Tarrik sucked in air, then barked a cant. A yard of shimmering force sprang from his hand, formed from his catalyst. His shadow-blade, rarest of the rare talents. He swung the iridescent blade up and sliced through the arm holding him aloft. Blood spurted. Ananias howled.
As his feet hit the floor, Tarrik darted his blade toward his opponent’s chest.
Despite the agony of amputation, Ananias wrenched his sword into a parry. Tarrik stuttered another cant, and his shadow-blade vanished, re-forming in the instant Ananias’s sword passed through the expected point of impact without resistance. Ananias, overbalanced, tried to recover . . . too late. Tarrik’s shadow-blade sank deep into the demon’s chest.
Ananias’s eyes widened, and he cried out in mortal agony. Deep-purple heart’s blood erupted from his mouth, spilling like wine overflowing a glass.
With a vicious jerk, Tarrik yanked his blade to the side. It pulled free from Ananias’s chest, trailing blood and ichor.
“You were greedy, Ananias, thinking about the reward before you won the fight.”
The demon’s hand, which could previously have torn Tarrik limb from limb, clutched desperately at him. But Ananias was already too weak. The fatal damage was done.
Tarrik smiled ferociously, uttering a cant he’d never thought he’d use again—one of domination, of the triumph of the strong over the weak.
He pressed his cut torso to Ananias’s. A connection solidified between them, not physical but ethereal. Agony exploded in Tarrik’s head: pain and pleasure combined. A scream tore from his throat, and his muscles and bones burned with infernal energy. Tears poured from his squeezed-shut eyes. His hands convulsed into tight claws. Burning. He was burning from the inside.
The pain lessened, then vanished as if it had never happened.
Tarrik opened his eyes and found himself lying in a pool of pinkish goo—what remained of Ananias. Strangely, it smelled of dirt and iron. To the side lay the demon’s severed limb.
He tried to stand, slipped in the mess, and fell on his ass. He crawled to the clean carpet to the side of the puddle and doubled over panting, legs and arms shaking.
He had to pull himself together. There would be time to go over what had happened later. Roska Fridle would be here soon, and she would have felt the passing of her summons into oblivion. She would be prepared with her most virulent sorcery. His survival wasn’t assured yet.
Tarrik felt for the wound across his torso, found it still open and leaking. He could barely move his left arm. When he tried, spikes of pain shot through him. The splinter of chair would have to be removed by someone else.
Focus, he told himself.
Ananias’s weapons and armor had disappeared, rebounded back to the abyssal realm when the demon died.
Tarrik looked at the iron-bound chest and fumbled Ren’s lens from his pocket. It had cracked in two. When he tried to view any arcane wards on the chest, he saw none but couldn’t tell if the lens was working or broken.
There was no time.
Tarrik whispered a cant and brought his shadow-blade into being again. He struck at the chest’s lock, averting his gaze in case sorcerous traps unleashed fatal energies. To his surprise, there was no overt sorcery, as his blade sliced through metal and wood. The lock clanked to the floor in two pieces.
He dissipated his blade and flipped the chest’s lid. Inside were blackwood boxes of different sizes. He frantically opened them and in the fifth found the coin-size orichalcum disc inset with a bloodstone.
Rushed steps sounded in the hallway—at least a dozen guards—and a woman began speaking harsh cants.
Tarrik pocketed the disc and lurched to the reception room, where he grabbed a bottle of strong spirits. He shadow-stepped through the stairway door and dashed up to shadow-step outside to the rooftop courtyard.
With any luck Roska would be thrown by the puddle of pink goo and arm that remained of Ananias, and her undisturbed wards. She’d likely search her rooms first for the intruder, which would give Tarrik more time to escape. Hopefully he hadn’t left a trail of blood . . .
He leaned on the low wall to catch his breath, a hand pressed to his side to stop the bleeding as best he could. He could feel a warm trickle from his upper-left-arm wound.
