by Caitlin Seal
Bargal was silent for a moment before answering. “You are obviously much more than you appear. My queen will be very interested in the magic that sustains you. It could prove the key to unlocking the secrets her scholars seek.”
“What secrets?” Naya asked.
“The oldest and deepest known to man. Her answers may be yours as well if you only shut your mouth and cooperate. If we do this right, we can all get out of here safely and no one else will have to get hurt.”
Naya clenched her teeth against a fresh wave of fear. Old magics. So, it seemed the warnings the strange woman had given her were true.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Naya said to Bargal. “Let Mel and Francisco go and I’ll help you escape. I’ll come with you to Endra. You can’t really expect to get out of the city with hostages. Someone will have found those bodies by now and the palace guards will bar the gate.”
“I think our chances are better than you know, and your friends here will all find they are safer with us than left behind. In a few hours, the news will spread, and this city will grow even less hospitable to your kind and to anyone who might be suspected of befriending you.”
That sent a chill through Naya. “Why? What have you done?”
Bargal didn’t reply. The hall they’d followed ended at a door. The Endran spy tried the handle, then muttered a curse in his own language.
“What is it?” Naya asked.
“He said the door is locked,” Bargal said.
Naya sensed the beginning of a plan and worked to keep the hope off her face. “I can open it,” she said, glancing back. She met Mel’s eyes briefly before looking at Bargal. Mel stood very still, her mouth set in a thin line and her hands clenched into fists. Naya prayed she wasn’t about to get her killed.
“Do it,” Bargal said after a pause.
Naya let go of Francisco’s arm and slid past him. She ducked her head so that Bargal and his spy couldn’t see her lips move and whispered, “When I tell you, run.” She didn’t wait to see if Francisco would respond, didn’t even dare to look at his face. The Endran spy made room for her, his eyes narrow and his aether prickly with suspicion. Naya kept her own eyes down and tried to look meek, not hard given her condition. She crouched next to the lock and slid her finger into it. Eyes closed, she felt her way through the tumblers. Long seconds ticked by and Naya heard footsteps coming from somewhere else in the hall.
“Hurry up,” Bargal said.
Naya clenched her teeth. “I’m trying.” The last tumbler clicked. Naya stood and opened the door, revealing a stretch of carefully trimmed lawn already shadowed with twilight, and beyond that a large wooden building that looked like it must be the stables Bargal had mentioned. Naya stood to one side as the Endran spy stepped out, followed by Francisco. She drew in aether and felt her bones ache in protest. “Go,” Bargal said, jerking his chin to motion Naya through the door.
Naya shuffled outside, then stumbled and pressed herself against the wall as though it were the only thing keeping her upright. The Endran spy gave her a scornful look, but didn’t move from where he stood guarding Francisco. The last ones through the door were Mel and Bargal. Naya pushed off the wall and leapt at Bargal, converting some of the energy in her bones into force to grab his knife arm and shove Mel away from him.
The runes on Bargal’s body flared to life more slowly than before. The attack had obviously taken him by surprise, and Naya guessed the dimming glow around his wrists meant that whatever magic he’d used earlier was at least partially expended. Naya managed to keep one hand wrapped around the arm that held the knife, even though her own fingers now burned as though she’d stuck them in a fire. Aether was seeping from her arm in an alarming way, as though bits of her soul were drifting free from her cracked bones.
Still, she didn’t let go as Bargal tried to twist free of her grip. She didn’t know what Bargal was, but the runes tattooed on his body had to be tied to the impossible speed and strength he’d shown before. If there was one thing Naya had learned about magic, it was that all runes could be broken. She forced the aether in her bond down through her arm, trying to push it into Bargal.
The runes around her grip pulsed with sudden brightness. Bargal’s eyes widened and an instant later Naya felt something else pushing against her, another will trying to force her aether out and away. In a flash Naya remembered the exercises Lucia had made her practice. Overloading a rune binding wasn’t the only way to deactivate it. Naya stopped fighting the force, reversing the direction of her will and instead pulling Bargal’s energy toward her.
Energy rushed into her. Bargal’s hand spasmed and the knife fell from his grip. The runes on his arm dimmed. With a snarl Bargal swung at Naya with his free arm. Naya let her head turn transparent as Celia had taught her. Bargal would overbalance when his blow didn’t meet resistance and she could use that to—
The fist slammed into her cheek, sending her stumbling back. Naya was so shocked she lost her grip on his wrist. Her hand went to her cheek as the force of the blow seemed to ripple through her body. Bargal hit her again, this time punching her in the stomach. The runes on his arm flashed and his fist connected with all the force of a cannonball.
Naya stumbled. She saw the bright glow of the runes flying toward her again and barely managed to throw herself out of the way. From the corner of her eye, she saw Francisco grappling with the Endran spy. Francisco’s face was deathly pale and his teeth clenched in pain, but he’d managed to get his arms wrapped around the man’s chest. Mel was crawling toward him, her expression furious as she tried to reach the fallen knife. Naya heard someone shouting, then running footsteps. Bargal looked away from her. For an instant rage burned in his eyes, then his expression shifted to one of exaggerated fear. He stumbled away from Naya, clutching his shoulder and gasping for breath. “Please, help me! It’s the wraith! She’s trying to escape! Stop her!” he cried out.
