The dawn found Cadderly at his meditation, at his exercises, reaching his arms far to the side one at a time, muscle playing powerfully against muscle. He eyed the open book on the table before him as he moved, heard the song in his head, and felt in tune with it. Sweat lathered his bare chest and streaked the sides of his face, and the young priest felt it keenly, his senses heightened in this meditative state.
When at last he finished, Cadderly was thoroughly weary. He considered his bed, then changed his mind, thinking that he had been spending too much time in his room the past few days. The day would be bright and warm; outside his window, Impresk Lake glittered with a thousand sparkles in the morning sun.
Cadderly closed the Tome of Universal Harmony, but, looking upon the waters of that lake, so serene and inspiring, he still heard the song acutely. It was time to take the knowledge (the emotional strength, he hoped) that he had gained from the book out into the world. It was time to see how his new insights might fit into the everyday struggles of the people around him.
Cadderly feared those revelations. Could he control the shadows he would inevitably see dancing atop the shoulders of the many people of Carradoon? And could he decipher their meaning—truly? He thought back to the events of the night before, when he had turned young Brennan away, frightened at the implications of the squirming, growling manifestations he had seen.
The young priest washed and toweled off, strengthening his resolve. The choices seemed clear: go out and learn to assimilate in light of his newfound knowledge, or remain in his room, living a hermitlike existence. Cadderly thought of Betisarius, alone in his tower. The wizard would die there, alone, and, most likely, his body would not be discovered for weeks.
Cadderly did not wish to share that grim fate.
Still wearing the mantle of young Brennan, Ghost, absently replacing the candles on the lowered chandelier at the top of the staircase, watched the young priest leave the Dragon’s Codpiece. He had heard Cadderly tell Fredegar that he would not return until late, and Ghost thought that a good thing. The Night Masks were in town and ready; Ghost had to meet with them this day. Perhaps young Cadderly would have a rather unpleasant surprise waiting for him when he returned that evening.
A patient killer, an artist, Ghost would have preferred to wait a few more days before arranging the strike, would have liked to get even closer to this curious young man, to know everything about him so that there could be no mistakes. The assassin considered this especially important in light of the potential problems arising from the arrival of the two other priests. Powerful priests had been known to resurrect the dead, and under normal circumstances, Ghost would prefer to take the time and discern exactly how much magical interference might be expected from the newcomers, particularly the priest bearing the title of headmaster. Might the Night Masks slay young Cadderly, only to have Avery locate his body and bring him back to life?
Bogo Rath presented even more complications. What might the upstart wizard be planning? the assassin wondered. Bogo had spoken with the other, lesser priest on the previous night, and that could not be a good thing.
Ghost did not like loose ends. He was a consummate professional who prided himself on being a perfect killer with never a lingering problem left behind. But while this operation seemed ragged to him, he had to believe that the problems could be circumvented—or eliminated. A new wrinkle had come into this picture, a new desire for Ghost that, in his mind at least, justified his seeming carelessness. Ghost felt the vitality coursing through his limbs, felt the powerful urges of adolescence, and remembered the pleasure those urges might bring.
He did not want to give up his new body.
But he knew, too, that he could not continue to play this charade much longer. With a single meeting, Cadderly had come to suspect that something was amiss, and Ghost did not doubt that those suspicions would only increase with time. Also, in this form, Ghost was severely restricted. His other body remained alive, and it would until the assassin fully committed himself to the idea of taking Brennan’s body as his own, a dangerous action indeed until this mission was completed. And while that other, puny form drew breath, Ghost could not use the Ghearufu on any new victims. Even to get to Vander, his chosen victim, Ghost would have to go through his own body, and doing that would release young Brennan.
Things would become so much simpler when Cadderly lay dead, he knew. Ghost had considered trying the strike the night before, when he had held a cutting knife in his hand just inches from Cadderly’s bare chest. If his aim had been good, the game would have ended then and there, and he could collect his gold, and seriously consider his immediate impulse to retain this young and vital body, to kill the trapped spirit of the young man back in his own room and remove the magical ring from the corpse’s foot. In just a few days, his spirit would become acclimated to this new form, and then the Ghearufu would be his to use again. Vital youth would be his once more.
Hesitance had cost the assassin his chance. Before he had resolved to move, Cadderly was again intent upon him. The loose ends—his ignorance of Cadderly’s powers, his ignorance of the other two priests—had held him back.
“Brennan!” Fredegar’s cry startled the assassin from his contemplations.
“What are you waiting for?” the innkeeper bellowed. “Get that chandelier cranked back to its place, and soon! The hearth room needs cleaning, boy. Now get to it!”
More restrictions accompanied the pleasing young form. Ghost did not even argue. The Night Masks were not far-he had plenty of time to get to them—and in truth, he was glad for the delay so that he could better sort through the many potential problems and the many interesting questions.
About an hour later, the assassin was even more grateful for the delay that had kept him at the inn, when a young woman, strawberry blond hair bouncing gaily about her shoulders, entered the Dragon’s Codpiece, looking for Cadderly and introducing herself as Lady Danica Maupoissant.
Another wrinkle.
“There’s the lad!” Ivan called, pointing back toward the front of the Dragon’s Codpiece and roughly spinning Pikel about.
“Oo oi!” Pikel piped as scon as he spotted Cadderly, more concerned with getting Ivan’s hands off him so that he might stop his spin. Dizzied, the green-bearded dwarf shuffled from foot to foot, struggling to straighten his cooking pot helmet.
Ivan started for Cadderly, who had not yet noticed them, but Danica put a hand on the dwarfs shoulder. As soon as the startled dwarf turned about and looked into Danica’s pleading eyes, he understood.
“Ye want to go to him yerself,” Ivan reasoned.
“Might I?” Danica asked. “I do not know how Cadderly will respond to seeing me. I would prefer . . .”
“Say no more, Lady,” Ivan bellowed. “Me and me brother got more than a bit of work afore us, and it’s getting late in the day already. I’ll get us some rooms there.” He pointed to the sign of an inn two doors down from where they stood, and two doors shy of the Dragon’s Codpiece. “Ye can come and get us when ye want us.
“And ye can give him this from me and me brother,” Ivan added, pulling the adamantite spindle-disks from a deep pocket. He started to give them to Danica, then pulled them back, embarrassed. As discreetly as he could, the gruff dwarf rubbed off a chunk of the weapon’s first victim’s face. Danica could not miss the movement. With a helpless shrug, Ivan tossed the disks to her.
Danica bent tow and kissed the understanding dwarf on the forehead, drawing a deep blush from Ivan.
“Hee hee hee,” Pikel chirped.
“Aw, what’d ye go and do that for?” the flustered dwarf asked Danica. He slapped his chuckling brother across the shoulder to set them both into motion, moving away from the inn and away from Cadderly. Ivan knew that if the young scholar saw them all, he would probably invite them in, thus ruining Danica’s desires.
Danica stood alone in the crowded street, watching Cadderly’s every step as he made his way into the Dragon’s Codpiece. Across from her, the waters of Impresk Lake sparkled in late afternoon sunlight, and she almost followed their spellbinding allure and ran away from her fears. Truly, Danica did not know how Cadderly would react, did not know how final their parting in Shilmista Forest had been.
If Cadderly rebuked her now, Danica did not know where she would turn.
For the young monk, who had faced many challenges, many enemies, no moment had ever been so trying. It took every measure of courage that Danica could muster, but, finally, she skipped off toward the waiting inn.
Cadderly was on the stairs, heading up, when Danica entered. He held his familiar walking stick in the crook of one elbow and was looking at some wrinkled parchment, apparently oblivious to the world around him.
Quiet as a cat, the agile monk crossed the room and made the stairs. A boy of perhaps fifteen years eyed her curiously as she passed, she noted, and she half expected the lad to stop her, for she was not a paying guest. He did not, though, and soon Cadderly, still too busy with the parchment to notice her, loomed just two steps ahead of her.
Danica studied him a moment longer. He looked leaner than he had just a few weeks ago, but she knew it was not for lack of eating. Cadderly’s boyish form had taken on the hardness of manhood; even his step seemed more sure and solid, less inclined to skip aside from his chosen path.
“You look good,” Danica blurted, hardly thinking before she made the comment. Cadderly stopped abruptly, stumbling over the next step. Slowly, he lifted his gaze from the parchment. Danica heard him gulp for breath.
It seemed like many minutes had passed before the young priest finally mustered the courage to turn and face her, and when he did, Danica stared into a confused face indeed. She waited for Cadderly to reply, but, apparently, he either could not find his voice, or had nothing to say.
“You look good,” Danica said again, and she thought herself incredibly inane. “I ... we, had to come to Carradoon. . .”
She stopped, her words halted by the look in Cadderly’s gray eyes. Danica had many times before stared intently into those eyes, but she saw something new there now, a sadness of bitter experiences.
Again, it seemed like many minutes slipped by.
Cadderly’s walking stick fell to the stairs with an impossibly loud thud. Danica looked to it curiously, and when she looked up again, Cadderly was with her, his arms wrapped about her, nearly crushing her.
Danica was independent and strong, arguably one of the very finest fighters in all the land, but never in her life had she felt so secure and warm. Gentle tears made their way down her smooth cheeks; there was no sadness in her heart.
Still wearing Brennan’s body as his own, Ghost watched the pair from the bottom of the stairs as he absently pushed a broom back and forth. His devious mind continued its typical whirling, formulating new plans, making subtle adjustments in the old plans. Ghost had to get things moving quickly now, he knew. The complications were undeniably piling up.
The skilled killer, the artist, was not afraid. He liked challenges, and compared to the many dead heroes he had left in his wake, this action, this victim, Cadderly, did not seem so much a problem.
Danica.
Cadderly had not seen her in more than five weeks, and while he had not forgotten her appearance, he was nonetheless surprised by her beauty. She stood inside the closed door of his room, her head cocked patiently to the side, strawberry hair dancing against one shoulder, and her exotic eyes, rich and brown, tender and knowing, gazing at him.
He had initiated their breakup. He had been the one who had left—had left Danica, the war, and Shilmista. He still was not certain of Danica’s intentions in coming to see him, but whatever they might be, Cadderly knew it was surely his turn to speak, to explain.
“I did not expect you to come,” he said, moving beside his reading table and gently closing the Tome of Universal Harmony. A nervous chuckle escaped his dry lips. “I feared I would receive an invitation to Shilmista Forest to witness the wedding of Danica and Elbereth.”
“I do not deserve that,” Danica replied, keeping her melodic voice eventoned and steady.
Cadderly threw up his hands helplessly. “I would have deserved it,” he admitted.
Danica produced Ivan’s gift and tossed it to him. “From the dwarves,” she explained as Cadderly caught the heavy disks. “They began it long ago, a present to the one who saved the Edificant Library.”
Cadderly could feel the strength of the weapon, and that horrified him as much as thrilled him. “Always weapons,” he muttered resignedly and tossed the spindle-disks to the floor at the foot of his bed, where they bounced against a small clothes chest, dented the hardwood, and rolled to a stop inches from Cadderly’s newly enchanted walking stick.
Cadderly regarded the fitting image and nearly laughed aloud, but he would not let Danica’s obvious distraction keep him from his point. “You loved the elf prince,” he said to her.
“He is now the elf king,” Danica reminded him.
Cadderly did not miss the fact that she did not respond to his accusation.
“You did ... do love Elbereth,” Cadderly said again, quietly.
“As do you,” Danica replied. “He is a dear friend, and among the most extraordinary and honorable people I have ever had the privilege of fighting beside. I would give my life for the elf king of Shilmista, as would you.”
Her words did not come as any revelation to Cadderly. All along, beneath the veil of his fears, he had known the truth of Danica’s relationship with Elbereth, had known that her love for the elf—and it was indeed love—was irrelevant to her feelings for the priest. Danica and Elbereth had bonded in a common cause, as warriors with shared values. If Cadderly loved Danica, and he did with all of his heart, then how could he not also love Elbereth?
But there remained a nagging question, a nagging doubt, and not one about Danica.
“You would give your life for him,” Cadderly replied with all sincerity. “I wish I could claim equal courage.”
Danica’s smile was not meant to mock him, but he felt it keenly anyway.
“I ran from there,” Cadderly pointedly reminded her.
“Not when you were needed,” Danica replied. “Neither I nor the elves have forgotten what you did at Syldritch Trea, or in the height of the fight. Tintagel is alive because of you. Shilmista is back in the hands of Elbereth’s people because of you.”
“But I ran away,” Cadderly argued. “Do not doubt that.”
Danica’s next question, tinged with innocence and honest trepidation, caught the young priest off his guard. “Why did you run?”
She dropped her traveling cloak on the small night table and moved over to sit on Cadderly’s bed, and he turned about to look out of his window, over the still-glittering lake in the dying light of day. Cadderly had never asked himself that question so bluntly, had never considered the cause of his distress.
“Because,” he said after a moment, then he paused again, the words still not clear in his mind. He heard the bed creak and feared for a moment that Danica was coming to him; he did not want her to see the pain on his face at that moment. The bed creaked again and he realized that she had only shifted and had not risen.
“Too much was spinning about me,” he said. “The fighting, the magic, my dilemma over Dorigen’s unconscious form and the fear that I did wrong in not killing her, the cries of the dying that would not leave my ears.” Cadderly managed a soft chuckle. “And the way you looked at Elbereth.”
“All of that would seem cause to remain beside those who love you, not to run away,” Danica observed.
“This madness has been mounting for some time,” Cadderly explained, “perhaps even before the evil priest began his assault on the library. Perhaps I have been troubled all of my adult life. That would not surprise me.
“I must face these troubles and get beyond them,” he continued, stealing a look at Danica over his shoulder. “I know that now.”
“But again . . ,” Danica began, but Cadderly, facing the lake again, cut her off with an outstretched palm.
“I could not face them beside you, do you not understand?” he asked, his voice pleading, hoping that she would forgive him. “Back in the library, whenever the many questions threatened to overwhelm me, all I had to do was seek out my Danica, my love. Beside you, watching you, there were no troubles, no unanswerable questions.”
He turned to face her squarely, saw the joy emanating from her beautiful face.
“You are not my answer,” Cadderly admitted, and he winced as Danica’s light went out, a great pain washing through her almond eyes.
“You are not my cure,” Cadderly quickly tried to explain, lamenting his initial choice of words. “You are a salve, a temporary relief.”
“A plaything?”
“Never!” The word was torn from Cadderly’s heart, bursting forth with the soreness that Danica needed to hear.
“When I am with you, then all the world and all of my life is beautiful,” Cadderly went on. “In truth, it is not, of course. Shilmista proved that beyond doubt. When I am with you, I can hide behind my love. You, my Danica, have been my mask. Wearing it, I could even hide from the horrors of that continuing battle, I am sure.”
“But you could not hide from yourself,” Danica put in, beginning to catch on.
Cadderly nodded. “There are troubles in here,” he explained, pointing to his heart and then to his head, “that will remain beside me until I can resolve them. Or until they destroy me.”
“And you could not face them while your mask was there to hide behind,” Danica reasoned. There was no malice in her quiet tones. Honestly sympathetic for Cadderly, she asked softly, “Have you found your answers?”
Cadderly nearly laughed out loud. “I have found more questions,” he admitted. “The world has only become more confusing since I delved into myself.” He pointed to the Tome of Universal Harmony. “You would hardly believe the sights that book has shown to me, though whether they are true sights or clever deceptions, I cannot tell.”
By the way Danica’s posture seemed to shrink back from him, Cadderly realized that he had said something revealing. He waited long moments for Danica to respond, to share the revelation with him.