Pushing the pain aside, he focused on a patch of shadow under a large tree thirty paces from the citadel wall. An instant later he was standing on the ground under the tree’s branches. Sweat dripped from his brow, and his clothes stuck to his skin. He glanced up to the courtyard. He couldn’t see any sign of the sorcerer. But the next shadow-step had to take him much farther if he wanted to be confident of not getting caught.
He focused on the shadowed side of a stable wall, obvious from the water troughs and bales of hay and the corral outside. He gave himself to the shadows and was there.
A gasp came from a nearby shape in the darkness. Tarrik whirled and came face-to-face with a blonde-haired girl—one of the stable hands who’d taken his and Ren’s horses. She sat behind a hay bale with a half-eaten apple in her hand. Her wide eyes stared into his, then dropped to his dripping wounds.
“Blood and fire!” uttered Tarrik, and the girl whimpered. His thoughts swirled as he grappled desperately for a solution, all the while knowing there wasn’t one.
She stood, her bottom lip trembling, the unfinished apple falling from nerveless fingers to the dirt. “Don’t . . . please . . .”
Tarrik had no choice. The command Ren had placed on him, her sorcerous bindings, compelled him to act. If anyone sees you in her residence, or can infer it was you, they are to die. Is that understood?
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The girl hadn’t moved, hadn’t attempted to flee. Her shoulders slumped, and she dipped her head.
At least he could make it quick.
Tarrik spoke a cant, and his shadow-blade sprang to life. He pushed it into the girl’s chest, through her heart. She gasped again, a soft whimper, then slumped to the dirt.
Tears leaked from his eyes as he withdrew his catalyst’s blade. He wiped them away angrily, cursing his weakness. The children of humans were not like the lower demons, which knew only hunger and lust. There was an innocence to them at the beginning of their lives. He’d seen it, felt it, when Jaquel had given birth to their own daughter, who had died young. The feeling had torn at his very essence.
Why should he care about humans? His years in this world, away from the abyssal realms, had sapped his hardness, made him more human. He’d struggled—and failed—to overcome the cursed softness before. And that had been the cause of his disgrace and exile. That punishment, after all he’d come to care about had been ripped away from him—Jaquel, Contian—had sent him spiraling into almost madness.
He lifted the girl’s body, shadow-stepped back to the tree, and placed her beneath it, gently arranging her into a restful pose, her back against the rough bark, hands clasped in her lap.
Chapter Six
There were no guards outside Ren’s rooms. If there had been, Tarrik would have had to kill them. He wondered how Ren would have explained her way out of such slaughter.
He staggered inside and slammed the door shut. An attempt to lie on his cot ended in pain and cursing as the jagged splinter in his shoulder dug in deeper.
Tarrik ended up sitting, his unwounded shoulder leaning against the wall. Clenching the bottle of spirits between his thighs, he used his good hand to uncork it and swallowed half the contents. His left shoulder and arm tingled as they lost feeling. Ren would have to tend to his injuries, whenever she returned.
He didn’t have to wait long. Three times, heavy feet stomped past the suite: no doubt guards rushing to reinforce Roska’s security or perhaps Veljor’s. Tarrik’s purple blood in Roska’s rooms would be obvious. She’d know another demon was responsible for the theft, for killing Ananias.
Tarrik heard a lighter step and sensed his master’s presence as she came closer. He swallowed another mouthful of liquor, stoppered the bottle, and tosse
d it onto his cot.
Ren opened the door a crack and slipped through. She took one look at Tarrik and spoke a series of cants. He knew she must be warding the door.
“You’re a mess,” she said.
“I return successful, Master,” he said flatly, and placed the disc on the cot.
She frowned at him and moved closer. “Your wounds . . . I don’t know if—”
“I have resigned myself to your touch. I will be of more use once they’re seen to.”
If Ren thought anything of his formal tone and words, she made no response. Instead, she rummaged through her gear and came back with a thin leather kit. She opened it to reveal numerous vials, metal implements, spools of thread, different-size needles, and what looked like rolled-up bandages.
She grimaced as she probed around the wooden splinter in his shoulder. Her fingers came away covered with his blood. “This is going to hurt,” she said, and removed a pair of pincers from her kit along with a pouch.
