The Knife in the Dark (The Seven Signs Book 2)

by D. W. Hawkins

  “You are such a bitch, Lilliane,” Jev growled.

  Dormael busted out laughing. He couldn’t help it—the sight of Jev rolling around on the walkway hit him with just the right amount of emotional spin, and the laughter began flowing out. Before long, everyone was sharing a laugh at Jev’s expense. Jev glared daggers at everyone else, but that only made it worse.

  “Alright,” Dormael said, gesturing for everyone to calm down. “We should get moving.”

  “If Jev can walk, that is,” Allen said, giving Jev a wide grin. “I don’t know, though—maybe we should just take the entire leg, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Dormael said. “I don’t think the boy will make it another step on that leg.”

  “We’re in agreement, then?” Shawna said, sauntering up between the two of them. “Do you two want to hold him down while I take the leg, or should Allen take the leg while Dormael and I hold him down?”

  “I gave D’Jenn my only good axe,” Allen said, “so it will have to be you, Shawna.”

  “My swords are probably the best tool to get it done, anyway.”

  “Lady Baroness,” Lilliane asked, “would you mind if I did the honors? I’ve been dreaming about a day like this for so, so long.”

  “I hate all of you,” Jev clipped, gathering his things as he rose to his feet. Everyone snickered at his comments, and helped him get his belongings together. Bethany walked up and handed him an odd piece of something from his pack, then took a meaningful look at his leg. She rolled her eyes and turned away, eliciting another round of laughter from the group. Jev put himself back together and started limping down the walkway ahead of them.

  Bethany trotted up and tugged at Allen’s wrist.

  “I’ll race you!”

  “Race me to where, girl? You run on ahead, I’ll catch up,” he replied.

  “Stay close,” Dormael said, pushing a bit of hair from her eyes. “Don’t get too far from the light.”

  “I won’t,” she sighed.

  Bethany took off down the walkway at a run, slapping Jev on the leg as she went by. The man made a squealing noise and swatted at the girl, but Bethany was too nimble for the awkward, limping youth. She skipped backwards in front of him, taunting as she went, before turning and gaining a good lead on him. Jev limped along like his legs were going to give out.

  “Let’s go find the next symbol, figure out which way to go,” Lacelle said, gesturing at Lilliane and Torins. The two of them nodded and followed her down the walkway, Lilliane throwing another mock-punch at Jev as she went by. Shawna turned to Dormael and Allen as the rest of the party made their way down the path.

  “Do you think D’Jenn is alright?” she asked. Dormael shared a look with Allen.

  “I hope so,” Dormael sighed. “D’Jenn is cunning, but so is Victus. D’Jenn has gotten out of a hundred things that were worse than this. We’ll see him by morning, I’m sure of it.”

  The problem was that he wasn’t sure of it. Anxiety was twisting around in his stomach like a rat looking for a way out. All he could do, though, was keep moving. Even if D’Jenn never came back, all he could do was keep moving.

  “Shawna!” Bethany called from down the walkway. “Come see this!”

  “Calm down, I’m coming,” she replied. Shawna shared a brief look with Allen and Dormael, then jogged down the path in Bethany’s direction. Allen sighed and gave Dormael an opaque look.

  “Did you suspect any of this was going to happen when you recruited me?” he asked.

  “No. I had a bad feeling, but this…no.”

  “Do you think our family is in danger? Tell me the truth. Will your deacon go after the homestead?”

  Dormael shook his head.

  “Victus is ruthless, but that’s always been his style. It’s the way he trained us. He would never hesitate to make a tough decision if it gained him something, but he’s not petty. He wouldn’t go after them to settle a score with us.”

  “What about to draw you out?”

  Dormael took a deep breath, and let it out in a long sigh.

  “He’s got more to worry about with managing things here,” Dormael said. He and Allen began to walk toward the others, but strolled along to allow some privacy. Even so, they passed Jev and left the man to struggle along. “If it’s clear to Victus that the Mekai knows his plans, he’ll have to work quickly to secure his power. He may send a Warlock or two out to find us, maybe to kill us, but he won’t be able to divert much attention until things have settled for him here. We’ve got some time before his focus will be on us.”

