The Adversary

Chapter Fourteen

24 Ches, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR) The Lost Peaks

The next morning, Farideh didn’t argue when Tharra pulled down a deepnight-blue and gold tunic and breeches, with high boots to match. She didn’t quail at the jewels or ask her for quiet. Her eyes were on Nirka, waiting by the door, her thoughts on whether Dahl had made it back out into the camp after they’d parted ways, agreeing to meet back in two nights. “Leave a sign if you can’t make it,” she’d said before he’d disappeared down the corridor. “Some mark on one of the roofs near the wall so I know you’re safe.” Dahl agreed. “You too. Hang something out the window?”

“I know just the thing,” Farideh had said, thinking of the selection of skin-baring dresses.

In the cold light of day, their scrambled plans seemed flimsy as the awkward gowns. She was supposed to find the rest of the components for Dahl to make another sending-salts of copper and dried formian blood.

“Or brain mole,” Dahl had said. “Or intellect devourer. It will be labeled. But don’t touch anything. Just find it.”

“I can palm a little silver,” Farideh protested.

“Don’t,” Dahl had said again. “Don’t give him a reason to be dangerous.”

As if he weren’t dangerous already, Farideh thought. As if she weren’t setting scores of people into his hands. Dahl had had a point about her misidentifying Chosen. But what else could she do?

“You’re quiet, my lady,” Tharra said, as she finished fastening the laces of the tunic.

“It’s a quiet morning,” Farideh said. Hardly morning anymore-Rhand had spent the early hours in his study with the Nameless One, blessedly leaving Farideh alone for a time.

Now finally dressing for highsunfeast, her head was starting to throb again, as if the strange powers were tired of waiting to be used and going to start up whether she liked it or not. She thought of Dahl’s embarrassed expression when she’d admitted she’d seen the lights of his soul and felt a blush creep up her neck. Whatever Sairché had done, Farideh hoped dearly it could be undone. She didn’t want to go around peeking in on people.

There was a tapping at the door. Nirka ducked out, her rapid Netherese carrying through the door.

“Is Dahl all right?” Farideh asked. Tharra blinked at her.

“I assume so,” Tharra said, stitching the end of a braid up to its root. “Don’t think they would have come asking for servants among the prisoners if they’d caught that fool sneaking out.”

Farideh frowned at the woman’s sudden chilliness. “He says you’re a Harper.”

“Not like he is, apparently,” Tharra said. Before Farideh could respond, Nirka opened the door again, sneering at Farideh.

“Your devil is here.”

Sairché. A chill ran down Farideh’s spine as she stood. Time for answers. She shoved the ruby comb into her braid, just in case. “Take me to her.”

Keep your calm, she told herself as she trailed Nirka through the shining corridors. You need answers right now, not revenge. You need to look as if you’re happy to be protected by her. You need to keep everything in balance.

Farideh had almost succeeded in quelling her anger, her nerves, when Nirka opened the door, and Lorcan looked back over his shoulder at her.

She did not think about how her face was set. She did not think about the words she was going to say. She didn’t think about where Sairché was or what she needed to know or what Rhand was thinking.

Lorcan was safe. He was here. She nearly cried out in joy.

Lorcan’s dark eyes studied her for a moment more, and without a word, he turned back to the wizard. Farideh closed her mouth.

“There you are,” she heard Rhand say. “We’ve just been discussing your progress.”

Farideh’s eyes darted to the wizard. To Lorcan. He was still not looking at her-they were still in danger, after all. There was still Rhand to fool.

“Have you?” she said, scrambling for something to say. “Have you mentioned how many sessions you’ve put me through? Standing out in the cold?” Rhand smiled. He eyed her, looking like nothing so much as a starving, frostbitten jackal after his time with the shade. “Not as many as I would have liked.”

“Do what you need to,” Lorcan said. “She’s not made of glass.”

Farideh faltered. Lorcan wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t give her any sign of what she was supposed to be playacting. “I never said-”

“Not to worry,” Rhand said to Lorcan. “I’m happy to find motivation for her.”