She placed a kerchief on the bed and poured a light-brown powder onto it from the pouch. Then she grasped the splinter with the pincers. Tarrik gasped involuntarily at the spike of pain.
“Do you want to bite down on something?” she asked.
“Your neck.”
“At least you’ve retained your sense of humor.”
“Get on with it,” he growled.
Pain was familiar to Tarrik, as it was to all demons. You became accustomed to pain early on, or you died. If you were hurting, you knew you were still alive. There was a certain comfort to the sensation, which grounded him in reality.
Ren yanked the splinter out. The puncture wound ached like fire, but Tarrik only clenched his teeth. His chest heaved as he kept his eyes on Ren’s. She scooped some of the powder onto his arm, which was now pouring blood, and he felt his skin tighten.
“The powder should stop the blood flow,” she said. “Then I can sew it up. It will also help to sterilize the wound.”
She cast more powder onto the wound in his side, then threaded a curved needle and, without hesitation, stabbed it into his flesh and began sewing up the slash from Ananias’s blade. Tarrik had to force himself not to flinch from her touch on his skin.
“This looks burned slightly. What happened?”
“I made it inside Roska’s rooms without incident, but moving toward the chest triggered a defense she’d prepared. A demon was summoned.”
“A minor one?”
“I wouldn’t be injured if so. It was Ananias Grimur-Sigvatux, demon of the Thirty-Ninth Order.”
“I take it he’s dead? Or did you merely escape?”
“He was stronger and more powerful than I. There was no way to escape.”
“And yet here you are. Alive. How?”
“Just because an opponent is stronger doesn’t mean they’re smarter. I killed him.”
Ren uttered an amused chuckle. “Roska won’t be pleased.” She inserted a final stitch and tied the thread off. “There. Now your arm.”
Tarrik turned slightly so she had more room to move.
“Where’s my knife?” she asked.
“I lost it. In Roska’s rooms.”
Ren huffed. “This has turned into a disaster. Luckily the blade was nondescript—they’re unlikely to trace it back to me. Scrying won’t work either. The Cabalists are always fighting among themselves. Roska will have too many suspects to choose from.”
Tarrik still seethed with remorse and anger over the girl’s death. The liquor had done nothing to stifle those feelings.
“You have the artifact you wanted. And a powerful demon under Roska’s control has been slain, which will significantly weaken her. Now we can leave and go on to the next evil plan you have in mind.”
Ren’s eyes narrowed, and her jaw muscles clenched. “Evil? You have no idea. What I’ve seen . . . what I’ve endured . . .”
“Spare me your protestations. When I fled, I encountered a girl—the stable hand who took my horse. She was sitting outside the stables eating an apple.”
Ren ceased sewing up his arm. He couldn’t see her expression behind him. For a moment, he thought she might say something, but she resumed her stitching.
“If anyone sees you in her residence, or can infer it was you, they are to die,” he parroted. “I placed her corpse under a tree nearby. She’ll probably not be found until morning.”
He grimaced at a particularly hard tug on the thread.
“I’m done,” Ren said. “I’ll bandage your shoulder, but not your chest. The latter is a shallow cut and shouldn’t open unless you exert yourself.”
She left him, and he could hear her washing her hands in the preparation room. She returned drying them on a towel, then busied herself repacking her kit. He didn’t know what he’d expected when he’d told her of the girl’s death, but it certainly wasn’t this emotionless calm.
Tarrik picked up the artifact, the cause of all of this turmoil, and handed it to her. He hoped the orichalcum disc was worth the mayhem and pain. Ren smiled.
He took out the cracked lens next, and her smile slipped. “It broke when Ananias slashed my chest and I landed on the chair.”
He lay down on the cot, his back to Ren, the bottle of spirits at his side.
She padded away, and he heard her getting ready for sleep. It wasn’t until she was under her blankets and her breathing steadied that Tarrik let himself relax and consider what had happened in Roska’s rooms.