“You question your faith?” she asked bluntly.
Cadderly spun away, his gaze again searching for the dying light on the lake. She had hit the mark squarely, he only then realized. How could he, as a priest of Deneir, doubt the vision and magic shown to him by the most holy book of his god?
“I do not doubt the principles espoused by the clerics of Deneir,” Cadderly asserted with conviction.
“Then it is the god himself,” Danica reasoned incredulously. “You question the existence of such beings?” her voice nearly broke apart with the words. “How can one who was raised among priests, and who has witnessed so much clerical magic, claim to be agnostic?”
“I claim nothing,” Cadderly protested. “I am just not certain of anything!”
“You have seen the magic bestowed by the gods,” Danica argued. “You felt the magic ... in healing Tintagel.”
“I believe in magic,” Cadderly reasoned. “It is an undeniable fact on the soil of Faerun. And, yes, I have felt the power, but where it comes from I cannot say.”
“The curse of intelligence,” Danica muttered ironically. Cadderly regarded her over his shoulder once more. “You cannot believe anything you cannot prove beyond doubt” she said to him. “Must everything be tangible? Is there no room for faith in a mind that can unravel any of the lesser mysteries?”
A wind had kicked up across the lake. Ripples rolled to the shore, carrying the last daylight on their crests.
“I just do not know,” Cadderly said, regarding the rolling water, trying to find some fitting symbolism in its transport of the dying light.
“Why did you run?” Danica asked him again, and he knew by her determined tone that she meant to force him through this, whatever the cost to them both.
“I was afraid,” he admitted. “Afraid to kill any more. Afraid that you would be killed. That I could not bear.” Cadderly paused and swallowed hard, forced to come to terms with this difficult realization. His silence went on, Danica not daring to interrupt his train of thought.
“I was afraid to die.” There it was. Cadderly had just admitted his own cowardice. He tightened his arms against his sides, fearing Danica’s stinging rebuttal.
“Of course you were,” she said instead, and there was no sarcasm in her remark. “You question your faith, question that there is anything beyond this existence. If you believe there is nothing more, then of what worth is honor? Bravery rides the crest of a cause, Cadderly. You would die for Elbereth. You have already proven that. And if a spear were aimed for my heart, you would willingly take it in my stead. That I do not doubt.”
Cadderly continued to stare out the window. He heard Danica shifting on the bed again, but was too lost in contemplations of her wisdom. He watched the last gasps of light riding the waves, riding the crest, and knew that there was truth in Danica’s description. He had been afraid to die in Shilmista, but only because the justification for continuing that fight was founded in a cause of principles, and those principles were, in turn, founded in faith. And he had been so angry at Danica and Elbereth, and all the others, because he had feared for them and could not appreciate their dedication to those higher principles, their willingness to continue a course that might easily lead to their deaths.
“I would take the spear,” Cadderly decided.
“I never doubted you,” Danica replied. There was something in the ring of her voice, something softer and mysterious, that made Cadderly turn back to her.
She lay on her side comfortably on his bed, her clothes dropped in a pile at the bedside. If Cadderly lived a thousand years, he would never forget the sight of Danica at that moment. She rested her head against her hand, propped at the elbow, her thick strawberry-blond locks cascading down her arm to dance on the single pillow. The minimal light accentuated the curves of Danica’s soft skin, the shine of her sculpted legs.
“Through all the weeks, I never doubted you,” she said.
Cadderly sensed the slight tremor in her voice, but still could not believe how brave she had been. Without blinking, he unbuttoned his shirt and started to her.
A moment later, they were together. The song played again in Cadderly’s mind. No, rather, he felt it, thrumming with urgency through every facet of his body, guiding him through every subtle motion, and convincing him that nothing had ever been so right.
Cadderly’s mind whirled through a dizzying jumble of thoughts and emotions. He thought of Danica bearing his child, and considered the implications of mortality.
Most of all, Cadderly focused his thoughts on Danica, his soul mate, and he loved her all the more. Perhaps once she had been his shelter, but only because he had made that her role. Now, Cadderly had revealed his vulnerability, his deepest fears, and Danica had accepted them, and him, with all her heart, and with the sincere desire to help him resolve them.
Later, as Danica slept, Cadderly rose from the bed and lit a single candle on his table, beside the Tome of Universal Harmony. Not bothering to dress, he looked back to Danica on the bed, and felt a surge of love course through his veins. Strengthened by that security, Cadderly sat down and opened the book, hopeful that, in light of this night’s revelations, he would hear the song a different way.
Many hours before Cadderly lit that candle, Ghost had slipped away from the young priest’s door, confident from his eavesdropping that the arrival of Danica Maupoissant would do little to deflect his solidifying plans. Actually, Ghost had come to the conclusion that he might be able to use Danica—her body, at least—to substantially increase the pleasure offered by this kill.
If he could possess the body of Cadderly’s lover, he might catch the young priest with his guard about as far down as it could possibly go.
But for all the eagerness reflected when Ghost rubbed his hands together, every step of the way back to his own room, he was wise enough to realize that things had become dangerously complicated.
Still bound in the cubby between bed and wall, poor, beaten Brennan looked up pleadingly.
“I will release you this night,” Ghost promised. “I have decided that I cannot afford to keep your body—and a pity that is, for the body is fine!”
Brennan, desperate to hope, almost managed to smile right up until the point when Ghost’s hands—Brennan’s own hands—closed around his borrowed throat. There was no pain this time for the beleaguered innkeeper’s son; there was only blackness.
The task completed, Ghost sat down on the bed, untying the weakling form and waiting impatiently for when he could take back his own body. He lamented that he had lost his chance at this fine young form, but reminded himself of the pressing business and pressing danger. He assured himself that he would find another suitable body soon enough, when Cadderly lay dead.
Kierkan Rufo eyed the stocked shelves with open contempt. Shopping! For more than a dozen years, he had labored in the Edificant Library, had meticulously attended to his duties, and now Headmaster Avery had sent him shopping!
This entire trip to Carradoon had been one humiliation after another for poor Rufo. He knew his actions in Shilmista had angered Avery (though he had convinced himself by this time that none of it had really been his fault), but he never would have believed that the headmaster would degrade him so. Through all the many meetings, with the priests of Ihnater, with several of the other religious sects in the city, and with the city officials, Rufo had been ordered to stand behind Avery and remain silent. These meetings were vital to the defense of the region, vital to the survival of the Edificant Library, yet Rufo was, for all purposes, left out of them. Not only was his input not wanted by Avery, the headmaster had outright forbidden it!
And now he was shopping. Rufo stood before the shelves for many moments, fantasizing that the other side had won in Shilmista Forest, thinking that he would have been better off if Dorigen’s forces had slaughtered the elves and had taken him into their ranks as the imp had promised. Perhaps the world would be a better place for Kierkan Rufo if Cadderly had fallen in the sylvan shadows.
Cadderly! The word screamed out in Rufo’s mind like the most damning of curses. Cadderly had apparently forsaken the library and the Order of Deneir, had virtually slapped Headmaster Avery and all the other priests in the face with his desertion—there could be no other word for the young priest’s actions. Cadderly had never been a good priest— not by Rufo’s estimation—had never attended to the many duties given the lesser clerics with any kind of dedication. And yet, in Avery’s eyes at least, Cadderly ranked far above Rufo, far above any except the ruling order in the library.
Rufo grabbed a sack of flour and pulled it to him so forcefully that a small white puff burst up at him, covering his face.
“Someone’s not seeming a bit too happy,” came a gruff, gravelly voice beside him.
“Uh-uh,” agreed a voice on the other side.
The angular priest did not have to look sidelong or down to know that the Bouldershoulder brothers had flanked him, and that fact did little to improve his sour mood. He had known that the dwarves were coining to Carradoon, but he had hoped that he and Avery would be well on their way back to the library before these two ever arrived.
He turned toward Ivan and started to push past the dwarf, through the narrow aisle of the cramped store. Ivan did little to aid the angular man, and with the dwarfs considerable girth, Rufo had nowhere to go.
“Ye’re in a hurry,” Ivan remarked. “I thinked ye’d be glad to see me and me brother.”
“Get out of my way, dwarf,” Rufo said grimly.
“Dwarf?” Ivan echoed, feigning a mortal wound. “Ye saying that like it’s an insult?”
“Take it for what you will,” Rufo replied evenly, “but do get out of my way. I am in Carradoon on important business, something you obviously could not understand.”
“I always figured flour to be important,” Ivan replied sarcastically, giving the bag a rough pat that sent another white burst into Rufo’s face. The angular man trembled with mounting rage, but that only spurred Ivan to further taunts.
“Ye’re acting like ye’re not so glad to see me and me brother,” the dwarf said.
“Should I be?” Rufo asked. “When have we ever claimed friendship to one another?”
“We fought together in the wood,” Ivan reminded him. “or at least, some of us fought. Others figured to hide in a tall tree, if me memory’s working proper.”
Rufo growled and pushed ahead, dislodging several packages in his attempt to get beyond Ivan. He had nearly made his way past when the dwarf threw out one strong arm, stopping Rufo as completely as a stone wall.
“Danica’s in town, too,” Ivan remarked, his other hand held high and balled into a fist.
“Boom,” Pikel added grimly behind the angular man.
The reference to Danica’s humiliating attack made Rufo’s face flush red with rage. He growled again and shoved past Ivan, stumbling all the rest of the way down the narrow aisle and knocking many more items from the shelves.
“A fine day to ye,” Ivan called behind him. Rufo dropped the sack of flour and passed right by the counter, fleeing for the street.
“Good to see him,” Ivan said to Pikel. “Adds a bit of flavor to a dull trip.”
“Hee hee hee,” Pikel agreed.
Ivan’s face went serious once more as he noticed a tall man selecting goods from a shelf behind Pikel. The man’s gait and movements were easy and graceful, his eyes sharp and steady, and he hoisted a twenty-pound bag of meal easily with one hand. His tunic moved up from the back of his trousers as he moved, revealing a dagger tucked securely in the back of his belt.
That alone would not have fired off any alarms in Ivan; many people carried concealed weapons in Carradoon, and Ivan himself had a knife in one pocket.
But the dwarf was certain he ‘d seen this man before, in a different guise. He watched the man for a few moments longer, until the man noticed him, snarled, and headed off the other way down the aisle.
“Eh?” Pikel asked, wondering what problem so obviously bothered his brother.
Ivan did not immediately reply, for he was too busy searching his memory. Then it came to him: he had seen a man closely resembling the shopper in the alley beside the Dragon’s Codpiece. The man had been more disheveled then, wearing tattered clothing and seeming like an ordinary street beggar, of which Carradoon had its share. Even then, though, Ivan had noted the grace of the beggar’s movements, a skilled and measured step.
The dwarf hadn’t thought much about it, and wouldn’t even have given it more than a passing thought now, except for the unpleasant incident on his journey into the city. Danica was convinced that the would-be bandits were not ordinary highwaymen and had been waiting to ambush the three companions. Ivan had little proof either way, and, while he held many private doubts, he knew Danica better than to openly disagree with her reasoning. An inspection of the bodies had revealed little, though, for the men carried no obvious marks, not even the familiar trident-and-bottle insignia of the enemy, which the companions had expected to find.
By all appearances, they had been simple robbers, coin-cidentally stumbling into the companions’ path, and that had seemed even more plausible when Ivan and the others had arrived in Carradoon to find Cadderly, Avery, and Rufo safe and secure at the Dragon’s Codpiece.
But prudent,battle-tested Ivan had not let his guard down, not one bit.
“We should go find Cadderly and Danica,” he said to Pikel.
“Tut tut,” Pikel argued, blushing with embarrassment and waggling a stubby finger Ivan’s way. Danica had not returned to her room the previous night, and the dwarves didn’t have to struggle to figure out where she had stayed, and why she had stayed there.
“We won’t bother them if we don’t need to,” Ivan growled back. “Just want to keep an eye on them, that’s all.” Ivan nodded to the end of the aisle, where the suspicious shopper was gathering more goods. “I’m not so sure we seen the last of the group that hit us on the road.”
“Eh?” Pikel balked.
“Sure, that bunch is dead,” Ivan said as Pikel finally hopped around to regard the man, “but me thinking’s that they got friends, and me fear’s that we were more than accidental targets.”
“Uh-oh,” Pikel whined. He looked back to Ivan, crestfallen and obviously worried.
“We’ll just watch ‘em, that’s all,” Ivan said comfortingly. “We’ll just watch ‘em close.”
Vander paced nervously about the barn on the outskirts of town. Ghost had telepathically contacted him using the power of the Gaearunj that morning to set the plans into motion; the strike against Cadderly would come before the next dawn. All of the other assassins were gone from the farm, sent into position with their remaining associates in Carradoon. There had still been no word of the five who had gone into the mountains, but word of the arrival of Danica and the dwarves into die city did not bode well for the missing Night Masks.
Still, fourteen expertly trained assassins should prove an ample number for a single, unsuspecting kill. At least, that had been Ghost’s reasoning when he had told Vander, the most powerful of the group, to remain at the farm, out of the way.
Truly the firbolg did not mind the specifics of the instructions; executions had always left a sour taste in the honorable giant’s mouth. What bothered Vander now was Ghost’s motivations in keeping him beyond the immediate action. The only times the devious little assassin ever used this method of attack was when Ghost sincerely respected the powers of his intended victim. On those occasions, Vander became no more than a secret escape route for Ghost. If the assassin got into serious trouble, he could just summon his magical item and flee to Vander’s body, . . . leaving Vander back in Ghost’s body to suffer whatever peril the assassin had gotten himself into.
How long would it continue? the firbolg wondered for about the ten thousandth time. How long would he remain the plaything of that wicked, honorless little weakling?
For all of his pacing and all of his painstaking thought, Vander could see no end and no escape. He could find consolation only by telling himself that in the morning Cadderly would be dead, and this wretched chapter of his miserable life would be at an end.
“You seem in a hurry,” the young wizard commented when Rufo, his face chalk white with flour, entered the Dragon’s Codpiece and made his way straight for the stairs.
Rufo looked at Bogo Rath and snorted derisively, but didn’t have the courage to ignore the young wizard’s hand gesture that Rufo should go over and join him.
“What do you need?” Rufo snapped, angry at all the world and especially impatient in yet another situation in which he was forced to serve. Everywhere the angular man turned, he found someone more than willing to give him orders.
Bogo laughed heartily and flipped his stringy hair over to the side, out of his green eyes. “How go your meetings?” the wizard asked.
Again Rufo snorted. “You should ask Avery,” he replied, venom dripping from every word. “Certainly I, the errand boy, would not know!” As evidence to his point, Rufo held up the few small sacks of purchases he had made in the first stores he had visited that day.
“You deserve better treatment than this “ Bogo commented, trying to sound like an honest friend.
“From you as well,” Rufo replied sharply.
Bogo nodded and did not argue. In truth, the young wizard, “Boygo” to his older associates, could sympathize with Rufo’s dilemma.
“Well, have you a task for me, or are you merely wasting my time?” Rufo asked. “Not that my time is such a precious thing.”
“Nothing,” Bogo replied. Immediately, the angular man spun away, heading back for the stairs. “As of yet,” Bogo remarked after him, stealing some of the ire-filled thunder from Rufo’s determined steps. The priest looked back one final time.
“You will be informed when you are needed,” Bogo said evenly, his visage stern and unyielding. The young wizard might sympathize with Rufo, but that would offer the priest little reprieve from the duties Bogo would eventually require of him.