Farideh stiffened, and she looked to Lorcan, ready for him to respond with sharp words or quick spells or worse. The muscle in his jaw flexed as he clenched his teeth.

“Well, kindly return her in one piece,” he said eventually. “I can’t do much with a corpse.”

Rhand chuckled. “You’d be surprised.”

Lorcan didn’t blink. “I don’t like surprises, you’ll find. I need her in one piece, as it happens, and still breathing.”

“Can I talk to you?” Farideh blurted.

Lorcan raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure you can.”

Farideh stared at him in disbelief. “Give us a moment alone, will you?” she said to Rhand.

Rhand was silent a long moment. “Of course.” He turned to Lorcan and offered a hand. “Well met. I trust you’ll make your own way out.” Lorcan glanced at Farideh, then slowly took Rhand’s hand.

“Well met,” he said.

The wizard shut the door behind him, and still Lorcan watched her, emotionless, distant. Farideh swallowed.

“I assume,” he said, “that between him and Sairché, you’re well appointed. So far as I’m concerned, you can continue as you have.”

“That’s it?” Farideh said. “That’s all? I am not well appointed. I have no idea what Sairché put me here for, I have no idea if I’m doing things right. Which is all aithyas at the moment: I cannot tell you how glad I am you’re safe.” She reached for him. “She promised, but-”

“He seems pleased,” Lorcan interrupted airily. “That’s enough for me.”

Farideh let her hand fall. It wasn’t an act for Rhand’s sake, she realized. Sairché hadn’t been lying about that. “I know you’re angry with me; I’m sorry-I didn’t see another way. But I’m glad you came back anyway.”

“Make no mistake,” Lorcan said, “this has everything to do with what my betters’ have demanded and nothing else.”

Farideh shook her head. “So do you have a plan?”

“Plan?” Lorcan said.

“How are we getting out of here? Or at least, what am I doing? What happens when I’ve found all these Chosen?”

Lorcan stared at her, his expression so empty and cold she felt for the first time since she’d met him that she was looking at a creature as far from mortal as it was possible to be.

“Why should you know my plans?” Lorcan said. “You don’t tell me yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

He smiled, and it reminded her, terribly, of Sairché. “Just that I’m so pleased to see Sairché’s desires lined up with yours. Felicitations on the wizard. I’m sure you’ll suit each other well.”

Farideh’s felt as if her chest were pulling into itself. Tatters of shadowsmoke leaped from her skin. “What did she tell you?”

“Everything you didn’t.”

“And you believed her?”

“You did!” Lorcan snapped. “No, I didn’t believe her-I’m not a fool. But she told me enough to see clearly that you’re not so innocent in all of this. You didn’t tell me about a wizard.”

“She told you about Rhand, but did she tell you why I know him?” Farideh said, her face growing hot. “Why I didn’t tell you? Why I don’t even want to talk about it now?”

“Where you got that lovely ritual book?” Lorcan asked. “He seems charming, by the way.”

“He isn’t,” Farideh started.

But Lorcan plucked one of the rings from Sairché’s necklace. “Spare me-I don’t care about your lovers’ quarrels and thanks to you-” He drew a sharp breath. “Thanks to you, I suddenly have a great many eyes on me I could do without. Just keep to your task, darling.” The pet name seemed to slip out, and a look approaching embarrassment crossed Lorcan’s handsome features. He didn’t look at Farideh as he blew through the circle of the ring, casting the whirlwind that sucked him back to the Hells.

Farideh stared at the space where he’d stood, as if she could will the portal to reverse, to reopen again. He was gone. He wasn’t going to save her. He was done with her. After so many upsets, so many upheavals, being left behind by Lorcan made her feel as if she’d been shattered into pieces. There was nothing left but hurt.

She thought of the ritual she’d managed to cast once, the spell that pulled Lorcan to her, out of the Hells. If she could just bring him back. .

Then he would turn it all on her anyway. This was always going to happen. He was always going to leave her. She thought of Temerity, the warlock in Proskur-how betrayed she had felt by Lorcan, but how betrayed Temerity had actually been.

She didn’t hear Rhand return until he spoke. “Good,” he said. “You’re finished.”

