by Barb Hendee
“No . . . no, don’t cry,” he whispered. “Everything is all right . . . everything. We just have to go a little farther.”
Her left arm jerked upward and then dropped at her side. Leesil stumbled as her whole weight shifted against him.
“Ghassan! What are you doing?”
At that other voice—again out in front—Magiere tried to turn her head.
“He must carry her alone, so I am free to act as needed.”
This third voice—deep and tainted with an odd accent—came from her left. She didn’t have a chance to look as someone else rushed toward her.
Magiere’s eyes opened a little wider at pain from her left arm being raised again. When it came down, it settled on smaller shoulders much lower than those of whoever had helped carry her before. She swallowed the pain as she looked over into . . .
Large, wide, round eyes of deep brown peering up at her out of an olive-toned face hidden inside an oversized cloak’s hood.
“Wynn?” Magiere whispered.
With only a brief half smile, Wynn nodded and then twisted her head to look up the street. It took effort for Magiere to follow that gaze.
There was Chap, and Wayfarer leaned on his shoulders with one hand as the two looked back at her. Despite relief on the girl’s haggard face, there was lost panic in her forest green eyes.
Wynn suddenly stiffened. “No! That’s not it,” she half voiced, her eyes fixed on Chap. “Three more intersections . . . then a right and two more.”
Chap must have babbled into Wynn’s head again.
“We need to go!” that foreign male voice ordered, now somewhere behind. “I will watch at the rear.”
Chap turned off up the dark street, forcing Wayfarer to follow.
“Can you go on?” Wynn asked.
“Yes . . . yes,” Magiere answered, looking to her lost husband. That was where she had always drawn strength when she thought she had no more.
“I’ll make this up to you.” He breathed into her face. “I swear.”
What did he have to make up for? He was the one who’d saved her.
No . . . you are alone . . . forever . . .
At that last echo of whispers weakly scratching at Magiere’s skull, her hate came back.
Hate gave her strength. Someone had done all of this, someone in that shimmering robe, and someone would die for what had been done to her and those she loved.
* * *
Brot’ân’duivé wove swiftly and silently through shadows in the alleys, cutways, and streets as he tracked Dänvârfij. He kept enough distance that even she would never hear him, though she would not have seen him if she looked back.
“Wynn, wait!”
As Dänvârfij halted at the alley’s mouth, so did Brot’ân’duivé near its other end. He had so intently focused on the hunt that the voice from far ahead caught him off guard.
Léshil should not have betrayed the others’ position so carelessly. By his voice, they were no more than another city block away. Perhaps they were even down the street beyond Dänvârfij. It took only the span of a breath to reassess the situation.
Imperial guards would be sweeping the city, though as yet he had not seen or heard any nearby. When they appeared, and they would eventually, they would not give attention to any nearby altercation as they sought to recapture prisoners. And his own prey might use that complication.
Brot’ân’duivé abandoned the need for the proper place and time. He backed out of the alley and charged up the last side street to round the corner for the street onto which the alley emptied. He stopped at the corner amid the cloying stench of a spice shop, but he did not see either Dänvârfij or the others along the open, empty street. That alone was the only fortune as he crept toward the alley’s mouth.
* * *
Dänvârfij went still upon hearing Léshil’s voice—followed by other voices too soft to hear clearly. Her first impulse was to scale to the rooftops, get ahead of her quarry, and only then drop to the street when she could take either Léshil or his monster of a mate. The others would not dare challenge her for fear she might kill a hostage.
She quickly rejected this notion.
Her task was to track and scout wherever their quarry would hide. Soon enough, imperial guards would flood the streets in a wide search. Attempting to take one of her targets now might prove a wasted opportunity if she had to escape capture herself.
Rhysís was to report to Fréthfâre, and then Dänvârfij was to follow with more information. They were spread thin in number, and it was essential to adhere to set plans. With the pending search of the guards, Léshil and Magiere would not dare move from wherever they next hid.
To know that place was all that mattered. And upon the rooftops, she might be delayed or cut off by any street too wide to leap across.
Dänvârfij cleared her thoughts with regained purpose and stepped out of the alley.
A shadow filled the corner of her sight, and she instantly spun toward it.
There was no mistaking who stood there, even without the garb of his caste. In a catch of breath she thought of all those of her team who had died since leaving their homeland.
Dänvârfij knew she stood no chance against a greimasg’äh, a “shadow-gripper,” a master of her caste’s ways. Once, she had revered him, lived in awe of him.
Sadness, mournful and infuriating, flooded her.
No anmaglâhk feared death. They feared only failure.
“Traitor!” she called him.
To her dull surprise, his answer was soft, perhaps sad.
“That would be you—and Most Aged Father—to our people.”
Hkuan’duv, her own jeóin and teacher, had been a greimasg’äh long before he died while killing Osha’s jeóin, the revered Sgäilsheilleache. By Hkuan’duv teachings and her love for him, Dänvârfij would not allow the traitor to walk away unmarked.