  “I don’t even like the thought of one of you bastards after me,” Allen said. “Dormael—do I have to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dormael said, feeling a surge of guilt for having landed his brother in this plot alongside him. “I’m sorry about this, brother. Truly sorry. But no—I think if you laid low for a while, and got as far from us as possible, then you would be fine.”

  “And you? Do you have to worry for the rest of your life?”

  Dormael felt his jaw muscles clench.

  “Yes. Until…until I don’t know when. Yes.”

  Allen let out a long sigh.

  “Well,” he said, laying a hand on Dormael’s shoulder, “I hope that we can stay at inns on this trip. I mean, we’ll be keeping low and all, I’m sure, but I would like to bathe every now and then, brother. I can’t let the ladies see me in anything less than ‘glorious’. It’s good for enemies, too.”

  “Cleaning yourself is good for your enemies?”

  “Not the act of bathing, no. But, if you show your enemies your best side—and, really this is only true in my case—it gives them something to aspire to.”

  “And then, you kill them.”

  “But in that short span of time, Dormael, they’re inspired,” Allen smiled.

  Dormael started to laugh. His brother had always been able to do that, ever since they were children. The laughter banished the anxious feeling—or softened it, anyway. He felt a smile settle onto his face.

  Just then, a cry rang out behind them. It was high-pitched and piercing, like something a giant bird of prey might utter as it swooped down to snatch a baby from its mother. It touched something primal in Dormael, and before he knew it, he had dropped his pack and spun around, clutching his spear in a white-knuckled grip. He heard the swish of steel as Allen yanked his own weapons free.

  A pair of odd forms crouched in the shadowy doorway. Dormael couldn’t see much about them, but something about their posture marked them as predators. Perhaps it was the way the pair of them moved, like wolves, or hunting cats. They were wrapped in dark, rotten cloth, with scarves over their heads that revealed nothing but a pair of burning pin-points of red light. Chills ran down Dormael’s spine at the sight of them, and he felt certain that the two creatures were staring right at him.

  “Jev!” Allen shouted. “Jev!”

  The boy stood frozen, staring behind him in shock. The sound of his name snapped him out of his trance, though, and he dropped his packs and started shuffling away from the two creatures as fast as his bruised leg would carry him. Dormael felt a sudden spike of fear.

  “Come on, Jev!” Dormael yelled. “Hurry up!”

  The two creatures both stiffened at the sound of his voice, like a pair of pointer hounds with a target. One of them was larger than the other, as if the second one was juvenile. They filled him with the same sort of instinctual revulsion as the Taker had.

  The things didn’t move as Jev scurried away from them, whimpering like a frightened animal. Other things rushed from the shadows behind the two crouching creatures, though, taking to the walkway and leaping over the sides in a mad rush. They disappeared into the shadows under the kettles, and Dormael pulled his Kai awake. He couldn’t tell what the things were, but they looked like people—enraged, very quick people.

  “Bethany! Shawna!” Dormael screamed, turning his gaze in thei
r direction. “Run!”

  **

  D’Jenn pushed aside a grate, and pulled himself up onto the edge of the Bruising Stretch, being careful to keep silent. He crawled like a shadow from the hole, and used his magic to put the grate back in place. It went down with a low, metallic clunk.

  He could feel the bracer around his arm—the piece of infused armor he’d taken from the dead Cultist in Soirus-Gamerit—sputtering as it resisted the pull of the Mekai’s spell. D’Jenn could feel the Mekai’s magic coming up from the ground like a creeping, whispering haze. The bracer didn’t completely shield him from it, but it disrupted the energies enough so that D’Jenn could use his own magic to resist it. It made a low, discordant note on the edge of his senses.

  The Bruising Stretch was a wide, white space of flat paving stones, reflecting the moonlight with cold indifference. It was strange to see it so deserted, though D’Jenn had certainly seen it so before. Perhaps it was the mood that made him feel that the sight was so surreal. It was the mood that clutched at his heart, raised the hairs on the back of his neck, and bent his ear to every little sound.

