Shadowborn

by Alison Sinclair

  “You all right?” she said, sharply.

  “Overhead!” a man shouted, and reflexively they all three ducked as guns fired from three directions—Sweet Imogene, some idiot was shooting inboard with a rifle!—and with a screech, a Shadowborn fell splayed on the deck. Ishmael and Lavender bellowed simultaneously, “Sound positions and form up!” Lavender added, “Abandon rests. Form up on the stairwells!”

  Ishmael’s lips drew back in a seasick grin. Brilliant girl. They needed to defend the entrances to the manor now, not the periphery, and positioned around the stairwells they would have clearly defined quadrants to cover and would be less likely to shoot each other. And they also needed only one voice giving commands. “Troop’s yours,” he barked, and lunged for the stair housing. In the shelter of the eaves, he dropped to one knee with a jar that nearly made him heave, but held his revolver steady, angling above the head height of a crouching man, as figures scrambled across the rooftop toward them. Seven, eight, ten men—one supporting the other, who was stumbling and holding his thigh.

  “Some cursed fool shot him,” the first man accused.

  Lavender shifted aside from the door to let him pass into the stairwell. “Everyone sound off!” she called, and was answered by ragged shouts from three directions and scattered yells from elsewhere. The nearest was a woman’s voice, and Ishmael sonned her figure just starting to move toward them from one of the sniper’s positions. Then sonn caught a plunging shape, and the woman shrieked and fell beneath it. Ishmael and the man next to him shot as one, and the Shadowborn reeled away and toppled from the edge of the roof, and did not rise again in the air. Nor did the woman rise, though she stirred a little, giving a bubbling sob that suggested a torn throat. Ishmael felt the other man start to move and blocked him with a rigid, bloodied arm. “No,” he growled. “We need t’stay here.”

  The man clubbed his arm with the hilt of his revolver. But from his other side, an older man said, “He’s right. Here they come.”

  Ishmael missed the first round, for the blow had awakened the pain in his clawed arm. Sweat running down his face, he balanced the revolver and fired upon anything that dropped from the air. He’d fallen into the easier task, he realized, having ducked for the outer stairwell; Lavender and others on the inside had to clear the area between the stairwells, without inflicting casualties on their own. With his arm screaming pain and the waxing and waning sense of Shadowborn making his head reel, he was less of a hazard here than there. And, Mother of All, she is good, he thought, listening to her shouted exchanges with the other groups, coordinating fire.

  “How many of these cursed things are there?” muttered the man at his side, reloading. Ishmael’s revolver clicked dry, and he jammed it into his waistband and drew the second. As he did so, vileness washed over him. Instinct wheeled him around, clear of the eaves. He sonned the Shadowborn even as it alighted on the stairwell roof above Lavender, folding gracefully on the crouch, claws extended to rake. Someone screamed warning at him, and he felt a gust of downdraft on his sweating neck. Knowing exactly the choice he was making, he braced the revolver with both hands and placed his bullet beneath his target’s prominent breastbone. As he did so, he felt a metallic puff past his cheek and a hot burst of liquid on his neck. He smelled blood, sharp and rich, and grinned in crazed gratitude at his savior.

  Then the dying Shadowborn toppled against him, the bare skin of its forehead brushing the bare skin of his neck, its thoughts invading touch-sense, the reek of its magic enveloping him. Under its weight, physical and psychic, he pitched forward onto hands and knees, aware of a roil of impressions that either body or mind or both must reject, so that he was either going to be thoroughly sick or simply pass out. Hands caught his jacket, hauling him into shelter by the collar and armpits, the urgent handling and brushed touches by his own a blessed antidote to the intimate sense of Shadowborn. Someone pushed his revolver back into his hand. “Thanks!” he croaked. “We need t’keep aware of the roof over our heads. And I need t’come through. . . .”

  He switched his revolver to his injured hand, dropped to a crouch, and scuttled to Lavender’s side. “Y’all right?” Lavender said, as he straightened up beside her.

  “Been worse.” He caught her sleeve, pulled her ear close. What he had to say had an even higher priority than having her undivided attention on the killing field. “I’d a touch-sense of that one. The mind’s more man than animal. It wasn’t chance that dropped th’other above you.”