“You met with the priest again this day,” Ghost said to Bogo when the young wizard entered his room later that afternoon. He really wasn’t surprised to find the sneaky assassin waiting for him, or by the fact that Ghost knew of his meeting with Rufo.
“I have warned you once of your meddling,” Ghost went on. Bogo’s face twisted curiously, and Ghost realized that he had made a mistake. He hadn’t warned Bogo of any such thing; the innkeeper’s son had done that, at least as far as Bogo was concerned.
“You?” Bogo questioned, his lips turning up in a smile. “I have not seen young Brennan today,” he remarked cryptically. “Actually, his father is quite worried about him.”
Ghost settled back on the bed and nodded silent congratulations to the observant wizard. “Let us just say that the young man outlived his usefulness,” he explained. “A very dangerous thing to do.”
Neither man spoke for a very long while, but there remained little tension between them. Ghost studied Bogo long and hard, and the young wizard seemed to sense that the assassin was forming some plans—plans that Bogo could only hope would include him.
“The time is close then,” Bogo remarked. “The disappearance of young Brennan is a question that you cannot let hang unanswered for a very long time.”
Again, Ghost nodded his silent appreciation of Bogo’s reasoning powers. “The time is nearly upon us,” he confirmed, “but it would seem that some things have changed.”
“The arrival of the priests and Danica?” Bogo asked.
“Complications,” Ghost replied.
“And what else has changed?”
“Your role,” Ghost answered immediately. Bogo initially took a cautious step back, fearing that he, too, might have outlived his usefulness.
“I had said you were only an observer,” the assassin explained, “and, so, by Aballister’s measure, you were meant to be. But you never believed that, did you, Rath? You never planned to sit back and watch while the Night Masks had all the fun of killing this young Cadderly.”
Bogo cocked his head curiously at the assassin, obviously unsure of what that plain fact might mean.
“And you have proven to me,” Ghost continued, “both by your astute conclusions and your ability to get close to our enemies, that your value extends beyond your assigned role.”
“I thought you did not want me talking with Rufo,” Bogo replied, still a safe distance from the dangerous man.
“I just explained to you that things have changed,” Ghost retorted. “We have a headmaster from the library to deal with and a formidable young woman, it would seem. I intend to handle the latter problem personally, and for that I will need to borrow your stooge.”
Bogo moved over to the bed, now more curious than afraid.
“A simple matter,” Ghost explained. “A simple, innocuous task for Kierkan Rufo that will allow me to get at the Lady Maupoissant.”
“You will kill her?”
“In a manner,” Ghost replied. “First I will use her so that when the Night Masks come for Cadderly, the one he believes is his closest ally will, in truth, be his enemy.”
Bogo’s smile widened, mimicking Ghost’s devious expression. The assassin’s plan was beautifully simple, with Bogo, and more particularly, Rufo, being the only potential trouble areas that he could foresee. To that end, the assassin then delivered a secure hook.
His smile abruptly disappeared, causing Bogo’s visage to assume a similarly grim tone.
“I offer you a part in this execution,” Ghost explained, “something you have craved since before we left Castle Trinity. I assure you that your role will be well-received by Aballister.
“But,” Ghost continued slyly, and this was the real hook, “my pay will be as originally agreed.”
“Of course . . .” Bogo started, but Ghost didn’t pause long enough to let him continue.
“And if Aballister does not deliver to me the full amount,” Ghost went on grimly, “then you must make up the difference—to the gold piece.”
Bogo nodded eagerly, more than happy to pay such a pittance in exchange for the prestige, and also beginning to understand for the first time, how very bad it might be to get on the wrong side of this wicked little man.
They spent another hour together, with Ghost detailing the plans and the role Bogo would play. To the ambitious young wizard, the plan and his part seemed safe enough (Rufo would actually be doing most of the work) and rewarding enough to satisfy him. Just as Ghost had known it would.
Cadderly and Danica had slept very late that day. Brennan did not appear with Cadderly’s break-fast, and Cadderly, in his modesty, was glad of that. He suspected that the innkeeper’s son had probably come to the door, then had turned away, blushing, at what he had heard inside. With a private smile, Cadderly thought no more about it. The lovers left their room shortly after noon, taking a meal together in the hearth room. Fredegar served them himself— an unusual occurrence that Cadderly realized was out of sorts only when the innkeeper asked him if he had seen anything of Brennan that morning. Still, Cadderly was too consumed by the presence of Danica to appreciate the implications of the missing youth.
He promised to keep an eye out for Brennan when he and Danica went out walking. Fredegar nodded his thanks, but he was plainly worried. “The mistakes of adolescence,” Cadderly explained to Danica, not too concerned for the welfare of the youth. He figured that Brennan had been out late in pursuit of some young lady, and that maybe this time Brennan had made the catch. For all of Cadderly’s inner turmoil, all the world seemed calm that morning, with Danica beside him again, and the young priest couldn’t even begin to think dark and ominous thoughts.
They left the inn together, crossed the wide way of Lakeview Street, and moved down to Impresk Lake’s sandy shore. The breeze was stiff off the water, chill but not cold, and long-winged birds zipped about at impossible angles and cut sharply in daring maneuvers all about them. The normal morning mist had long since dissipated, leaving the two with a grand view of the island that comprised the wealthier section of Carradoon, and the wide, arching stone bridge that led to it. Several multistory structures peeked up above the trees, and a fleet of boats, both pleasure and fishing, meandered around the land mass.
“I suppose I might come to accept the beard,” Danica said after many minutes of quiet watching. She moved over and tugged at an exceptionally long strand. “As long as you keep it trimmed!” “And I love you,” Cadderly replied with a contented smile. “Will you stay beside me?”
“Are you certain you want me to?” Danica said in a teasing tone, but there was a subtle undercurrent of dread in her question.
“Stay with me,” Cadderly said again, more forcefully. Danica looked back to the water and did not answer. The request seemed so simple and obvious, and yet, the woman realized that many obstacles remained. She had gone to the Edificant Library to study the ancient works of Grandmaster Penpahg D’Ahn, the Most Holy One, prophet and founder of her order. Only in the library could Danica continue her work, and that work was very important to her, the culmination of all her personal goals. As important as Cadderly?
Danica was not honestly sure, but she knew that if she gave up her goals to remain beside her lover, then she would forever look back to this time and wonder what might have been, what level of perfection she might have achieved.
And there remained, too, the war. The last few days had come as a reprieve to the battle-wean woman, despite the attack on the road, but Danica knew that this quiet time was only temporary. More fighting would break out, if not now, then in the spring, and Danica had long ago resolved to be a part of that.
Cadderly, though, had run away from it, and the woman now did not know if he would change his mind.
So Danica did not answer the question, and Cadderly, wise enough to understand her hesitancy and her fears, did not ask it again. Day by day, he decided. They would pass their time together day by day and see what changes the wind across the lake brought.
They walked quietly along the beach for some time, Cadderly leading Danica to one of his favorite places. The shoreline jutted sharply out into the water in a small, tree-covered peninsula with banks only a foot above the water level. A single path, barely a foot wide, led the way into the thick tangle, ending at a small clearing right in the center of the peninsula. Although they were barely a half-mile from the bustle of Carradoon, and barely a half-mile from the island section as well, it seemed to Cadderly and Danica that the world had disappeared beyond the shelter of those trees.
Danica looked slyly at Cadderly, suddenly suspecting the reason he had brought her out here.
But Cadderly had other ideas. He led Danica down another narrow path, to the very tip of the peninsula, beside a small pool formed by the waves whenever a large boat passed by. Cadderly indicated a mossy stone and bade Danica to sit.
Cadderly walked the perimeter of the pool, muttering something under his breath that Danica could not make out. She soon came to understand that the young priest was chanting, a magical spell, most likely.
Cadderly halted the walk. His body swayed gently, a willow on the wind, he seemed, and his arms moved about in graceful circles. Danica’s eyes settled on Cadderly’s holy symbol, the single eye-and-candle design set in the center of his wide-brimmed hat. She felt a pulse of power from that emblem; it seemed to glow with some inner strength.
Cadderly’s arms waved again as he reached low in front of him and swung them slowly out wide to either side.
The water reacted to his call. The center of the pool bubbled with sudden energy, then rolled outward, great ripples moving to every edge. Danica moved her feet in close to her, thinking that she was going to get splashed, but the water did not break the edges of the pool. As the waves crested, there came a great hissing sound and the water vaporized, rolling up into the air to form a grayish cloud.
More water rolled out to be consumed, and when it was done, just a few small puddles remained where the pool had been. The cloud hovered for a few moments, until the pull of the wind broke it apart to nothingness.
Danica blinked in amazement and looked to Cadderly, who stood very still, staring at the mud-and-puddle pit.
“You have become powerful,” she remarked after some time had passed. “For a nonbeliever.”
Cadderly glared at her but could not sustain any anger in the face of her disarming smile. Through his smile, though, Danica recognized the young man’s torment.
“Perhaps it is just a variation of a wizard’s magic, as you fear,” she offered, “but perhaps the strength does come from Deneir. You seem too quick to deny what others of your order—“
“My order?” Cadderly was quick to interrupt, his tone both sarcastic and incredulous.
“Your holy symbol vibrated with power,” Danica replied. “I witnessed it myself.”
“A conduit to the energy, much like the tome on my desk,” Cadderly said more sharply than Danica deserved. He seemed to understand that, and his tone softened considerably as he continued. “Whenever I call on the magic, I merely recall some of the words in that book.”
“And it is a book of Deneir,” Danica reasoned.
Cadderly shook his head. “Do you know of Belisarius?” he asked.
“The wizard in the tower to the south?” Danica said.
Cadderly nodded. “Belisarius has a similar book—a spell book. If he attached a god’s name to it, would it then become a holy book?”
“It is not the same,” Danica muttered, frustrated.
“I do not know,” Cadderly said finally.
Danica looked to the lake behind her, to the gently lapping waves against the many small rocks at the peninsula’s tip, determined to change the subject. Then she looked at the muddy hole, somewhat disconcertingly. “How long will it take to refill?” she asked, clearly not happy with the results of Cadderly’s display. “Or must it wait for the next rain?”
Cadderly smiled and bent low, scooping a few drops of the remaining water into his cupped palms. He pulled his hand in close to his chest, again muttered some words under his breath.
“As the graceful rain must fall!” he ended, then he threw his hands out before him, threw the water to the air above the muddy pit. A tiny cloud appeared, hovering and churning in the air, and a moment later, a steady stream of water poured forth, splashing into the mud.
Before Danica ended her first burst of laughter, the pool had returned, as full as when she had first seen it.
“You find this humorous?” Cadderly asked, narrowing his gray eyes and thumping his fists against his hips so that he seemed a caricature of wounded pride.
“I find you humorous,” Danica retorted, and Cadderly’s expression revealed that he was truly hurt.
“You have all the proof right before you,” Danica explained, “more proof than the vast majority of ordinary people will ever know, and yet you remain so filled with doubts. My poor Cadderly, so damned by the unending questions of his own intelligence!”
Cadderly looked to the pool he had magically evaporated and then refilled, and chuckled at the irony of it all. Daniea took his hand then and led him back to the clearing at the center of the peninsula. Cadderly thought to keep going, down the other narrow path and back out to the wider beaches, but Daniea held tight to his hand and did not continue, forcing him to turn about.
They were alone in the sun and the breeze, and all the world seemed peaceful. Daniea smiled mischievously, her almond eyes telling Cadderly without the slightest doubt that it was not yet time to leave.
It was nearly twilight when Cadderly and Daniea made their way back to the Dragon’s Codpiece. Farther down Lakeview Street, fatherly Ivan watched their progress. The dwarf was much more at ease than he had been, and the safe return of Cadderly and Daniea told him that his suspicions might be unfounded, that he was acting as silly as a mother hen.
But was it a coincidence, just a moment later, when a beggar came to the end of the alleyway next to the Dragon’s Codpiece, and appeared to be watching the young couple as intently as Ivan?
Ivan sensed that the man meant to go after the two, and the dwarf started to make his way slowly up the street. He didn’t have his great axe with him—it wasn’t considered proper to stand about on one of Carradoon’s streets so obviously armed—but he was wearing his deer-antlered helmet. If this beggar made a move against Cadderly, Ivan resolved to gore him good.
Cadderly and Daniea turned into the inn, and the beggar leaned casually against the wall. Ivan stopped, perplexed and feeling very foolish. He looked all about, as if expecting everyone else on the street to be pointing at him and chuckling, but no one had apparently noticed anything unusual about his stalking advance.
“Stupid dwarf,” he muttered under his breath. “What’re ye getting so anxious about? Just a poor man, looking for a bit of coins.” Ivan stopped and scratched his yellow beard curiously when he looked back toward the alleyway.
The man was gone.
Daniea giggled, but Cadderly was not amused at the knock on his door—not at that particular moment.
“Oh, go and answer it,” Daniea whispered to him. “It is probably the innkeeper’s son, who you have been worried over the whole of the day!”
“I do not want to go,” Cadderly replied, pouting like a child. This brought another chuckle from Daniea, who pulled the bedclothes up tight about her neck.
Groaning with every move, Cadderly pulled himself out of bed and eased over to the door, wrapping himself in his discarded cloak.
“Rufo?” he asked as he cracked the door open. The hallway was dark, the candles in the great chandelier atop the stairs having long since died away. Only the glow from the hearth room’s fireplace offered any light at all. Still, Cadderly could not mistake Rufo’s tilting posture.
“My greetings,” the angular man replied. “And my apologies for disturbing you.” Cadderly blushed deeply, a sight the angular man obviously enjoyed.
“What do you want?”
“You are needed in the hearth room,” Rufo explained, “as soon as you can.”
“No,” The answer seemed simple enough, and Cadderly moved to shut the door, but Rufo stuck his foot in the way.
“Headmaster Avery will return with a delegation from the Ilmater chapel,” Rufo lied, for he knew well that Headmaster Avery was snoring contentedly back in their room.
Cadderly looked back over his shoulder to the balcony doors, to the blackness of the night. “What time is it?” he asked.
“It is very late,” Rufo admitted. “The priests of Dlmater wish this done in private. They seek information about the deaths of their acolytes at the Edificant Library during the time of the chaos curse.”
“I have already written my testimony—“
“Avery asks that you come,” Rufo pressed. “He has not required much of you, certainly less than he asks of me.” Obvious resentment rang clearly in the angular man’s tone. “You can do this much for him, impudent Cadderly, after all the headmaster has done for you.”
The argument seemed solid enough. Cadderly groaned again, then nodded. “Ten minutes,” he said.
Danica’s giggling renewed as soon as the door was closed.
“I will not be gone long,” Cadderly promised as he pulled on his clothes.
“It does not matter,” Danica replied coyly. “I am certain I shall fall asleep immediately.” She stretched languidly and rolled to her side, and Cadderly, cursing his luck, left the room.
He, too, must have been sleepy, for he didn’t even notice the weasellike man—was it a man?—behind a slightly opened door, watching him go.
“Cadderly?” Danica uttered the question, but she heard it as though someone else had spoken the words. A smell of exotic flowers permeated the room.
Somewhere deep in her mind, she was surprised that she had fallen asleep so soon. Or had she? How long had Cadderly been gone? she wondered. And what was that smell?
“Cadderly?” she asked again.
“Hardly.”
The word should have sounded like a warning to the woman—she knew she should open her eyes and find out what in the Nine Hells was going on ... but she couldn’t.
