“You’re here,” Lowellin said to the three newcomers. “Let me be the first to welcome you to my world. How was the trip?”
The leader of the Devourers said something in his harsh tongue, and Lowellin shook his head.
“Please. My command of your tongue is weak at best. Why don’t we speak in mine?”
The leader made a hissing sound. Then he said, “Where is it?” His accent was thick and difficult to understand.
“I have it right here, S’nash,” Lowellin replied. Reaching inside a pouch tied to his belt, he drew out what looked like a piece of smooth red crystal. It was semi-circular on one side and jagged on the other, as if broken from a disc. He handed it to S’nash. “That’s the one I got from Marad.” He reached inside the pouch again and withdrew another piece, similar to the first. “And here is the piece I recently retrieved from the steppes.” He handed it over as well.
“This is not all of it,” S’nash said harshly. “The key is not complete.”
Lowellin put up his hands. “No, it’s not. But I know where it is, and I have a plan to get it.” He gestured at the partially-completed ships. “Once these are finished, my army will board them, and we will go retrieve the final piece.” He looked over at the ships. “Why are the slaves not working on them? I left orders that they were to work day and night.”
To the two kneeling Ankharans he said, “Where are the other two sorcerers?”
It was Maphothet who answered, their leader. The blue tattoos on his face were very similar to the veins on the Devourers’ faces. “I don’t sense them anywhere near.”
“There was a battle,” S’nash growled, “as we were preparing to come through the portal. When we arrived, a human attacked us.” Once again, his gaze fell on the shadows where Fen was hidden. “The other two sorcerers are most likely dead, killed by the human.”
“Fen,” Lowellin said. “And here I thought that two of them could handle him. No matter. There is nothing he can do now.”
We’ll see about that, Fen thought grimly.
“So be it,” S’nash said. “We will take control now, and there will be no more mistakes. We will go to this other place and obtain the final piece. Perhaps you will be of some use in this,” he said to Lowellin.
“I got you two pieces already,” Lowellin observed. “And I broke open the vault containing the third. Given a little more time I would have had it for you.”
“Yet a little girl defeated you.”
Lowellin flared. He grew taller suddenly, and from him Fen could feel Stone power radiating, power as old as the world. “I am not a servant to be bullied,” he said. “I am—”
“I know very well who you are, Shaper,” S’nash said. “I think it is you who have forgotten who I am.” The Devourer raised one hand. His fingers curled.
Something moved under Lowellin’s skin, a bulge that moved up his neck towards his jaw. Another bulge appeared under his shirt. Lowellin grimaced and stepped back. When he spoke next, it was through gritted teeth.
“Enough. I remember.”
“See that you do not forget again.” S’nash lowered his hand. The creatures under Lowellin’s skin sank back out of sight.
“I’m glad we could have this talk,” Lowellin said, rubbing the side of his neck. “It’s always surprising how much those things hurt.”
“They have their uses,” S’nash said. He looked toward the city. Fen didn’t know if the riots were still going, but clearly the fires were not yet out. Flames lit up the night sky in several different areas, and smoke boiled upwards. “Your city burns, Lowellin. If it is to be any use to us, it would be better if it did not burn down. Take control.”
“It will be done,” Lowellin said, lowering his head slightly in acknowledgement of the order.
“You have some quarters, I presume,” S’nash said. “Take us there.”
“A whole palace, in fact. Ilsith could take us. It would be faster,” Lowellin said.
“I am the chosen of the Queen of Chaos,” S’nash sneered. “I will not sneak around in the shadows.”
When he said that, Fen thought he saw Ilsith stiffen, but the light was poor, and it was hard to tell.
They walked away, none of them noticing Fen hidden in the shadows, though the one-eyed Devourer paused and looked back over his shoulder.
Who was the Queen of Chaos? Fen wondered. If the Devourers answered to her, she must be unbelievably powerful.
And then it hit Fen, what the key was for.
They needed it to free the Queen of Chaos.
Chapter 7
Light was growing in the east as Fen moved through the city. The riots had died down, and the streets were mostly quiet, with only a few people still out and about. Those few he encountered either slunk away or stared at him belligerently until he passed. He turned down one street and saw a soldier crouched beside a body on the ground. The soldier was going through the man’s pockets. Fen saw a flash as he found a gold coin. Seeing Fen approaching, he stood and drew his sword.
“Move along, and I won’t cut you,” he growled.
Fen felt his anger rise. This man was a soldier. He’d taken the same oath as Fen had. To see him turn his back on it as soon as Samkara was vulnerable was unbearable. He didn’t slow down, only kept walking straight at the man, who gave him a grim smile.
“Are you drunk or stupid?” the man asked, stepping forward and swinging his blade at Fen’s head.
But Fen saw the way the man’s weight shifted in the instant before he swung, and he was already moving. He stepped inside the blow and caught the man’s wrist in one hand. He twisted and pulled down, using the man’s own momentum against him. The man stumbled forward, and Fen struck him in the jaw. The soldier lost hold of his weapon and fell to the ground. Fen picked up his sword.