  She gave an indelicate curse. He doubted she understood all the implications of the information, but knew she would understand what she needed to, here and now: these were cunning, mindful foes. “You’ve it in hand here,” he said, with a private prayer to gods real and imagined that this would continue. “I need t’get down to th’north gate.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Go.”

  He went, managing to be a turn of the stairs out of their hearing before the aura of Shadowborn, exertion, and injury overwhelmed him. The bout of vomiting was as short as will and self-control could make it; fortunately for his legend, it went unobserved. He’d owe the house staff a tip for the cleanup. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and lurched down the stairs at a creditable run, already hearing shouts and shots from the direction of the ballroom. Sweet Imogene, if they forced the entrance, with the ballroom full of the weakest of refugees and the wounded—

  He veered off on the third floor and ran for the door to the roof of the ballroom, which in the ballroom’s glory days had held a rooftop dance floor. Now it held guard positions, but was usually only lightly manned—and if no one had thought to reinforce the guard, and they had been taken by surprise . . . It had a door to the third story wide enough to admit three in promenade, as well as a servant’s side door. He wheeled around the final corner and sonned the door still closed, blessedly intact and barred. His sonn caught the figure of a slight man, hands to the bar, and for a heartbeat he thought it was Balthasar Hearne. “Hoi!” Ishmael bellowed. “Hold there.” The figure whirled and plunged down the main stairs, moving far more spryly than he would have expected of the travelworn physician. He would have pursued, but the servant’s door opened and what stepped across the threshold was not Darkborn. He slammed against the wall and fired, two-handed, into the doorway. Curse it—he had neither the time nor the dexterity to reload, which left him with five bullets and a knife. “Stranhornes!” Ishmael roared at the top of his lungs. “To me! Ballroom roof!”

  Balthasar

  Trouble on the roof, Balthasar had registered someone saying outside some time ago. Straus had cocked his head, listening; he nodded grimly and went back to itemizing the many faults of his son by marriage. He and Balthasar were repairing the muscular back of a young drayman who had used his carriage to ferry the weak and wounded in the retreat from Stonebridge, and shielded his last passengers from attack with his own body. With fixed concentration, the Stonebridge apothecary dripped chloroform onto the mask over the patient’s face. He had hardly spoken since he stumbled in the gate with the youngest of his brother’s children in his arms. His own oldest daughter was upstairs with the defenders, but none of the rest of his or his brother’s families had reached the manor, and no one could tell him whether they were alive or dead.

  The drayman was carried from the table alive, though neither physician thought well of his chances. They had washed the wounds extensively and cleaned them of shreds of cloth, but the tissue damage was so extensive that they could not completely debride them, and Shadowborn lacerations infected easily, Straus muttered grimly as they stood side by side, scrubbing the blood off their hands. “Likely be dead in days, even if we’re not overrun. . . . Y’any good with a firearm, city man?”

  “No,” Balthasar said.

  “So I take it you’ve not got one?” Straus, Balthasar realized, was armed: his sonn outlined the shape of a revolver under the other man’s surgical apron. Was the surgeon prepared to fight?

  “No . . . should I?”

&nb
sp; “Not if it makes y’more hazard to th’wounded.” Straus sonned him. “But there’s some would like t’have a bullet for themselves.”

  Rather than die under Shadowborn teeth or claws, Bal understood. He knew there were some to whom the manner of death mattered, who believed that some deaths profaned body and soul. He was not one. Most deaths were ugly. He shook his head.

  Straus said no more on the subject. “We’ll take th’scalp wound next, if there’s none worse next door.”

  Next door had been an intimate dining room for the baronelle and her circle. Bridal and naming-day cakes would have sagged under the weight of the decorative molding and piping. Rows of pallets held men and women waiting for surgery, recovering after surgery, or dying in the greatest possible comfort. Mostly now they were quiet, drugged or weak or resigned to pain, so that he could hear the sobs of the young woman rocking in a chair in the corner. Bal sighed. Her sister had gone into premature labor during the retreat. The child must have died. Perhaps the mother, too.