You have no champion, Farideh thought. No one else is going to keep Rhand from hurting more people except for you and Dahl.

“Are you ready?” Rhand asked, offering her an arm.

Ready as I’ll ever be, she thought. She ate the offered highsunfeast mechanically, repeating Lorcan’s words in her thoughts again and again, just to harden her heart.

A dozen prisoners were waiting in the courtyard. Despite the flurries of snow, the guards had stripped them of any sort of cloak. Farideh edged closer-even without trying she could see several of them glowing like firebrands. An old, straight-backed human man, another with a hooked nose, a willowy elf woman with short-cropped hair.

A sturdy-looking man, deep browns and reds flickering over him-blurring together with the colors surrounding the dark-skinned boy he carried on his back. Both carried a rune, sharp and dark-like fresh soil for the boy, like charcoal for the man. The boy met Farideh’s eyes with a dark, steady gaze.

And in that moment, Farideh was sure: she couldn’t send another soul into Rhand’s fortress.

“Is there a problem?” Rhand said.

Farideh shrugged. “There just aren’t any.”

“None?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Rhand stared at the crowd. He gestured to the guards, and the prisoners were led out the larger door as a second group was led in. Farideh eyed them as they entered-that dwarf with the thick black beard, that half-elf wreathed in green, that little blond-haired boy who eyed Farideh back, deeply serious.

Farideh swept the crowd twice and shook her head. “None of them.”

Rhand’s brows raised. “None of them?”

“Perhaps we’ve found them all already?” she said. She hardly dared move as his blue eyes pierced her. But after a moment that seemed to stretch taut and thin as a tripwire, he waved to the guards, without ever breaking his gaze.

“Perhaps they’ve realized what you are doing,” he said. “Perhaps they’re hiding their little lights.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, the picture of calm. “I can see. . their souls still shine. Only none of them have the markers that the others did.” She considered the group that filed into the courtyard-another four in this one, a young man whose copper rune seemed to pulse with his heartbeat; an elf wound up in lines of green that framed her mark; a little blue-skinned genasi girl, sniffling and hiccupping and shimmering like light on the water with a blurry, uneven rune; and a dragonborn with silvery scales that shone a little too brightly around his chest.

“Perhaps I’m overtaxed from the last two days. Or perhaps there aren’t as many as we thought.”

Rhand was still looking at her when she glanced back. “Perhaps.”

Farideh again considered the group. He might be suspicious, but he had no reason to believe she would lie, and no way to prove that she was. Even proving she was right took days. She bit her tongue, as if deep in thought, then shook her head again. “None.”

“None,” he repeated.

“Perhaps the guards are bringing back the ones we rejected yesterday,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”

“Nothing,” he repeated. He watched her several tense seconds, before stepping entirely too close to her. He slipped an arm around her, and shouted a rough word of Netherese down to the guards.

The guards’ grins flashed into being, one by one, like stars appearing in a suddenly dark night.

“If there is nothing here,” Rhand said, low and in her ear, “then I have no use for them, do I?”

The first blade speared the young man, as easily as if he were made of almond paste, and no god on Toril or beyond stopped it. The coppery rune flared and vanished, as he pressed useless hands to his wounds. Farideh cried out in horror, but it made no difference. There were too many bodies, too many blades. Too much pain for the shadar-kai to pass up.

The little genasi girl froze in the middle of it, and started to scream.

The prisoners tried to flee, but in the little courtyard, the only exits were barred and blocked by more shadar-kai. Some fought. They died faster. Farideh tried to pull away, to get her hands up. The powers of the Hells poured into her, but Nirka’s knives were suddenly pricking at her chin, and strange hands were holding her wrists tight.

Down below, one of the guards sliced an old woman’s throat, bright red blood pumping from the wound. Rhand grabbed hold of Farideh’s jaw and wrenched her face toward the carnage. “Oh, you will watch.”

The lights around the elf suddenly caught fire in bright lines of green that surged out of Farideh’s strange vision and into reality. The elf cried out, throwing her arms up to shield herself, as a fringe of vines erupted out of the cracks between the stones and twisted around her.

