Steering Patch through the chaos of the market square, Alec rode on into the maze of side streets beyond to Blue Fish Street. Light still showed around the front shutters, although in the excitement Rhiri had let the lanterns hanging at the Cockerel's front gate go out.
Thryis will be after him for that.
Alec thought, riding around to the back courtyard.
He stopped at the stable long enough to unsaddle Patch and throw a rug over her steaming back. Leaving her with water and feed, he let himself through the lading-room door and hurried up the back stairway. With all the uproar around town, perhaps Seregil would overlook the fact that Alec had ignored his admonition to spend the night at Watermead.
He knew the way upstairs well enough not to bother with a light. On the second floor he gave the corridor a cursory glance, then headed up the hidden stairs to their rooms. The keying words for the glyphs had become habit to him by now, and he spoke them with absent haste as he went up. In his eagerness to find Seregil, he failed to notice that the warding symbols did not make their usual brief appearance as he passed.
No final dream or vision prepared him.
Nysander was dozing over an astrological compendium by his bedroom fire when the magical warning jolted him to his feet; the Oreska defenses had been breached. The alarm was followed by a storm of message spheres, swarming like bees through the House as every wizard in the place called out for information.
Or in fear.
Invaders in the atrium!
Gloria’s voice rang out in a red flash.
A dying cry from Terminal’s young apprentice stabbed at Nysander's mind like a shard of glass, and then that of Germinal himself—
The vaults! — cut short by another burst of blackness.
Through the onslaught of voices Nysander called out to Thero. There was no response.
Steeling himself for the battle he'd hoped never to fight, Nysander cast a translocation and stepped through the aperture into the corridor of the lowest vault just beyond the secret chamber. Shadowy figures waited for him there. He took a step toward them and stumbled. Looking down, he saw what was left of Germinal and his apprentice, recognizing them by the shredded remains of their robes. Other bodies lay heaped beyond them.
"Welcome, old man." It was the voice from Nysander's visions. Magic crackled and he barely managed to throw up a defense before it struck him in a roar of flame. The corpses sizzled and smoked as it passed.
Regaining his balance, Nysander retaliated with lightning, but the smaller of the two invaders merely lifted a hand and brushed it aside to explode against the wall. By its light, Nysander saw it was a dyrmagnos. Beside it stood a figure so cloaked in a shifting veil of shadows that Nysander could not be certain at first if it was human or supernatural.
"Greetings, old man," the dyrmagnos hissed.
"How weary you must be after your long vigil."
Not Tikarie Megraesh, but a woman, Nysander thought as he took a step toward her. She was a tiny, wizened husk of a creature, blackened with years, desiccated by the evil that animated her. This was the ultimate achievement of the necromancer—the embodiment of life in death wearing the sumptuous robes of a queen.
Raising gnarled hands, she held up two human hearts and squeezed them until blood oozed out in long clots, spattering to the floor around her feet.
"The feast has begun, Guardian," the figure beside her said, and Nysander again recognized the voice of the golden-skinned demon of his visions. But it was an illusion. Through the veils of darkness, he saw a man—Mardus—speaking with the voice of the Eater of Death.
Just behind them, several other robed figures came into view. Nysander could smell the stench of necromancy coming from them and with it something heartbreakingly familiar—the unmistakable sweetness of Ylinestra's special perfume.
"After all these years of anticipation, you have no reply?" the dyrmagnos sneered.
"There has never been any reply for you but this."
Raising his hands, Nysander launched the orbs of power that burned against his palms.
32
The moon had passed its zenith by the time Seregil came back to Blue Fish Street. It had been a pointless day overall. With the Beggar Law in force, most of his more valuable contacts had fled or gone to ground. Those that he had managed to track down had no fresh information on Plenimaran movements in the city. If the enemy was in town, he was keeping a low profile.
Weary as Seregil was, however, the sight of the unlit lanterns in front of the inn brought him up short. A tingle of presentiment prickled the hairs on his neck and arms. Ducking quickly into a shadowed doorway across the street, he scrutinized the courtyard for a moment, then drew his sword and crept cautiously across to the front door.
It was slightly ajar.
Leaving it untouched, he crept around to discover the back door open as well. He pushed it wide with the tip of his blade, tensed for attack, but there was no sound from inside.
An unlucky door filled his nostrils as he entered the kitchen; the stale, flat smells of a cold hearth and lamps left to gutter out on their own. Taking out a lightstone, he saw nothing out of place, except for Rehire’s pallet, which was missing from its place near the hearth.
On the second floor the signs were more ominous.
Thryis and her family were not in their rooms and only Cilia's bed appeared to have been slept in;-the linens were thrown hastily back, and the coverlet hung awry over the side. Next to the bed, an overturned chair lay in the shattered remains of a washbasin.
A grim heaviness settled in the pit of Seregil's stomach as he moved on to the guest rooms at the front of the inn. Only one had been occupied. The unlucky carter and his son lay dead in their beds, smothered with the bolsters.
The hidden panel leading to the stairs up to his rooms appeared unhampered with from the outside but opening it, he found that the warding glyph at the base of the stairs had been tripped. There were spots of blood on the lower steps, and several were smeared where more than one person had stepped in them before they'd dried. The glyphs farther up were simply gone. Still gripping his sword in his right hand, he drew his poniard with his left hand and mounted the stairs.
The doors at the top of the stairs stood open, showing darkness beyond. If there was anyone lurking in the disused storage room, it was best to find out now while there was still a chance of easy retreat. Fishing a lightstone from a pouch at his belt, he tossed it into the room. The stone skittered noisily across the floor, illuminating the few crates and boxes scattered there. No one jumped out to attack, but the floor told a tale it didn't take Micum Cavish to read; people had been in and out of his rooms, quite a number of them. Some had been dragged and some had been bleeding.
The final warding glyph on the door to the sitting room was gone, too. Taking a deep breath,
Seregil flattened himself against the wall next to the door frame and slowly turned the handle.
A band of eerie, shifting light spilled across the floor at his feet, and with it came a horrendous slaughterhouse stench. Weapons clutched at the ready, he stepped inside. Even with all the warning he'd had, his first glimpse of what lay beyond struck like a blow.
Several lamps had been left burning, and pale, unnatural flames danced on the empty hearth.
Someone had turned the couch to face the door, and on it four headless bodies sat as if waiting for him to return.
He knew who they were even before he looked past them to the heads lined up on the cluttered mantelpiece.
The strange light cast their features into tortured relief: Thryis, Diomis, Cilia, and Rhiri seemed to look with dull incomprehension toward their own corpses, which some monstrous wit had arranged in attitudes of repose. Diomis leaned against his mother, one arm draped over her bloody shoulders.