Black-winged figures wheeled through the pillars of rising smoke. Isiem could barely see them from his window, but he knew that they were strix. He counted twenty or thirty, perhaps more, from the limited vantage of his window. Mostly they kept well out of bowshot, but now and again one of them would swoop down to pick off a vulnerable straggler. In the confusion of the fire, no one fought back.
Where are the Hellknights? They should have been out there protecting Crackspike's people, but Isiem saw no sign of Erevullo or his men. Oreseis, too, had vanished.
Cursing, Isiem pulled on his clothes and grabbed his spellbook, shoving it under his shirt to save it from the flames. He tied a damp handkerchief around his mouth and nose to screen some of the smoke. Then, bracing himself for the onslaught, he hurried downstairs.
The doorways were haloed in wavering scarlet. Smoke rushed up the staircase's slanted ceiling like a ghostly river running in reverse. Pools of oil made burning lakes on the floor—too many pools, and too few of them ringed with smoke-dulled glass.
Those weren't broken lamps. Someone had poured that oil there.
But how could a strix have sneaked into Crackspike to set up an arson? And how would it have known that the Hellknights were unprepared to stop it?
Someone's conspiring with them.
But he had no time to wonder who or why. Not yet. Gasping through the smoke, Isiem plunged through the last door into the street. Behind him, the boarding house burned.
He hadn't expected a fight—while traveling with the Hellknights, he hadn't expected anyone to offer a fight—and was poorly prepared for one. Few of his spells were likely to be useful, and fewer would be able to reach the strix in the sky.
There was even less he could do to help the townspeople; Isiem had never been a gifted healer, and his god was not, in any event, especially inclined to mercy. He'd serve them best by driving off their enemies.
With that thought in mind, Isiem looked for the best place to begin.
Crackspike held no good fighting ground. Its buildings offered the only cover in easy reach, and they were all afire—another sign of a conspirator, for he doubted the strix could have set so many buildings alight, and so thoroughly, in the space of a few minutes. But there was a clear space where a damaged tent had collapsed, smothering its own small fire under the weight of its heavy canvas. Isiem went there, ignoring the cries of the wounded.
His plain gray robes gave him some cover in the night. Enough, he hoped, to trick the eyes of aerial foes scanning for targets through smoke and chaos. Isiem pulled his hood over his white hair and waited.
He didn't have to wait long. Two strix dove through the night, so close that the tips of their wings nearly touched, and swept directly overhead as they pursued a man who had just stumbled from the Long-Bottomed Lady's outhouse. The man had one leg in his pants and the other bare. The empty pant leg flapped between his feet, tripping him with every step. Drunk, unarmed, and hobbled by his own clothing, he had no chance of escape.
But he made good bait.
Isiem waited until they were past. The strix never slowed; they seemed completely unaware of him. Perhaps his shadow-gray cloak fooled them, or the scattered fires played tricks with their night vision. Perhaps they were just so intent on their prey, and so certain of their enemies' disarray, that it never occurred to them that a real threat might be lurking in the dark.
He raised his hands, and a flare of dazzling golden motes erupted around the strix like a plume of dragon's breath in the night. Shimmering dust coated their wings, their hands, their eyes—and, abruptly blind, they careened out of the sky.
If the strix had been higher, they might have escaped disaster; even blind, they might have stayed airborne long enough for Isiem's spell to wear off. But they were already brushing the rooftops, and diving lower still, when he struck. They hit the ground hard, one after the other, and out of nowhere a girl was on them, bashing their heads with a burning brand. She wept as she swung the club, but it did nothing to weaken her blows. In seconds both strix were dead, the bloody pulp of their brains seeping through the soft glitter of Isiem's spell.
"Shadowcaller!" It was Erevullo's voice, although amplified far beyond any level human lungs could sustain. "We are here! West of the stable! Join us!"
Isiem looked that way, but through the screen of burning buildings he could see nothing. The half-dressed man that the strix had been hunting was already gone. Above, more black-winged figures wheeled, dipping occasionally as they picked off fleeing Crackspikers.
