Shadow’s Lure

by Jon Sprunk

  Caim froze for a fraction of a heartbeat as a tremendous roar echoed behind him. But it wasn’t the shadow beast. Samnus launched himself from the doorway and into the press of soldiers. Seizing them in his bruised arms, the burly thane plunged over the side of the landing and into the empty space between the stairways. Their combined screams dropped like stones down a well. Caim couldn’t believe what he had just seen. It was madness.

  Caim rushed at the soldiers on the steps. As he deflected a hammer stroke aimed at his face, Caim felt the presence of the sword like a great black bird perched on his shoulder. He wanted to draw it, but he wasn’t sure he could trust the weapon. Or perhaps he couldn’t trust himself as the bloodlust sang in his ears.

  As he punctured the stomach and inner thigh of the man across from him, the north door banged open. Aemon and Dray exploded onto the crowded landing, plowing into the soldiers with their boar spears. The distraction allowed Caim to beat aside a soldier’s guard and put him down with a stab up through the armpit.

  When the last soldier was slain, Caim leaned against the wall. His forearm was killing him. There was blood everywhere—pooled on the floor, streaked across the walls. Keegan sat on the floor holding his left hand on his lap. His sister dabbed at the wound with the edge of her cloak. Caim pushed aside his exhaustion to go over to them. Keegan’s palm was laid open like a cleaned fish belly. Blood welled from the cut in thick streams. Liana tried to take hold of her brother’s arm to get a better look, but Keegan jerked it away and pressed it against his stomach.

  “Let it go, Li.”

  “Keegan! It looks bad. Let me see!”

  “No, Li—”

  Caim grabbed the boy’s arm and pulled up his sleeve. Long cuts ran along the inside of his forearm. They looked like they had been made with a knife blade. A few looked recent, but faint lines showed where old cuts had healed over. Caim looked up, but Keegan was staring down at his lap, his lower lip pulled into his mouth. Caim moved in front of his find so none of the other outlaws could see.

  “Keegan,” Liana said. “Did you do this?”

  His chest shuddered as he drew in a long breath. “Sometimes I can’t deal with it, Li. You know? Father and the war. I just …”

  Caim sliced a strip of cloth from the youth’s cloak. While Liana wrapped the makeshift bandage around her brother’s hand and forearm, he gripped the boy’s shoulder.

  “You did well.”

  Keegan winced as his sister tied off the ends of the bandage. “I could have done more.”

  “Any more,” Liana said, “and we’d be sewing your funeral bag.”

  Caim looked Keegan in the eye. “You did plenty.”

  The youth nodded. Caedman was slumped against the wall beside them. If anything, his pallor had gotten worse. Wonderful. All this to rescue a warm corpse. Caim turned around. The rest of the outlaws gathered around the landing. Three men held the east door shut, even though the pounding from it had ceased. Ramon strode toward them. “Where did you come from?” he asked Liana.

  “She stowed away,” Caim replied.

  Ramon bent down and winced when he got a closer look at the prisoner. “It’s worse than I thought. You think he’ll live?”

  “I don’t know. He’s beaten up pretty bad, but he’ll stand a better chance if we can get him out of here.”

  “The front is the best way out.”

  Caim didn’t like it, but he had to agree. The presence of the soldiers was a bad sign.

  Ramon pointed to a pair of men. “Take the lead with Caim. Oak and Lumel, you stay with Caedman. Everybody stay tight around them.”

  Oak and the other man selected bent down and hefted Caedman. One of the men holding the opposite door shut called over, asking what they should do.

  “Wedge it shut,” Caim said. “With a knife or a spear tip. Anything you can find.”

  The outlaws formed up. Those with injuries, including Caedman and Keegan, were placed in the center of the column. Liana scowled when Ramon put her there as well, but she said nothing.

  “Let’s go,” Caim said, and he started down the steps.

  On the way down they passed Joram’s body, hacked to unrecognizable pieces. Ramon didn’t say a word, but he picked up his cousin’s hammer. Flight by flight Caim led them down the stairwell, while the shadows crept overhead. The doors on the other landings were shut and no sounds issued from them, but with each floor Caim’s anxiety grew. It was as if some invisible doom hovered above his head. He rode the feeling down to the ground floor.