* * *
Brot’ân’duivé saw Dänvârfij’s expression drain of all emotion. It would have been better for her to hesitate, perhaps flee, and die more quickly that way. When she rushed him, he did not move at first.
Her first strike never landed.
The blade passed a whole hand’s thickness from his chest as he twisted and dropped into a crouch. He slammed one palm up into the elbow of her outstretched arm. The other slapped the inside of her forward knee.
Both of her legs buckled willfully instead of just the one. As she came down, her extended arm folded and her elbow slipped off his palm before his strike was completed. She slashed down with her blade as she dropped into a crouch to match his own.
Brot’ân’duivé twisted his striking hand, and her blade slid off his palm as he threw himself into the near building’s sidewall. He folded his outer leg before his weight overcame inertia and pulled him down the wall, and he thrust out with a foot.
To his surprise, she intercepted the heel coming toward her head by raising her shoulder. The kick still knocked her back to roll across the street stones. She was on her feet again as he rose up.
He did not close but stood his ground, waiting as she poised for another rush.
He half expected her to charge past him at a tangent, seek the wall to step up, and come down upon him from above. Or perhaps she would finally turn and run.
Brot’ân’duivé had calculated every option available when Dänvârfij came again.
In a flash, her lunging foot slid forward along the ground. It was too predictable, though that was his mistake as much as hers.
He barely sidestepped, twisted, and spun the blade in his other hand, still held hidden beneath his wrist. He drove it toward her right eye as she hit the ground in a hurdler’s straddle.
She collapsed forward over her outstretched leg, ducked her head under his thrust, and her right hand struck for his forward knee. He shifted weight to his other leg, taking the blow as she pushed off her rear-cocked leg, shot upward, and thrust her blade for his abdomen.
Brot’ân’duivé speared b
oth hands downward as he dropped his own blade.
One hand turned her blade aside as his other thrust down along the far side of her head. He let his weight drop with a sudden crouch as his deflecting hand swung up under her blade arm. His other snaked in and folded around her neck.
Brot’ân’duivé thrust up with both legs, arching his back.
A mute but sharp crack of bone answered his effort.
She went instantly limp with her head wrapped under his right arm. Then came the clatter of her blade upon the street. He waited for three calming breaths.
When he let the body flop to the street, he stood there looking at her. Dispassionately, his gaze traced from her open but blank eyes, with large amber irises, to the barely parted lips and then on to the neck, broken and twisted aside at an unnatural angle.
It had all taken too long and left him wondering why he had let it be so. When he turned away, a sharp pain in his left side halted him.
Brot’ân’duivé brushed aside his cloak.
He stared at blood soaking his tunic around a clean slice in the fabric. It was not that he had been wounded. This had happened more than once in his life, but not in recent memory against only one opponent. In fascination, he looked back at the still body in the street.
She had wounded him. Not severely, but still . . .
A strange sorrow overtook him but not for her death.
Dänvârfij, “Fated Music,” lay still with empty eyes staring up at nothing. Like all of his people, when she had come of age, she had gone to sacred ground to face the spirits of their ancestors. By whatever one saw in that place—which was never to be spoken of—a new name was taken.
Brot’ân’duivé heard no music in the street or anywhere in this faraway city. For all the loyalists he had killed, he had felt nothing. They had become the enemy, serving a paranoid madman who endangered the people.
His regret was not that he had killed her. It was the waste of what she might have become. In that silent moment, without even the whistle of a bird in the dark, it was as if her name—her life’s truer purpose—would never be fulfilled.
Regret turned to an anger he could not suppress. Perhaps that regret had been there all along, for there was one other thing he had almost left behind. He returned to lean down over her corpse. After removing all her weapons, he searched for one specific object, found it, and held it up.
Smooth and tawny and oval, it had been grown from the very tree in which Most Aged Father had lived for perhaps a thousand years. It was a communication device much like one that Brot’ân’duivé carried for speaking to other factions of dissidents among his people. The ones carried by anmaglâhk on a mission had only to be pressed against the trunk of any tree to speak to Most Aged Father.
This was the last word-wood possessed by Dänvârfij’s team. Without it, they were cut off from their tyrant patriarch.
Brot’ân’duivé studied the smooth bit of wood. Instead of destroying it, he slipped it through the bloodied slit into hiding within his tunic. He retrieved his own stiletto, which he had also forgotten. He had forgotten or overlooked too many things this night.
Before joining Léshil and the others, he had one more stop to make, to retrieve a few things he had purposefully hidden.
He left Dänvârfij’s body where it lay.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ghassan grew more concerned as he led Wynn and the escaped prisoners onward, enough that he abandoned following, watching from behind, and stepped out to take the lead. It did not help that the silver-gray wolf eyed him with what he guessed was suspicion.
Once the escape had been uncovered, an alarm had been raised inside the imperial grounds. He fervently hoped the prince remained unconnected to any of this. Ounyal’am was one of few allies he had left, and the prince was the only one with both political power and the placement to use it. But Ghassan had been shocked at the physical state of Magiere.