She felt a thumb, a gloved hand, she believed, pressed against her eyelid, and then her eye was forced open, just a crack. Danica tried to focus her thoughts—why was she so sleepy?
Through the blur, she saw herself in a small mirror. She knew that the mirror was hanging around someone’s neck.
Whose neck?
“Cadderly?”
The laughter that came back at her filled her with dread, and her eyes popped open against the permeating drowsiness, suddenly alert.
She saw Ghost for just an instant, too briefly to strike out, or even to cry out. Then she fell back into her own thoughts, into the blackness that suddenly became her own mind, and she felt a burning pain throughout every inch of her body.
Danica did not understand what was happening, but she sensed that it was not good. She felt herself moving away, but knew that her body was not moving.
Another blackness loomed in the distance, across a gray expanse, and Danica felt herself pulled toward it, compelled to sink into it. The first blackness, her mortal coil, was left behind, far behind.
Few in all of Faerun would have understood, but few in all of Faerun were as well versed in meditation as Danica.
Her identity!
Someone was stealing her very identity!
“No!” Danica tried to cry out, but control of her body’s voice was almost gone by then and the word came out as an indecipherable whimper.
Danica focused her will, dismissed the continuing smell that she now suspected was some sort of sleeping poison. She located that approaching blackness and pushed against it with all her mental strength, understanding that to enter it was to be lost.
A moment later, she felt another presence, similarly wandering out of body.
Her thoughts screamed a thousand protests at it, but it did not respond; it just kept making its way for the blackness that Danica had left behind.
“Where are they?” Cadderly asked impatiently when he came down into the hearth room. The fire burned low and the place was empty, except for him and for Rufo, sitting nervously at a table in the far corner.
“Well?” Cadderly growled as he moved over and took a seat opposite the angular man.
“Patience,” Rufo replied. “It will not be long.”
Cadderly leaned back and threw one arm over the back of the chair. By his estimation, it had already been too long. He looked at Rufo again, noting a subtle undercurrent of nervousness in the angular man. Cadderly dismissed the feeling and any suspicions it started to encourage, reminding himself that Kierkan Rufo was always nervous.
The young priest dosed his eyes and let the minutes slip past, let his thoughts linger back to Danica and the pleasures and implications this day had brought. He would never leave her again, of that much he was sure.
Cadderly’s eyes popped wide.
“What is it?” he heard Rufo ask loudly. Cadderly studied the man, saw Rufo blink.
Heard Rufo blink!
The fire crackled so powerfully that Cadderly thought the whole wall would be aflame, but when he turned to regard the hearth, the embers barely seemed to glow with their last flickers of life.
A fly buzzed by the bar. Gods! Cadderly thought, the thing must be the size of a small pony!
He saw nothing there.
And then he was aware of that song again, playing softly in the back of his mind. Instead of trying to figure all of this out, Cadderly wisely just allowed himself to feel.
Something—some danger?—had put him on his guard, and he had subconsciously replayed a page from the tome, enacted a magical spell to heighten his hearing.
“What is it?” Rufo asked him again, more urgently. Cadderly did not look at the man, just held a hand up to silence him.
Breathing.
Cadderly heard the steady inhale and exhale of breath a few tables away. He looked over but saw nothing.
But there was something, someone, there! Shifting his probe, Cadderly felt the magical energy.
“What are you saying?” he heard Rufo ask, and he realized only then that his lips were moving, forming the words from yet another page of the Tome of Universal Harmony.
Cadderly saw a silvery outline of a young man, recognized the stringy locks of hair hanging down to one side of the invisible intruder’s head.
Rufo shoved him roughly, forcing his attention.
“What?” the angular man demanded.
Cadderly started to rebuke him, then stopped and instead locked his intent gaze on Rufo.
Danica calmed her thoughts; she had to beat the other presence to the void of her physical mind. She turned her spirit about, willed her mind to connect fully with the tiny part of her that she had left behind, the part that had forced her mouth to utter that pitiful sound. She sensed the other presence pushing at the blackness then, nearly entering her form.
She felt a burning sensation.
Danica saw too many things in the next instant for her to possibly sort through them. She saw, most clearly, murders, dozens of murders. She saw Night Masks.
Night Masks!
The assassin band, the scourge of Westgate, had killed her parents. She saw a clan of giants, through the eyes of a giant.
She saw the other giants die at her own giant hands.
She saw Cadderly, on the road to Carradoon, huddled at his desk over the Tome of Universal Harmony, crouched behind the protection of his partly opened door.
To her horror, Danica realized that she was recalling someone else’s memories, had connected with the small part this other identity had left behind on its journey to take her body! And that this person, whoever it might be, had been close to Cadderly on several occasions.
Night Masks!
Let me out! her thoughts protested.
The other identity cried out to her in rage and agony and disbelief. She heard no words, but understood its meaning acutely, understood that her focused rage could push her back to where she belonged.
Let me out!
Danica pushed against the foreign blackness with all her mental strength, called upon her rage in combination with her years of mental training. The burning intensified, then abated, and Danica felt a physical presence once more— her own body.
The smell returned and Danica felt a doth pressed against her face. Giving in to her warrior instincts, she locked her fingers into a gouging position and cocked her arm for a strike.
She fell hard against the floor, but she didn’t realize it.
Shadows, evil, misshapen things, grumbled and growled from the angular man’s shoulders, their demeanor toward Cadderly obviously hostile. Rufo reached out across the small table to touch Cadderly again, but the young priest slapped his hand away.
“Cadderly!” Rufo responded, but the young priest sensed clearly that the man’s apparent concern was a facade. Before Rufo could move again, Cadderly pushed against the table, slamming its other edge into the angular man’s belly.
Cadderly honestly did not know what to do, did not know whether he was being warned or misled.
“Tell Avery that he can find me in the morning,” the young priest said, rising and spinning about to survey the room. He sensed that the invisible wizard was long gone.
“Avery will not like that,” he heard Rufo say, but more acutely, he heard a thump from somewhere upstairs that he knew instinctively was his own room.
Danica!
Cadderly bounded across the floor to the stairs, but then he was moving slowly, as if in a dream, barely able to put one heavy foot in front of the other.
The song played in his head; he instinctively pictured a page from the great book, a page describing focused magical energies, describing how to dispel such malevolent collections of magic.
A moment later he was moving again normally, free of whatever magical bonds had been placed on him. The door to his room was closed, as he had left it, and all seemed as it should.
Cadderly burst through the door anyway, to find Danica, her breathing rapid, sprawled upon the floor, tangled in a pile of blankets next to the bed. Cadderly knew she was alive and not seriously hurt as he held her in his arms.
The young priest surveyed the room. The notes from the song seemed more distant to him now and all seemed calm, but still the young priest wondered if someone had come in during his absence.
“Cadderly,” Danica breathed, suddenly coming awake. She looked about her, confused for a moment, pulled the blankets high and brought her arms in close—actions that struck Cadderly as curious gestures.
“A terrible dream,” Danica tried to explain.
Cadderly kissed her gently on the forehead and told her that everything was all right. He placed his chin atop Danica’s head and rocked her in his arms, his own smile widening with growing security.
Danica was unharmed. It had been only a dream.
As the night wound on toward morning, the guests in half of the eight private rooms at the Dragon’s Codpiece slept soundly.
Bogo Rath was simply too agitated to think of sleeping. Knowing what was to come, and knowing that he had played a part in the prelude to the actual assassination, the young wizard thought through the potential problems facing him that morning. Would Kierkan Rufo remain loyal? And even if the priest did, would the odd and angular man be able to carry out the mission Bogo had set before him? Things could get very troublesome at the Dragon’s Codpiece very quickly if a certain headmaster from the Edificant Library was not dealt with properly and efficiently.
Bogo understood the unmerciful Night Mask organization well enough to realize that Ghost would hold him responsible if Kierkan Rufo failed. The wizard paced his small room, taking care to keep his footsteps as quiet as possible. He wished that Ghost would come to him then, or that one of the approaching band would at least make contact to let him know how things progressed.
The young wizard resisted an urge to crack open his door, remembering that if he interrupted at an inopportune moment, he might well share Cadderly’s grim fate.
In his own room, Ghost sat staring out his window, bitter and full of rage. He hadn’t slept at all that night, after Danica’s mental discipline had defeated his attempted possession. He had wanted to be close at hand when the assassin band roared in; he had even been forced to go to the band that night and change the orders. Danica must die beside her lover.
For all the unexpected twists, the assassin remained confident that Cadderly would die that day, but even if the young priest fell easily now, this had been a messy execution, filled with complications and unexpected losses. Vander had killed one man; five others were missing in the foothills of the Snowflakes.
And young Cadderly was still very much alive.
And very much awake. In his room, the young priest sat at his table, dressed for the coming day and reading through the pages of the Tome of Universal Harmony. The hearth room had shown Cadderly many surprises earlier that night, and he searched for an entry that might help explain the sudden heightening of his senses, particularly his hearing.
Danica sat crosslegged on the floor beside the bed in quiet meditation, allowing the priest his needed privacy and taking some for herself. Hers was a life of discipline, of private challenges and trials, and though it was a bit early, she had already begun her daily morning ritual, working her inner being, stretching her limbs, and clearing her mind in preparation for the coming day.
Danica had discovered no answers for her strange experience earlier that night, and, truthfully, she hadn’t sought any. To her, the encounter with the unknown other mind remained a dream; since nothing else traumatic or dangerous had occurred, the explanation seemed to satisfy.
“The sun has not peeked over the rim!” Headmaster Avery protested, managing with some difficulty to roll his bulky form out of bed.
“That was Cadderly’s wish,” Kierkan Rufo reminded him. “He desired secrecy, and I believe what he might have to say will be worth the effort.”
Avery struggled to clear his throat of its nighttime phlegm and draw in a profound breath, never taking his curious stare off the angular man.
Rufo struggled even harder to remain calm under that searching gaze. He kept his breathing steady; so many things depended on his facade now. And beneath the calm front, turmoil boiled in Rufo. He honestly wondered how it had come down to this, how he had been led to such a dramatic point. He had been used by Barjin when the evil priest had invaded the library several months before; he had been the one who had kicked Cadderly down the secret stairway, nearly leading to the library’s downfall.
Rufo had never quite forgiven himself—no, not forgiven himself, but rather, had never quite been able to justify the action to himself. Self-forgiveness would imply that he held guilty thoughts for that treacherous act, and by this time, the angular man held none. With every event that had come after Barjin’s invasion, Cadderly had become more Rufo’s rival, more his bane. In Shilmista, Cadderly had emerged a hero, while Rufo, through no fault of his own (at least, none that he would admit, even to himself), had become a scapegoat.
Bleary-eyed, Avery stumbled across the floor and pulled on his clothes. Rufo was glad to be released from the headmaster’s gaze.
“Are you coming down with me?” Avery asked.
“Cadderly does not want me there,” the angular man lied. “He said he would meet with you alone in the hearth room before Fredegar began his work.”
“Before dawn,” Avery muttered distastefully.
Rufo continued to stare at the portly headmaster’s back. How had it gotten this far? Rufo didn’t hate Avery—on the contrary, the headmaster had acted on Rufo’s behalf many times over the last decade.
But that was behind them now, the angular man reminded himself. Shilmista had undeniably changed Rufo’s life course, but now, looking at vulnerable Avery, the angular man had to pause and consider just how drastically.
“Well, I am off for the hearth room, then,” Avery announced, moving to the door.
He wasn’t even carrying his mace in the loop on his belt, Rufo noted. And he hadn’t yet prayed and prepared any spells.
“Truly I wish Cadderly would be more conventional,” Avery remarked, his obvious fondness for the young priest showing through, and that only strengthening the treacherous Rufo’s resolve. “But, then, that is his charm, I suppose.” Avery paused and smiled, and Rufo knew the portly man was engaged in some private recollection of Cadderly.
“Meet me in the hearth room for the morning meal,” Avery instructed. “Perhaps I will be able to persuade Cadderly to dine with us.”
“Just what I desire,” the angular man muttered grimly. He moved to the door and watched Avery descend the sweeping stairway to the dimly lighted hearth room.
Rufo closed the door softly. His part was done. He had set events into motion, as the young wizard had instructed him to do. Avery’s fate was the headmaster’s own to deal with.
The angular man leaned back against the wall, desperately trying to dismiss his growing guilt. He recalled Avery’s recent treatment of him, of the terrible things the headmaster had said to him and the threats to drive Rufo from the order.
For Kierkan Rufo, so consumed by resentment, guilt was not a difficult emotion to overcome.
Half asleep in the common room of the inn two doors down from the Dragon’s Codpiece, his head resting on the ledge of the alley window, Pikel heard a distinct whistle. The dwarfs grogginess held fast only for the few moments it took Pikel to remember what his brother would do to him if Ivan caught him asleep on his watch.
Pikel stuck his head out the window and took in a deep breath of the chilly predawn air.
Another whistle sounded, from the alley on the other side of the building he was facing.
“Eh? “ the dwarf questioned, his instincts telling him that the whistles were not random, more probably a signal. Pikel hopped up from his seat and ran to the front door, throwing aside the locking bar and hopping out onto the inn’s front porch.
He saw shapes moving out of the alley beyond the nearest building, shapes moving onto the veranda of the Dragon’s Codpiece, slipping quietly through the open door.
Pikel started forward to better investigate when a movement close beside him stole his attention. A large man rushed up to him, sword slicing wildly. The first hit bounced off the dwarfs armored shoulder, not penetrating but leaving a painful bruise.
“Oooo!” Pikel exclaimed in surprise, backpedaling the way he had come. The man kept right with him, flailing away viciously. Pikel had no weapon—he had left his club back in his room, not really believing Ivan’s growing suspicions that dangers were lurking just outside.
The green-bearded dwarf believed them now, with this man hacking away at him, driving him backward with every step. Blood rolled down one of Pikel’s arms; he took a glancing hit across the cheek that drew a thin red line.
The beating continued relentlessly, and Pikel, nearly across the common room, had little distance left to run.
The lockpick had been silent. Headmaster Avery, his heavy eyelids drooping, didn’t even realize that anyone had entered the Dragon’s Codpiece until the assassins were upon him.
Then they were beyond him, slipping up the stairs as quietly as shadows.
Cadderly looked up from the Tome of Universal Harmony and glanced over his shoulder at Danica.
“What is it?” the woman asked, her meditation interrupted by the sheer intensity of the young scholar’s stare.
Cadderiy lifted a finger over pursed lips, beckoning the woman to be silent. Something had called out to him, a distant song, a voice of impending danger. He took up his spindle-disks and his walking stick and started to rise, facing the closed door.
He hadn’t even left his chair when the door burst open and dark shapes stormed in.
Danica was still sitting cross-legged when the first assassin, sword in hand, rushed at her. The killer came in low, gaping in disbelief as Danica’s coiled legs sprang, her momentum lifting her into the air. She tucked her legs under as she rose, clearing the low strike, then descended on the bending man.
Her legs locked around his neck as she came down, clamping tightly, and she jerked herself to the side violently, dipping into a full bend and throwing her full weight right under the bending man.
The assassin saw the room spin, but his body had not turned.
Cadderly whipped his walking stick across in front of him and was amazed when he heard something—a crossbow quarrel, he realized—tick off it and fly harmlessly wide. He swung again in a wide, shoulder-level arc, this time offensively, as two men bore down on him. Instinctively, Cadderly dropped to one knee and snapped his spindle-disks straight out ahead of him.
The ducking Night Mask came down right in line with this second weapon, catching the adamantite disks on his forearm.