“What?” Naya took a step back.
“Run!” Francisco shouted.
Naya looked at him, then back over her shoulder to see a pair of soldiers running toward them from the direction of the stables. Meanwhile a black carriage pulled into view just beyond the commotion. “What about you?” Neither Francisco nor Mel looked like they were in any shape to flee.
“We’ll be fine. Run, damn you! Warn my father,” Francisco shouted again.
“Please help! They’re trying to kill me!” Bargal shouted. He’d fallen to the ground and was backing away from her. All signs of his supernatural strength and speed were gone, and with the bullet wound in his shoulder he looked exactly like the victim he was pretending to be. It wouldn’t be hard to convince a few Talmiran soldiers that Naya was the enemy here, and by the time she got the chance to argue otherwise, it might already be too late.
In a few hours, the news will spread, and this city will grow even less hospitable to your kind.
Corten saw the gleam of metal as the knife flew toward him, felt the wraith eater runes pulling at his bond. No. Not this again. He was not going to die again. He threw himself sideways and the world tore around him. Darkness and cold poured in and howling wind drowned out the sounds of fighting.
Corten fell back into the shadowy grasses of death.
“No!” He stood, his hands balling into fists. The knife hadn’t even touched him. How—
“Peace, spirit,” a raspy voice said behind him.
Corten turned and saw the shadow man standing among the grasses. “Peace?” he said. “Peace?” A humorless laugh tore from his throat. “Was this some sort of joke? Sending me back just so I could die again?”
“You are not dead,” the shadow man said.
“I—what?”
“Did you think we would invest so much in your return and not offer you any protection? We would not waste our power so. You did not die. You merely stepped into the fringe.”
Stepped?
Corten looked down at his hands. He was still wearing Francisco’s borrowed clothes. Over the shirt he once again wore his vest of glass plates, and he could feel the weight of the sword tugging at his hip. Interesting. Had they somehow persisted in this place? Or had his mind re-created them upon his return?
So far as he knew, there were only two ways for a soul to enter death: either by traveling through a necromancer’s portal or by being thrown there by trauma great enough to separate it from its physical form. He had no body left to break from, and he was pretty sure he would have noticed if someone had opened a portal to death in the middle of the Talmiran palace. “How?” he asked.
“The details are beyond you,” the shadow man said. “My people have spent long in the fringe. We know it and have used our knowledge and our power to bind you here. The magic of the binding acts as its own portal, allowing you to slip between this place and the living world.”
Corten gaped as he tried to imagine the complexity of such a binding. “That’s impossible. How can I be my own portal? And what do you mean I’m bound to the fringe? Spirits have to be bound to a part of their body. You can’t just bind someone to a place, especially not this,” he said, waving at the gray-and-black expanse around them.
“I told you the details were beyond you,” the shadow man said blandly. “You should return to the other world now. If you stay here too long, your glow will draw the scavengers.”
“No,” Corten said. “I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers.”
“Then ask your questions quickly.”
“You said before that I was to be your agent. What did you mean? And what are you?” Corten asked.
The shadow man was silent for a moment. “It will be easier if I show you.” Before Corten could protest, the shadow man strode forward and placed one hand flat against his chest.
A flood of images filled Corten’s mind, flashes of runes, faces, voices. It was all chaotic and none of it felt as real as that first vision of the ritual. He stumbled away with a gasp. His head hurt. He felt like he had the first time he’d drawn too much aether, his body brimming with energy that threatened to tear him apart if he didn’t set it free. “What did you do?”
“I have given you what I know, and what my people have seen in the memories of the dead who pass through here. The one you hunt calls herself a queen. She seeks to claim sovereignty over all realms, even death. If not stopped, she will attempt the gatekeeper’s ritual. She will fail, just as those who tried before her failed. You saw the consequences.”
“What if she succeeds?” Corten asked, remembering the darkness that had spread in his vision of that ritual, withering flesh and cracking stone with the force of its passing.
“She won’t. The ritual is flawed at its very core. No mortal can control the doors of death. Trying warps the very fabric of reality.”
“What am I supposed to do about any of this?” Corten asked.
“We cannot touch the living world, so you must go in our stead. Find this self-proclaimed queen and stop her.”
“But if you can bind me like this, then why not do the same to yourself?”
“We have tried, but we are too deeply a part of the fringe now. We cannot pull ourselves back through the barrier.” A snarling roar sounded somewhere in the distance and the shadow man looked around. “You must go.”
The growl sent fear shivering through Corten. He had more questions but none he wanted to ask so badly that he would risk facing another scavenger. Besides, he had to make sure Naya and the others were all right. “How do I get back to the living world?” he asked. His head ached with the strange jumble of memories the shadow man had shoved into it.
“I have given you the answer. Think.”
“What? I—Oh.” One of the foreign memories flowed to the surface. Corten saw a set of runes in his mind, a binding that twisted around itself, echoing the patterns that now flowed through his own body. With it came an understanding that was more intuition than anything else. Corten raised one hand and focused his aether to draw a series of runes in the dark. Light trailed from his fingers to outline the shape of the runes in the air before him.