  There wasn’t a soul in sight.

  The walls of the Conclave Proper rose like a monolith into the sky, only a short run from the Bruising Stretch. D’Jenn quested out with his own magical senses, trying to pierce the cloud of magic around him to spy anyone who might be moving around. The bracer on his arm sang its discord into his mind, but D’Jenn was able to see around it. The grounds were deserted.

  He turned his eyes on the tower.

  The Conclave Proper rose many stories above the ground. The tower—of course—had been constructed with magical means, as well as physical ones. There were platforms on the side of the tower that were attached by impossibly thin branches of stone and steel. In another place, a steel frame flourished from the side of the tower to support a room that was shaped like a bubble of stone. It was hundreds of links high.

  The deacon’s study was at one of the topmost rooms that branched off the tower, held up by one of those flowing steel cages. D’Jenn wished—and not for the first time—that he had Dormael’s affinity for flying. A quick slip of the skin and a short flight would be preferable to a long, arduous climb, magic or not.

  The gods like to laugh at our misery.

  Going into the tower would be folly. The Mekai’s spell was an effective one, but even that wouldn’t have caught everyone. There would still be people moving around, still be someone in the hallways that would see him. If another Warlock saw him, he was finished.

  If one wasn’t watching him at this very moment, of course.

  D’Jenn moved the axe around to the small of his back, and walked down the path toward the Conclave Proper. His back itched for the entire walk, but he knew that appearing normal was more important than rolling through the shadows like an amateur. If someone was looking, he was just an ordinary wizard out walking the pathways through the grounds.

  D’Jenn saw no one, even when he got close to the Conclave Proper.

  As he reached the base of the tower, he moved along the edge of the wall, walking around to the southern face. He could get a great distance up the side of the wall before he needed to scoot his way around, but there was no changing the winding path he would have to take in order to reach Victus’s study. Oddly, it was Victus’s voice that his memories conjured.

  Nobody ever said being a Warlock was easy.

  D’Jenn’s hands itched to be around the man’s throat.

  He whispered a spell onto his hands and feet, then started to climb. The wind was cold, and the stone under his hands still damp from the day’s rain. His fingers grew numb, but he split his consciousness and channeled bit of heat to keep them warm. Numb hands were unresponsive hands, and that was the last thing D’Jenn wanted.

  He pulled himself up the side of the tower, using his feet to help support his weight. The higher he went, the stronger the wind blew, whipping his mesavai around his thighs. He climbed a few more links until the tugging garment pulled at the haft of the axe, and D’Jenn had to reach back on reflex to catch it. He almost fell from the tower, but his magic kept his other hand stuck to the wall.

  D’Jenn paused for a moment, his heart pounding against his ribcage, then continued upward.

  Victus had betrayed them all. D’Jenn replayed the words of Vera’s letter again in his mind, ruminating on them until they were burned into his skull. They spun around his head like a miniature whirlwind.

  I will always love you, she had said. He killed some of us already, I’m sure of it.

  Vera, Taglion, Kirael and Jastom—all his friends. They had all trained under Victus, had all grown under his tutelage. They had been family to him. D’Jenn had eaten with them, and slept alongside them. Dormael had given Jastom the nickname Three-Fingers on the first day of their training, due to the fact that a dog had bitten two of the offending digits from his right hand. Kirael had been in love with Taglion all throughout their training, and even after. Taglion, though, had been a complete rake, and never acknowledged her. Everyone used to cringe every time Kirael looked longingly across the room at Taglion, and at the way she had been green with jealousy when Taglion had been partnered with Vera. D’Jenn almost smiled as he remembered the way Jastom would mime her, fluttering his eyebrows in mockery of her undying love.

  They were all dead now.

  Vera was dead now.

  The one thing that D’Jenn had to know above all else was the truth about their deaths. He needed to hear it from Victus himself, listen to the man explain his reasons. Nothing could salve the pain at having lost them—at having lost Vera—but he had to know. The need smoldered in his chest.