Beside her, a burst of silver motes surrounded the dragonborn, and even as shock gripped Farideh, she felt the passage to someone old and distant and stern crack wide as the rune that marked his god burned bright as a fire. In the same moment, the little genasi girl’s screams reached a frantic pitch as the shadar-kai closed on her, becoming a roar like the waves ahead of a ferocious storm. They fell back, toppled by the noise, and the child’s eyes were deep and unfathomable behind their swollen lids. A rune the color of storm clouds nearly wrapped itself around her tiny frame.

The shadar-kai separated these, shunting them toward the smaller door, even as their fellows were cut down.

“You see,” Rhand crooned, stroking her jaw, “we managed fine before you. A little pressure in just the right way, and I don’t have to guess who I need to pay attention to-they make themselves known. Perhaps less ideal than the arrangement you and I have. After all”-he looked down at the courtyard, at the swamp of blood and spilled innards-“who knows what the rest of them might have been good for, with time.”

The dead man who’d worn the copper rune stared up at Farideh, as if he knew it was all her fault. She swallowed against the lump in her throat, against the feeling that she would surely vomit.

“Now,” Rhand said. “If you are through being willful, shall we continue?”

Dahl folded his arms over his chest, then self-consciously uncrossed them, as Tharra and Armas considered the array of weapons he’d brought. He had never been so aware of the flask in his pocket, heavy now with stolen liquor. Stolen and untouched, he reminded himself, trying to focus on that instead of the headache he still hadn’t shaken and the nerves that made the gruel in his stomach coil like snakes. He hadn’t heard back yet what Oota had decided to do about Phalar, and in the stark light of day, he wasn’t sure anymore what he thought the answer should be.

“To tell the truth, I expected you to be turned away,” Tharra said, sitting off to the side. Dahl had asked her for sketches of the tower above the cellar rooms and she’d managed the beginnings of these with a charred twig and a swath of ragged fabric that had been clothing once. “You’re lucky Phalar’s trick didn’t come sooner. I warned you it was dangerous.”

Dahl scowled. “I handled it.”

“You were lucky,” Tharra said again.

“Luck’s better than the alternative,” Armas said, nudging the punchdaggers to one side with his clawlike hands. “The whips were a good thought. More drovers than swordsmen around here.”

“Thank you,” Dahl said. “I grabbed sickles for the same reason.”

Dahl had slipped out of the armory, his pack heavy with weapons and Farideh’s ritual book. He didn’t dare swim out through that narrow passage, but a little searching led him through the storeroom he’d escaped through the first time.

And to the pyramid of sticky black casks, filled with the shadar-kai’s special brew. Much as Dahl would have liked to swear he’d gone right past the stuff, the sight of it had given him a terrible thirst. He’d filled the flask and ever since found himself wondering what a little would do.

“There are enough weapons to make a run at them,” Armas said. “Fortify Oota’s court and mount a defense. Especially if we can steal some bows right before.”

“Until the wizard lets his spells fly,” Tharra countered. “There’s no sense rushing into things. Just having these is an enormous step.”

Dahl kept his tongue-a sip, he thought. A sip would be fine and you’d be a lot easier for everyone to deal with.

Armas sighed. “I suppose.” He examined a sickle. “There’s more prisoners every day. We can’t protect them all.”

“Especially with that tiefling at hand,” Tharra said.

“She seemed fond enough of you when we spoke,” Dahl said.

Tharra looked up at him and smiled. “Did she?” she said. “I suppose I’ve only got so much to go on. Like how many people are being taken thanks to her.” She gave Dahl a serious look. “You really think she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing? A tiefling? A warlock? A Netherese collaborator?”

Dahl ignored her. “We’ll have to find an area to fortify that Rhand can’t hit from the tower,” Dahl said. “Close up to the fortress, maybe. Or perhaps up against the wall, out of reach. And we need to be prepared for an escape. Let’s start with the Chosen-”

“I’m sorry-first you think you can beat the wizard and his shadowwarriors,” Tharra interrupted. “Now you think you can pass the wall when none of us have managed?”