Cadderly expected the man to immediately retaliate, for the young priest had not yet learned of the power of Ivan’s forging. Cadderly stared as the man’s arm folded—it seemed as though he had grown a second elbow!—under the power of the blow.
But pausing to gape with a second enemy so near was not a wise choice. By the time Cadderly realized his error, realized that a spiked club was on its way down to crunch his head, he knew that his life was at its end.
Pikel managed to keep close enough to his pursuer so that the man hadn’t been able to extend his long arms and get in a serious hit. Still, the dwarf said “Oooo!” repeatedly, feeling the sting of a dozen razorlike slashes.
Pikel’s first thought was to go for the stairs, but he dismissed the idea, realizing that if he started up, he would rise to his enemy’s level and lose his desperately needed advantage of being down below the man’s optimum striking area. The dwarf veered to the side, backpedaling faster, nearly tumbling over in the effort.
The man stayed with him, every step.
The killer stopped suddenly, and Pikel realized that he could not do likewise, leaving the dwarf wide open for a full-force roundhouse. “Oooo!” Pikel screamed, desperately hurling himself backward through the air. He collided heavily with the wall before he had gotten very far, and the assassin’s sword whipped across just under the breastplate of the dwarfs fine armor.
Pikel didn’t even have the time to cry out for this newest wound. He bounced back off the wall and charged forward wildly. The assassin held his sword level in front of him, and Pikel would have impaled himself, except that he grabbed the sharp blade with his bare hand and turned it aside.
Then Pikel was up against the man. He released the sword almost immediately and wrapped the man’s arms in his own, pushing with all his strength, his stubby, muscled legs pumping frantically.
Now the killer was backpedaling and Pikel driving forward, gaining speed and momentum. The dwarf could hardly see around the larger man. He aimed for the open door but missed, two feet to the left.
The inn suddenly had a second door.
Danica hit the floor harder than she would have liked, but she managed to scramble back under her victim fast enough so that the next closest Night Mask inadvertently sliced his sword into the back of his still-standing companion.
Out the other side, Danica ran to the foot of the bed, hooked the post in one arm, and spun right around, hopping up onto the mattress. A Night Mask came up on the bed as well, at the other end, bearing down on the apparently unarmed woman.
Danica kept low and kicked straight out. She could hardly brace herself amidst the tangle of blankets, so her kick was not fierce, but neither could the assassin brace himself, so it did not have to be. The man stumbled in the tangle and lurched over. Danica came up under him, hooking her arm under and behind his shoulder and heaved him away, using his own momentum to launch him over the foot end of the bed.
She was up, grabbing the blankets as she went, knowing the sword-wielder was too close. Instinctively she lifted the tangle of cloth out in front of her, smiling grimly as she felt it absorb the weight of the coming blow.
Caught in, and concerned with, the impromptu web, the assassin didn’t even realize Danica’s next attack until her foot connected solidly with his belly.
The agile monk let herself drop as the man lurched over, using the spring of the bed to lift her right back up, her forearm slamming against the stooping man’s face. Danica’s second arm, coiled against her chest, snapped out under the first, thumping into the man’s throat, then she reversed the angle of her first arm, flying high over her head in its follow-through, and came down diagonally at her stunned victim, blasting against his collarbone. He flew to the side, and Danica, temporarily free of any immediate threat, was not pleased by what she saw beyond him.
Again using the spring of the bed, the young woman leaped out, diving between the posts at the foot of the bed. She heard a heavy thump distinctly as a crossbow quarrel hit the wall right behind her.
The man she had thrown this way was back up and turning back to the fight, but hardly prepared as Danica’s shoulder-block launched him over the table and crashing into the wall.
“Stop!” The word came from somewhere deep inside Cadderly. He wasn’t even aware of the magical strength it carried until the killer above him, already beginning his stroke, pulled his spiked club to a halt and stood perfectly still. The weapon hovered just a few inches above Cadderly’s head.
The command had no lasting power, and the assassin came out of it quickly, snarling and lifting his club for another strike.
Still purely on instinct, Cadderly lashed out in two directions at once, slamming his walking stick against the side of the man’s knee, and heaving his spindle-disks straight ahead, to collide with the crumbling killer’s chest and send him flying backward.
“The balcony!” Danica cried, and Cadderly, seeing the group of killers—some cocking crossbows—still coming in the door, could hardly disagree.
Danica hooked his arm as she passed and threw open the door.
The song had started again in Cadderly’s head, somehow passing through the confusion and the many noises.
He grabbed Danica’s hair and jerked violently backward just as the woman took her first step out of the room. Fully caught by surprise, Danica fell back.
Cadderly snapped his spindle-disks across her angled torso, to meet head on with a thrusting dagger coming the other way.
Ivan’s disks easily won the contest, bending the dagger blade and crushing the hand that held it.
Cadderly recoiled quickly, felt the sting as the disks snapped back into his own hand, and then whipped them straight back, this time hitting the wounded Night Mask in the chest, driving him over the railing.
The assassin reached out as he tumbled, grasping futilely at the rail. His hand hooked the balcony just enough to allow him to continue in his spin, to put his legs straight out under him so that when he fell the twenty feet to the ground, he landed flat on his back.
And he lay very still.
Pikel shook the splinters from his beard and hair.
“Me brother!” The call, though emphatic, sounded distant, and then was accentuated by the crash of shattering glass and splintering wood as Ivan, hearing his brother’s distress, ran full speed down the inn’s second story hallway and flung himself headlong through the window above the inn’s front door.
He crashed down with a groan, two feet to the right of Pikel and the stunned assassin, showering the two of them with glass and shards of broken wood.
The killer, up first, his back bleeding from many gashes, turned around to discern this newest threat. He saw the lower half of Ivan—the dwarfs upper torso having plummeted right through the raised wooden decking—but he knew by the way the dwarf was flailing and cursing that Ivan would not be held captive long.
He almost got his sword up before Pikel grabbed him by the ankles and yanked his legs out from under him.
Pikel continued to pull, dragging the man away from Ivan. Rage blinded the green-bearded dwarf. “Ooooooo!” he growled, winding up, beginning his spin, and locking the man’s feet under his arms.
The Night Mask twisted and turned to get at the dwarf, but Pikel’s footing was sure and his spin quickly gained enough momentum to force the man out straight.
“Ooooooo!”
The man bounced and flailed, and had all that he could handle in just keeping a hold on his sword.
“Ooooooo!”
Now the only part of the Night Mask making any contact with the ground was his arms as he struggled to find a handhold, to find something to grab on to.
“Ooooooo!”
Pikel spun furiously; the man, narrowly missing porch posts and the inn’s wall, heartily joined in his scream.
Ivan, back up, watched in disbelief that soon turned to amusement. The dwarf laid his brother’s club aside, spat in both his hands, and took up his huge double-bladed axe.
The killer noticed Ivan’s preparations and gave a halfhearted swing of his sword, not even coming close to hitting the mark. His arm still extended, he slammed his wrist against the porch support as he came around, his sword flying harmlessly out into the street.
Ivan tightened his grasp on the axe. He started to swing, but the man was by him.
“Gotta lead him,” the dwarf reminded himself, taking a bead as the circling target came around again. He saw the Night Mask’s face go ghastly pale, saw the most profound look of horror the tough dwarf had ever witnessed.
Slam!
Distracted by a rare onset of sympathy, Ivan’s timing was not so good and he buried his axe deeply into the wooden decking.
Pikel didn’t even notice his brother or the axe, didn’t notice that the killer’s scream had dissipated in a breathless gasp of terror, and had no idea of how he would stop this spin, or stop the world from spinning in his dizzy head.
“Ooooooo!”
The weight was gone suddenly and Pikel twirled into the wall. He looked down to the empty boots, still held tightly under his arms.
The poor assassin took out the closest supporting pole and crashed through the railing, breaking under the top rail and skidding along through the thin, carved balusters. He bounced along for several feet, then came to an abrupt halt, his hip driving onto the pointed edge of a broken beam. There he lay, half on the porch and half hanging out over the cobblestone street, groaning softly.
“Nice boots,” Ivan remarked, running past Pikel and tossing his brother the tree-trunk club he had brought along. Ivan started for the fallen man, then veered away, hearing a scream as someone went toppling over a balcony—Cadderiy’s balcony—of the Dragon’s Codpiece, two doors down.
Both dwarves breathed a sigh of relief when they rushed past the unmoving form of the fallen man, glad that it was not Cadderly or Danica who had gone for such a tumble. But the continuing sounds of battle twenty feet above them told them that their friends were not out of trouble just yet.
The door to the inn was closed again, and barred, but such had never stopped the Bouldershoulder brothers. Actually, coming into the hearth room with a dislodged door in front of them proved a good thing for the dwarves, for several crossbow quarrels greeted their entrance, thudding harmlessly into the oaken barrier.
A quarrel ripped past Cadderly’s shoulder, drawing a line of blood along his arm. Night Masks bore down on him from behind; two others waited on the balcony, a sword and a heavy axe gleaming dully in the predawn light.
Still holding Danica by the hair, Cadderly pulled the young woman to her feet. Immediately, she became a blur of motion, snapping a burst of kicks and punches at the already wounded men who were closing from behind. She landed several solid hits, enough to force one of the assassins to back off. But the other caught Danica around the waist and his momentum carried both of them across the narrow balcony to the rail.
Danica got one hand up onto her attacker’s face, her fingers seeking out the man’s vulnerable eyes. One of the Night Masks on the balcony, though, forewarned of this extraordinary woman’s prowess, found a devilish answer. A single swing of his huge axe broke apart the railing that was supporting both Danica and her attacker.
They pitched over the side together, Danica releasing her grasp on the man’s face and swinging both her arms wildly to find a handhold.
Cadderly saw her fall away, his face locked in a stare of helpless denial.
A crossbow quarrel smacked into the back of the young priest’s thigh. He turned about as he sank to the deck, sheer rage splayed clearly on his usually calm features. Without even thinking of the movement, Cadderly lifted a clenched fist toward the bowman and uttered, “Fete!” the elven word for fire, the command word for his magical ring.
A line of flames shot out from Cadderly’s hand, seeking his attacker, immolating the man in a burning shroud.
With a mental shriek of revulsion, Cadderly ended the fire. He spun about again, his walking stick leading, and got a solid hit on the swordsman. He didn’t really care how badly he had hurt the man; all he wanted was to get the man out of his way, to clear the path to the axe-wielder who had sent Danica away.
Again, inexperience had led Cadderly to an unwise single-mindedness. Before he ever got near to the axe-wielder, strong hands grabbed at his shoulders and drove him to the side railing.
Ivan threw the heavy door aside, meaning to charge right to the stairs. A gruesome sight off to the side slowed him, though, for just a moment, and when he resumed his charge, his fury had heightened tenfold.
Pikel, too, thought to head straight for the stairs. “Uh-oh,” he mumbled and he ran to the right, for the cover of the room’s bar instead, for several dark shapes knelt in formation on and above that staircase, all holding deadly crossbows.
Pikel dove over the long bar, coming to a crashing halt along the narrow walkway behind, up against kegs of thick ale. To the dwarfs surprise, he was not alone, and he just managed to convince Fredegar Harriman that he was not an enemy a split second before the terrified innkeeper bonked him over the head with a full bottle of brandy.
A quarrel ricocheted off the blade of Ivan’s axe; another struck the dwarf on the head, stunning him, though his fine helmet managed to deflect the thing up between the deer antlers. Perhaps that particular quarrel knocked some sense into the thick-headed dwarf, for Ivan wisely cut to the side, skidding in around the staircase and scrambling for cover underneath it. He slammed hard into one of the structure’s supports as he rushed in, getting all tangled up with it. By the time the dwarf figured out that it was just an ordinary wooden pillar and not some lurking enemy, he had battered it to pieces.
Ivan blushed, thinking himself incredibly foolish. Then he looked around, noticing the other four supports—one more on this side, two on the opposite side and one in the middle—and a wide and wicked grin spread over his face.
Danica caught hold of the feeble trim along Cadderly’s balcony, and her strong hands would not let go, despite the nagging weight of the Night Mask, still clutching at her waist.
The woman wriggled and squirmed, freed up one foot, and slapped it back and forth across the stubborn man’s face.
Only a dozen feet from the ground, the attacker wisely let go, dropping heavily but unharmed, on the cobblestones.
Danica’s thoughts of climbing back up to join Cadderly on the balcony lasted only a moment, until the trim split away on one end from the main frame, sending Danica on a swinging ride around the corner of the balcony.
Instinctively, she kicked out and leaped before the trim broke away altogether, latching on to the sill of a window near the building’s corner, opposite from where she had left Cadderly. Unable to break her momentum, Danica was forced to leap out again, farther from the fight, but this time landing with a more solid handhold and foothold on a gutter running up the side of the building, just around the corner.
By the time she managed to peek around, the balcony was crowded with black-and-silver-outfitted assassins. She didn’t see Cadderly at first amid that throng and could not pause long enough to sort him out, for one crossbowman put her immediately in his sights and two other assassins came over the rail, walking the ledge toward the gutter.
Danica scrambled the ten feet or so to the rooftop. Only as she pulled herself over did she realize that she had somehow badly twisted her knee, probably in the struggle over the railing.
“Cadderly,” she mumbled over and over; this scenario reminded her vividly of when she had left the young priest to join the fray in Shilmista, when she had been forced to trust in Cadderly to take care of himself.
She started across the roof, thinking to go right above the balcony and leap down upon the enemy. She turned, though, hearing the gutter groan under the weight of a pursuer.
“Do come up,” Danica muttered grimly, thinking to clobber the fool as soon as he poked his head over the roofs edge. It never occurred to her that this well-prepared band might already have someone planted on the roof.
She heard the crossbow click behind her.
“A valiant fight, Lady Maupoissant,” said a baritone voice at her back, “but a futile effort against the skill of the Night Masks.”
Cadderly’s walking stick flew away when he collided with the railing. He hardly kept his bearings as he spun over, but did manage to loop one arm about the railing.
It seemed a wasted effort, though, for the Night Mask clubbed at that arm mercilessly, determined to drop the young priest over the side.
Cadderly’s first instinct told him to just drop—the fall probably wouldn’t kill him. He realized, though, that another assassin loomed below, and he would be easy prey before he ever recovered from the fall.
None of it seemed to matter when the second Night Mask, the axe-wielder, joined the first at the railing above him.
“Farewell, young priest,” the man said evilly, lifting his cruel weapon to split Cadderly’s head wide.
Cadderly tried to utter a magical command at that man, but he could do no more than groan as the club connected again against his already wounded shoulder.
The young priest glanced around desperately, only a brief moment left open to him. He saw a tiny ledge along the building a few feet away, behind him, and for some reason he did not understand, a memory of Percival, the white squirrel, came to him, an image of Percival skittering happily and easily along ledges at least that thin back at the Edificant Library.
There was no way that any man could make that leap to the ledge, as twisted as Cadderiy was. Yet somehow, he was there, and not holding desperately. Hand over hand, foot over foot, the young priest ran along the ledge.
“Get him!” he heard one of the frustrated and astonished assassins yell from behind, and then the other called for a crossbow.
Cadderiy came up fast on the corner, with no intentions of turning aside. The alley was only about eight feet wide at this point, but the only apparent handhold on the building across the way was several feet higher than his present perch. By the time Cadderiy registered this fact in the still-dim morning light, though, it was too late for him to alter his course.
He leaped, soared, impossibly high and impossibly far. Hardly slowing, he found himself scrambling easily up the side of the other building, disappearing over the top before any crossbowman back on the balcony could begin to get a shot at him.