  The wind whipped his hair across his face, and D’Jenn spat a bit of it from his mouth as he continued upward. He could hear it whining as it lashed him against the side of the tower, and whipped his clothing about. D’Jenn thought about using Dormael’s floating spell, but after a moment’s consideration, decided against it. If he weighed less, then the wind would probably take him right off the side, and flutter him out over the river like a dead leaf. The last thing he wanted to do was take a swim in the river Ishamael.

  It took him an eternity to make the climb. The tower that rose from the Conclave Proper was high, and each stylish platform, or hanging room, or gigantic window was a hazard for anyone wishing to remain unseen. After crawling a meandering path up the side of the tower, D’Jenn finally found himself clinging to the stone at the base of the steel beams which cradled Victus’s study.

  His arms were shaking from the climb, his legs from anxiety.

  Closing his eyes, he listened with his Kai. The bracer continued its discordant warble, and the tower hummed with the Mekai’s spell. The steel just above him was cold, though, and lacked any sort of magical ward. D’Jenn reached a tentative hand up to touch the cold metal, hoping to the gods that he could trust his senses. If a hidden ward gave him an unexpected shock, it wouldn’t be good.

  A fall from this dizzying height would splatter him like a bug.

  His hand rested on the steel, and no hidden magical spells sprang into action. D’Jenn breathed a sigh of relief, then readied himself for what was to come. There could be no room for error—this was the Deacon of the Warlocks he was dealing with, the very man who had trained D’Jenn in the first place. D’Jenn would be surprised if there was nothing nasty lying in wait for any potential assassins.

  Still—would he have expected anyone to make this climb, and in the heart of his power? D’Jenn couldn’t be sure, but he was hoping that it would prove a blind spot in Victus’s planning. Doing the unexpected was always the best way to see an assassination through, but Victus would know that. Would he try and anticipate the unanticipated, or would he dismiss the idea as impractical?

  I’m too close to worry about it now, he thought. Nowhere to go but forward.

  D’Jenn clung to the curving steel bars, and began to shimmy into the complicated web of metal. His spell didn’t work
quite as well as it did against the flat surface of the stone, and D’Jenn had a terrifying moment when one hand slipped on the damp steel, and he clambered to hold onto it. He worked one foot into the web, then the second, and he was suspended from the side of the tower. The flat bottom of the stone room was some distance above him, supported by a network of flowing steel bars. D’Jenn clutched the metal, trying not to think about how he was going to scramble around the bottom corner of the room, and up the side. The wind howled, tugging at his clothing again.

  Are the gods trying to taunt me now?

  D’Jenn reached back to check the axe that Allen had given him, then started a slow, arduous crawl through the web of curving steel. He could see the Bruising Stretch from where he was, just a white square smaller than his palm. Moonlight sparkled on the surface of the river. The distance to the ground yawned beneath him, but it was his anger that was making his legs shake.

  He kept telling himself that.

  D’Jenn worked his way to the top of the cage, crawling to where the thing fell away into open air. It supported the huge stone room with delicate swirls of metal, as if the block was being carried upon a gust of wind made into steel. D’Jenn had to hold on to those curving, slippery metal rails, and pull himself out to the edge of the study. There was nowhere to rest his feet, so he had to hook his legs over the rails and hug them as tightly as he could, while stretching outward to get a hand flat on the stone.

  For one dizzying second, he hung over the open air below, muscles spasming with tension.

  Then, his hand stuck to the stone, and he crawled around the bottom edge of the study like a spider. He let out a huge breath in relief as he was once again vertical instead of horizontal. He clutched to the side of the room, letting his face rest against the cold, damp stone. He gave his legs a few moments to calm themselves.

  There was a single square window that opened into the study. It was large enough for two people to stand upright, and looked out over the river. In the morning, the shadow of the tower stretched over the river and through the valley. The view from Victus’s window was one of the best in the Conclave. From his desk, he could see the river in the morning, and the city splayed out beneath him. For now, though, the window was shuttered against the cold night air.