He had gone to great lengths to engage potential assistance in hunting Khalidah, but this barbaric, pale-skinned woman could not even walk on her own. Now he feared he had risked too much—including his prince—for too little. Worse still¸ by now the imperial guards would be searching the city for the escapees, and he had not yet reached the halfway point to his hidden sanctuary.
Everyone with him was out in the open. Though few citizens passed by in the streets this late at night, more would have been better in slowing the search by any guards.
“You two, down there,” someone shouted.
Ghassan did not look back. Dwellings along this street were built one against the next. There was nowhere to dash quickly out of sight.
“Ghassan?” Wynn whispered from behind him, still bracing up Magiere.
“We need to find another route,” he whispered.
He hurried for the next side street but stopped as two men in gold sashes appeared a block ahead.
“There! Quickly!” one shouted to the other.
Ghassan heard Chap snarl behind him, and then a howl carried from afar as if answering him. He recognized Shade’s eerie sound. What was the black majay-hì doing? Her noise would call every other guard within hearing.
He blinked slowly, and in the dark behind his eyelids, lines of light spread, but he never had a chance to finish with his gaze fixed on the first guard.
The man suddenly stumbled and fell hard.
There stood Chane right behind him. The second guard skidded to a stop beside his downed companion and turned. Instead of using his sword, Chane struck with his free hand. His fist cracked against that one’s face. As that second man dropped, he kicked the first in the side of the head.
Ghassan had no time for questions as the black majay-hì uttered another howl from somewhere. Chane pivoted sharply toward that sound, and his jaggedly cut hair swished over one glittering eye as he looked toward Ghassan.
“Go!” he rasped. “Now!”
Instead of coming to the group, Chane turned and ran down an alley in the direction of Shade’s howling.
Ghassan shook his head. Chane was going after the dog? This was a group of bizarre and unexpected loyalties, but Ghassan did not hesitate and fixed on an alley’s mouth halfway up the block.
“Everyone run!”
* * *
Chane followed Shade’s howl, and it ended abruptly. They had had to split up to further divide and confuse the imperial guards leaving the grounds. Only blind luck brought him to two more of those about to close on Wynn and the others. And now Shade was in trouble.
She would not have howled twice in a row to simply keep any guards from following her.
When her last howl ended, Chane lost his only certain way to track her. He bolted down a side street following the last sound she had made. The street did not run fully in the right direction, so he swerved into a cutway, veered again when he reached a back alley, and raced out across another street to where the alley cut through another block.
He stopped completely.
The alley did not go through; it was a dead end.
Something glinted ahead in its darkness.
Chane’s sight widened as he let hunger flood him. Near the alley’s blocked end stood two imperial guards with their backs to him. Whatever growled beyond them kept their full attention . . . including a snarl and a clack of teeth.
He could not see beyond those guards, but he knew Shade’s sound was spurred by panic and anger. Both men had curved swords in hand, though one withdrew a step at Shade’s warning. Why did she not rush them and break through?
Something more was not right.
The one who backed up snapped something at the other, but Chane’s Sumanese was still too poor to catch the words. There were no wolves this far south, and these two might be confused about exactly what she was.
Chane crept in along the alley’s left wall. As he neared, he spotted something more.
A third guard was trapped in the dead end’s left corner, and his right sleeve was shredded and stained dark. His wide, unblin
king eyes fixed toward something still blocked from Chane’s sight—likely Shade. Those eyes twitched toward a sword on the ground just out of reach.
Shade had hobbled one but had to turn to face the other two. If she charged, the third stood poised to snatch up his sword. And if Chane startled any of them too soon . . .
The third one’s eyes looked right at him.
Chane raised his sword, tip up, as he charged.
The nearest of the paired guards began to turn. Chane smashed the sword’s hilt into the back of that one’s head as the second turned in alarm.
As the first began to topple, Shade charged for the second guard. She stumbled as her right foreleg buckled slightly. The third, wounded guard behind her lunged for his fallen sword, and Chane lost self-control for an instant.
The feral thing inside of him almost cut loose.
He slammed his shoulder into the toppling guard, trying to knock the man into his companion, and he heard Shade snarl and snap. The third one crouched, gripping the hilt of his fallen sword, and without thinking, Chane slashed downward with his own sword.
The tip tore into the third guard’s jaw and throat as he tried to rise. His head whipped back and he toppled into the rear wall.
At more snarls, snapping, and a sudden scream, Chane spun before the body hit the ground. On the floor of the alley, Shade was atop the second guard trying to get to his sword arm.
Chane rushed in and kicked the man in the head too hard.
The guard’s body spun a hand’s length on the alley floor, nearly tumbling Shade before she could hop off. Other than Shade’s panting and rumbling, the alley went suddenly silent. All three guards had been put down.
Chane dropped on one knee and reached for Shade.
She twitched her head back with another rumble, and he froze. They stood there staring at each other. She finally swung her head and looked to the guard near the alley’s end wall—the one he had slashed.
Chane did not look. He knew the man was dead.
He had sworn to Wynn not to kill, but she had not been here. When Shade’s head swung back and she made to step around him for the alley’s open end, her foreleg gave a little again.