Pikel peeked up over the bar to see one of the assassins bearing down on him, the other two leaning over the far side of the staircase, trying to get a shot at Ivan.
The green-bearded dwarf hopped up, club in hand, ready to meet the challenge.
“Here,” came Fredegar’s call behind him. Pikel glanced back to see the brandy bottle, now stuffed with a burning rag, coming for nun.
“Oo oi!” Pikel cried, too startled to catch it, as Frede-gar had intended. The dwarf did get a hand off his club fast enough to tap the bottle over him, though, and he spun about immediately and shimmed the slow-moving missile with his club, creating a small fireball and showering the approaching assassin with glass shards and flaming liquid.
“Oo oi!” Pikel squealed again, this time happily, as the man fell away to the floor and rolled about desperately to get the stubborn flames off his robes. When the assassin finally got back up, he ran screaming for the door, having no more heart for the fight.
The dwarf hopped up on the bar, then fell back again as the bowmen on the stairs took note of him.
Cunning Ivan’s only mistake was that he saved the center support for last. Not until he knocked it out, with a single powerful swipe of his axe, did the grinning dwarf realize that he was stood directly under the heavy structure.
The stairs, and the two surprised Night Masks standing on them, came tumbling down.
Only one of the assassins had regained his feet when Ivan finally managed to burst through the pile of broken wood. The dwarf came up with a roar and tried to swing his axe, only to find its head caught fast on a random beam.
The assassin, bruised but not too hurt, grinned at him and pulled out a short sword.
Ivan tugged mightily, and the axe pulled free, coming across so swiftly that neither the dwarf nor the assassin even realized its movement as it struck the assailant, cutting cleanly through the man’s belly.
“Bet that hurt,” Ivan mumbled with a helpless, almost embarrassed shrug.
Again Pikel hopped up on the bar, and again he reconsidered, seeing a pair of dark shapes rush out of Cadderiy’s room into the aisle above, right to the lip of the fallen stairway.
The frustrated dwarf groaned loudly—these two also carried those wretched crossbows.
Pikel realized that he wasn’t their target, but he knew, too, that Ivan, standing unsuspectingly right below the ledge, was.
Night Masks. The words stung Danica’s heart as surely as could the crossbow quarrel aimed her way.
Night Masks. The band that had killed her parents; the wretched, evil assassins of Westgate, the town where Danica had been raised. The questions that rushed into the young woman’s mind—Had they come for her? Where they working for the same enemy that had sent Barjin and the invading army into Shilmista?—were no match for the bile, the sheer rage, that climbed up the young woman’s throat.
Slowly, she turned to face her adversary, locking his gaze with her own. He was a curious sight, bleeding in several places, leaning to one side, and struggling to draw breath, with half of his face swelling in a grotesque purple bruise and wooden splinters sticking from his hair, face, and arms. And for some reason, the man was barefoot.
“I will not ask for a surrender,” the assassin slurred, waving the weapon. “Not after the dwarves ...” He shook away the frightening memory of the fight at the other inn, dropping several splinters to the roof with the effort.
“You shall be offered none,” Danica assured, barely able to spit the words through gritted teeth. A growl escaped her lips as she dove to the roof and rolled.
The crossbow fired and Danica felt something thud against her side, though she was too enraged to know the seriousness of the wound or even to realize the pain. She came up near where the man had been, to find that he had taken flight.
Danica was on him in a few strides. He spun to face her, and she leaped into him, grabbing him tightly. Her knee moved repeatedly, each blow connecting on the man’s groin.
She hit him a dozen times, grabbed his hair and ears and yanked his head back from her, then pulled it forward and drove her forehead in to meet it, splattering the man’s nose and knocking out several teeth.
She kneed him a dozen more times and butted him again. Her fingers raked the beaten man’s face; she drove one finger right through his eye.
Night Masks!
Danica jumped back from the doomed man, spinning a circle kick that snapped his head to the side violently and forced him into a series of stumbling steps. Somehow he did not fall down, though he was hardly conscious of his surroundings.
Danica leaped high behind him, lay herself fiat out, planted both feet on the man’s back, and sent him in a running takeoff over the roofs edge.
She pulled herself back to her feet, saw that two men had gained the roof by the gutter, though neither had summoned the courage to charge the furious woman.
Too many emotions assaulted the wounded and weary monk. The appearance of the assassin band, the knowledge that these were Night Masks, sent her mind careening down a hundred corridors of distant memories. More recent memories, too, like the strange dream of the previous night, when she had, for a moment, entered the consciousness of her mental attacker.
What had happened to Cadderly? Danica’s fear multiplied when she learned the identity of the killers. Had the Night Masks again taken the love from Danica’s life?
She fled, her eyes filled with tears, her arm and side throbbing. Up the sloping rooftops, across the uneven angles, leaping the small gaps, the young monk went.
The two killers followed her every step.
Ivan looked down, an inch to the side, to the neat hole the crossbow quarrel had drilled into the lumber pile. Slowly, the dwarf lifted his gaze to the men standing ten feet above him, one leaning over the broken ledge, smiling grimly, with a cocked crossbow pointed Ivan’s way.
Sheer desperation shoved new heights of insight into the mind of Pikel Bouldershoulder. Ivan—his brother!—was about to die! Pikel’s eyes darted all about, taking in a surrealistic view of the grim scene.
Bar . . . pile . . . dead man (guts, yech) . . . struggling men . . . Ivan . . . precipice . . . crossbowman . . . chandelier . . .
Chandelier? Chandelier above the leaning man.
They had to bring the thing down to light the candles, Pikel reasoned. The dwarf whipped his head about, his gaze coming to rest on the crank, conveniently located at the back of the bar.
The assassin standing over Ivan paused long enough to wave good-bye to the helpless dwarf.
Pikel could have just pulled the pin out of the crank to set the spindle spinning, but now was not the time for finesse. With a “Whoop!” to try to distract the crossbowman a moment longer, the green-bearded dwarf hopped from the bar to the shelving along the wall, crashing aside scores of mugs and bottles, the shelves breaking away under his weight.
“Ooooooo!” he wailed as he slammed his club against the crank. Spindle and all broke out from the wall, hanging stubbornly by a single peg. Pikel, on his knees beside Fredegar, looked at it as though it had tricked him, but then, with a loud popping noise, the last peg gave and the whole assembly rocketed up into the air.
“What?” the confused crossbowman asked.
His companion behind him gasped.
The chandelier took the crossbowman on the shoulder, spinning him over the precipice.
He crashed into the wood pile beside Ivan, the stunned dwarf nodding, stupefied. As though the gods had decided to play some macabre joke, Ivan heard the distinctive click a moment later as the crushed man’s crossbow, pressed harmlessly between the man and the broken stairs, fired.
“Hee hee hee,” chuckled Pikel, standing again to watch the spectacle. He forgot that the spindle above him was fast unwinding, and fast dropping, and he was back to his knees when it ricocheted off his skull.
“Oooo.”
“Set the rope!” he heard Ivan cry, and, shaking away his dizziness, Pikel wrapped the rope in his arms.
Ivan grasped his axe handle in his teeth (not an easy thing to do!) and started up. He noticed that the remaining assassin in the pile behind him was getting to his feet, so he jumped back down to the raised end of a plank lying between him and the man. Ivan’s end snapped down and the end under the crawling assassin went up, slamming the man under the chin. He groaned and rolled away, grabbing at his shattered jawbone.
That done, Ivan leaped up again, stubby arms pulling him up the rope to the level of the other crossbowman. To the side, he noticed that Pikel was similarly climbing.
Ivan rushed on, finally getting his head high enough so that he could see the other man.
It was not a pleasant sight.
For the second time in the last few moments, Ivan Bouldershoulder stared into the wrong end of a readied crossbow.
Pikel made the ledge and let go of the rope, realizing only then that he had not secured it below him.
Ivan dropped like a stone. The crossbow fired, harmlessly high. And the stubborn assassin on the first level, his jaw grotesquely shattered, realized his folly in going to the rope under the climbing dwarf.
As he sat atop the man, atop the pile of broken stairs, Ivan, for perhaps the first time, thought it was not such a bad thing to have a scatter-brained brother.
Still on all fours, the young priest skittered fast and surefooted along the edge of the adjoining building. His spindle-disks clung tightly to his hand, hanging to the end of theff-cord and bouncing along the building’s side. Cadderly hardly noticed them, and had no time to stop and replace them in any event. Nor did the young priest note that the pain was no more in his wounded thigh.
He spotted Danica, running weakly away from him, limping, and then he spotted the two black-robed killers in pursuit, gaining on the stumbling woman with every stride.
Cadderly came up on the other side of the building, where the alley opened perpendicularly to a wide lane of craft stores called Market Square. Two merchants, up at dawn to prepare for the coming day, spotted the young priest and stared, then pointed up and called out something that Cadderly did not bother to decipher.
Too enraged to think of his movements, Cadderly slipped headfirst over the side of the building, going down hand over hand. A banner had been strung along thick ropes across the alley as a sign for one of the craftsmen’s shops.
Hand over hand, foot over foot, Cadderly ran across the tightrope. He heard a shout of disbelief from the street below, didn’t even realize that it was aimed his way. Back on the many-angled roof of the Dragon’s Codpiece, the young priest charged off, nothing but Danica in his thoughts.
He spotted her a moment later—she had leaped across the narrow alley to the next building—stumbling over the crest of a dormer, going headlong. The two men went over right behind her.
“No!” the young priest tried to call out, but his word came out as a strange, squealing sound.
Never slowing, his eyes focused straight ahead, Cadderly flew over the short alley expanse.
One of the black-robed killers emerged from the region Danica had entered, in full flight. Cadderly feared he was too late.
The remaining man in the corridor darted into Cadderly’s room, brushing aside the smoke and stench of charred flesh that blocked the doorway.
Pikel grabbed the rope again, and Ivan began to climb, his efforts aided by his brother’s hauling movements toward Cadderly’s door.
Pikel drove on, much relieved when he saw Ivan’s stubby hand come over the lip of the hallway. But then four shapes emerged from Cadderly’s room.
Pikel instinctively let go of the rope.
He winced at Ivan’s diminishing wail and the dull thump as Ivan landed again on the assassin at the bottom of the rope.
Pikel couldn’t worry about it, though, not with four killers just a few strides away.
But the Night Masks were no longer interested in battle. Seeing the stairs gone, they sought other avenues of escape. One grabbed the rope and, without even testing to see if it was secured, leaped over the precipice. The others ran the other way down the hall, scrambling over the railing wherever they found high spots—tables mostly—where they could get down.
Pikel thought to give chase, but he paused when he heard a door creak open, heard chanting. The next thing the green-bearded dwarf knew, he was lying several feet from where he had been standing, a sharp and burning pain in one side, and his shocked hair wildly dancing on end.
Me brudder. The words cried out in Pikel’s mind over and over, a litany against the swirling dizziness, a reminder that he could not remain up here, lying helplessly on the floor.
Ivan heard the man land heavily beside him, and he felt the other one squirming slowly beneath him. The dwarf opened one heavy eyelid to see the assassin standing over him, sword in hand.
The thrust came before the dwarf could react, and Ivan thought he was dead, but the assassin struck low, beneath Ivan.
Ivan didn’t question his luck. He struggled to a sitting position, trying to locate his axe, or anything else he might use against the standing killer.
Too late. The assassin’s sword came up again.
“Me brudder!” Pikel cried as he flew over the precipice.
The assassin dove away, rolled to his feet, and followed his companions out the door.
Pikel hit Ivan full force.
Ivan groaned as he waited patiently (he had no choice in the matter) for Pikel to crawl off him. “If ye’re looking for thanks, keep looking,” Ivan grumbled.
Cadderly was too late in getting to the scene—for the sake of the other assassin.
The young priest relaxed as soon as he crested the steep roof. Danica was below him, in a valley between several gables. The remaining assassin was there, too, kneeling before Danica, his arms defenselessly by his sides and his head snapping to one side and the other, blood and sweat flying wide, as Danica landed blow after blow on his face.
“He is dead,” Cadderly remarked when he got beside the young monk.
Danica, sobbing, slammed the man again, the shattered cartilage of his facial bones crackling under the blow.
“He is dead!” Cadderly said more emphatically, though he kept his tone calm and unaccusing.
Danica spun about, her face contorted with a mixture of rage and sorrow, and fell into his arms. Cadderly stared curiously as he wrapped his own arms about her, and Danica jumped back, staring at the young priest in disbelief.
“What?” she stammered, backpedaling even farther, and Cadderiy, noticing the change for the first time, had no answers for her.
His arms and legs, covered in white fur, had become those of a squirrel.
“Turn it back,” Danica pleaded, her voice edged in desperation, her hands trembling at her sides. Cadderly stared helplessly at his squirrellike limbs, without the slightest idea of how to beguin to reverse the process. “I cannot,” he admitted, as much to himself as to Danica. He looked helplessly to her, his gray eyes wide with disbelief and horror.
“I cannot.”
Danica moved to him, or tried to, until the pain in her side sent her lurching over. She grasped at the bloody wound in her abdomen just above her hip, and slumped to one knee.
Stubbornly, Danica got back to her feet, one hand held out in front of her to keep her concerned lover at bay.
“That must be tended,” Cadderfy pleaded.
“With squirrel arms?” Danica’s retort stung the young priest more than she had intended. “Turn your arms and legs back to human, Cadderly. I beg you.”
Cadderly stared long and hard at his limbs, feeling deceived, feeling as though his god, or the magic, had led him astray. Danica stood before him, needing him, and he, with the limbs of a rodent, could do nothing for her.
The young priest searched his memory, let page after page of the Tome of Universal Harmony flip through his thoughts in rapid succession. Nothing openly hinted at what he had done, at this transformation, miraculous and damning, that he had somehow brought upon himself.
But while Cadderly found no direct answers, he did begin that distant harmony, that sweet, inspiring song where all the mysteries of existence drifted past him, waiting to be grasped and deciphered. The song rang out a single word to the young priest, the name of the one person who might help him make sense of it all.
“Pertelope?” Cadderly asked blankly.
Danica, still grimacing, stared at him.
“Pertelope,” he said again, more firmly. He turned his gaze to Danica, his breath coming in short gasps. “She knows.”
“She knows what?” the young woman asked, wincing with every word.
“She knows,” was all Cadderly could answer, for in truth, he did not really know what information the headmistress might have for him. He sensed only that the song was not tying to him, was not leading him astray.
“I must go to her.”
“She is at the library,” Danica argued. “It will take you three . . .”
Cadderly stopped her with an outstretched palm. He closed his mind to the stimuli around him and focused on the song again, felt it flow across the miles, calling him to step into it. Cadderly fell in with the tune, let it carry him along. The world became a dreamscape, surreal, unreal. He saw the gates of Carradoon and the western road leading into higher ground. Mountain passes zipped along beneath his consciousness, then he saw the library fast approaching, came upon the ivy-strewn walls and passed right through them ... to Pertelope’s room.
Cadderly recognized the tapestry on the back wall, to the side of the bed, the same one he had stolen so that Ivan could use it in making a replica of the drew crossbow.
“I have been waiting for you to come to me,” he heard Pertelope say. The image of the room shifted and there sat the headmistress on the edge of her bed, dressed as always in her long-sleeved, high-necked black gown. Her eyes widened as she regarded the presence, and Cadderly understood that she saw him, with his rodent limbs, though he had left his corporeal form far behind.
“Help me,” he pleaded.