The runes felt familiar even though he was sure he’d never seen them before. As he traced the last line, he clenched his hand into a fist, as though to grab the last threads of energy and hold them tight. The darkness hummed with potential and Corten shivered at the sense of power. The energy he held didn’t feel like aether. It was almost as though he could sense it straining against his will, trying to break free.
Something was moving in the dark. It crawled on a dozen arms with joints in all the wrong places. No time. Corten tore his gaze away from the scavenger, then pressed his closed fist against the center of the floating rune binding and pushed. The runes burned brighter. They drew energy from him almost as fast as the wraith eater had.
For a moment it was as though he were straining against a heavy door. Weakness seeped into his limbs, but some part of him knew that light and life existed just on the other side of that door. He had to get back. He thought of Naya, of Lucia, of that terrible killing darkness the vision had shown him.
The door shifted—not by much—but enough to open a crack. Enough for him to slip through. Corten pushed forward. He felt himself stretching, straining against the pull of the fringe. Then he stumbled into a blood-soaked hallway and gasped in a breath of aether.
The floor was covered in corpses and the energy he absorbed stank of fear and death. But he was back. He glanced down. Though his sword and armor were gone again, he was relieved to see his clothes had remained. While they were talking on the ship, Lucia had mentioned creating a portal that let someone step physically into death. It seemed the shadow men had done the same with his new binding somehow.
Corten surveyed his grim surroundings. Soldiers lay broken across the hallway. He should have been horrified by the violence of the scene, but he felt only a sort of clinical detachment. Among the bodies he saw no sign of Naya or Francisco or the men who’d been fighting against the soldiers.
Those men. Another memory surfaced, this one of runes carved in flesh, glowing with aether. The runes on the arms and legs of the red-haired stranger and his companion weren’t exactly the same as the ones in the memory, but they were close.
Enhancement magic. Crude, but effective.
Corten blinked the scraps of memory away before they could distract him. Someone shouted from beyond the curve of the hallway. Corten looked around and spotted a small servant’s door. It had been left partway open and there was a smear of blood on the handle. Without giving himself time to question, Corten slipped through it and into the narrow hall beyond.
Naya ran, ducking back the way they’d come into the servant’s hall. She’d made it more than halfway to where the fight had taken place when she rounded a corner and ran into someone.
Naya stumbled back, then gasped. “Corten?!” His eyes had a strangely distant look when they met hers, but otherwise he seemed completely unharmed.
“Naya. Good, you’re alive. Where are the others?” He caught her, steadying her with a hand. His grip was strong and wonderfully warm against her arm. She wanted to lean into him and close her eyes.
Not yet.
Naya drew in a sharp breath of aether, trying to clear away her exhaustion. “They’re outside, back that way. What happened to you? I saw you disappear.”
“I stepped through to the fringe,” Corten said. “I’ll tell you about it later. That man with the red hair—he’s connected somehow to what the shadow men warned us about. We have to find him.”
Stepped through to the fringe? What in creation did that mean? Still, Corten was right, they didn’t have time for explanations right now. “If you mean Ambassador Bargal, then I already know about that,” Naya said.
“You do? How—?”
Naya shook her head. “No time. The Endrans
are trying to escape. They’re the ones behind all the trouble at the Congress. But I think everything they’ve done here is just a distraction. I have to warn Delence.”
Corten seemed to absorb all this with a surprising amount of calm. “When we first got here, a man told Francisco that Delence was meeting with the queen. I’m not sure where. If you’re going to look for him, then I’ll try to stop Bargal from escaping.”
“What?” Naya asked. “Corten, no, those men are dangerous.”
Corten met her eyes again and smiled. “I can do this.” His smile fell a little. “But maybe you should come with me. You’re fading.”
Naya pulled her hand from his. Where had this new confidence come from? She hesitated. She didn’t want to leave him alone. She didn’t want to let him out of her sight ever again. But she had to warn Delence, and doing so would mean risking capture again by the Talmiran soldiers. “Find somewhere safe to hide. I’ll come back for you, I promise.”
She didn’t wait for his answer, instead slipping around him and running down the hall. Her eyes burned with tears of relief she couldn’t shed. He was alive.
By the time she got back into the main palace, a group of soldiers stood around the bodies Ambassador Bargal had left on the floor. Three of them leveled their pistols at her as she came stumbling out of the servant’s door.
“There’s been an attack!” she said before any of them could gather their wits. “The Endrans are attacking!”
Commotion sounded from the hall behind her. Naya felt fear and mistrust darkening the soldiers’ aether. “Stay right there!” one of them said.
Naya growled in frustration. They didn’t have time for this. “Send someone to block the gates,” she said. She didn’t wait to see how they’d react before ducking left and running down the hall. One of the guards made to grab her. He caught her sleeve and Naya heard fabric tear. She stumbled but managed to regain her feet and keep running. A pistol shot cracked behind her and a metal ball tore through her stomach to lodge in the wall in front of her.