“I told you, Farideh thinks there’s a way. Maybe she’s wrong, but there’s plenty of sense in preparing for either possibility.”

“And so I come back to this,” Tharra said, “how in the Hells are you so sure she’s not going to turn on us? You don’t have an answer for that.”

Someone banged on the door of the little hut. The three Harpers scrambled to hide the weapons, but the door swung open before anyone could stop it. Dahl grabbed a dagger and got to his feet.

Oota’s big human guard, Hamdir, leaned in and nodded to Tharra. “You’d better come. We’ve got a problem.” He noticed the weapons spread across the table and raised his eyebrows. “Nice.”

Tharra gave Armas a worried look, before hurrying out the door after Hamdir.

“Probably nothing.” Armas sighed. “Oota likes making her jump, and what should she do? Complain she’s being included?”

“You think Tharra’s right?”

Armas shrugged. “They’re both stuck in their ways, if you ask me. Tharra’s right-we’re not ready for a fight.” He turned over a dagger. “But maybe we need to be.” He peered out the window. “I need to go get the kids out of the underground rooms. Let them have some sunshine.”

Dahl considered Tharra’s hardly begun maps. It was clear she wasn’t interested in helping him. Or admitting she wouldn’t help him. He sighed-more politics, more Harpers giving each other sidelong looks. “What about the elves?”

“What about them?”

“You carry them messages from Oota and Tharra, right? What is it they want? A battle? A long wait?”

Armas gave a short laugh. “The opposite of whatever Oota’s offering, usually.” He set his hands on the table, the finger cages clacking against the wood. Armas sighed. “Cereon-that’s their Oota-wants out, that’s for sure. His advisors feel the same. This place. . it’s not somewhere you settle down. The waters, the cold, the mountain itself. You know if the elves don’t want to be somewhere, there’s a damned good reason.”

Dahl considered the array of weapons a moment. “But they don’t want to fight the wizard.”

“Oh they’d love to-who wouldn’t? But”-he held up one caged hand-“the ones in charge are in the same straits. No gestures, no spells. I almost wish you’d smuggled out a good heavy hammer. At this point I’d let you try.”

The cages weren’t too large, Dahl thought. Smaller than a cup altogether. . or a carvestar.

Small enough for Farideh’s spell to destroy.

“If I found a way around the cages,” he said, “do you think they’d throw in?”

“If you ask them right.”

“So I’ll ask them.”

Armas snorted, but then realized Dahl meant what he’d said. “Oh. Take me along. Trust me. Cereon’s. . well, you know what people think of the eladrin? Make it a little haughtier. He won’t talk to you. He doesn’t even like speaking Common-they don’t send me because I’ve got Dead Leira’s touch. Do you even speak Elvish?”

Dahl scowled at the half-elf. “Orth Quessin, arluth.”

Armas made a face. “Don’t do that around Cereon. Flaunting your Dalespidgin is exactly the kind of thing that will just kick his kettle. I’ll bring it up. Trust me.”

“It has to be now,” Dahl said. He pulled Farideh’s ritual book and the mix of stolen components out of the pack. Armas’s brows rose.

“Gods. Where’d you get that?”

“The same place I’m going to get the magic to break your cages,” Dahl said. “Go see if Hamdir will watch the little ones for a bit, while I figure out how to speak enough Elvish.”

“Evereskan dialect,” Armas said, his eyes still on the book. “That’s more important than you think.”

“Write a line before you go. We’ll take the elves some daggers to sweeten the pot, and be back before Tharra and Oota are through.”

“You’re not going to tell them where we’re going?”

“And let them argue over it?” Dahl said, plucking a tiny bottle of ink laced with potent magical salts from the jumble of components. “Let’s be sure before we start anything.”

The amulet hung around Mehen’s neck, solid as an iron anchor. All too often, as the strange party tramped through the High Forest-Zahnya in her palanquin, her undead breaking brush ahead of them-Mehen found himself holding the onyx pendant in the flat of his palm. It didn’t take the weight from his neck, though, and it tended to draw the boneclaw’s soulless gaze.

