Rhand stared at the crowd. He gestured to the guards, and the prisoners were led out the larger door as a second group was led in. Farideh eyed them as they entered-that dwarf with the thick black beard, that half-elf wreathed in green, that little blond-haired boy who eyed Farideh back, deeply serious.
Farideh swept the crowd twice and shook her head. “None of them.”
Rhand’s brows raised. “None of them?”
“Perhaps we’ve found them all already?” she said. She hardly dared move as his blue eyes pierced her. But after a moment that seemed to stretch taut and thin as a tripwire, he waved to the guards, without ever breaking his gaze.
“Perhaps they’ve realized what you are doing,” he said. “Perhaps they’re hiding their little lights.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, the picture of calm. “I can see. . their souls still shine. Only none of them have the markers that the others did.” She considered the group that filed into the courtyard-another four in this one, a young man whose copper rune seemed to pulse with his heartbeat; an elf wound up in lines of green that framed her mark; a little blue-skinned genasi girl, sniffling and hiccupping and shimmering like light on the water with a blurry, uneven rune; and a dragonborn with silvery scales that shone a little too brightly around his chest.
“Perhaps I’m overtaxed from the last two days. Or perhaps there aren’t as many as we thought.”
Rhand was still looking at her when she glanced back. “Perhaps.”
Farideh again considered the group. He might be suspicious, but he had no reason to believe she would lie, and no way to prove that she was. Even proving she was right took days. She bit her tongue, as if deep in thought, then shook her head again. “None.”
“None,” he repeated.
“Perhaps the guards are bringing back the ones we rejected yesterday,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”
“Nothing,” he repeated. He watched her several tense seconds, before stepping entirely too close to her. He slipped an arm around her, and shouted a rough word of Netherese down to the guards.
The guards’ grins flashed into being, one by one, like stars appearing in a suddenly dark night.
“If there is nothing here,” Rhand said, low and in her ear, “then I have no use for them, do I?”
The first blade speared the young man, as easily as if he were made of almond paste, and no god on Toril or beyond stopped it. The coppery rune flared and vanished, as he pressed useless hands to his wounds. Farideh cried out in horror, but it made no difference. There were too many bodies, too many blades. Too much pain for the shadar-kai to pass up.
The little genasi girl froze in the middle of it, and started to scream.
The prisoners tried to flee, but in the little courtyard, the only exits were barred and blocked by more shadar-kai. Some fought. They died faster. Farideh tried to pull away, to get her hands up. The powers of the Hells poured into her, but Nirka’s knives were suddenly pricking at her chin, and strange hands were holding her wrists tight.
Down below, one of the guards sliced an old woman’s throat, bright red blood pumping from the wound. Rhand grabbed hold of Farideh’s jaw and wrenched her face toward the carnage. “Oh, you will watch.”
The lights around the elf suddenly caught fire in bright lines of green that surged out of Farideh’s strange vision and into reality. The elf cried out, throwing her arms up to shield herself, as a fringe of vines erupted out of the cracks between the stones and twisted around her.
Beside her, a burst of silver motes surrounded the dragonborn, and even as shock gripped Farideh, she felt the passage to someone old and distant and stern crack wide as the rune that marked his god burned bright as a fire. In the same moment, the little genasi girl’s screams reached a frantic pitch as the shadar-kai closed on her, becoming a roar like the waves ahead of a ferocious storm. They fell back, toppled by the noise, and the child’s eyes were deep and unfathomable behind their swollen lids. A rune the color of storm clouds nearly wrapped itself around her tiny frame.
The shadar-kai separated these, shunting them toward the smaller door, even as their fellows were cut down.
“You see,” Rhand crooned, stroking her jaw, “we managed fine before you. A little pressure in just the right way, and I don’t have to guess who I need to pay attention to-they make themselves known. Perhaps less ideal than the arrangement you and I have. After all”-he looked down at the courtyard, at the swamp of blood and spilled innards-“who knows what the rest of them might have been good for, with time.”
The dead man who’d worn the copper rune stared up at Farideh, as if he knew it was all her fault. She swallowed against the lump in her throat, against the feeling that she would surely vomit.
“Now,” Rhand said. “If you are through being willful, shall we continue?”
Dahl folded his arms over his chest, then self-consciously uncrossed them, as Tharra and Armas considered the array of weapons he’d brought. He had never been so aware of the flask in his pocket, heavy now with stolen liquor. Stolen and untouched, he reminded himself, trying to focus on that instead of the headache he still hadn’t shaken and the nerves that made the gruel in his stomach coil like snakes. He hadn’t heard back yet what Oota had decided to do about Phalar, and in the stark light of day, he wasn’t sure anymore what he thought the answer should be.
“To tell the truth, I expected you to be turned away,” Tharra said, sitting off to the side. Dahl had asked her for sketches of the tower above the cellar rooms and she’d managed the beginnings of these with a charred twig and a swath of ragged fabric that had been clothing once. “You’re lucky Phalar’s trick didn’t come sooner. I warned you it was dangerous.”
Dahl scowled. “I handled it.”
“You were lucky,” Tharra said again.
“Luck’s better than the alternative,” Armas said, nudging the punchdaggers to one side with his clawlike hands. “The whips were a good thought. More drovers than swordsmen around here.”
“Thank you,” Dahl said. “I grabbed sickles for the same reason.”
Dahl had slipped out of the armory, his pack heavy with weapons and Farideh’s ritual book. He didn’t dare swim out through that narrow passage, but a little searching led him through the storeroom he’d escaped through the first time.
And to the pyramid of sticky black casks, filled with the shadar-kai’s special brew. Much as Dahl would have liked to swear he’d gone right past the stuff, the sight of it had given him a terrible thirst. He’d filled the flask and ever since found himself wondering what a little would do.
“There are enough weapons to make a run at them,” Armas said. “Fortify Oota’s court and mount a defense. Especially if we can steal some bows right before.”
“Until the wizard lets his spells fly,” Tharra countered. “There’s no sense rushing into things. Just having these is an enormous step.”
Dahl kept his tongue-a sip, he thought. A sip would be fine and you’d be a lot easier for everyone to deal with.
Armas sighed. “I suppose.” He examined a sickle. “There’s more prisoners every day. We can’t protect them all.”
“Especially with that tiefling at hand,” Tharra said.
“She seemed fond enough of you when we spoke,” Dahl said.
Tharra looked up at him and smiled. “Did she?” she said. “I suppose I’ve only got so much to go on. Like how many people are being taken thanks to her.” She gave Dahl a serious look. “You really think she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing? A tiefling? A warlock? A Netherese collaborator?”
Dahl ignored her. “We’ll have to find an area to fortify that Rhand can’t hit from the tower,” Dahl said. “Close up to the fortress, maybe. Or perhaps up against the wall, out of reach. And we need to be prepared for an escape. Let’s start with the Chosen-”
“I’m sorry-first you think you can beat the wizard and his shadowwarriors,” Tharra interrupted. “Now you think you can pass the wall when none of us have managed?”