He took a step westward, then paused and glanced at the girl who had killed the fallen strix. Her brown hair had come loose of its pins, tumbling over wide dark eyes and a snub nose. Traces of paint clung to her lips, almost as bright as the blood on her hands. She was one of Posie's girls, although he could not recall her name.
"Get out," he told her.
She shook her head, frustration and fear plain on her face even in the murky firelight. "They're shooting everyone who runs."
"Use your spells. You have them, don't you?" She nodded, confirming his guess. Isiem went on. "Disguise yourself as one of them. Crippled, so you have to walk. The strix don't kill their own—if there's any question in their minds, anything at all, they won't risk it."
"I can't do the wings." The girl dropped her club. She stared at the bloody wood blankly, as if unsure where it had come from. When her gaze fell across the bodies of the strix she'd killed, she shuddered and wiped her hand on her thigh, leaving a stuttered smear. "The spells Posie taught us aren't that strong."
"Shadowcaller!" Erevullo called again.
Isiem bit his lip. He plucked a small blue bottle from an inner pocket of his robes and, wondering why even as he did it, flipped the vial at the girl.
She caught it reflexively, then stared at the tiny bottle in confusion. "What's this?"
"Your way out. Drink it and run." He didn't wait to see if she listened. Weaving the same spell that he'd imbued into the potion—a stronger version of the minor glamer that, he guessed, the girl had used to hide from the diving strix for a few seconds—Isiem wrapped himself in a shroud of invisibility and walked away.
He went westward, but he went cautiously, and he took a wide swing south instead of heading in a straight line. Any strix who understood Taldane would have heard Erevullo's call and would know to expect Isiem's coming, and he might make easy prey for such a hunter.
Best, then, to be wary.
Past the stables, he saw the Hellknights. A small brazier of gold and black iron sat in the middle of their circle, its gems twinkling ruddily with reflected flames. It seemed the signifers had just begun their work when they were attacked; jars and vials of spell components were scattered at their feet, and a sack of withered, fleshy masses slumped open by the brazier.
Oreseis and Erevullo were with them, but only a third of the Hellknights' number were there, and they were on the verge of being overwhelmed. Where are the rest of them?
The Hellknights had overturned several supply wagons to form a semicircular breastworks. The fortification offered them scant protection from aerial attackers, though, and while the signifers' magic kept the strix at bay, they were quickly running out of spells. Their horses were gone, scattered by terror or shot down by the strix.
Charred and lightning-blasted strix corpses littered the rocks around them. The survivors stayed out of spellshot, but they kept the Hellknights surrounded, waiting for an opportunity to strike. In the meantime, they continued to pick off fleeing Crackspikers. Isiem saw the corpse of the man from the Long-Bottomed Lady's outhouse sprawled in a ditch nearby, three flint-tipped throwing spears in his back. He never had gotten his pants on.
Off to the side of the signifers' huddle, a lone strix sat motionless under folded black wings. Silver and glass glinted amid its ruined feathers, studding the joints of its wings: Isiem's needles and the shards of broken bottles from the Long-Bottomed Lady's cellar. The Hellknights hadn't taken them out.
Why is he here? Isiem wondered, before he realized the obvious answer. Oreseis needed to stage a plausible escape for his captive so that the other strix would take their wounded kinsman home. Presumably the strix, once given to the shadow, was supposed to sneak away while the signifers pretended to be distracted by their work on the devilstongue relay. Then he—or the shadow that lived in his flesh—could betray his rescuers from within.
The attack had thrown that plan into confusion. The Hellknights appeared to have actually forgotten Kirraak while fighting for their own lives, but the captive strix seemed unable or unwilling to break for freedom.
And Kirraak's presence also explained why the strix continued to harry the Hellknights, even though they had already lost several of their number to the signifers' spells. They could see what the humans had done, and they would not abandon one of their kin to that torture.
Isiem wondered whether their courage would kill them. If Oreseis had already completed his ritual and given Kirraak to the shadow, saving him could be fatal to the strix. If they took their comrade from the Hellknights and returned him to their tribe, the shadow that lived in his body would betray the location of their lair. The Hellknights would have every advantage in their attack ...and the Kuthites of Nidal, with their nightglass, would be able to condemn all the strix to the Midnight Lord's thrall. Every last one of them, given to the shadow. Chained to the same altars that already claimed Nidal.