Mehen smirked and held the pendant up, dangling it like a lure at the creature. The boneclaw rubbed its fingers together in response-skritch, skritch.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Daranna pointed out as she passed Mehen by. None of the Harpers had been eager to take Zahnya’s amulet. Daranna, in particular.

“A calculated risk,” Vescaras had called it, after Mehen had allowed the Red Wizard to stand.

“There is no ‘risk’ when allying with Thayans,” Daranna had said. “There is certainty. We’ll regret this.”

“Eventually,” Vescaras said. “But not immediately. At the moment, they make fair allies.” Zahnya had, in fact, healed the scout who’d fallen from the tree, keeping the ghoul’s terrible poison from felling her-and all before she raised her own dead. The fallen apprentices made for poor palanquin bearers and poorer ghoul controllers. But they would make more fighters to stand against the wizard and his forces, should it come to that.

“Surely you want the Shadovar fortress gone from these woods,” Khochen said. “She promises that much.”

“We’re wasting time,” Mehen had snapped, and undead or no undead, he had followed after Zahnya and her palanquin. A sad army, he thought, infiltrators and restless corpses. But if Zahnya had the means to stop the wizard and destroy the fortress, he would follow her. Albeit with a watchful eye.

He strode up to walk beside the palanquin and yanked at the curtains. Zahnya opened them a finger’s length. “Yes.”

“How much longer?”

“Two days? Perhaps more. My creations don’t need to rest,” she added. “I didn’t plan to either. I need to be at the fortress at the appointed time, so-”

Mehen narrowed his eyes. “What happens at the appointed time?”

Zahnya shrugged. “My ritual works. If you want your fellows out of range, well, then I hope you can keep up.” She twitched the curtains shut once more.

“She’s hiding something,” Khochen said, when Mehen walked alone again. “Do you notice, she never throws those curtains open enough for anyone to see in? There’s something in there, I’ll wager.”

“You ought to stop wagering,” Mehen said. “She says it will take us another two days or more. That she’ll go on without us if need be.”

“Well,” Khochen said. “Then we’ll simply make certain there is no need.” She dropped her voice. “Daranna carries a special waybread to keep us running. But let her be furious at the rest of us another day. She’ll be likelier to share then.”

Mehen grunted. He hoped so-broken planes he hoped so. As he walked he couldn’t help imagining the fortress and camp. A sprawling keep? A fortified tower? Barracks? Tents? How many soldiers? He imagined Farideh-thrown in a dungeon, tied to a stake, locked in a tower, dead-and shuddered. For all he tried to keep his mind focused on what he might do to get to her, what he might have to plan around, his thoughts kept drifting there.

And Havilar. .

Brin will keep her safe, he told himself. Or I will knock him senseless.

“Shall we resume then?” Khochen asked. “There’s little else to do.”

“Resume what?”

“Our discussion. About your latest friend.”

“What is there to discuss? I want nothing to do with Bahamut’s orphans.”

Khochen regarded him mildly. “Goodman, I said you made an excellent guess. I didn’t say you were right.” Mehen stared her down, but Khochen didn’t so much as blink.

“Will you stop with these games, little verlym?” Mehen spat. “Congratulations-you’re very clever. Someone is after me, then name them. I’m not going to dance for you.”

Khochen clucked her tongue. “Out in the woods with you and Daranna. Maybe I should have left you two stone-tongues together. Happy in your silence.” Mehen bared his teeth, but the Harper only smiled. “Does the name Kepeshkmolik Dumuzi mean anything to you?”

“What does Kepeshkmolik want with me now?”

“What did they want with you before?” Khochen asked. “It’s a fair question,” she added, when Mehen growled. “I haven’t a side in this. So make me choose.”

“Henish,” Mehen spat. “You only want a story.”

Khochen smiled. “Sweetens the pot.”

And it was an old pain, Mehen thought, far duller, far less dangerous than stewing on what might happen, what troubles might lay over the horizon. Much as he hated to give Khochen what she wanted. “I was meant to marry their scion. Kepeshkmolik Uadjit.”

“A good match?”

