“A very evil man,” she said. “I can show you the way to his camp. I can help you destroy him.” She swallowed hard. “We’re on the same side, for the moment.”
Mehen’s pulse pounded. An evil man. Fari, he thought. Fari, Fari-what have you gotten caught in? He knew where he stood-if it meant they got where they needed to be faster, he would lead the slavering ghouls himself.
Vescaras and Daranna traded glances. Khochen’s eyes shifted off the boneclaw and to Mehen’s. “A caster would be handy,” she said.
“No,” Daranna said. “She’ll turn on us.”
“I can give you assurances,” Zahnya said. “The amulet-you can keep it. Control my creations, and the boneclaw.”
“Unwise.” The boneclaw’s hissed word made all of the Harpers jump. Its burning eyes pierced Mehen. “They will betray you.”
“Or they kill us now,” she said to the monster. Zahnya pulled the amulet from her neck and held the jewel up to Mehen. “It is, unfortunately, their choice.”
Tharra hadn’t been exaggerating. The next morning Dahl’s stomach had settled, his head had stopped spinning, and he felt far less fatigued. But his skull felt as if someone had filled it with nails that flexed and pierced his brain as he moved.
You don’t have time for a hangover, he thought. He shuffled out into the sunlight, nearly vomited from the sudden pain, and found Oota’s two guards waiting for him.
“Better, Harper?” the half-orc grunted. Dahl cursed to himself: Tharra clearly had different opinions about the need for secrecy.
“Oota has questions for you,” the human, Hamdir, said. “Come on.”
The little courtyard was empty this time, and Oota was sitting on a makeshift camp stool, making it look like a chieftain’s throne. She smiled when Dahl entered, and Dahl had to wonder what god’s hand had touched her, as a chill went down his spine.
“I assume Tharra has told you what we’re up against,” Oota said. “What we are.”
“More or less,” Dahl said. “Though that poison you dumped down my throat didn’t make things easier to make sense of. What do you want?”
Oota’s dark eye shifted off Dahl, to the entrance. “Tharra and I,” she said, “are on the same side. Let me make that absolutely clear. However, she and I have different ideas of how to be on the same side. How to run things. You understand?”
“Go on,” Dahl said.
“Tharra thinks it’s a death wish to take up arms against the wizard. She thinks we should bide our time until rescuers arrive. I say that is a death wish. There is no way into or out of this camp that the wizard doesn’t make. He picks us off, one by one. Some day-soon-we’ll have to take a stand, and the longer we wait for that day, the more people we lose.”
“You have no weapons.”
Oota smiled to herself. “We have some weapons. Some of us are weapons. Enough that if we had a clever strategist-someone who could even the odds from inside the fortress perhaps? — we could stand a chance. She says you stole a uniform.”
“I’m not about to stroll in there and start cracking skulls. I’d be dead in heartbeats.”
Oota’s attention shifted back to him. “Son, I know what you think of me-but whatever my kin have shown you, people don’t follow me because I’m a fool. I wouldn’t send you in alone. And I wouldn’t send you in without a plan. All I’m asking is if you have the means and the stones to do it.”
“Doesn’t Tharra know how to get in and out?”
“As a servant,” Oota said. “They offer extra rations for those of us desperate or foolhardy enough to take on tasks. But every breath there’s a guard on their back, and no one works down near the armory.” She sat back. “You can certainly use that, if you find a way. But you’re right, we need weapons. We need to deal with present threats first.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Word is,” Oota said, “the wizard has a new pet. A tiefling witch who’s making his life a lot easier.”
Dahl held in every curse he knew. “Does he now?”
“He’s picked up plenty of prisoners over the months, for the gods know what purpose. About thirty all told. But in two days she’s picked out that many of my people-all folks we suspected of having the gods’ good graces-and who knows how many of the rest. Tharra is out asking the longears for their count. Speck’s chatting up the remnants who don’t follow either of us.”
Dahl nodded, as if he were considering the numbers, but all he could think was that Khochen had been right. His younger self had been right. He thought of the distant way Farideh had acted, the way she’d snapped at him before she teleported them to the fortress. There was no questioning it-Farideh was an enemy.
No questioning it, he thought, but some stubborn part of him still didn’t believe it.
“This keeps up,” Oota said, “the rest of us will be next.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I need someone to get into the parts of the fortress they won’t let servants go to. Recover some weapons and deal with the tiefling. Cripple the wizard somehow.”
“Just that?” Dahl said. “I’m guessing based on that wall and that castle that we aren’t talking about some dabbler.”
Oota shrugged. “Rumor is, he’s not as powerful as he lets on. Maybe there’s something in there that will make the difference. Tharra knows where the witch is-she can get to the tiefling, but as I said-”
“Oota.” Dahl turned and saw Tharra standing in the doorway.
“Ah, my good friend,” Oota said. “What do the longears say?”
“Sixteen. Speck’s found eight more missing.” Tharra nodded at Dahl. “Did you tell him what’s happening?”
Oota stood. “We were just discussing what comes next.”
Tharra gave Dahl a dark look. “Well, good to see you’re up. Can I talk to you a moment?”
Dahl followed Tharra out into the sunlight.
“She’s asking you to help her attack the fortress, isn’t she?” she asked. “Gods be damned, her mind runs like a mine cart.”
“Infiltrate,” Dahl said. “She makes some good points.”
“Good points? Aye, well, here’s the one Oota will never make: attacking the wizard will kill more people than it will ever save. Starting with you.” She pointed up over the rooflines, at the fortress’s tower rising up to vanish in the low clouds. “Six points to that tower. He has a full view and at least four novices who can cast better than any of us. He doesn’t even have to come down to our level to destroy the entire camp. A few spells and we’re all ash.”
“Not when the clouds are this thick,” Dahl said. Anyone on the tower’s heights would be hard-pressed to see the ground. “You time it right, and-”
“You don’t have to aim much with a meteor swarm. And if you’re right and he doesn’t bother? Then he sends out the shadar-kai. They’ll mow through us like we were wheat stalks in a drought. Better to bide our time.”
“You must have casters.”
“He’s seen to that. You met Armas? My fledgling? He was a sorcerer. Can’t cast a thing, though, on account of the cages on his hands-every one of them is the same. They wake here, already hobbled, none of them the sort of wizard gifted enough to cast without hands. And if you think he’s let a spellbook slip by, you’re madder than a mouther. They come in here with nothing but their clothes.”
No weapons, no casters, no resources to speak of. Except perhaps for Dahl’s sword and stolen armor. And the Chosen that the wizard hadn’t claimed. “I can get in. Dressed like a guard.”
“And you’ll die before you pass the gatehouse. The human guards don’t come out of the fortress,” she said. “You’re lucky none of the shadar-kai saw you. If you head back in, pretending like you belong, they’re going to know something’s funny when they don’t know why you went out.”
“Nobody?” Dahl asked. “You don’t get soldiers fraternizing or-”