by JANRAE FRANK
"You found her?" Jimi asked.
Alora swallowed and nodded, indicating the body with her chin. "Over there."
Jimi went, and dropped to his knees. He froze for a moment and then threw up in the hedgerows. When he mastered himself, he said, "Alora, find Yukiah. It's Arruth. She's dead."
Osterbridge and Isen had arrived with Jimi and stood just behind Alora. Isen closed her eyes against the sight of her butchered friend. Osterbridge gripped her shoulders in a silent attempt at comfort.
Isen glanced up at him. "I'll get Yukiah. I know where he is." Then she ran off.
"Wait for me," Osterbridge shouted, running after Isen. "I don't want you going alone."
* * * *
Galee watched the knights, led by Jimi with Arruth's body in their arms, cross the quad. She concealed herself within the shadows of a broad spruce. The vampire had come in search of Solance – her servants had seen him flee to the library – and then stopped to observe the knights. She clenched her fists in anger when she realized that Wrathscar must have murdered the girl in retaliation for Edouina's victory. Wrathscar was taking too many chances. Someone could have noticed him with Arruth. Galee kept warning him against acts of this nature and he kept ignoring her; Wrathscar was going deeper and deeper into the rogue state. It would not do to attract undue interest or suspicion. When they entered the palace, Galee moved on. She spied Solance emerging from the library. He must have sensed her because he retreated back inside. She would make an example to Wrathscar of Solance. Then she would bring in other healers. The Master of Blood could reproduce all of Solance's experiments and chemicals, magical and mundane. Solance had long ago become expendable.
Galee followed and lost sight of him for a moment. Solance had become more wary since the day Belyla bit him. She opened her awareness, sensing him among the farthest stacks of an obscure section. He hovered, pretending to scan the stacks. She glided noiselessly up behind him. "You failed me," she hissed, leaning close, her lips beside his ear. He jumped and turned. It was a cool night, yet sweat beaded on his forehead.
"Galee, please, I tried..." He whimpered softly.
Galee flexed her hand in front of his face, her fingers lengthened into claws, the secondary nails sliding from their sheaths. "I hate failure. I punish it," she purred.
"Galee."
She closed her hand and then extended her forefinger, stroking the tip of his nose with the long nail. "I forgive you," she said, gripping his shoulder with her other hand and dropping the first level with his chest.
"Thank you," he responded, starting to relax.
Galee shoved the nail into his chest between the third and fourth ribs, wrapping her arm around him, holding him closely like a lover, while her venom pumped into his heart. She covered his lips with hers and kissed him deeply so that he could not cry out. His eyes rolled up in his head and he sagged against her. She lowered him into a chair, settling him face down so that it looked as if he had fallen asleep reading. When she finally fought the yuwenghau she would see that he got all ten fingers.
* * * *
"Sha." Mohanja lay in bed with the stitched leg uncovered, disliking anything over it, wearing just his small clothes. "Get some raiders down to clear out Solance's offices, nab him too. I've a gut feeling he's going to end up dead. I meant to say something sooner, but I was hurting too bad to think. It's the way Galee was looking at him. Way Wrathscar was too."
Shaheeramaat nodded, stepped into the parlor, spoke to the Guildsmyn there, and came back. Then she dropped her dressing robe on the floor, climbing carefully onto the bed and nestled in the crook of his arm along his less badly wounded side.
* * * *
The knights gathered in the upstairs drawing room with Edouina, Dynarien, Osterbridge, and Yukiah because there were too many of them for the downstairs parlor. All wore somber faces, many of them streaked with tears. Arruth had been like a younger sister to all of them since her arrival last year.
On one of the sofas, Jysy huddled in Jimi's arms, muttering now and again in stunned grief, "They killed my sister."
"Dear my god," Edouina said suddenly, lifting her tear-streaked face from her arms, which were folded on the central table, to look across at Dynarien and Alora. "We did have a witness to what happened to Talons, one who was too afraid to say she knew."
"What are you talking about, Edouina?" Alora frowned.