He had absorbed a higher-level demon, and the consequences were numerous. The constraints a sorcerer placed on a demon were finely tuned to individual strength. When Tarrik changed—and he would once he could assimilate Ananias’s power—Ren’s bindings might no longer hold him. Even if they only weakened, Tarrik would surely gain some leeway, some freedom. Only time would tell.
He was sure Ren didn’t know of the effects of him killing Ananias, or she would have strengthened her bindings at the very least.
He felt Ananias’s essence in his mind like an egg waiting to be cracked.
And the egg had to be eaten slowly, or Tarrik risked losing himself.
Before dawn lit the sky outside, the soft shuffling of booted feet woke Tarrik. He made out at least four pairs, possibly five, but the guards didn’t hammer down the door. He listened while they positioned themselves in the hallway outside and swapped a few hushed words. He decided it was guard duty as normal. And if the city’s elite forces hadn’t come by now to restrain him and Ren and haul them before Veljor to mete out justice—whatever that consisted of in this blasted place—they’d probably gotten away with the raid on Roska’s rooms. The sorcerer herself might suspect them, but Tarrik reasoned she’d be powerless to act without hard evidence.
He dragged himself off the cot, wincing as his arm spiked with pain and his side burned. At least he’d managed a full night’s sleep—no Samal-sent dreams to disturb Ren, no attack from another strange dead-eye—so his wounds were already healing. His hand searched for and found the bottle of spirits he’d snatched yesterday. He took a deep swallow. Today would no doubt be interesting, and he’d need to keep a tight lid on his emotions.
He heard rustling as Ren rose from her bed. She stood in his doorway dressed in her long-sleeved robe.
“If anyone comes, they’re to wait outside. You will remain here to guard me.”
She moved to the preparation room and closed the door. From inside he heard sounds of washing, clothes rustling, buckles clinking.
Tarrik tugged on his coat. His clothes would need a wash soon—they were starting to reek—but the smell helped to mask the musk of the humans that inflamed him.
Ren came out dressed in the worn and stained traveling leathers she’d been wearing when she’d summoned him. “We’re leaving,” she said, grabbing her sword and buckling it to her back. She touched its hilt as if for reassurance.
“Won’t that look suspicious?”
“It’s of no matter. I got what I came for, and Roska can’t prove I had anything to
do with what happened last night. Besides, I have someone planting rumors to misdirect her.”
Unless she sees you have the artifact. But Tarrik couldn’t see a way of alerting Roska while Ren’s bindings still held him. Best to bide his time and seek another opportunity.
“Collect our gear, and follow me.”
Tarrik did as ordered and shouldered their saddlebags, grasped his spear, and followed Ren to the door. His wounds twinged with discomfort, and he grimaced.
“We will escort you, my lady,” a guard said when they exited the suite.
Ren smiled. “Of course.”
The guards filed in behind Tarrik, except for one who hared off in the other direction. Tarrik developed an itch between his shoulder blades as Ren led them along corridors and down stairs.
When they reached the courtyard where they’d left their horses, she halted and turned to the guards. “Have our mounts saddled and brought out.”
“You’re leaving?” said one of them.
Not too bright, these humans.
Ren nodded. “Is there an order I cannot?”
“No, my lady.”
The guard waited a moment before walking toward the stables at a deliberately slow pace. He obviously knew his commander wouldn’t want Ren to leave but was too lowly to do anything about it. He probably hoped the guard he’d sent scurrying off would bring him new orders.
“Serenity Branwen!” barked a man’s voice.
Tarrik whirled, bringing his spear up in front of an oddly dressed human.
He was as tall as Tarrik and considerably bulkier, dressed in dirt-stained, torn garments only fit for burning. He held an orichalcum staff, the top of which was formed into the face of an old man. A goatlike stench clung to him, which Tarrik recognized as madness.
Three steps behind him stood a young girl with brown hair and a greenish cast to her skin who was clad in a plain brown skirt and shirt.
“Puck Moonan,” said Ren. She gestured at Tarrik to lower his spear.
Puck ignored Tarrik, but the girl sneered at him and laughed.
Shadow of the Exile (The Infernal Guardian Book 1) Page 11