  Samnus lay between the bodies of the soldiers he had carried to their deaths. Blood and pulp were splattered across the floor and up the walls. With a glance at each shadowed corner, Caim moved to the archway leading to the prison’s front gate. The long corridor was empty and the doors along its length closed. It looked innocuous, like an easy stroll to the exit, but the feeling nagged at him. Something wasn’t right.

  “Stay here,” he said.

  The word was passed back through the ranks as Caim edged into the corridor. Leaving behind their muted chorus of shifting footsteps, muffled coughs, and clanking metal, he paused at each door he passed, listening for anything untoward, hoping to find something to attach to his heightened apprehension, but they stood like rows of silent guardians watching his passage. He stopped at the edge of the atrium. The sensation had grown to a gigantic weight pressing down on the back of his neck. As he stepped toward the gate, a faint noise reached him. A footstep? He couldn’t tell. Maybe it was nothing. They might still get out of here alive.

  Caim halted as a tiny voice hissed in his ear.

  “Caim!”

  Heart racing, he looked around for her distinctive glow. “Kit?”

  “Caim! You … door … –ow …”

  It was definitely Kit, but he could barely hear her. “Kit, where are you?”

  “… can’t … you!”

  Caim tried to follow the direction of her voice, but it was too faint. He remembered the night he’d fought Levictus on the palace roof, and how the sorcerer’s magic had separated Kit from him. He closed his eyes and tried to reach out to her. “Kit, I’m right here. I need you—”

  But she was gone again, leaving him more troubled than before. He only had a moment to process it before a sharp creak of metal against metal whispered through the atrium’s still air, and the front gate flew open with tremendous force to clang against the inner wall. A fierce wind, stinking like an opened grave, howled through the gaping doorway. Caim lifted an arm to his face, choking on the horrible stench.

  “Dark’s blood!”

  He looked to see Keegan crouched a dozen paces behind him. How the youth had managed to sneak up behind him, Caim didn’t know, but his feeling of dread intensified.

  “Get down!”

  Caim lunged, but he was an instant too late as something lashed through the doorway. He didn’t get a look at it, but he saw its effects as Keegan was hurtled the length of four wagons down the corridor to land flat on his back. Sprawled on the floor where the youth had stood only a moment before, Caim did the only thing he could think of—he rolled to his feet and charged the gate. Something zipped over his left shoulder, as quiet as an evening breeze, but the power of it jangled down his arm from shoulder to fingertips.

  Something stood in the doorway. A slender figure framed by the darkness. Something in the way it stood, arms upraised as if supplicating the night sky, reminded Caim of his past. It had to be …

  The witch.

  Caim sprinted with both knives held low for gutting slashes. Then the figure pushed back its hood, and a moonbeam caught her high cheekbones, the slope of a slender nose, smooth smoky-gray skin.

  Caim heard sounds beyond the doorway, but all his attention was focused on the woman as her lips parted.

  “Scion …”

  What was that supposed to mean? A warning? There was something about this woman that dug into his brain. Her statuesque beauty called to him. The mysterious folds of her clothing whi
spered of forbidden secrets. Caim blinked. What was he thinking? He tried to stop his momentum, but an irresistible force drew him toward the doorway. He dug in his heels. His legs shook, but they continued to carry him forward. Caim clenched his jaws as he remembered his battle with Levictus, but there was an allure about this woman he couldn’t resist. If he just got close enough to see her better, to smell the sweet musk of her hair, to bend his neck … No! Kill her! Kill her!

  Caim watched his arm extend with horrifying slowness. The point of the suete knife shone bright as it reached toward her shadowed breast. Caim warred with himself. He didn’t kill women. Not since …

  He forced his mind back on the witch. She was lifting a hand toward him. Caim braced himself, but nothing seemed to happen. Then a fierce pain flared in the palm of his right hand. Caim ground his teeth together as tendrils of smoke rose from the blade of his knife and the steel began to darken before his eyes. His nerves screamed for him to drop the weapon, but he held on, determined to fight through the pain. All he could think of was completing the last three steps that would carry him to the witch and plunging the smoking blade into her heart.