It would save dozens of human lives. Hundreds, perhaps. Even the strix would survive, after a fashion.
That was a worthy goal. Wasn't it? Victory with fewer deaths?
Crouched invisibly by the stables' covered well, Isiem tried to decide what to do.
There was a chance that he could help the Hellknights escape from their pinned position. One of the spells he had prepared the previous night struck fear in the hearts of those it touched. He had intended to use it to terrify his prisoner with visions of possession, but it would work just as well to distract the strix from their attack on the Hellknights. It might even send them fleeing.
But something held him back from casting. The desperation with which Kirraak had fought him in the cellar, the dream of crows and hungry altars ...or maybe just his old wish, that half-buried childish longing in the Dusk Hall, to finally be free of Nidal and its curse and his servitude to a god he had never loved, but only feared.
Wasn't this what he had wanted? Wasn't this why he had sought the assignment in Westcrown, and then leaped at the chance to work still farther afield? Everything that Isiem had done and planned since his apprenticeship had been calculated so that he might have this very chance. And now that it lay within his grasp, he hesitated.
He felt no great loyalty to Erevullo and his Hellknights, nor even to Oreseis. They were servants of a conqueror who had come to eradicate an entire people—the Chelaxians for silver to fuel their imperial ambitions, the Nidalese for worse.
The strix might be monsters, but even monsters did not deserve that fate. And yet Isiem did not raise a finger to help them, either. It was not in him to turn against his former comrades.
Almost as if he could sense that no answer would be forthcoming from the missing shadowcaller, Erevullo turned back to his own men. "Barseno."
"My lord." The Hellknight's gruff answer carried clearly through the night, despite the crackle of burning buildings and the fearsome devil-visaged helm that masked his face.
"Prepare to lead us out. Mirenna: the stone." There must have been some hesitation, for after a pause Erevullo spoke again, with a sharper edge. "Now. We have no choice."
Isiem couldn't hear the subordinate signifer's answer, if there was one. The Hellknights began gathering their weapons and preparing to move out. A hulking man dressed in full plate armor—Barseno, he presumed—readied his shield, raising it high to ward himself and Erevullo against aerial attacks.
As two others covered her with thin bone wands, a female signifer raised a black-veined amethyst to the sky and slashed the palm of her other hand. She gripped the jewel tightly in her bloody fist, holding it for the span of three heartbeats. Then the amethyst shattered with a crack like a frost-burst tree. The signifer was thrown back against the wagons; she cried out in pain, but no one looked her way. All eyes were riveted on the winged devil-woman who stood where the stone had broken. Starlight seemed to surround her in a silvery halo, illumining every detail of her savage grace. But at the same time, the shadows in her movements seemed impossibly deep.
Isiem had never seen such a creature before, although he knew of them from his years in the Dusk Hall. Some said they were fallen angels; others claimed they merely mocked angels by imitating their forms. Whatever the truth, the fiendish warrior looked as lovely as any angel, but there the resemblance ended. Her weapons were barbed and brutal, and cruelty radiated from her like heat from a fire. He was awed, and more than a little frightened, that the diabolists of Cheliax had bound the fiend for Erevullo to command, and that they thought Crackspike worthy of her intercession. How much silver is in these hills?
The woman was tall, nearly six feet, and her raven wings towered almost as high again over her head. An ebon bow crossed her back, and a rope of burning hair sat coiled at her hip. She was sheathed in mail of glossy black scales that looked harder than steel, but clung to her movements as fluidly as silk. Bruises and cuts, livid on her porcelain skin, accented her otherworldly beauty rather than detracting from it.
"Cover us," Erevullo ordered, already turning away. The devil nodded curtly and, with two dust-swirling sweeps of her wings, launched herself into the air. Most of the Hellknights followed Erevullo, but a few kept their eyes on the strix, bows and wands at the ready.