The soldier looked up at him in fear, rubbing his jaw with one hand. Fen pointed the sword at his chest.
“Get out.”
“What?”
“Get out of Samkara. This city doesn’t need people like you. If I see you here again, I’ll kill you.” He jabbed the man in the chest as he spoke, hard enough to draw a little blood.
The man scrambled to his feet and ran away.
Fen looked around. Until now he’d been wandering more or less aimlessly, his thoughts filled with the events of the night, along with doubts and fears as to what to do now. He realized that he needed somewhere to go. Obviously, he couldn’t go to the castle. Lowellin would be looking for him.
His gaze fell on something painted crudely on the side of a building in red paint.
Fen lives! it said.
It was as Cowley had said. He’d become a rallying figure for those who opposed the foreign sorcerers and their hold over the Fist. After the failed execution, too many people knew his face. He needed a place to hole up and get off the streets. He needed a disguise.
He remembered a place then, an abandoned temple near where he’d grown up. It should serve, assuming it hadn’t been torn down or occupied.
He picked his way through the streets, moving faster as the day grew brighter. The light showed him things he didn’t want to see. Buildings gutted by fire and still smoking. Ash-covered survivors picking through the wreckage. Bodies lying twisted on the cobblestones, men, women, even children, many of them looking like they’d been torn by wild animals. Shops that had been looted, doors kicked in, goods scattered in the street. It was hard to believe that only a short time ago the city had been jubilant about the victory over Marad. Samkara had fallen fast and hard.
He tried to turn down one street only to find it barricaded by overturned wagons and broken crates. Three men and two women were manning the barricade. The men held old swords that had probably been lying in attics, forgotten until a few days ago. The women held pitchforks.
“Nothing here for you,” one of the men said. “You’ll not come into our neighborhood.”
Fen put his hands up and backed away. One of the women squinted at him.
&nb
sp; “Say, aren’t you that guy, the one whose head they tried to chop off?”
Fen jogged away without replying. One of them shouted after him, but he ignored them.
The city was coming to life. Fen worked his way down side streets and alleys, sticking to the remaining shadows, keeping his head down. Fortunately, most people seemed as eager to avoid him as he was to avoid them.
It had been years since he’d spent any time in his old neighborhood, and he took a few wrong turns before managing to find the street that led to the temple. It was narrow and winding, more an alley than a street, climbing as it went. To either side were tenements several stories tall, old, rotten buildings that leaned over the street as if planning on collapsing into it at any moment. The few windows that faced the street were tightly shuttered. No one was out.
At the end of the street, on top of a small hill, was the old temple. It was three stories tall, a crumbling building of weathered gray stone with a tall spire on top. On the frieze above the arched front door were the remains of some forgotten god, the face gone, hands outstretched. Many of the slate roof tiles were missing, and the stained-glass windows in the front had been smashed in long ago. A low, iron fence enclosed the front yard, which was covered with dead, yellowed weeds and scattered debris, a child’s shoe, a dead cat, some rags.
When Fen was growing up, the children in the neighborhood all believed the temple to be haunted. They frightened each other by whispering stories about how the last priest to inhabit the place had been brutally murdered, his body hung on a hook above the front door. The stories also said that when the men of the neighborhood went to take the body down, it was missing, but they heard footsteps inside the temple and saw the bloodied face of the dead priest at one of the windows.
He and his friends had dared each other many times to go into the building, but none of them had ever been brave enough to.
Fen looked around to make sure no one was watching. The street was still deserted. He opened the squeaking gate and hurried across the yard. Once again looking around, he pushed on the front door. At first it wouldn’t move, but then it opened grudgingly.
It didn’t look like anyone had been inside in years. There was a small vestibule, the door separating it from the nave fallen off its hinges. From the high, arched ceiling an iron chandelier hung, the stumps of old candles still in their sockets. The pews had been taken. The floor was wood planks. On one side the wood had rotted away, revealing a dark hole into the basement. The altar was gray stone, the moldering remains of a book open upon it. Thick dust covered everything.
He walked through the nave, dust rising with each step. Dim sunlight filtered in through a window high in the back wall above the altar. There was a doorway to his right, and one in the far corner. He chose the one in the far corner. The door collapsed when he opened it, and when the dust settled he could see narrow stairs twisting upwards. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and found himself in what must have been the priest’s living quarters. A simple cot, the thin mattress nothing but shreds and mouse droppings. Two trunks. A basic desk with a chair that was tipped on its side. There was a shelf with tattered books on it.
An circular iron stairway led upwards to a small room in the base of the spire. There were windows front and rear, the glass still intact. The floor creaked alarmingly when he stepped onto it, but it held his weight as he crossed to the front window. From here he had a good view back the way he’d come. No one seemed to have noticed his passage.
He went to the back window. There were no buildings behind the temple. The hill fell away steeply into a narrow, brush-choked ravine with a stream at the bottom. To the right, downstream, he could see a rope-and-plank footbridge crossing the ravine.
Fen went back downstairs, checking the rooms out a little more closely this time. There was no back door to the temple, but there was a small back window on the second floor. That was good. He could hang a rope out it and leave that way if necessary. Another one of Flint’s lessons: never leave yourself with no line of retreat.