  Two steps.

  Caim hissed as his knife inched closer. His legs felt like pillars of wet clay, dragging him along. The wind howled in his ears, the rotting stench filled his lungs. Invisible talons closed around his throat, and the witch’s mouth opened in a smile. But the assault only hardened his will.

  One step.

  Caim looked into her dark eyes, sparkling like pits of oil. Much of her face was still swathed in shade. Then the shadows parted, and Caim saw her in full. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, which saved it from being bitten through as his jaws clamped shut. He knew her features as he knew his own. Unbidden, the old dream bubbled up through his subconscious, and he was once again standing in a familiar courtyard illuminated by walls of raging flames.

  The frigid wind flogged his small body. The cold slid through his veins like ice water. There was blood on his hands. He wiped them on his shirt, but they wouldn’t come clean.

  A wail pierced the silent night. Caim’s stomach ached like someone had punched him as his mother burst from the burning house, into the arms of the waiting soldiers. He wanted to run to her, to save her, but he could do nothing as the dark men dragged her away, into the fields and the great forest beyond, vanishing like a pack of ghosts.

  His mother’s face.

  Caim’s feet almost slid out from under him as the paralysis left him. He halted the impetus of his thrust. His arms, suddenly too heavy to lift, fell by his sides. His mother’s screams pierced his skull. Caim opened his mouth, but he stood voiceless before her, unable to move or pull his gaze away. She hadn’t changed at all, still as youthful and vibrant as in his memories. But there was a cast to her features, an opacity to her eyes that cut through him. Then she smiled, and he was sure that if he could just look closer, he would see her as she had been before.

  The strident screech of metal snapped Caim out of his stupor as rows of iron bars fell across the doorway, separating him from the woman with his mother’s face. The impact shook the floor as the heavy portcullis fell into place.

  The witch clapped her hands. A cloud of darkness fell over Caim as he was hurtled away from the doorway. A cocoon of shadows enveloped him, protecting him from the icy wind that tore at the skin of his face and hands and stole the breath from his lungs. Despite the protective barrier, he landed hard. Caim rolled up on one elbow as the shadows peeled away from him. Some of them were riddled with hoarfrost and did not move. He glanced down the passage toward the gate. Keegan stood in the atrium, one hand on the gate’s windlass. The woman stood in darkness once more, all except for her eyes. They burned into his brain from across the divide. When they flared up, a sudden ache ripped through his chest.

  As Caim started to rise, something zipped past his ear. Outside, a troop of crossbowmen ran up to the other side of the portcullis. Buzzing quarrels peppered the air. One slammed into Caim’s shoulder and knocked him on his back. Breathing through gritted teeth, he sat up, and the bolt fell away. Its point had transfixed a wriggling shadow and failed to penetrate his jacket.

  Keegan yelled in his ear. “Come on!”

  Caim ran with the youth, missiles speeding past them, and tried not to think about one of those steel-headed bolts punching through his spine. The corridor seemed miles longer than before. As they approached the stairs, he heard fighting ahead. Caim passed Keegan under the stone archway and plunged into pandemonium. Outlaws and jailors were locked in combat on the stairs. There was no time for tactics. Caim jumped into the fight.

  Vibrations ran up his injured arm as he stabbed a man holding a truncheon. The jailor cried out and pitched into the arms of the outlaw he had been about to brain, but Caim was already moving past them. The outlaws fought without savvy or technique, but their foes were possibly worse. On the second-floor landing, a knot of Keegan’s friends fended off twice their number of guards. Caim sliced his way into the line of attackers. Shadows gathered overhead as if to watch the slaughter, and he had to fight to hold them at bay. The power hummed within him. The black sword rattled against his shoulder, pleading to be let free, and part of him wanted to do it. What’s happening to me?

