”
“I like it,” Alaric said. “Very effective.”
Sienne watched him covertly. He didn’t seem at all disturbed by having killed someone with his bare hands. Granted, the carver wizard had been evil and not human, but she’d looked human, at least a little… it might be good that he wasn’t upset, but maybe they should all be worried.
“And we got the stone,” Dianthe said, patting it where it lay in the grass nearby.
“Well,” Sienne said. “About that. It’s… not what we were told.”
She was suddenly the center of attention. “Don’t tell me it’s not the thing we were sent after,” Alaric said.
“It matches the description Tonia Figlari gave us. It’s the right stone. But it’s not an artifact.”
“You are sure of this?” Kalanath said. He prodded the stone with the tip of his staff.
“Very sure. Not only does it not have magic—that’s the thing I noticed but wasn’t conscious of before—it was nearly turned to mud with the rest of the wall. An artifact would be immune to a transform.”
They stared at the stone. “So… what does that mean?” Dianthe said.
“It could mean several things,” Alaric said. “Tonia might have lied to us about the stone, intending us to die here. She might have told the truth and just been misinformed. Or someone might have used her to get at us.”
Sienne hadn’t thought of that last one. “What do you mean?”
“She chose us because of our reputation, but she’s no scrapper. So someone must have steered her in our direction. Which leads us back to the possibility we came up with about Sienne’s friend Aneirin—”
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