Pertelope’s comforting smile fell over him warmly.
“You have found Affinity? the headmistress explained, “a powerful practice, and not without its dangers.”
Cadderly had no idea what Pertelope was talking about. Affinity? He had never heard the word used in such a way.
“The song is playing for you,” Pertelope remarked, “often without your bidding.” Cadderly’s face revealed his startlement.
“I knew it would,” Pertelope continued. “When I gave you the Tome of Universal Harmony, I knew the song would begin to play in your mind, and I knew that you would soon find the means to decipher the mysteries hidden within its notes.”
“I have not” Cadderly protested. “I mean, things are happening around me, and to me”—he looked helplessly at his own limbs, translucent replicas of his corporeal form— “but they are not of my doing, not of my control.”
“Of course they are,” Pertelope replied, drawing his attention away from his polymorphed limbs. “The book is the conduit to the magical energy bestowed through the power of Deneir. You summon and guide that energy. It comes to your call and bends to your will.”
Cadderly looked down helplessly, and doubtingly, at his deformed body. He knew Pertelope could see his problem, and wondered if Danica could as well, back on the rooftop in Carradoon. Those squirrel limbs flew in the face of what the headmistress was saying, for if Cadderly could control the magic, as Pertelope insisted, then why had he remained half a rodent?
“You have not learned complete control,” the headmistress said to him, as though she had read his mind, “but you are still a novice, after all, untrained and with mighty powers at your fingertips.”
“Powers from Deneir?” Cadderly asked.
“Of course,” answered Pertelope coyly, as though Cadderly’s next remark would come as no shock whatsoever to her.
“Why would Deneir grant me such powers?” the young priest asked. “What have I done to warrant such a gift?”
Pertelope laughed at him. “You are his disciple.”
“I am not!” Cadderly said, and he gave a horrified expression, realizing that he had offered that admission to a headmistress of his order.
Again, Pertelope only laughed. “You are, Cadderly,” she said, “You are a true disciple of our god, and of Oghma, the brother god, as well. Do not measure fealty in terms of rituals and attendance to duties. Measure it by what lies in your heart, by your morals and your love. You are a scholar, in all your inquisitive mind and in all your heart, a blessed scholar. That is the measure of fealty to Deneir.”
“Not according to Avery,” Cadderly argued. “How often he has threatened to throw me out of the order altogether for my indiscretions concerning those rituals you so quickly dismiss!”
“He could not throw you out of any order,” Pertelope replied. “One cannot be ‘thrown out’ of a religious calling.”
“Religious calling?” Cadderly replied. “If that is what you must label it, then I fear I was never in the order to begin with. I have no calling.”
“That’s absurd,” replied Pertelope. “You are as attuned with the precepts of Deneir as any person I have ever met. That, my young priest, is what constitutes a religious calling! Do you doubt the powers you have begun to unlock?”
“Not the powers,” Cadderly replied with typical stubbornness, “but their source.”
“It is Deneir.”
“So you say,” answered Cadderly, “and so you are free to believe.”
“You will, too, in time. You are a priest of Deneir, a follower of a god who demands independence, the exercise of free will, and the exercise of intellect,” Pertelope continued, again as though she had read Cadderly’s mind. He had to wonder if Pertelope hadn’t played through this scenario herself many years ago.
“You are supposed to question—to question everything, even the existence of the gods and the purpose of being alive,” Pertelope continued, her hazel eyes taking on a faraway, mystical look. “If you would follow blindly from ritual to ritual, you would be no better than the cattle and sheep that dot the fields around Carradoon.
“Deneir does not want that,” Pertelope went on, calmly, comfortingly, and looking directly back at the frightened young priest. “He is a god for artists and poets, freethinkers all, else their work would be no more than replicas of what others have deemed ideal. The question, Cadderly, is stronger than the answer. It is what accomplishes growth—growth toward Deneir.”
Somewhere deep inside, Cadderly prayed that Pertelope was speaking truthfully, that the apparent wisdom of her words wasn’t just the feeble hope of one as confused and desperate as he.
“You have been chosen,” Pertelope went on, bringing the conversation back to more concrete terms. “You hear the song and will come, over time, to decipher more and more of its notes, to better understand your place in this confusing experience that we call life.”
“I am a wizard.”
“No!” It was the first time that she appeared angry during the conversation, she did not immediately reply. “Your magic is nature!” Pertelope asserted. “Was it beyond those enchantments a priests is casting?”
Cadderly thought long and hard. In truth, everything magical he had done in some way, at least, replicated clerical spells. Even this Affinity was not so different from the shape-changing abilities exhibited by the woodland priests, the druids. But still, his powers were different, Cadderly knew.
“I do not pray for these spells,” he argued. “I do not get out of my bed in the morning with the notion that I should be able to create light this day, or that I will find need to turn my arms into a squirrel’s paws. Nor do I pray to De-neir, at any time.”
“You read the book,” Pertelope reasoned, stealing Cadderly’s building momentum. “That is your prayer. As far as selecting spells and memorizing their particular chants and inflections, you have no need. You hear the song, Cadderly. You are one of the chosen, one of the few. I had suspected that fact for many years, and came to understand just a few weeks ago that you would take my place.”
“What are you talking about?” Cadderly asked, his near-panic only intensified by the fact that Pertelope, as she spoke, had begun to unbutton her long gown. Cadderly gaped in amazement as the headmistress peeled the garment off, revealing a featureless torso covered by skin that resembled the hide of a shark, covered not with skin, but with sharp denticles.
“I was raised from childhood on the Sword Coast,” the headmistress began wearily, “near the sea. My father was a fisherman, and often I would go out with him to tend the nets. You see, I found affinity with the shark, as you have with squirrels—with Percival in particular. I came to marvel at the graceful movements, at the perfection of that oft-maligned creature.
“I already explained to you that Affinity is a practice that is not without its dangers,” Pertelope went on, giving an ironic chuckle. “You see, I, too, fell prey to the chaos curse. Under its influences, I assumed my affinity with the sharks. Now it is too late to change complitly back.”
It hurt Cadderly to think that this wonderful woman, always a dear friend to him, had suffered by the curse that he had brought upon the library.
There was no malice, no blame, edging Pertelope’s voice as she continued.
“The change I enacted is permanent,” she said, rubbing a hand along her arm, the denticles drawing several lines of blood on her human palm. “It is painful, too, for my whole body is part human and part fish. The very air is poison to me, as would be the waters of the wide sea. I have no place left in this world, my friend. I am dying.”
“No!”
“Easy,” Pertelope replied easily. “I am not young, you know, and have labored long on this confusing path we call life. The curse killed me, do not doubt, and I have struggled to hang on for the very purpose that is before me this day. You, Cadderly, are my successor.”
“I will not accept it.”
“You cannot avoid it,” answered the headmistress. “Once begun, the song never ends. Never.”
The word sounded like the bang of a drum to Cadderly, suddenly terrified of what horrors he may have unlocked in the pages of that awful book.
“You will come to know the limitations of your powers,” Pertelope went on. “And there are indeed limitations.” She looked disconcertingly at her own destroyed arms as she spoke, making her point all too clear. “You are not invincible. You are not all-powerful. You are not a god.”
“I never said—“
“Humility will be your preservation,” Pertelope promptly, sharply interrupted. “Test the powers, Cadderly, but test them with respect. They will drain you and take a bit of you with them whenever you summon them. Exhaustion is your enemy, and know that enacting magic will inevitably weary the spellcaster. But know, too, that if Deneir has chosen you, he will demand of you.”
Pertelope smiled warmly, revealing her confidence that Cadderly would be up to meeting the challenge.
No reciprocal smile found its way to Cadderly’s face.
“Do you plan to go somewhere?” Ghost whispered to Bogo Rath, seeing the young wizard in the upstairs hall of the Dragon’s Codpiece with a sack in hand. The assassin stepped out of Cadderly’s room and motioned for Bogo to follow him to his own room.
“The city guard has been called,” the wizard explained. “They will swarm all about this place.”
“And find what?” Ghost replied with a snicker, thinking it an ironic statement, given that he had just deposited Brennan’s body in Cadderly’s room. “Certainly nothing to implicate either one of us.”
“I hit the green-bearded dwarf with a lightning bolt,” Bogo admitted.
“He did not see you,” Ghost retorted. “If he had, you would be dead. Both he and his brother are up and about, downstairs with Fredegar. They would have come back for you long before this if the stupid dwarf suspected you had launched that magic.”
Bogo relaxed a bit. “Did Cadderly and Danica get away?”
Ghost shrugged, unable to answer. He had seen little beyond the carnage left in the wake of the violence. “Temporarily, perhaps,” he answered at length, and with as much conviction as he could muster. “But the Night Masks have been set on the trail now. They will not stop until the young priest is dead.
“Then I am free to return to Castle Trinity,” Bogo reasoned hopefully.
“If you try to leave now, you will invite only suspicion,” Ghost replied. “And if Cadderly has managed to elude the assassins, he will likely return here. This is still the best seat at the game, for those who have the courage to play to the end.”
The last words sounded clearly like a threat.
“Aid the city guard in their investigation,” Ghost continued, a sudden ironic smile crossing his features. He was the artist, he privately reminded himself, already weaving new webs of intrigue. “Tell them you possess some knowledge of magic, and that you believe a bolt of lightning was set off in the upstairs corridor. When the dwarf confirms your story, you will be viewed in a favorable light.”
Bogo eyed the assassin doubtfully, even more so when he remembered that Kierkan Rufo was still about, carrying information that could certainly damn him.
“What is it?” Ghost asked, seeing his mounting concern.
“Rufo.”
Ghost chuckled evilly. “He can say nothing without implicating himself. And he, by all of your descriptions, is too much a coward to do that.”
“True enough,” Bogo admitted, “but I am still not certain of our wisdom in remaining at the inn. We have underestimated Cadderiy and his friends, it would seem.”
“Perhaps,” Ghost said in reluctant agreement, “but do not complicate the error by overestimating the priest now. For all we know, Cadderly might lie dead in an alley.”
Bogo hesitated, then nodded.
“Be gone,” Ghost instructed, “back to your room, or to aid in the investigation, but say nothing to Rufo. Better that the cowardly priest be left alone to stew in his guilt and terror.”
Again Bogo nodded and then was gone.
Ghost’s confidence disappeared as soon as he was alone. This had been a complicated visit to Carradoon, had not been a clean kill. Even if Cadderly was dead, the toll had been horrendous, with more than half of the dedicated Night Mask band killed.
Ghost really was no longer sure that remaining at the Dragon’s Codpiece would bode well for either himself or Bogo, but he feared the consequences of trying to slip away with the city guard, and two rambunctious dwarves, snooping around. He moved to his door and cracked it open an inch, curious to see what might be transpiring outside. He watched carefully for Rufo, thinking that if the treacherous priest made any dangerous moves, he might have to kill him.
No, it had not been without complications, but that was part of the fun of it all, was it not? It was a new challenge for the artist, an intricate landscape for the filling canvas.
Ghost smiled wickedly, taking comfort in the fact that he wasn’t in any personal danger—not while he had the Ghearufu, and had Vander as a waiting and helpless host on the outskirts of town.
Cadderiy was relieved to see Danica still up and conscious when he rejoined his corporeal form on the rooftop beside the Dragon’s Codpiece. The young woman’s face remained contorted in pain. A crossbow quarrel protruded from her right side, hanging from skin and tunic and surrounded by a widening crimson stain.
Cadderiy did not immediately go to her. He closed his eyes and forced the song back into his thoughts. The notes drifted past until Cadderiy recalled that part of the song, that page in the tome, he had been hearing back on the balcony when he had enacted the change to the squirrel form.
Danica whispered to him softly, sounding more concerned for his own safety than for her own. With some effort, Cadderiy pushed her words away, concentrated on the music. His mouth moved in silent prayer, and when he at last opened his eyes, Danica was straining to smile and his arms and legs were back to normal.
“You found your answers,” the young woman remarked.
“Along with more questions,” Cadderiy replied. He pulled his spindle-disks from their tight hold on his finger and tucked them away, then moved beside his love.
“You were speaking,” Danica said to him, “but not to me. It sounded like half of a conversation, the other half—“
“Was with Pertelope,” Cadderiy explained. “I, or at least my consciousness, was back in the library.” He hardly noticed Danica’s stare, was more interested in her sorely wounded side.
When he recalled the song this time, it sounded more distant to him, required more effort to get near it. Pertelope’s warnings of exhaustion welled up in him, but he pushed his mounting fears away; Danica’s health was more important.
Cadderiy focused on the dangling quarrel as much as on the wound it had caused; his thoughts were as much on destruction as on healing. His chant was uttered through gritted teeth.
Danica grunted and winced. Black smoke wafted from her wound. Soon a small cloud of the stuff covered her side.
The quarrel was his enemy, was Danica’s enemy, Cadderiy determined. Poor Danica, dear Danica.
When the smoke dissipated, gone, too, were the crossbow quarrel and the wound.
Danica straightened and shrugged, not knowing how she could possibly thank Cadderiy for what he had done.
“Are you injured?” she asked, concerned.
Cadderiy shook his head and took her arm. “We must be gone “ he said, his tone absent, as though he was talking more to himself than to Danica. “We must go and sit together, privately, and try to sort through the turns fate has shown us.” He cocked his head, turned his attention to the growing tumult in the awakening lanes around the Dragon’s Codpiece, particularly to the clip-clop of many hooves echoing from every direction.
“The city guard is about,” Danica replied. “They will require information.”
Cadderiy continued to pull her along.
“We have nowhere to go,” Danica argued as they neared the building’s back edge, many soldiers coming into sight along Market Square.
Cadderiy wasn’t listening. His eyes were closed again and he was deep in some chant, deep in song.
Danica’s eyes widened one more time as she felt herself become something less than substantial. Somehow Cadderly kept his grip on her arm and together they simply blew away, off the rooftop, riding the currents of the wind.
Bogo Rath slipped out of the Dragon’s Codpiece a short while later, rushing briskly past the dwarves and the bereaved innkeeper in the hearth room. After brief consideration, the frightened young wizard decided that Ghost’s presumptions were not worth risking his life over, and he decided, too, that departing the inn after such tragedy could not be viewed as a suspicious act.
The only thing the city guardsman asked of him as he passed through the hole where the front door had been was that he remain in town.
Bogo nodded and pointed to an inn a few doors farther up Lakeview Street, though the wizard had no intention of staying around for very long. He would go to the inn and get a room, but would remain in Carradoon only until he had studied the spells that would allow him to leave quickly and without the possibility of being stopped.
The morning light was still new, and the mist had not yet flown from the waters of Impresk Lake.
The great three-arched stone bridge connecting the mainland to Carradoon’s island section loomed ghostly. It towered above Cadderly and Danica as they drifted in a small rowboat, quiet with their thoughts and the lap of the gentle waves against the prow.
The weather was fitting to Cadderly’s grim mood. He had killed a man, had burned him to a blackened ball, and had knocked another from the balcony, leaving him for dead as well. There had been no real choice, Cadderiy knew, but he could not easily dismiss his guilt. Whatever the reasons, he had killed a human being.
He tried hard to not think of the man’s family, children perhaps, waiting for a father that would never return.
Danica, too, sat quietly, deep in thought, at the small boat’s prow. More accustomed to battle than her somewhat innocent companion, the young woman was more concerned with what had precipitated the vicious attack.
What had brought the Night Masks upon her and Cadderly?
Cadderly took up the oars and gave a single stroke, reversing the drift and pushing the boat farther out from the imposing bridge. He let the oars hang in the water and turned about on the bench seat to face Danica.
