“Think about it,” Mosscrow urged. “As much as I am suggesting these individuals are good, decent people just like you or me, we must also acknowledge that there are those that take up crime and run amok with dastardly intentions, same as anyone might. Take, for instance, the Master of the Shadows.”
A chill bled through Despiris. Talk of supernatural ability and gifted individuals, using magic to combat figures such as the Master of the Shadows, the missing statue on the roof that Despiris suddenly suspected had been a gargoyle...
“Clevwrith,” she murmured, wariness leaking into her voice. “Something is wrong.” Clevwrith hardly acknowledged she had spoken, intent on the meeting below, and Despiris’s uneasiness grew. “The missing statue on the roof… It was a gargoyle.”
“Mm-hm,” came his distracted reply, as if he’d already concluded as much.
“It was them who sent it after us. Someone here, probably, among the gifted individuals they’re introducing.”
“Probably.”
Despiris stared at the side of his impassive head, not understanding his lack of reaction. “Clevwrith.”
For the first time, he turned to look at her.
“We shouldn’t be here.”
“Why the sudden trepidation, Des? Hadn’t you figured out the real purpose of this event yet?”
The coldness spread, and suddenly she understood. How could she have not seen it? The rumors broadcasting the event had spread too quickly, too colorfully. As if someone had wanted word to reach the SFH. How could she have been so stupid? “It’s a trap.” The rush of dreadful insight stirred her innards, making her feel sick. “They knew we would come. They wanted us to come.”
Clevwrith grinned darkly. He had known. “Indeed.”
The Lord Advisor was pointing out how magic could be used to take untouchable fiends such as the Master of the Shadows off the streets, where all else failed. Him and any others who thought themselves above the law and enjoyed terrorizing the kingdom unchecked.
“If you are still unconvinced, allow me to illuminate the problem. This is an event to showcase gifted individuals, so I would be remiss not to showcase the Shadowmaster himself. He is indeed one of our guests tonight, here with us as we speak.”
Murmurs of surprise and unease met that unexpected revelation, but Crow spoke over the drone.
“Tonight, I welcome him. For tonight, we rise to meet him on his playing field.” Raising his hands and eyes to the rafters, the Lord Advisor hailed with thunderous aplomb, “Welcome, Spylord!”
Although Despiris knew they were hidden in shadow, she felt that hungry gaze as if she perched in a spotlight. Her nerves went taut, palms growing sweaty on the rafters.
“I know you are here,” Crow said as if talking directly to them. “And I dare you to escape me this time.”
Despiris wished she could shrink into nothing, suddenly wanting to be anywhere else but there. “We should go,” she urged quietly. Once again, Clevwrith didn’t seem to be listening.
Footsteps sounded quietly somewhere on the same level as the spies, an obvious effort of stealth failing to fool the Shadhi’s keen senses. That and a creaking board sounded a warning.
Despiris’s gaze snapped toward the sound, settling on a shadow creeping through a nearby doorway.
Her hand went to Clevwrith’s shoulder. “Go,” she hissed, the urgency in her voice not something he would ignore outright.
The Shadowmaster glanced over his shoulder to gauge the danger, following her momentarily off the beams. They retreated into deeper shadow and waited for the patrolling guard to pass them by.
Holding her breath, Despiris tried to force her thrumming heart to slow, wishing this feeling of fear would crawl back to the undetectable corner in which it used to lie dormant. Once manifested, it seemed you could never quite outrun it again.
She clung to the shadows, pulse pounding. Clevwrith, on the other hand, hardly waited for the sentry to pass their hiding place before he returned to his post over the meeting, nearly brushing the guard’s back as he cut close behind him.
He was dangerously fascinated by the nature of this event, his recklessness a delightful game.
As if one encounter with a gargoyle hadn’t been enough. Did he not remember how close it had come to tearing them to shreds? How they’d run and fought and feared for their lives?
Had Clevwrith not been afraid?
