“Cassana” Alias breathed.
The woman lowered her hood. Her chin was sharper, her features older, her hair longer and better tended, but her features were Alias’s. She might have been her mother. “Yes, Cassana. I’ve come to take you home, Puppet.”
Favoring his good leg, Dragonbait sprang for the upper bunk bed for his sword, and Akabar began chanting a spell. Alias grabbed a poker from the stove tools.
Cassana laughed.
Akabar’s spell was disrupted as the floorboards beneath him erupted and skeletal hands grabbed him from the hole and pulled him through the floor. He disappeared with a scream.
A trio of daggers arched from the black-clad assassins, embedding themselves unerringly in Dragonbait’s hide. The weapons could not have caused much damage—they were small and had struck only his shoulder, his arm, and his tail—yet the saurial dropped like a sack of laundry. Poison blades! the swordswoman realized.
With a cry of anguish, Alias charged the Fire Knives. She cracked one assassin in the head with the handle of the poker, then rammed the tip into the throat of a second. Snatching the sword from the scabbard of the third one, she turned it on him instantly. He fell over the bodies of his brothers, staining them with his blood.
Only Cassana stood between Alias and the doorway. She muttered no spell, nor did she look alarmed. Alias hesitated uncertainly. Cassana applauded the swordswoman’s performance briefly.
“Very good, Puppet. Welcome home,” the sorceress said, slipping a slender, blue wand from her sleeve into her hand. “Now sleep.”
Alias lunged at her foe. Cassana, the puppeteer, waved the wand, and Alias collapsed at her feet.
27
Alias’s Masters
When Alias awoke, her head felt as though molten lead had been poured behind her eyes, and her mouth was as dry as the sands of Anauroch. She blinked in the dim candlelight that illuminated her room, a room in an inn like a hundred others at this end of the Sea of Fallen Stars.
A moment of panic seized her. Was she being forced by the gods to relive all her mistakes as some sort of punishment? No. This was not The Hidden Lady, nor any other place she’d ever been.
She found herself placed on a bed with her arms folded like the dead. She was not alone. Dragonbait had been unceremoniously dumped at the foot of the bed and was sprawled out on his stomach. Akabar had been propped up in an overstuffed chair across from the bed, his hands manacled by thick bands of cold iron to contain his magical ability. She and the mage were still wrapped in blankets, but Dragonbait was naked, like an animal.
Alias slid to the floor and knelt beside the saurial. He was still breathing. She sighed with relief, and tears welled in her eyes. The poison on the assassins’ blades hadn’t been deadly. Horrid red and violet bruises speckled the green scales along his legs and torso. Why had they been so vicious with him? she cried inwardly. She tugged the coverlet off the bed and draped it over him, then shook his shoulder gently. He did not stir.
They’d been much kinder to Akabar. His shoulder had been snapped back into place, though it still looked bruised and tender. A soft touch brought him fully awake. He took in her concerned features, Dragonbait’s body, the room around him, all with a quick glance.
“What happened?”
“We lost,” she replied. “They swept us up like dirt in no time at all.”
The mage frowned. He tried to stand up, but something had drained away all his energy. He flopped back into the chair, clanking his chains. Pain radiated from his shoulder. He sucked in air, trying not to cry out.
“It looks like we’ll be with you through the bitter end, whether you want us or not.”
The despair in his voice twisted Alias’s heart. Stubbornly, she tried to renew his hope. “We’re not all captured yet,” she pointed out, pacing the room. “Olive is still at large. We’ve gotten out of worse.”
Alias tried the door. The knob did not turn, and an experimental slam with her shoulder indicated that it was barred on the far side, as well as locked. The window was not constructed to be opened and, being made of crown glass set in a lead frame, could not be smashed out. The circles of glass would have let in light, but it was dark outside. The prisoners had no clues as to their whereabouts.
Alias bit her lip and stood in the center of the room, wracking her brain for some way out. There was no chimney, the walls were brick, the floor and ceiling solid oak.
Akabar rose shakily from the chair and staggered over to Dragonbait. He tried to wake him first with gentle shakes and then, in frustration, with more violent ones. Akabar looked at Alias and shook his head.
“Okay, masters,” Alias said. “It’s your move.”
Her words received an immediate reaction. A portion of the wall near the door became misty, then translucent, and finally transparent. Alias reached out and touched it. It was firm and cool, like glass in the autumn. Taking a gamble, she slammed into the clearing wall with her shoulder, hoping to break through. The wall may have looked like glass, but it still felt like bricks. Alias rubbed her aching shoulder.
Cruel laughter came from beyond the wall, and Alias caught sight of Cassana seated on a raised throne on the other side of the transparent barrier. It distressed Alias that the witch’s features were so similar to her own. Will I look like that, sound like that, be like that, in a few years’ time? the swordswoman wondered. She tore her thoughts away and concentrated on the two other figures beyond the wall.
A male halfling in a flashy yellow taffeta costume sat at Cassana’s feet, playing with a wicked-looking knife. There was something bizarre about his eyes—they had no whites around the irises, yet the pupils looked white. The halfling smiled far too broadly, reminding Alias of the kalmari.
A skeletal figure in a brown cloak stood beside the throne, leaning on a twisted staff. His face was hidden beneath the hood of his cloak.
“Hello, Puppet,” Cassana greeted her. She was dressed in a rich, flowing gown, worn off one shoulder. The white cloth glittered in the candlelight like woven diamonds. A band of matching material circled her brow, holding her auburn hair in place. She turned the slim, blue wand over and over in her hands.
Alias’s spine stiffened at the sorceress’s address. The voice was so familiar, but not because it was her own. Alias recognized the harsh, bitter tones. She had listened to the voice before, and she had hated it then as she did now.
An old, lost memory surfaced. She was rising out of a pool of silver streaked with crimson. Cassana stood over her with that wand, laughing in low, rich tones—the laughter of a vain woman, delighted to see herself replicated.
Alias bared her teeth in a tight smile. “Hello, Cassana. Or should I call you Mother?”
Akabar now stood beside the swordswoman, his jaw slack, amazed at the resemblance Alias bore to the sorceress.
Cassana gave a guttural laugh and shattered her illusion of being an older Alias. Such a laugh could never come from Alias. It was a cruel, heartless laugh, and Alias was neither of those things.
Akabar pointed at the tall form beside the throne. “That’s the one who grabbed me.”
Cassana motioned lazily, and the skeletal figure reached up with age-rotted hands and flipped back the hood of its cloak. Beneath lay a skull covered with translucent, jaundiced flesh stretched like a drum head. Its features consisted of a rictus-grin, a deteriorating nose, and ebony eye sockets in which sharp points of light danced.
“Yesss,” the undead creature hissed. “I reached up and snared you tight, stopping your blood and freezing your muscles.” The creature flexed a skeletal hand, each finger bone sharp as a knife. “Yet you live, petty wizard. But only because the Lady Cassana craves unblemished fruit on occasion.” The undead creature laughed, too—a hoarse, wheezing laugh disturbingly familiar to Akabar. Try as he could, however, the Turmishman could not place it.