What followed was a whirling, chaotic combat that Isiem could scarcely track. Strix and devil fought in circles through the thin cold moonlight, ascending higher than his eye could follow and plummeting with impossible speed. The fiend hurled her burning rope at her victims, snaring and dragging them out of the sky one by one. Blood and feathers fell like rain.
The woman who had slashed her hand began another spell. Ghostly steeds materialized out of the darkness, and the Hellknights climbed into their saddles. While their devilish ally kept the strix from following, they began to ride off. Kirraak remained where he was, squatting senselessly in the dust, and the airborne strix redoubled their attacks upon seeing their kinsman so close to freedom. Fireballs burst in the sky, searing Isiem's eyes with their brilliance, as the signifers exhausted their wands to drive the strix off. Stray arrows plummeted into the dirt. They were abandoning him.
As quietly as he could, Isiem slid away from the well's limited cover. He had no clear idea of where he wanted to go, or how he would get there, but the simple fact that he could consider such things made him almost giddy. He could scarcely believe that the moment was real—that Erevullo and the Hellknights had just ridden away, leaving him for dead.
And then the scale-clad devil swept down before him, filling the air with the scent of blood and roses.
"Who are you, little mouse?" A mocking little smile curved her lips. Isiem had not released his spell, but invisibility was no barrier to the fiend's sight. Her catlike eyes fixed on him easily. This close, the heat radiating from her body was overwhelming. Blood wetted her lashes and ringed her eyes like red kohl. "You have the look of a deserter."
She drew an arrow and set it to her long black bow, but Isiem didn't move. He couldn't. He was fascinated: a mouse in the serpent's gaze, helplessly enraptured by the jewel-bright vision of death. She was so beautiful...and freedom was so frightening. Perhaps this was easier. The grave would hide him from Zon-Kuthon too, wouldn't it?
"The penalty for desertion is death," the fiendish archer said. And as she spoke, the strange hypnosis snapped, and Isiem remembered that he did not want to die so easily after all. He wanted to live.
He was almost too late. Isiem scrabbled for a simple spell—something that might actually trick a creature immune to illusions, and that he mi
ght throw out quickly enough to save himself—but he had no delusions about his chances. If the devil wanted to kill him, she would. She had her arrow nocked and ready, and there was no outrunning that.
But she wanted to toy with him, and that gave Isiem just enough time to complete his spell. White mist rose around him, thick and clammy as rain-soaked wool. It blinded them both, but only the devil had reason to care. She screeched in frustration and loosed her arrow even as Isiem threw himself backward, desperately trying to evade her.
He almost dodged. The arrow sank into his shoulder and angled upward through his arm, knocking him sideways in a blaze of pain, but it wasn't the killing shot it might have been. Isiem lay where he fell, breathing shallowly through his mouth and hoping against hope that the fiend would believe he was dead.
There was nowhere to hide. The mists only covered a small space, and he had no magical escape prepared. Fleeing on foot would be suicide. If the devil wasn't fooled, he'd have to fight—and his odds were not much better there. But it was the only option left to him, so Isiem gritted his teeth and eased his fingers silently toward the hilt of the crystalline wand tucked into his boot. He waited, listening for the slightest indication that might tell him where his adversary was, and where he could best aim the deadly cold stored in that wand.
But the bluff worked. He heard her wings flap and felt a buffeting wind as the archer returned to the air. His wound throbbed terribly, sending a new jolt of agony through his side every time he moved. Blood soaked his clothes and the dirt beneath him. The arrow might have been poisoned, or enchanted by some devilcraft. Or perhaps it had just been a lucky shot. Whatever it was, Isiem could feel his strength waning with every breath he took, and knew that if he did not heal himself soon, he would die in his shroud of mist.
Surreptitiously, he reached for another wand, this one silver rather than stone. It resembled a small version of the needles that pinned the human sculptures over the great square of Pangolais, and that was no accident. Zon-Kuthon's healing came with a high price in pain; to craft the wand, Isiem had inflicted careful wounds on a hundred weeping sacrifices, offering their misery to the Midnight Lord so that he might alleviate his own someday.
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