Troubled, Despiris crawled cautiously out after him. What could she do but cling to her master’s side? If anyone could get out of this, Clevwrith could. Just because she’d learned she wasn’t invincible in this game, didn’t mean he wouldn’t continue to bolster the same untouchable legacy he always had.
“Since the Master of the Shadows does not seem keen to announce himself,” Lord Mosscrow was saying, “perhaps it is time we gave him a little nudge. Lady Verrikose, if you would be so kind as to grace us with another demonstration. Find me,” he purred, “the Shadowmaster.”
The pathetic urge to tug on Clevwrith’s sleeve quivered in Despiris’s fingers, the instinct that they should retreat refusing to rest. But equally persistent was Clevwrith’s intrigue with what brewed below, what Despiris was beginning to fear might doom them both. With morbid curiosity, the Spylord stayed riveted on the meeting, waiting to see what the Lord Advisor had in store for them.
Despiris didn’t want to find out. What have we done?
Lady Verrikose’s eyes fell shut behind her veil, her back straightening and her shoulders squaring into a poised posture. The other members at the table fell utterly silent, watching, waiting.
A moth fluttered up into the rafters, catching Des’s eye as it hovered beside her. Facing away at first, it rotated on vibrating, dusty wings to face her. Cursing the trivial distraction and how jumpy she had become, Despiris directed her gaze back to the woman below, trying to imagine what was happening in the mind behind the veil.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Clevwrith taking note of the moth as well.
Lady Verrikose’s eyes flashed abruptly open. She tilted her head back, gaze piercing through that delicate black veil straight into the rafters.
Despiris’s blood turned to ice.
“They’re up there,” Lady Verrikose announced with chilling certainty.
Clevwrith rocked slowly back on his heels, something like alarm – but astonishment was probably closer – surfacing in his gaze. Then quick as a flash, he turned to snatch the hovering moth right out of the air and was gone, his swift departure hidden behind the flurry of his cape.
A similar incredulity raced through Des’s mind, as she connected the earlier clue that was the woman’s apparent telepathy with the hounds to her ability to connect with other creatures as well. The moth had been no coincidence, no ‘trivial distraction’.
Lady Verrikose had found the Shadhi through its eyes.
Stricken to stillness by the notion, Despiris crouched alone in the rafters. She’d been too frazzled to track Clevwrith’s departure, and now she was stuck there without him, clueless as to his whereabouts. Hell. What now…?
A mouse crawled out of a hole in the wall and ventured onto the beam beside her. Warily, she eyed the innocent-looking creature, no longer trusting anything.
The accursed rodent stopped to perch at the edge of the beam, sniffing in her direction. Those beady little eyes met hers intelligently. Knowingly.
A wave of apprehension nearly sent Despiris clattering to her feet and scrambling to vacate the beams, but she forced herself to cling to an ounce of composure. Rational thought was chief on the list of things that would help her escape this circus. And so, restraining herself, she rose slowly to her feet, taking a small amount of comfort in the fact that the mouse – and Lady Verrikose peering out of its shared eyes – would see her as a daunting giant looming over its puny form.
Stepping over the creature with her best attempt at impassivity, she followed what she could only hope were Clevwrith’s footsteps into the dark nooks and cranni
es of the abandoned upper level.
Alas, she couldn’t find Clevwrith anywhere. The shadowed annexes were empty, strung with undisturbed cobwebs. Where had he gone?
Peering into an old closet, she disturbed bats sleeping within. Startled, they screeched into flight, spilling out past her scrambling form. Feinting to the side, she let the swarm rip past, but, as soon as they reached the other side of the room, they changed course abruptly and veered back toward her.
Bolting, Despiris careened out of the room, drawing the swarm after her. It was Lady Verrikose, she knew, that chased her in the guise of the creatures she donned as her mask.
Back through the attic-like network of the dome Despiris fled, trying in vain to lose the bats. By then she was lost down the ancient twists and turns, too frantic to map her surroundings. It was luck that found her back in a chamber that bore an exit onto the roof.