"I'm almost certain that Arruth must have been hiding in the pantry like she always did. I'm so used to dismissing it from my mind that I never thought of it before. That's why I had the mattress thrown down in there. It's been her refuge for months. She must have been so terrified. I'm going to kill them. So help me, Lord Hadjys, My Liege, I'm going to kill them. He killed her because the Grand Master spared my life. But also so that we would never know who he is."
Osterbridge sat on the couch with Isen nestled against him and his arm around her shoulders. "We're in this together, Edouina," said Osterbridge. "It isn't just you and Dynarien. They murdered my closest friends, tortured Yahni."
Jimi nodded at that. "I still haven't heard from my family. Too much is going on for it not to be connected."
"Ceejorn is right," said Yukiah from a chair in the far corner. "We are in this together, Edouina. You have to trust us all. We stand together or we die separately." He cast his gaze around the room, making certain that he made eye contact with each and every mon there. "I don't want anyone doing anything rash or acting on their own initiative. I also don't want anyone traveling alone outside the temple and school buildings. Travel in pairs."
Everyone agreed.
* * * *
Sha had stayed late at her office, partly because she did not want to face anyone until she pulled herself together. The sight of a butchered child always affected her that way. What the monsters had done to Arruth with teeth and blades had left her sick at heart. Initially they had brought Arruth's body here for the coroner's reports, which was her responsibility, but she had had them move it to the Guild Wing. It would be Guild healers who did the autopsy, since Arruth had been a Guild student. Under normal circumstances, it would have been done here, but nothing was normal any longer and Sha wondered when and if it ever would be again.
She shoved her papers into the drawers and put the crossbow, which was sitting on a chair on the desktop. The second crossbow sat on a side table within easy reach. She still shivered when she thought about the warning written on her walls in blood.
"Enough," she muttered under her breath. "Mohanja's probably worrying because I haven't come home yet." At least he wasn't treating her like she was made of glass the way he had twenty years ago, which was part of what had driven her away from him. It felt good to be in his bed again after all these years, but she had no intention of telling him that. Yet.
Sha left her office and walked out into the outer chamber just as three guardsmyn entered. Two of them bearing a litter with a covered body on it. The hairs stood up on her arms. "What is this?"
"Librarians found him in the stacks when they started to close up."
Sha flicked the cover back from the corpse's face and gasped. "Solance."
"There's not a mark on him. Figure it was a heart attack or something."
Well, Mohanja would just have to wait.
"Come with me." Sha gestured and led the way to the post-mortem room, where she indicated they should place the body on the long metal table. It was an expensive, molded table since steel was one of the few things that did not soak up blood and other body fluids, which would otherwise have complicated her task. "One of you fetch my assistant and another healer, preferably Dorie if you know her."
"I do," one of the guardsmyn grinned.
Sha knew that Dorie had a taste for guardsmyn, and suspected he must have been one of her conquests.
"Rest of you get out and leave me alone with the body so I can work."
They obeyed and Sha opened a drawer, took out several green crystal cylinders, and set them beside the bo
dy. Then she went to another cabinet and came back with a golden preserving bottle such as the sa'necari had developed to keep blood fresh in. The Guild borrowed whatever technology they found that could be applied to their work. The crystals they used came from Faewin by way of Hellsguard, the table from Iradrim where the dwarves were experimenting with molding metal as well as working it. The first preserving bottles came from Waejontor, but the Guild mage workers had found ways to replicate them. This time a set of the blood and tissue samples would go directly to the Guild wing along with her findings. She took a set of fine tiny blades from a shelf and a white crystal to record to her general body analysis. The white crystal replicated the effects of the memory stones once worn by the lifemages who had been extinguished in a long campaign of genocide conducted by the sa'necari of Waejontor. She began stripping the clothing off Solance's corpse.
Dorie entered with Muirgheas, Sha's assistant. "Who died?" Dorie asked, not bothering to hide the concern in her voice, for she had known too many of the recently slain personally.
"Solance. Help me get his clothes off. I want samples taken of everything. Liver, kidneys, blood. Everything."