  He wanted Kit back, but he had no sense of her. She could be on the other side of the moon. Blood ran across the stone under his feet, and bodies piled around him until the remaining guards pulled back up the steps. Energized by this reprieve, the outlaws surged forward and pushed their foes up to the next level. Caim started to follow, but a hand clapped on his shoulder. He whirled, then lowered his knives at the sight of Ramon. The big man’s face was masked in blood. An ugly purple bruise marred his cheek.

  “What?”

  Beyond Ramon, several outlaws hunkered on the steps. As the sounds of fighting receded, he heard their painful groans. Caedman sat against a wall. Caim hadn’t taken the time to really look at the outlaw captain before. He was as tall as Ramon. His arms and shoulders were strong despite being twisted in angles Caim didn’t want to think about.

  “I take it,” Ramon grumbled, “we’re not going out the front.”

  “I don’t suggest it.”

  Caim pushed past the big man. Keegan knelt on the floor with Liana’s head cradled in his lap. A thick tide of blood ran down her scalp. Caim set down his weapons and touched her gently. The gash on her head looked nasty, but it was shallow.

  “She tried to help.” Keegan rubbed the back of a hand across his face, leaving streaks of blood. “I didn’t see the guy behind us until it was too late.”

  “She’ll be all right,” Caim said. “But we need to get her out of here.”

  He looked around. What options did they have? Fighting their way out the front gate would be suicidal. He might escape, with luck, but with the witch involved he couldn’t even predict that with any certainty.

  Scanning the outlaws, he spotted the tall man with red hair in the back. “You. What’s your name again?”

  “Braelon, but everybody calls me Oak.”

  “Oak, did your cousin tell you any other ways out of here besides the front gate?”

  Everyone quieted. Downstairs, metal screeched, a violent sound that grated on the nerves.

  Oak frowned. “Orwen never mentioned another exit, and I never really asked. He mainly talked about all the loonies locked up in this place.”

  “This is a waste of time,” someone muttered.

  “What about the roof?” Caim asked.

  In his head he was trying to devise a way to get a dozen people, some of them injured, across the rooftop and down six stories of sheer stone wall. Maybe if they tied blankets together for a makeshift rope …

  “Nah,” Oak answered.

  “I didn’t see any hatches above,” Caim admitted. “And the windows are too narrow to fit through.”

  “Wait,” Keegan said.

  “What if we make ourselves up like guards?” a man ventured. “Unifor
ms and such. Maybe we could—”

  “Walk out the door as easy as that?” another finished for him. “You’re crazy. They’d sniff us out sure as—”

  “Wait!” Keegan shouted.

  “What?” Caim asked.

  “If we can’t go out the front and we can’t go up, what about down?”

  “How’s that?” Ramon asked. “We going to turn ourselves into moles and dig our way out? You’re as daft as a—”

  “What do you mean?” Caim asked.

  The boy’s face had turned bright red under the scrutiny of his fellows. “Well, there’s tunnels all beneath the city, right?”

  “You mean the sewer tunnels.”

  Keegan nodded. “Exactly. A building like this is probably connected to those tunnels.”

  Caim ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, tasting blood. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard so far. Everyone downstairs. Find an access to the sewers and we might get out of this alive.”

  The bulk of the outlaws returned from above, bloodied and exhausted, and Ramon rushed them down the steps. Caim helped Keegan carry Liana. Seeing her unconscious reminded Caim of when he’d carried Josey to his apartment from her foster father’s manor. Both were strong, independent women and fiercely attractive. Navigating the gore-slick stairs, Caim shook as the energy that had flowed through him during the short battle drained away, leaving him ragged and worn out. But it wasn’t as bad as the debilitating spells he used to suffer after encounters with his powers, for which he was grateful. The last thing he needed was to swoon at the feet of these men just when they were starting to listen to him.

  They reached the ground floor to the sound of distant clanging—the soldiers outside hammering at the portcullis. A few outlaws peered through the archway looking toward the atrium. They held their weapons nervously, but Caim saw something new in their expressions, a grimness he hadn’t seen before. About time. Where was this when we were running for our lives through the city streets?