“The best Verthisathurgiesh could broker. Kepeshkmolik is a wealthy clan, with many families. Uadjit is a skilled diplomat. A very wise, very proud woman with a very keen longsword.”

“Pretty?”

Mehen shifted. “I suppose.”

“But you wouldn’t do it.”

“I was in love with someone else.”

“So you insisted you would marry your lover.”

“There was no point in that,” Mehen said. “In Djerad Thymar, you marry for alliances, for eggs.”

“And those eggs wouldn’t be good enough,” Khochen finished, “for Verthisathurgiesh.”

Mehen snorted at Khochen’s sense of irony-it was a little funny-and startled the apprentices as much as the ghouls on their leads.

But then the Harper’s superior expression fell and Mehen realized she’d meant it-broken planes she’d meant it plain. His roar of laughter made the ghouls howl and claw at the ground.

“Shush!” one of the ghouls yelped. “Stop it! Loud!”

“She was barren?” Khochen said, but she was guessing now, and he laughed until he thought his scales would shake off and the ghouls would go mad of the sound.

“She was from a bad family? She. . wasn’t a dragonborn?”

“Gods damn it!” the female wizard shouted. “Shut up, you brazen fool!”

“Well, well,” Mehen said. “I suppose you’re not as observant as you think you are, Harper.”

Before Khochen could reply, the shrieking ghoul leaped away from its handler, yanking the lead from the apprentice’s hand. The young man snatched at the line, missed, and worse, in his efforts let his grip on the remaining ghouls slip. Two more broke free.

“Catch them!” the other apprentice shouted. “Catch them, quick!”

Daranna ignored the apprentice’s meaning, pulling her bow and nocking an arrow to it almost as quickly as she let it fly. It struck one fleeing ghoul directly in the base of its skull, and the creature dropped like a stone. Another fled past Vescaras and into the High Forest, scored by his rapier. Lord Ammakyl and two of the scouts ran after it.

The first ghoul turned, mad-eyed and slavering on Mehen. It barreled toward him, and Mehen hardly had time to pull his falchion free before the corpselike creature reached him.

But not an arm’s reach from him, the ghoul stopped, flinched, and scrambled back. Mehen took hold of the amulet. “Stop!” it barked. “Shush! Stop it!” It threw itself at him again, as if it didn’t care what the amulet did.

A blade reached out of nowhere, skewering the ghoul through its bony ribcage. “You are not behaving,” the boneclaw thundered, holding the speared ghoul up like a tidbit of meat plucked from the spit. “Mistress Zahnya has decided to be unwise. Do not compound that.”

“Ow,” the ghoul mewled. “Sharp.”

The boneclaw let the weaker creature slide to the ground. The apprentice who’d loosed it dropped beside the ghoul, casting dark magic that slithered over the ghoul’s blood-blackened skin and muttering to himself. The other apprentice turned on Daranna, who was staring into the forest, after the lost ghoul. “You fool,” she shouted, storming toward Daranna. “You’ve killed the other one, and we haven’t got time to-”

Daranna replied with the butt of her bow, slammed into the apprentice’s nose.

“Enough,” Zahnya said, emerging from her palanquin. She surveyed the damage, clearly biting back her rage. “Harper, heal her. And then, Mayati, burn the corpse.” She looked at Mehen. “What did you do?”

“Not a thing,” Khochen answered. “Your pets seem a bit sensitive.”

Zahnya glared at the Tuigan spymaster. “Give me the amulet,” she said to Mehen. “You obviously can’t be trusted with it.”

“The amulet worked fine,” Mehen said. “Just your ghouls aren’t convinced of it.” He tilted his head. “Maybe you ought to be out here, walking with us. Remind them of their place.”

“Don’t chide me,” Zahnya said. Her gaze slid to the palanquin, as if she were thinking about what lay within. “Push on,” she said after a moment, climbing back into her place. “And if you kill any more of my creatures, our deal is done.”

“Excellent,” Daranna murmured. She glowered at Khochen and at Mehen, who hoped dearly it wouldn’t come to a battle before they reached the camp and Farideh.