“Night Masks,” Danica muttered grimly.
Cadderly looked at her; the name meant little to him.
“From Westgate,” Danica explained. “They are among the deadliest killers in all the Realms. We were fortunate to escape them, and I now believe I have escaped them twice.”
Cadderly’s expression showed that he still did not understand.
“On our journey down from the library,” Danica continued, “the dwarves and I were attacked by a band of five.”
“Many bandits have been reported on the roads during these troubled times “ Cadderly remarked.
Danica shook her head, certain that there was a connection between the attack on the road and the one in Cadderly’s room.
“Why would an assassin’s guild from Westgate come after us?” Cadderly reasoned.
“Us?” echoed Danica, “No, they are after me, I fear. It was the Night Masks who killed my parents, years ago. Now they have come to finish the job.”
Cadderly didn’t believe a word of that explanation. He sensed that—if Danica’s theories about the identity of the killer band were correct—there was more at work here than the completion of a decade-old vendetta. Cadderly contemplated his own experiences of the last few days, thought of his meeting with Rufo in the hearth room and the presence of the invisible wizard. And what had happened, he wondered, back in his own room that night?
He looked at Danica quizzically. “I found you on the floor, terrified. Tell me about your dream.”
“I do not remember much,” Danica admitted, and her tone revealed that she did not really see the point of it all. Cadderly was determined, though. He thought for a moment, then took out his crystal-centered spindle-disks.
He held them up before Danica’s eyes and set them spinning. Even in the dim light, the crystals flickered with reflective fires. “Concentrate,” Cadderly begged the woman. “Let the crystal into your mind. Please, do not use your meditative talents to block me now.”
“What will this tell us?” Danica argued. “It was just a dream.”
“Was it?”
Danica shrugged—it was a dream that contained references to the Night Masks, after all—and relaxed, focusing her gaze on the spindle-disks. Cadderly watched her intently, then closed his eyes and thought of the sacred tome, heard the song playing the words to a simple spell of hypnosis.
Danica sank deeper, her shoulders visibly slumping, as Cadderly quietly chanted. His words became prying questions that Danica heard only subconsciously.
Cadderly, too, allowed the hypnosis to fall over him, used it to achieve complete empathy with Danica.
The questions rolled out of his mouth, though he was barely aware of them. And Danica answered, as much with her posture and her facial expressions as with mere words.
Danica blinked her eyes open; Cadderly followed her lead. Neither of them knew how much time had passed, but Cadderly understood then, beyond any doubt, that Danica’s nighttime experience had indeed been an important clue.
“It was not a dream,” he announced.
Cadderly recalled what Danica had imparted to him under the hypnosis: the sense of departure from a black sphere that the young priest knew represented her identity. The image reminded the young priest vividly of his own telepathic experiences with the imp Druzil and the wizard Dorigen. Might those two be behind all this?
Cadderly dropped a hand into his pocket to feel the amulet he had taken from Rufo in Shilmista Forest, an amulet that Druzil had given Rufo to improve telepathic contact between the two. With the amulet, Cadderly had been able to sense the imp’s proximity, and he took comfort that it had not signaled Drazil’s presence in many weeks, not since the large battle in the forest.
But who then? he wondered.
Dorigen remained a distinct possibility.
“Possession?” he muttered, using the word as a catalyst for his thoughts.
Another image struck Cadderly then, an image of Nameless, the beggar on the road, and the horrible, shadowy shapes writhing atop his shoulders. He remembered, too, that night when Brennan had come to his room, projecting the same vile aura. Perhaps the song of Deneir had not lied to him; perhaps the attempt on Danica was not his enemy’s first try at possession.
Cadderly winced, remembering Fredegar’s worries that young Brennan had not been seen since that night. He tried to recall clues as he took up the oars for another single stroke against the drift.
“What is it?” Danica asked. Her tone revealed her understanding that Cadderly’s mind had unlocked some of the secrets.
“They have not come for you,” the young priest answered with certainty, looking over his shoulder. “They were here before you, around me, close to me.” Cadderly exhaled deeply, fearing for Brennan and Nameless, and let his gaze drift across the water to the gray outline of the great bridge. “Too close.”
Danica started to reply—something comforting, Cadderly knew—then she stopped and cocked her head curiously.
Cadderly began to turn his whole body about, to fully face Danica, understanding that something was wrong and fearing that the young woman had come under some mental assault.
Danica spun about, rocking the boat so suddenly that Cadderly, though he was seated near the center, almost went over the side.
“Stubborn!” Danica cried. Her hand snapped in front of her just in time to grab the wrist of the man who had tried to drive a dagger into her back. Holding tight, Danica leaped to her feet, stretched her attacker’s arm to the limit, and pulled him farther over the bow.
She gave her attacker’s arm a quick, violent twist and brought her free hand over the back of his fingers, jerking the man’s hand back toward his wrist.
Cadderly tried to get about in the rocking boat to go to Danica’s aid, but all he wound up doing was stumbling over the boat’s center seat and slamming himself on the side of the head with one of the oar handles.
He realized that the stumble was a good thing, though, as a knife soared up over the side of the boat and whipped across above his head. Reacting instinctively to the threat, Cadderly forearmed the oar, freeing it from its lock to tumble into the water near the unseen attacker.
The young scholar got his spindle-disks looped onto his finger. The boat rocked, and he looked back the other way, across the boat, to see still another assassin coming up over the side.
Danica held her balance easily in the rocking craft. She continued her vicious press on the caught man’s hand, finally forcing him to release his dagger.
She wasn’t done with him yet.
Night Masks!
Danica’s foot snapped out wide, coming back around the man’s head and forcing his chin over the prow rail. Holding him tightly against the wood, Danica yanked his arm back out over the water. She locked his elbow so that he could not bend the limb and pressed straight down.
The man’s eyes bulged as the bow pressed his throat up under his jaw.
Cadderly’s off-balance throw soared lower than he had hoped, but while he did not get the man’s head, he did get a few fingers—and the top plank of the boat. Wood splintered, the remaining oar flew off, and so did the assassin, clutching his blasted belly as he fell away into the lake.
Free of the weight, the boat rocked back so far that Cadderly feared its other side would dip under the water-where the knife-thrower waited.
The young priest realized how vulnerable he was, and how vulnerable Danica was! They needed a distraction, something to allow them to get their bearings.
Water did come in over the broken side of the boat when it rocked back again, but Cadderly took no note of it, intent on the wounded man fumbling in the water with the floating oar. The shape of the oar caught the young priest’s attention.
With one foot planted in the rocking boat, and with the choking man struggling frantically against her, Danica amazingly held her balance.
The struggling killer tried to come up over the side, but Danica jammed his arm down mightily, dislocating his shoulder.
The man could not even grimace at the obvious pain. His face went blank, weirdly serene. Danica understood. She brought her foot back around, released its hold on the man’s head, and let him slip under the water.
Her sensibilities returned to her then, her sheer rage at the presence of the Night Masks temporarily sated by the reality of the kill. Others were about—Danica realized for the first time that others were likely about!
She turned, and to her horror, saw Cadderly disappear under the water in the grasp of a killer. Another boat, with several men in it, approached from behind; Danica did not know if they were friend or foe—until a crossbow quarrel cut the air beside her face.
Instinctively, she dove to the floor of the boat. She knew she had to get to Cadderly, but how? If she went under the water, how could she hope to stop this approaching menace?
A scream to the side turned Danica about, to peek over the broken plank. There floundered the wounded Night Mask, the one Cadderly had hit with his spindle-disks, fighting desperately to free himself from the clutches of a long, thick constrictor—a snake about the same size as one of the boat’s oars.
The man somehow broke free and began swimming with all speed toward the approaching boat. The snake slithered off in pursuit, slipping under the water as it went.
Despite the peril, Danica could not help but smile. She knew that the appearance of this snake was no natural coincidence; she knew that Cadderly, and that mysterious power, had struck again.
Danica got up to her knees. The other boat was closer now; she could see a man in the prow leveling a crossbow her way. She jerked up, as though she meant to stand, then fell flat and heard the whistle of the high-flying bolt.
Now she had time to get over the side, into the water after Cadderly. Before she moved out of the boat, though, the water churned and the Night Mask appeared, his face contorted in terror and the second snake, the second oar, wrapped about his shoulder and chest. He reached for the boat, then slapped at the water and the beast.
Then he was gone.
Again the water churned, a short distance to the side. Up came Cadderly, impossibly fast, his body breaking out of the water impossibly high.
He was standing on the water! And still wearing his hat, the holy symbol set in its front glowing furiously.
Danica nearly laughed, too amazed to react any other way. Cadderly took in a few gulps of air, seeming more surprised than Danica.
He looked back toward the approaching boat—the swimming man had just about met it by then—and saw that the crossbowman was preparing another shot.
“Get in!” Danica cried, thinking Cadderly too vulnerable standing on the water out in the open. Cadderly seemed not to hear her. He was chanting, singing actually, and waving one hand slowly to and fro.
Danica looked back to the other boat, saw the man leveling the crossbow—and saw Cadderiy standing in the open, vulnerable.
She scrambled to the side, grabbed at a piece of broken wood floating in the small pool at the bottom of her boat. She came up throwing, skimming the wood sidelong so that it spun and swerved . . . and plopped harmlessly into the water a dozen feet to the side of the approaching craft.
But the crossbowman had flinched, had looked her way.
A sudden swell erupted in the calm lake, near where Danica’s wood had disappeared. The water reared up and rolled, as if aimed, toward the enemy boat. The crossbowman had set his sights on Cadderly again when the wave collided against the side of his boat. Not even bracing himself at the time, the man lurched over the side and nearly lost his weapon.
At first, Danica wondered how the little piece of wood had so disrupted the stillness of the lake. She realized it was no more than coincidence, though, and she turned to the true source of the swell. Cadderiy, still standing calmly, sung his soft song and waved his hand back and forth.
Another swell rose and crashed against the enemy boat, turning it about so that it was facing the bridge.
Cadderly smiled; another swell turned the boat so that it was feeing the shore, directly away from him.
“Come,” Cadderly said to Danica, extending his hand. “Before they get their bearings.”
Danica at first misunderstood, thinking that Cadderly wanted her to help him into the boat. He resisted her pull, though, beckoning her to go to him.
The assassin who had pulled Cadderly; under the water bobbed to the surface facedown. The snake that had been wrapped about him became an oar again at Cadderiy’s command and floated benignly, a harmless piece of flotsam.
“Come,” Cadderly reiterated, tugging Danica. She jumped onto him and wrapped herself about him.
Cadderly looked about, then ran for the island. Danica watched over his shoulder, taking note that his footsteps did not splash the water. Rather, the burdened young priest left depressions in the lake surface, which quickly reverted to the natural water shape, as though he was running across soft ground.
Behind them, the enemy boat finally straightened and the crossbowman pulled the swimmer up over the side. The oar that had been chasing him bobbed up over the waves.
Danica kissed Cadderly on the neck and rested her weary head on his shoulder. The world had gone crazy.
Cadderly came to the shore mumbling, thinking out loud. He kept chugging along but slowed under the weight of his burden when he hit more solid ground.
“Cadderly . . .”
“If those are professional assassins,” he was saying, “we must assume they were hired by our enemies, by Dorigen perhaps.”
“Cadderly. . .”
“Someone has made the connection to us,” Cadderly continued, undaunted. “Someone has determined that we are, or at least that I am, a threat to be eliminated.”
“Cadderly. . .”
“But how long have they been hovering about me?” the young priest muttered. “Oh, Brennan, I pray I am wrong.”
“Cadderly!”
Cadderly looked right at Danica for the first time since he had left the lake. “What?”
“You can put me down now,” Danica replied.
She hit the ground running, grabbing Cadderiy’s wrist and tugging him along. They heard the enemy boat skid to shore through the brush behind them.
“Stubborn,” Danica said, looking over her shoulder gravely.
Cadderly knew she wanted to turn and finish the fight. “Not now,” he begged. “We must get back to the inn.”
“We may never get our enemies so out in the open again,” Danica reasoned.
“I am weary,” Cadderly replied. And indeed, the young priest was. The song no longer played in his head, but was replaced by a severe headache, the likes of which young Cadderly had never before experienced.
Danica nodded and sped on. They crashed through a hedgerow, into the back yard of one of Carradoon’s finer estates. Dogs began to bark from somewhere nearby, but Danica did not veer from her path through another hedgerow and into another open yard.
Several people, older merchants and their spouses stared at the fleeing couple incredulously.
“Get to cover and alert the city guard!” Cadderly called to them as he followed Danica past. “Thieves and murderers pursue us! Call out the city guard and send them to the bridge!”
The couple burst through another row of bushes, coming out onto a wide, fiat cobblestone lane, running between lines of beautiful manor houses, between lines of staring, curious people.
Not a horse or wagon was seen on the bridge at this early hour, something Cadderly took comfort in as he and Danica started across. The young priest would have hated to place anyone directly in the path of his deadly pursuers, and he knew by the continued bark of distant, unseen dogs that the Night Masks had not given up the chase, were only a few minutes behind.
Cadderly skidded to a stop when they came to the high point in the first of the bridge’s three arching supports. Danica started to question him, but was stopped by his conniving smile.
“Gift for the assassins,” he said to her as he fell to his knees. He used his soaked cloak to trace a square on the stone of the wide bridge.
“The first page I ever looked at in Headmistress Pertelope’s book always amazed me,” he explained, not slowing in his work. “I knew it was a spell, similar to one I had seen in the book of Belisarius.”
The square completed, two lines of wetness running parallel across the structure, Cadderly rose and led Danica a few dozen steps farther along.
Cadderly called up the song and began to chant, knowing the words intimately. He had to stop, though, and rub his temples to relieve the throbbing the powers caused.
They will drain you and take a bit of you with them whenever you summon them, Pertelope had warned him. Exhaustion is your enemy . . .
“They are on the bridge!” he heard Danica say, and he felt her tug at his arm, trying to hurry him along.
It could not be helped. Cadderly fought through the pain and weariness, forced the song into his mind and to his Lips.
What is the bond that holds the stone? A bond that wetness breaks. What are you without the bond?
Danica knocked him to the ground; he barely heard the crossbow quarrel pass them by. Still he sang, his concentration complete.
Seep, my water, seep Through the bond, so deep.
The leading assassin stumbled suddenly, lurched forward as though his feet had been ensnared, fell facedown onto the bridge, . . . and sank into the mud that the section of bridge had become.
Danica and Cadderly heard splashes below as chunks of mud and stone dropped into the lake. Another assassin hit the area but managed to fall back, knee deep in the collapsing morass.
The man who had gone in headlong screamed as he dropped out the bottom, plummeting the twenty feet or so to the churning lake.
The entire section Cadderly had marked off slipped down right behind him.
Four stunned assassins stood at the edge of the fifteen-foot gap separating them from their intended quarry, staring in disbelief.
“She said that Deneir would demand of me,” Cadderly remarked to Danica, rubbing his throbbing temples. “And he will again, when we get to the inn.”
“You have come into some faith?” Danica asked as they fled, leaving behind the frustrated assassins’ curses and the clip-clop of many horses coming onto the bridge, bearing city guardsman.
Cadderly looked at Danica as though she had slapped him. He calmed and shrugged, having no recourse against her logic.
They heard the shouts of guardsmen and killers as the trapped assassins, one by one, dove for the cover of the water.
The way was clear, all the way back to the Dragon’s Codpiece, to dead enemies and dead friends.