The hatch in the dome flew outward and banged hard as Despiris emerged into the acrid night air with bats spilling out all around her. The silhouette of a guard patrolling the roof spun at the commotion, cursing at what he saw.
Disregarding him, Despiris charged into the open air, swatting at the persistent cloud of slicing wings.
A second figure flowed into sight in her peripheral vision – this one more shadow than silhouette – and suddenly Clevwrith was beside her again. He stripped his cape from his shoulders, wielding it in a swift, swirling pattern as if dancing with it. When the flurry was finished, he held the cape closed by all four corners like a sack, a jumble of bats captured within. They jostled over one another through the soft walls of their prison, jutting and jabbing and squeaking.
Taking her quickly by the elbow, Clevwrith steered her behind a statue. He knelt, still not uttering a word to her, and whipped the corners of his cape into a knot to keep the bats contained. Even as guards approached from beyond their cover, he remained utterly calm, each motion deft and unflustered. The sound of nearby footsteps did not faze him. Once satisfied – and not a moment sooner – he stood and grasped Despiris again by the elbow. She might as well have been the green apprentice again, flustered and scared and in need of direction.
Snap out of it, Des, she commanded herself, but found an equally irate position toward Clewrith’s behavior. Did he not even for a moment consider that they might be out of their element?
They flourished from statute to statue, doubling back when nearly intercepted by guards. As they perched on the edge of the roof in front of a second gargoyle, the bloodhounds spotted them from the ground and bayed an alert.
“She’s watching from their eyes,” Despiris breathed as Clevwrith pulled her close and they shrank as far back from the ledge as the statue would allow. “What are we doing here, Clevwrith?”
Footsteps chopped closer as guards interpreted the hounds’ message.
“What we always do,” came the Shadowmaster’s easy reply.
“You’re playing with fire you don’t understand.”
“Shut up, Des,” he ordered calmly. And in a blur he spun her out from their hiding place to disappear behind another statue. It left Despiris breathless, the roof’s edge too near for comfort as they whirled dizzily so high above the rest of the world. But Clevwrith’s embrace guided her to safety, and she clung to him where they crouched, trying to remember the girl who had been dazzled by dancing on the rooftops.
That girl felt so distant, so foolish, so naïve and whimsical. This was madness.
As daring stunts continued, each more precarious than the last, her irritation grew to anger. He was enjoying the risks just a little too much, relishing the danger like a fix for a rampant addiction.
And Despiris had had enough.
As they came up from a tandem dive-and-roll behind a rearing Pegasus statue, Despiris wriggled forcefully out of his grasp. “Stop this foolishness,” she insisted shortly.
Concentration broken by her reprimand, Clevwrith’s brow flickered in confusion as he focused on her. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re going to get us killed.”
“You’re going to get us caught. We can’t stop in the middle. Get back here.” He held out a hand, waiting impatiently for her to take it.
She eyed it with indignation. “We shouldn’t be in the middle of this.”
A muscle clenched in Clevwrith’s jaw, lending a tightness to his face she had never seen before. “Now is not the time for this, Des!”
“And when are you ever going to listen to this, unless your life is on the line?”
“We’re not going to die, Des. But you have to listen to me. Come here.” He gestured insistently with his extended hand, which she continued to resist. “When have I let you down?”
You haven’t, a sentimental, sorrowful part of her wanted to assure him. But she stuffed sentiment into the recesses of her being, unwilling to dismiss the survival instinct raging inside her.
Because it wasn’t just instinct. It was wisdom. Wisdom found at the root of fear.
“This situation is not the same as the rest,” she snapped in a fierce whisper.
“No challenge is the same. We deal in unknowns all the time.”
“Not like this.”
“Des. This is my calling. The culmination of everything we’ve been practicing for.”
“This is your obsession,” she countered hotly. “And our only practice involves nearly getting torn to shreds at the hands of a single beast unleashed from this horde.” Gesturing furiously, she indicated the surrounding ring of monstrous statues.