  “Hearne.” Stranhorne’s one-armed aide wove between pallets to accost him. “The baron—Strumheller—wants a word with you. They’ve taken him over t’the briefing gallery. Not bad hurt,” he added, as he registered Balthasar’s reaction. “Baronette Laurel is stitching him. Get her off her feet for a while.” Then he said, loudly enough to be heard by patients and helpers alike, “We’ve fought them off,” and, quietly, to Balthasar, “though it was a near-run thing.”

  In the side gallery, Ishmael di Studier was leaning back in one of the chairs, arm extended along a narrow table. Laurel di Gautier was suturing two oblique lacerations on his forearm. Ishmael’s teeth were set in a roll of leather and his sound hand was locked on the arm of the chair, but otherwise he endured without flinching.

  She had obviously done this before, by the speed and deftness with which she set the sutures. Possibly even to Ishmael himself, given the ease with which she touched the mage. Balthasar waited as she tied off the last few. “I’m done,” she said quietly, and began to clean the skin. Ishmael unclenched his teeth and removed the tooth-marked leather. He snagged a towel from the stack at her elbow and wiped his face and soaked hairline.

  Balthasar cleared his throat, attracting their attention. “Hearne,” said di Studier, hoarsely, before he could speak. “What did Lord Vladimer say first when he came to?”

  “Ordered us not to move, or he would shoot to kill.” That he would not forget, for his heart had nearly stopped as Telmaine had moved and Vladimer had shot into the floor just beside her head. He had not thought Vladimer would bluff.

  Ishmael’s shoulders did not relax. Deliberately, he held out his sound hand. “Touch me,” he said. “Above th’glove. I’ve sound reason for asking,” he added.

  Balthasar hesitated, but could not persuade himself a Shadowborn would have willingly let Laurel inflict such pain on it as Laurel had just done on Ishmael. He pushed down the cuff of Ishmael’s glove, fingers seeking his pulse and finding it, fast with pain and the aftermath of exertion, but full and regular.

  The pulse jumped; Ishmael hissed out a breath. “Sorry,” murmured Laurel.

  Balthasar released Ishmael’s wrist and stepped back. “Ask me,” Ishmael said.

  “I’d not have touched you if I had any doubts,” Balthasar said, as the mage must know. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “First thing is, I just went skin t’skin with one of those Shadowborn.” Laurel’s head jerked before she caught herself; Ishmael, his head turned toward Balthasar, didn’t notice. “Wasn’t meant, believe me. The thing was dying, toppled against me.” He stopped; Balthasar realized he was fighting nausea. “Foul with Shadowborn magic—”

  Laurel paused in her cleaning to pass him a small towel that smelled strongly of mint, even at Balthasar’s distance. Ishmael wiped his face, inhaling deeply of the scent. “Cursed unpleasant,” he said with feeling.

  “But informative,” Balthasar said.

  “You have that way . . . of cutting to th’essence.” He paused as Laurel propped up his hand and began to bandage his arm. Her head was cocked, listening. “It was a formed mind that touched mine. Not a sane man’s, but no beast’s, either. Th’thing had once been Darkborn—I’m sure of it.”

  “Ishmael,” said Laurel in horror. “You . . . could sense that?”

  “Aye, m’lady. I shouldn’t be speaking of this in front of you—”

  She shook her head crisply. “Father’s prohibition might have made sense in the past, but it makes none now. We need to know what we’re fighting.” She split the bandage with a stroke of the scalpel and knotted the ties neatly around his wrist. “So, they’re . . . transforming Darkborn into Shadowborn.” Her head came up; she sonned him. “Lavender knows?”

  Thinking of her twin’s lost love? Or her twin exposed on the rooftop?

  “She knows. Can’t be sure on that,” Ishmael said. “Just that they’ve minds closer t’men than beasts. Though th’implications are ugly, for th’ones lost.” He rolled his head on the back of the chair. “Second thing, Hearne, is I don’t suppose y’were up on the third floor a little while ago?”

  “No,” said Balthasar, uneasily.

  “Thought you mightn’t have been. Trouble is, I sonned someone much like you trying t’open the door to the rooftop dance floor. He bolted just before th’servants’ door opened and a whole scourge of Shadowborn tried t’pile through. I got reinforcements just as I shot myself dry.”

  “They’ve infiltrated us,” Laurel said for him. “Come in with the refugees.”