Muirgheas pulled Solance's boots off and then his pants. "Whoooeee," Muirgheas remarked with casual causticness. "He never had much to offer a woman, now did he? No wonder he never got any ladies without some coins in his hand." He flicked the corpse's shriveled cock.
"Muirgheas, just get him undressed. No commentary, please. None of us liked him. But he's dead and we need to find out why."
Sha's assistant yanked the scarf from Solance's neck, balled it up, and tossed it in a basket.
"Hadjys merciful!" Dorie exclaimed, turning the corpse's head for a better view of the scars. "He's been bitten at least three times here. One of them looks recent."
"Who else is here today?" Sha asked, feeling chilled.
"Just the three of us," Muirgheas supplied. "Newt is sick and Gyes is birthing babies at Lord Anghee's apartments."
"How many kids does that give Lord Anghee now?" Sha asked, putting on her coldest professional manner.
"Seven and no heir in sight."
"That's a shame," Dorie said, trying to sound light.
Finally the black robe and undergarments came off the corpse and everyone fell silent for several heartbeats. What immediately drew all their eyes was the black and green circle of necrosis around a tiny puncture wound with a spider web of red lines radiating from it in the middle of his chest. Next their eyes went to the feeding scars along his shoulders and arms, reminiscent of Yahni.
Sha broke the silence. "I want samples of everything. Open him up while I Read." She brought a chair over, settled herself with the white crystal in one hand and Solance's cold, clammy wrist in the other.
* * * *
Sha carefully packed her set of tissue samples and the crystaled report, which she would transcribe later, into two satchels and headed for the Guild wing while Dorie and Muirgheas finished up with Solance's corpse for the healers' records. Something had gone wrong between Solance and his co-conspirators. If they could prove a connection between Solance and Galee or Wrathscar or both then they could close the shop on all of them. She hoped fervently this could be done. If they could do this quickly enough perhaps they could save the heir. Sha walked briskly along, the skin prickling on her arms and neck, feeling the hair rise every time she had to pass close to a soldier in the Umber and Pine as if they were watching her. The Great Central Hall was filled with them and with others. She saw Channadar at his usual spot, telling his stories and caught the tiny nuances of pain in his movements. She wished he would not push himself so hard, but the Fae-lord was stubborn. The arm was half crippled and it would not take much to finish it off.
Channadar noticed her and smiled, flicking a fan at her to come, but she shook her head and walked past him. She had to reach the Guild Wing safely with the samples. Sha wished she had brought along one of the crossbows she kept at her desk, but that would have been too conspicuous.
The Guild Wing's doors stood open and Sha walked in. The clerk at the desk was an old geezer who had shown up a week ago. More and more of them had begun to simply arrive and report for duty without being called up, which Sha had not had time yet to inquire about so it seemed an odd and mysterious phenomena to her. She nodded to him. "I need to see Queiggy."
"He's in the second floor meeting room with Aramyn and Yukiah discussing the little girl."
"We've got another body."
The geezer nodded. "Go on up."
Sha had ordered Arruth's body stored in the Guild Wing until she could get to it today. She wondered suddenly if she should have done that with Solance's instead of simply going to it immediately in the Healer's post-mortem room out of habit. She remembered the words written in blood on her wall after the break in:
BACK OFF, SHA
After turning her samples into a Guild healer in the Wing to put away for her, she returned to the palace healers' center. The outer chamber seemed eerily silent ... too silent.
"Dorie? Muirgheas? Is anyone here?" She walked quickly to the post-mortem room and screamed. Solance's body was gone, replaced by Muirgheas' corpse. His head had been torn off and placed in the middle of his chest with his hands around it, except that his hands were no longer connected to his arms. Beyond the table in the shadows, Sha spied two forms. A faint whimper reached her. She kicked the table into them, dumping the pieces of Muirgheas' body across the figures and the floor. One mon rose with a growl while the other remained unmoving. A tensing of her arms with a small twist brought her stars from the armsheaths. Sha put a spiked star in the creature's eye, another in its throat, and a third in its chest. It still came on, but now she could see it clearer and retreated. She jerked her loose wrap-around blouse open, showing her breasts, and a weapons harness holding four stilettos. Sha drew two stilettos from the shoulder harness.
