Where are they ... the devices of my master?
Everything went black.
Leesil thought he might vomit from the sudden pain, and then the buzz of a thousand whispers in his head went silent all at once. When he could see again, he found himself collapsed upon the cold stone floor. He hadn’t even found the strength to push up when he saw the hood of the gray robe was turned the other way ...
Wayfarer lay on the floor, utterly silent and unmoving. Before Leesil cried out to her, he spotted Chap. The dog’s ears were flattened as he glared up into that hood, and his sky blue eyes narrowed. Even in weakness, Chap’s jowls pulled back in a dry-throated snarl.
“What do you want?” Leesil got out as he pushed up to a sitting position. “Where is my wife?”
Chap still stared up into that hood, and the hood never turned as an answer rose in Leesil’s mind.
She is not yours anymore. And until I have what I desire, you will never see the sun ... or have the freedom of death.
The figure turned for the open door. Only then did Leesil notice that none of the guards had come in. The one that he could see outside in the passage stood facing away as if nothing were happening.
“What are you talking about?” Leesil choked out. “What ... what do you want ... from us?”
The figure paused in the doorway, though it did not turn back. The storm of whispers filled Leesil’s head like a nest of wasps stirring around the answer.
Ask your ... dog ... since I cannot ask him myself.
The gray robe drifted out, and the heavy iron door slammed shut without a guard turning to grab its handle.
Leesil was caught in confusion. He tensed as he heard the outside lock bolt slide home. He looked to Chap. The dog’s eyes were still narrowed over a silent snarl as he watched the cell’s door. From the look of him, whatever that robed figure had done—could do—Chap hadn’t been affected.
“Who was that?” Leesil whispered.
Chap barely lowered his eyes but didn’t meet Leesil’s.
—I do not know—
“How did he do that ... get in my head like ... like you?”
—Not ... like me—
“Then how?”
Chap remained silent for so long that Leesil wondered if his old friend even knew. He looked to Wayfarer’s crumpled form. Before he called to her, he heard her shallow breaths, as if she simply slept. And Chap’s answer struck him then.
—Sorcery—
Leesil’s whole mind went blank and he grew cold. It was one word he hadn’t thought would come. That art of magic was supposed to have been wiped out long ago, but it didn’t answer his other question.
“You heard something. I can see it. What in the seven hells is that robed one after?”
Leesil waited—and waited—but not a word popped into his head. The dog lowered his eyes and, with one glance at Wayfarer, his muzzle settled on his forepaws.
Chap stared blankly across the floor in silence, not looking at anyone.
Leesil grew frantic. Whatever the robed figure wanted, it might be enough to stop Magiere’s torment.
“Chap?” he whispered, and then more sharply, “Chap, what does that ... man want? Damn you, answer me!”
Chapter One
Ghassan il’Sänke slipped through the night backstreets of the empire’s capital. Once a sage in the Suman branch of the Guild of Sagecraft, he made his way silently toward the inland side of the guild’s local grounds. As on previous surreptitious visits over the last moon, he was uncertain what to do when he arrived.
He no longer wore the midnight blue robe of a domin of Metaology, for that certainly would catch anyone’s attention—too risky considering he was now an outcast and sought by both the city and the imperial guards. In disguise, he now looked nothing like the sage of rank that he had once been.
Beneath the hood of a faded open-front robe, his short chocolate-colored hair with flecks of silver was in disarray. Strands dangled to his thick brows above eyes separated by a straight but overly prominent nose. His borrowed clothing of a dusky linen shirt and drab pantaloons was no different from that of a common street vendor.
He turned into the small open market that he passed through on all such visits and headed into a cutway between two shops for a less visible approach to the guild’s complex. In part, he wondered whether such caution was needed. Few people about this late would ever glance his way.
Most of the stalls were closed with their tarp flats pulled down, and all nearby shop awnings had been lowered and shut tight. But he had learned in hard ways to be more cautious than ever before. When he slipped along the cutway, across the back alley, and then neared the next street, a new smell filled his nostrils.
Something rank cut through the alley’s stench.
At the slow click-clop-scrape coming closer, Ghassan peeked out from the cutway’s black shadows. Up the northward stretch of the next street, an old man with a cane of scrap wood shuffled nearer along the sandstone cobble. Wrapped in rags too filthy to show any hint of color in the dark, he dragged his lame foot more than the good one. Of the many unfortunate moments that must have made up this beggar’s life, he slowed in turning his gaunt face toward the cutway’s mouth.
Ghassan’s training was quicker than his caution. With barely a blink, the dark behind his eyelids filled with lines of spreading light. In an instant, a doubled square formed in sigils, symbols, and signs burned brightly. Then came a triangle within that square and another inverted within that, both at the center of the pattern. As his blink finished, he completed his incantation with a flash of thought quicker than spoken words.
The glowing pattern overlaid Ghassan’s sight of the beggar’s face.
The old man blinked as well. He looked about as if having seen something and then second-guessing upon seeing it no more. With a tired sag of his shoulders, he moved on in his click-clop-scrape.
Ghassan waited until the beggar was halfway to the next cross street before silently stepping out. He could have made the old man see someone else in his place, but to wipe his presence from the awareness of one target was much simpler.
Such were the subtleties of sorcery, especially for a master of the third and most reviled practice of magic.
Well past dusk, Chane Andraso stood on deck as a ship maneuvered into dock at the Samau’a Gaulb, the main port city of il’Dha’ab Najuum, one country in the Suman Empire. Arrival after sunset was nothing more than good fortune. Had they docked earlier—considering he was a noble dead, specifically a vampire—he would have had to wait until nightfall to disembark. Now he gazed out over the vast, seemingly endless port with mixed emotions.
He and his companions had sailed south along the coast for nearly a moon. Partly relieved to reach their destination, he struggled to suppress anxiety over what they might face here.
“It’s just as I’d imagined,” said a breathy voice beside him.
Chane glanced down as Wynn Hygeorht stepped to the railing. She was so short she could have stood beneath his chin. Though in her early twenties, she looked younger, or at least she did to him. For a moment, his gaze locked on her pretty, oval face of olive-toned skin surrounded by wispy light brown hair.
With heat lingering from the day, she had packed away her cloak and wore what she often called her “travel robe.” This marked her as a scholar—a “sage”—from the Guild of Sagecraft, specifically its founding branch in her homeland of Malourné, far to the north. Back there, all sages dressed in full-length robes, but this shorter one stopped at her knees. Beneath it she wore pants, tunic, and boots to move more easily. Still, the robe was the wrong color for her.