  “You . . . didn’t sense anything?” Balthasar said, cautiously.

  Ishmael grimaced, scar jumping. “I sensed plenty,” he said. “Was ready t’heave the whole time I was on the roof and fighting them in the hall. It wasn’t false heroism kept me in place,” he said to Laurel. “But no, I didn’t sense anything from any particular one—but if they’d any sense, they’d have been keeping clear of me.”

  Stranhorne arrived with his one-armed lieutenant. The scholarly baron now had armor over his shirt and a holstered revolver at his waist. His hair was untidy and matted—with blood, by the smell. He shook his head as his daughter opened her mouth. “Not mine.” She passed him a towel, pointed him in the direction of a washing basin and jug set on the side table. “Mother,” she said, firmly, family shorthand, maybe, for Mother would insist or Mother would be outraged or Mother would have hysterics. Somehow, knowing the late baronelle’s daughters, he couldn’t believe it would be the last.

  Laurel sketched in their conversation so far as her father scrubbed his arms and blotted the worst of the gore from his hair and leathers. Stranhorne said over his shoulder, “So, you’ve not lost it after all.”

  “Aye, it seems not. Though a man with a burned tongue might still taste spices, if they’re strong enough.”

  “All right.” Stranhorne turned. “We’ve fought off the first wave. And we need to take a moment to decide what else of our tactics we need to change—we obviously hadn’t thought through the implications of having Shadowborn come in force from the air. We’ve still got about four hours to sunrise. Strumheller, what’s your best guess on whether they’re liable to be active after?”

  “M’best guess, Stranhorne, depends on past experience, which has shown itself a poor guide in this.”

  “Take it nonetheless,” the baron ordered.

  “If they were once Darkborn, then they may be bound by th’Curse as we are.” We have the father of Tercelle’s children to falsify that hope, Balthasar thought, but did not say. “If they come by day, then they don’t want us—don’t want us to change or t’eat or any of th’other things they could do with our flesh. And if they come by day—it galls me t’say this—we can’t fight them. We can only hope to burrow deep t’survive.”

  Something in Ishmael’s face, something in Stranhorne’s, disturbed Balthasar. “And how likely is that?” Stranhorne said in a still voice.

  Ishmael hesitated. His voic
e sounded almost studiedly impersonal; unusual for him. “We might be able t’close some of us in your lower cellars, so that it’d be more trouble t’the Shadowborn t’dig them out than they’d care to take. Predators don’t waste energy and don’t put themselves at risk. They’re in our territory, enemy territory. But we’ve never had them come at us in such force before.”

  “Should we evacuate now?” Stranhorne asked. “If the message reached the Crosstracks, and the telegraph is running and the tracks are clear, a relief force should be at the Crosstracks by nightfall. They might even be there already.”

  “We’d likely lose more doing that than waiting for the relief force,” Ishmael said. “Unless we can be certain there’s some they want more than others, and that they can tell us apart, if most of us went on the road, most of th’Shadowborn would follow.”

  There was a silence. Then Laurel said, quietly, “There is one other option.”

  Her father and mentor waited. “You know what it is,” she said, “but you won’t say it yourselves. Ishmael says they have minds like men, and we’ve certainly discovered that they will exploit our weaknesses and attack our commanders. If they’re intelligent, we might be able to negotiate with them.”

  “Negotiate our surrender, you mean,” her father said, though not harshly. “Nothing we’ve met suggests it would be otherwise. They need not speak to communicate their intentions most eloquently. If I thought we’d gain anything by it, I’d swallow my gorge and negotiate, but nothing they’ve done suggests they have aught else in mind but slaughter and domination.”

  “Father,” she said, carefully, “would your answer be the same if they were not using magic?”

  He frowned, not at her but at the thoughts her question inspired. “Truthfully, I can’t know,” he said. “But magical or nonmagical, we can judge them by their deeds. Strumheller, in my place, would you negotiate?”

  “Never,” Ishmael said, without a pause. “Maybe I’m influenced by the sense of the magic and the touch of the mind—but nothing in their deeds, as you say, suggests they recognize our right t’live in peace. Our best hope is t’bloody them; then they might listen.” He rolled his head. “Hearne, what’s your say?”