"Guild healer," the Lemyari spit, trying to keep its remaining eye on her as she moved. Dorie's blood coated the monster's mouth and lower face.
"Hellspawn," Sha growled, she felt sickened, but in control. She was Guild.
It charged her, claws out, the tips beading with the deadly venom. Sha retreated, kicking a chair into its path. If she could reach her office, the loaded crossbows would give her a better chance of killing it before it killed her.
The Lemyari plucked the stars from its body, stalking after her.
Sha had to glance around to avoid bumping into furniture while keeping her eyes on the Lemyari. She backed into the central room and it followed. The moment it emerged from the post-mortem room, Sha shifted her grip on the stilettos and threw, putting one of them into its chest, but missing the heart. It leaped toward her, then jerked and lay still upon the floor, a bolt precisely through its heart.
Aramyn stood by the door to her office with her crossbow in hand and the second one resting against his knee. "I heard the action and borrowed your bows. I hope you don't mind," he said mildly.
"Dorie, oh gods, she might still be alive." Sha ran back into the post-mortem room, trying not to vomit at the pieces of Muirgheas as she dropped to the floor and gathered Dorie up. The woman had been violated extensively and feed upon by more than one of the monsters.
Dorie's eyes opened. "They came in ... so fast, Sha ... so fast." Then Dorie went still and Sha began to cry.
Aramyn knelt beside her, slipped an arm around Sha. "I'm sorry. I came here following a hunch. But I didn't listen to it soon enough."
"We're running out of healers, Aramyn," Sha said when she could finally speak. "Except for in the Wing. They're killing all my friends. They know I'm looking for them. I'm not going to back down. I want you to know that. I'm not going to let them get away with this. I should have had Solance's corpse moved to the Guild Wing immediately. This wouldn't have happened."
"We're all looking for them, Sha. And we're going to catch them."
* * * *
Galee summoned her most highly placed allies to a
meeting the morning after the murders in the healers' offices. She wanted to secure matters to her advantage before Sha could move to bring anyone in from the outside to fill the vacancies left by Dorie, Solance, and Muirgheas. Copies of her list of possibles lay on the center table at which her cat's paws sat. She curled up on her couch, watching them closely. "It is so tragic. We've lost four of the palace healers in less than three months."
"Most of the senior lords have personal physicians, My Lady," said Lord Naren. "I don't see it as a problem."
Galee observed his eyes, remembering the way he had taken Yahni Kjarten's condition at the dinner party at Wrathscar's manor, yet been shaken to learn that Zarliche was eating man-flesh across the table from him.
"Yes, I know. But with so many people arriving for the wedding..."
"There is that," Lord Westli commented.
Galee noticed the small bruise on Westli's neck that looked like the fading remnant of a human's love bite. Philomea had been skillful, and there would be no betraying scar, but she would still need to talk to her about this.
"I also have some recommendations," Lord Wrathscar said.
"As you see on those pages I have given you," Galee put in. "I always stay on top of these matters. The Grand Master depends on me so heavily. Sha usually objects to my choices. She's so fussy. But I think we have the votes to override her."
"Absolutely," Lord Naren agreed. "Present your choices and we will override Sha's wishes. We must keep the palace healers up to full strength. This is no time to be excessively picky. We all trust your judgment, Galee."
"Thank you, Lord Naren," Galee simpered. "You are too kind."
Elomina sat beside Lord Karishee, her hand on his knee. From time to time, Karishee flicked Elomina a glance, his eyes glazed with the kind of longing that Galee recognized as the early stages of a Passion-Dance.
Lord Cadmean kept rubbing a spot on his neck hidden by his heavy black hair, and Galee wondered if she would find a fang bruise there also. That one would have to be Dargaurite's doing, as she was currently sharing Cadmean's bed.
