Paul Crilley - Night of Long Shadows

A huge crash behind Wren brought him whirling around. The staircase and part of the floor had collapsed. Flames flickered through gaps in what remained of the wooden flooring. The whole place was about to go down.

He turned his attention to the scene outside. His heart leaped into his throat. Col was busy fighting off five ravers. As the halfelf watched, the human decapitated one of the creatures, then brought his sword down in a diagonal slash that cleaved another from shoulder to hip. He kicked the thing in the stomach, pushing it off his blade, and parried a clumsy swipe by another, sending its hand sailing through the air. The others looked up from their gory feast and saw Col battling two of their kind. They raised their faces to the sky and shrieked with excitement, then ran toward Col, fighting and snapping at each other as they tried to get to him first. Col threw a look over his shoulder to glare at Wren.

“Sorry,” muttered Wren, and pointed the wand at the closest raver. He released a charge of electricity. It arced to the ground and wreathed the creature in a spider web of blue light. It threw its head back and howled in pain, trying to pull the threads of electricity from its body. A second later, it dropped to the ground, smoke rising from its corpse.

Wren let loose with another burst from the wand. This time, the electricity jumped between the jostling ravers. The front line went down, writhing and shrieking. Wren kept the charge going, and every creature that touched those on the ground was immediately caught up in the arc. Col finished off the two he was fighting and darted around the side of the skycoach, slashing backhand at a raver who reached out to grab him. Its arm sailed through the air and slapped another one in the face. The victim looked down at the arm twitching on the ground, then leaped with a snarl onto the back of the one-armed creature.

Col reached the skycoach and laid about with his sword, stabbing and yanking at the creatures who had stayed close to it. Wren aimed and let loose with the remaining charge in the wand, shielding Col with a wall of electricity. Ravers ran straight into it.

It distracted the beasts enough for Col to reach the controls. The skycoach rose jerkily into the air and turned in Wren’s direction. He dropped the wand and readied himself to jump aboard.

The skycoach was still a few floors below him when a resounding crash in the room sent him spinning around. The entire floor caved in, taking everything with it. Flames roared up through the gaping hole, licking hungrily at the rafters. Wren shielded his face from the heat and tried to balance on the ragged hole in the tower wall. Col was looking up at him as he guided the coach as close as he dared. Flames licked out of arrow slits in the stone base of the building.

As Wren watched, trying to judge the distance to the sky-coach, two ravers jumped from a room somewhere in the tower and landed in the vehicle. One of them was on fire. The skycoach dropped with the unexpected weight and tipped to one side. Col struggled with the controls, fighting to right it before he crashed into the tower wall. The burning raver rolled around in the back seat, slapping its burning rags.

The other one, however, had spotted Col and was climbing over the seat toward him.

Wren sighed and took his dagger from his belt. He couldn’t believe his luck. He was about to do an incredibly heroic thing and Torin wasn’t even around to witness it. He’d never believe it when Wren told him.

He muttered a prayer to the nonexistent god of inquisitives and jumped from the tower.

As he fell, he saw Col look up at him, his eyes widening in shock. Wren had the smallest moment to grin at the stupefied human before he landed in the skycoach, one leg on the seat and the other jarring painfully against the floor. His breath exploded from his body and he struggled to pull himself to his feet.

He looked up and saw the raver’s face not inches from his own, mouth open to reveal serrated teeth. It lunged in to take a chunk out of Wren’s neck.

Wren jerked backward and plunged the dagger up in an instinctive movement. The blade caught the raver under the chin and thrust up into its brain. The creature’s mouth snapped shut on its tongue, cutting the tip clean off. One of its eyes closed. The other opened wide, the eyelid fluttering as if it had a tick. Wren wrenched the dagger out and the raver collapsed onto the side of the coach. The half-elf helped it on its way, kicking it over the edge.

The other raver still burned. The fire had spread up its legs and across one arm. Wren leaned over and stabbed whatever was in reach, hitting the upper arm that wasn’t on fire. The raver screeched and whipped around to glare at Wren, then it stood up and leaped over the side. Wren grabbed the side of the skycoach and watched the creature plummet directly into a huge shard of glass. The spire punched through the raver’s stomach and the creature slid down the shaft, the width at the spike’s base ripping the creature apart.

Wren collapsed into the seat, gasping for breath. Col had righted the skycoach and was guiding it straight up into the air. Col looked over his shoulder, and Wren was astounded to see the man grinning.

“Now was that an escape, or was that an escape?” he shouted.

“Yes. Well, something like that, certainly,” said Wren.

Col let out a whoop of delight. “Where to?” he called.

Wren struggled to pull himself up and climbed over the seats to the front. “To Skyway. All we can do now is find Cutter and hope he got the shard from Tiel.”

“We’re on our way.”

The third day of Long Shadows

Sar, the 28th day of Vult, 998

The first thing Cutter did when he left Tiel’s place was find a House Jorasco healer, using some of the money he had picked up at Silvermist to pay. He wanted to be in top condition when he took on the halfling. He was confident he could take Tiel, but he wasn’t sure about Bren. He still had to figure out what to do about him.

As he was leaving the healer, he stole an expensive thigh-length coat with intricate embroidering around the cuffs. It belonged to a nobleman visiting one of the other healers for a broken arm. Cutter buttoned it up over his bloody shirt, trying to look halfway respectable. Halfway-because no matter how expensive the outfit, he always looked like he was wearing someone else’s clothes.

The House Lyrandar skycoach carried Cutter up into the late afternoon sky. The summer day had turned humid. Black clouds piled up on the horizon over the Dagger River. Thunderheads climbed high into the sky, lit golden on one side by the lowering sun. As the coach took him to his destination, the heavy clouds slowly moved across the sun. Golden streamers punched through the dense curtain to dance across the water below.

The storm would hit before the day was out.

A shadow fell across the coach as the driver took them beneath the massive floating district of Skyway. From this angle, it looked like a massive white cloud, the layers of magical cloud-stuff the floating island rested on obscuring everything else from view.

They glided out from under the shadow and rose above the lip of the island. From this height, it was abundantly clear to Cutter the kind of money needed to live here. Mansions ten times the size of Tiel’s dotted the landscape. Their gardens were so large they could have been parks. Cutter watched as a griffon padded sedately along a wide boulevard, the rider sitting tall in his seat. He nodded at a carriage that trundled past, pulled by a pair of hippogriffs.

Skyway was separated into two halves-Brilliant to the north, and Azure to the south, with Cloudpool Park cutting through the middle. Cutter had heard people speak about the park, but he’d never expected to see it for himself.