Jon Sprunk - Shadow's master

Malig produced a bottle from somewhere, and the astringent smell of spirits filled the room. “You got a plan yet?”

Caim pulled up his hood. “I'll be back soon. Don't go wandering off.”

“Why? You going to skip town without us?”

Caim left without answering. The courtyard was empty. Checking to make sure his knives were loose in their sheaths, he started off down the side street. He avoided the lights shining from windows. With this many Northmen packed together-the town was large enough to hold a thousand or more with ease-he might have expected fighting and carousing to be commonplace. He passed a few drunks wandering the streets, but no soldiers or constables. The town had an air of lawlessness, and yet despite that it was as quiet as the grave. He found himself treading lighter, as if afraid to disturb the stillness, as he worked his way around to the north end.

The tugging in his head was stronger again. He wanted to bash his forehead against the side of a building. Kit, this would be the perfect time to come back. But she didn't appear, and that compounded his irritation.

Beyond the buildings, Caim reentered the snowy tundra of the wastes. Distant lights twinkled to the northeast. Another town, perhaps, but smaller. He looked to the west and thought he could make out another settlement in that direction, but the tugging pulled him due north toward the hills outside of town. He followed.

Caim was so intent on his destination he almost stumbled into the path of a tragic procession. The crack of a whip made him stop as a double line of slaves approached. Backs bent, legs straining, they pulled a massive block of glossy black stone behind them. Caim hunkered down to watch. The slaves were a scrawny, unhealthy-looking bunch. Mostly men, but a few women as well, clad in dirty rags. While one team pulled, a second group of slaves kept the block moving on a series of log rollers, taking them from behind once the stone passed over and rushing them to the front to go under the block again. Northmen in long cloaks and tall helms coerced them with kicks and buffets.

Caim slipped away. The terrain became rougher underfoot as the foothills rose to chalky, gray cliffs littered with snow and scree. When the slope became too steep, he picked his way around until he found a chimney in the cliffs. There were enough cracks in the bedrock he could almost climb it like a ladder. A grand sight was revealed to him at the summit.

Massive black walls rose from the plateau atop the cliffs. Round towers more than a hundred feet tall studded the ramparts. From where he had climbed up, Caim saw the mammoth gatehouse, by itself as large as the palace in Othir. Beyond the walls rose the tops of cyclopean towers. Not round, but not completely square either, they were constructed with sharp vertices and bowed lines unlike anything in the south. Caim thought back to the slaves he had seen below and the huge block they'd been dragging. He imagined other camps strung around the citadel, all providing slaves and material.

This had to be Erebus. He'd found it at long last. Some part of him had despaired of ever finding it, fearing it was a lie, one last torment inflicted by his aunt before her demise. But it was real.

A monstrous pyramid dominated the skyline, and a hollow feeling gnawed at Caim's insides as he recalled the vision he'd seen in Sybelle's sanctum.

He hovered before an enormous construction perched on the desolate plain. Its angular black walls were riddled with silver veins and pockets of polished crystal. Gargantuan towers rose like titanic fingers, topped with dagger-sharp spires.

Was his mother inside, a captive for all these years? Or was she long dead? He gazed up to the pointed apex.

Now what?

That was the question. He didn't have a clue what to do next. Caim started walking parallel to the walls as he considered how to gain entry. The ramparts looked thick enough to shrug off any siege weapon he'd ever seen, but there were flaws in any design.

Caim halted as a sudden pressure constricted inside his chest. He dropped to one knee and reached for his knives. Distant sounds reached his ears from the west, where a cortege of people climbed a stone road leading from the cliffs to the citadel gates. Eight men carried a palanquin covered by gauzy curtains, and a coffle of slaves trailed behind. When they neared the gatehouse, a horn blew from the high walls, and a troop of soldiers in black plate armor filed out.

Caim was about to move closer when the litter stopped. The curtains covering its interior opened, and a woman's face appeared. He took her for a shadow woman by her lustrous, dusky skin and deep black hair. She was slimmer than Sybelle had been, with sharper features and thin, arched eyebrows. When she gazed in his direction, Caim ground his teeth in frustration, knowing on some level that she had sensed his presence, just as he'd sensed her. He ducked down to create a lower profile and concentrated on hiding from her extramundane perception, pushing back against the pressure in his chest. It was an uncomfortable sensation, similar to scrubbing his skin with a stiff wire brush from the inside, but after several slow, deep breaths the constriction eased.

On the road, the woman looked about for another minute, and then let the curtain fall shut. The soldiers formed up and escorted the palanquin inside the citadel. The gates of the barbican closed behind the last slave in line, sealing the fortress.

Caim sighed through his teeth, weighing his next move. Continue on alone and cast the dice, or retreat and regroup. The stars were out, red specks scattered across the black sky like fiery embers stirred by a strong breeze. He got to his feet and headed back to the cliffs.

As he reached the top of the chimney and prepared to lever himself over the edge, Caim noticed something that made him stop in his tracks. The tugging in his head, which he had followed for more than three months and several hundred leagues, was gone.

Josey ducked under a low-hanging branch, its pallid twigs curled like claws in the dark. She was bone-tired, but every time her eyes closed she saw them again-the hacking swords and axes, the maimed soldiers writhing on the ground, the cacophony of screams that filled the air and went on and on like it would never end.

“Majesty,” Brian said in her ear. “Are you all right?”

She nodded and tried not to think about his strong arm around her middle or the places her backside touched against as she rode before him in the same saddle. But those thoughts were comforting compared to the horrors that otherwise haunted her. She had always imagined two armies made a titanic crash when they met, but from her vantage on the hill she had heard only muted shouts and tinny clangs, the thwacks of the siege engines as they released their fury. The invaders had weathered the flights of arrows and missiles to pour over the earthworks like an army of ants, filling the trenches with the bodies of friend and foe alike. Josey thought it was going to end right then and there, but Argentus sent his reserves straight into the boiling heart of the fight, and the auxiliaries held the center.

But then a fiery explosion rocked the battlefield. Soldiers were hurtled into the air like dolls, their mutilated arms and legs flailing. Oily smoke wafted from the glowing crater where a platoon of her men had been standing a moment before. Josey looked to Hirsch, but the adept had his eyes pinched shut while he mumbled under his breath. She couldn't understand a word of it. She expected balls of fire from him in response, or lightning from the sky, not foreign mantras. Another explosion decimated a squadron of archers, and Josey searched for the source. Then she saw them advancing through enemy ranks, a company of horsemen in gleaming black armor. They surrounded a mighty figure of a man who could only be the enemy commander. He was clad from neck to heels in crimson plate and wore no helmet on his shaved pate. A bannerman rode behind him holding a standard-a black fist clutching a bolt of lightning on a bloodred field. The warlord lifted his arm, and yet another explosion tore through her troops.