“And if we didn’t come to them, they would hunt us down like animals and we would die alone and forgotten in the lost crags of the city,” Clevwrith snapped, shocking her.
Taken aback, Despiris blinked at his vehemence. At his abrupt, blunt acknowledgment of their likely demise.
“We don’t cower like prey in the nooks and crannies of the world,” Clevwrith all but growled through gritted teeth. “We are the predators. We take the fight to them. It is our only play.”
Despiris could hardly believe what she was hearing. “You’re…you’re here to fight?” It was bad enough that he’d known it was a trap and hadn’t bothered to fill her in on that damning detail. But so much worse if he had dragged her here with the intention of going down fighting.
“I’m here to win,” Clevwrith corrected, and although it did nothing to redeem his good sense in her mind, her relief was palpable. He was still the same Clevwrith, unwise in coming, perhaps, but with every intention of getting back out. Of besting his opponents with his wits. “Even the biggest, baddest predators in the wild don’t kill each other needlessly. If you don’t want to be messed with, you have to put on the best show. It’s bravado. It’s illusion. It’s necessary for survival. And it’s how things have always been.”
Fluctuating with conflict, Despiris nevertheless had enough sense to plaster herself back to his side and creep around the base of the statue as a guard came poking about. Once he had moved on, Clevwrith spoke again, this time more quietly.
“You’ve never needed this explained to you, Des. You were a natural. The creature of the night that all others should fear. Because we do not fear the way other things do, and it makes us powerful.” She wished she could go back to that way of thinking – she really did. The unshakable confidence, the haughty surety, the unfazed outlook that ensured every outcome. She couldn’t, of course, and Clevwrith could see it, now. “But you are questioning staying by my side,” he divined, “and that is the first thing that has scared me in my entire life.”
Was there a plea in his eyes? That and his revelation left her stunned, the slew of uncharted territory unspooling into an ever greater tangle around her. The Master of the Shadows, afraid?
What world was this? How had it come to this? She wished she could trace it all back to the moment everything changed. But that seemed hopeless at this point. Hopeless and pointless. The fact of the matter was it didn’t feel the same at his side, anymore, and it was because of too
many things.
The questions raised by her encounter with the ‘other side’. His kiss. His apparent willingness to risk her life without informing her of the trap they were headed into.
It was too much. Too much to untangle from inside the knot.
Although she momentarily lost her grasp on words, she worked her way around the lump in her throat, mastered her emotions, and spoke clearly. “They caught me once,” she said with a shake of her head. “You said I was ready, that I was just like you, but they caught me. I am not like you, Clevwrith. I am like me. And I need to know who that is, before I put on the best show for the rest of my life and fool even myself.”
It was Clevwrith’s turn to be stunned, a clear well of pain filling his eyes.
Despiris blazed on before she lost the nerve. “So you go on being invincible, if that’s your calling. But I don’t believe in invincibility anymore. I know my limits now. I came face to face with them here tonight.”
With that, she snatched the sack of bats from him and emerged from hiding. She made for the opposite side of the roof where she knew she could transfer to a pillar that sported cracks adequate for foot- and handholds.
A guard advanced, but she unfurled Clevwrith’s cape and let the horde of screeching creatures loose in his face. Clawing at the air around him, the guard forgot her in his frenzy to deflect the swarm. Despiris left the roof for the pillar, descending as fast as she dared. This was probably her last chance – if it wasn’t too late already. Clevwrith could wait around playing games while forces beyond him layered themselves upon one another and crept out of the woodwork to oppose him, but she was getting out before any other ‘demonstrations’ were initiated. She was not so cocky that she thought herself untouchable by magic.
By forces she had no understanding of.
On the ground she was met by a slew of armed guards. She swept out a pair of her own knives, ready to defend herself. Flesh and blood, she might be able to best. She knew how to fight.
Blades are not what I’m afraid of.
Eyeing her ready stance, the guards hesitated, forming an impeding half-circle to keep her cornered in lieu of attacking.
Girl of Rooftops and Shadows (The Shadow's Apprentice Book 1) Page 17