The other door on the ground floor opened onto stairs leading down to the cellar. The cellar was low-ceilinged, the brick walls crumbling badly, one corner collapsed. There was a good deal of debris scattered around, including a couple of wooden crates that were mostly intact.
Fen took two of the crates back upstairs with him and stacked them inside the front door. There was no bar for the door, but with the crates there, if someone opened the door, he’d hear it. Then he went back to the living quarters on the second floor, scraped away the mouse droppings littering the cot and lay down. Always rest when you can, was another of Flint’s lessons. He was tired, and there wasn’t much he could do now.
Chapter 8
Ravin was exhausted. She hadn’t slept much in the past two days. Two nights ago—the night before Fen’s execution—she hadn’t slept at all. After she got back from visiting him at the prison, she’d spent the whole night pacing her room, crying and praying to whatever gods would listen to intervene and save her beloved’s life.
When dawn came she’d been brittle and ragged from tears and exhaustion. She’d gone about her daily tasks as usual, but the whole time she’d been somewhere else. She couldn’t stop picturing Fen kneeling and placing his neck on the chopping block.
After she dropped a second glass that shattered all over the kitchen floor, the head cook took pity on her and sent her to her room. But she didn’t go. The thought of being cooped up in there, after spending the whole night in there worrying, was unbearable. Instead she wandered the halls of the palace unseeing, waiting for the horrible news that was sure to come, while still hoping against hope that some miracle would occur.
When the sun was fully up, and she knew his execution must have been carried out by then, she collapsed onto a chair in a quiet hallway and poured forth fresh new tears. A bell or more had passed when she heard her name called and looked up to see Amma hurrying toward her, a big smile on her face.
“Fen’s alive!” her friend cried, and the two women clung to each other and cried some more as Amma recounted how the executioner’s axe had melted when he tried to behead Fen.
After that the city erupted into chaos. The king and most of the army went out in the streets, fighting mobs and trying to put out fires. Violence raged across the city the entire day and into the night while Ravin waited breathlessly for news. It was agony not knowing what had happened after the guards hustled Fen back into the prison. Was he still there, or had he escaped? Would the Fist forgive Fen now? Or would he simply find a different way to execute him?
Another sleepless night passed, and when morning came she went to set the table for the king’s breakfast as she always did, though she doubted he would show up. One of the servants came into the room and hurried over to her.
“Have you heard?” she asked Ravin. She was an older woman and a known gossip who spent more time spreading rumors than working. Usually Ravin avoided her. But not this time.
Her heart in her mouth, she turned to the woman. “No. What happened?”
“It’s only a rumor…”
“I don’t care. Tell me.” Ravin had to resist the urge to shake the woman.
“Last night the Fist went to the prison. He came out a while later with Fen. They told a crowd of people they were going to kill the Ankharans.”
“That’s…wonderful,” Ravin said, her knees going weak suddenly. A vast sense of relief flooded her. She sat down on one of the dining chairs.
“That’s not all. They were seen later down at the docks, where they’re building those new ships. There was a huge battle. At least one of the sorcerers was killed.”
“Where are Fen and the Fist now?” Ravin asked. “Are they okay?”
The woman shrugged. “No one knows. They haven’t been seen.”
The door to the dining room opened, and the two servants turned toward it. Ravin got up from the chair, hoping that it would be Fen and the Fist who came walking through, but the
man she saw turned her blood to ice, and she fell back a step involuntarily.
It was Lowellin. Behind him were two Ankharan sorcerers.
Ravin backed away from the table, her thoughts whirling. Had Fen and the Fist been defeated after all? Then she realized that the sorcerer in the lead was Maphothet. He and the other sorcerer had been gone from the city for some days, though no one knew where they had gone or why. That probably meant these sorcerers were not the ones Fen and the Fist had been fighting.
Following them were three others who were clearly not human. They were tall, heavily muscled, and wearing unusual-looking armor made of metal plates that looked like scales. Their skin was deathly white, their veins showing clearly through. Ravin had never seen these creatures before, but she knew who they were, and she knew that their appearance here meant that Fen had lost.
They were Devourers. The portal to the Abyss had been opened.
Last to enter was one who was roughly the same size as the Devourers, though hunched over as if deformed. Shifting shadows wreathed him, making it hard to see his features clearly. Even though she had never seen him in this form, Ravin knew without a doubt that the shadowy figure was Ilsith, and that this was his natural form.
She realized instantly that she needed to get out of here before Lowellin or the sorcerers saw her and recognized her. If Fen was somehow still alive, still out there somewhere, then she couldn’t let Lowellin get his hands on her. He’d use her against Fen like he did last time.
The other servant was already beating a hasty retreat for the door. Ravin snatched up a dish from the table and fell in behind her, keeping her head down and her face turned away from Lowellin. Each step was agony. She wanted to run, but she was afraid it would attract too much attention. She could feel eyes on her, or at least thought she did. She hoped that they would only see a faceless servant clearing away a dish.
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