Jon Sprunk: Shadows son

Levictus vanished, leaving behind a few spots of blood. But this time, Caim witnessed something he hadn't before. As the sorcerer disappeared, he stepped into a hole in the air, like a window into nothingness. It slammed shut behind him, but tendrils of dark luminescence remained. Caim turned, following them with his eyes. He was ready when Levictus reappeared on the other side of the roof. He struck. The sorcerer nearly fell on his back evading the lunge. His knives deflected the sword's path enough to avoid being spitted. Then, like a cat he righted himself and kept coming.

Around and around they circled while Kit danced above their heads. Her laughter rivaled the thunder. Caim took a scratch on his left hand, a shallow wound, but Levictus followed up with a series of stabs that put him on the defensive. Yet the sorcerer was slowing with every step, while Caim felt his stamina improving. The sword twitched in his hand like a living thing. He pressed with a riposte, but Levictus parried and leapt at him. Caim tried to reverse his momentum as the tip of a black knife raced toward his unprotected chest. He didn't have time to think as he twisted to avoid the deadly strike. The edge of the roof reared up toward him. Off balance, he would have fallen, should have fallen, except that the darkness billowed around him, cradling him in its grasp. His feet left the tiles, and came down a moment later behind the sorcerer. Somehow, he had been transported a dozen feet through thin air. Levictus turned, his knives moving. Even as his brain boggled at what had just happened, Caim lunged.

Levictus made no sound, but the tendons of his neck stood out like taut cables. His eyes stabbed at Caim with the hatred of the damned for one interminable moment. Then, he slumped to his knees.

Caim shoved the blade deeper and stepped back. The sword's hilt quivered in the sorcerer's chest like the masthead of a floundering ship. In his mind, Caim saw his father, kneeling in the blood-drenched yard of their family estate.

Justice. At last.

Sibilant whispers echoed in the darkness. Caim balled his hands into fists as the shadows returned, but they ignored him. Skittering like tiny spiders, they adhered themselves to the sorcerer's body until they encased it in a black cocoon. The corpse dissolved before Calm's eyes, melted away with the rain and ran down the cracks between the roof tiles. A minute later, nothing was left but his father's sword and an empty, sodden cloak.

Caim watched the black garment flap in the wind. The presence was gone, the beast and the little shadows with it, and something else as well. His fear. A weight had been lifted from his mind. He was different-he accepted that-but he wasn't a monster.

A faint wail rode the storm's howl. Josey!

He limped toward the roof's edge, but froze as a barrage of lightning strokes illuminated the night. Ral blocked his path, face streaked with pink lines of blood, sword drawn back. Caim recoiled, but there was nowhere to go. Even an old woman couldn't miss from so close. Ral grinned through his gory mask as the sword shot forth like a bolt from an arbalest. Caim grabbed at the blade with his naked hands, but it slid between his fingers and plunged into his stomach. Warm blood bubbled over Calm's hands as he braced himself for the disemboweling twist, but the sword dropped from the killer's hand to clatter on the tiles. Ral gaped with a stunned expression as he collapsed at Calm's feet for the second time.

Caim lifted his gaze to the slight figure in drenched rags standing behind the dead assassin, one of his suetes clutched in her shaking, bloodstained hands.

"Jo-" Caim tried to say, but the roof jumped up to smash his face.

Then, he was on his back. Josey and Kit knelt on either side of him. Their hands tugged his jacket in different directions, each trying to pull him upright, but the darkness held him in its embrace. His thoughts were slow to come. Water coursed down Josey's face. Overhead, the heavens roiled in their wrath, but an expanding sense of peace filled the hollow spaces of his soul. She was safe.

"It's all right," he whispered with a smile that took all of his dwindling strength.

"Don't leave!" Josey and Kit shouted in his ears. "Stay with me!"

He wanted to stay, but he had to disappoint them both as the night pulled him down into its unfathomable depths.

orning brought a fresh glow to the city. Breezes laden with the sea's cleansing tang blew across the cemetery grounds and banished the lingering stenches of smoke and death. Low strains from a six-piece orchestra filled the grassy strips between long rows of tombs while people gathered around the freshly dug plot.

An imposing marble gravestone stood in the midst of the assembly, the beveled edges of the words engraved upon it glinting in the pale sunlight. Caim Du'Vartha

Dear Friend and Loyal Subject. It is Not the Night We Fear, But the Gathering Shadows Beyond Our Ken.

From his vantage in a thicket of aged brushwood Caim read those words, their letters seared into his brain like harbingers from the next world. Although the faux funeral had been his idea, Josey had come up with the epitaph. He wasn't keen on the "loyal subject" part.

It was an odd thing to observe his own funeral. He supposed this was how ghosts, recently evicted from their corporeal bodies, must feel as they watched their friends and loved ones gather to pay final tribute. In all, he found it rather dreary

Then again, the world had taken on a different shade since the events on the palace roof. The trees, the grass underfoot, even the people attending his memorial-none of them seemed completely real. A new presence flitted in and out of his awareness, always on the periphery. Every so often he would catch a glimpse of a shadow-low to the ground, moving swiftly-and then it would be gone. It was as if he had stepped through a doorway into another world, one deeper and more profound than the one he had known all his life, and there was no going back.

Kit hadn't changed, of course. Or rather, she had returned to the same waif she had always been, ever youthful and bubbling with effervescence. Whatever transformation happened to her that night, it had reversed back by the time he regained consciousness. She refused to discuss the beastly presence, refused even to admit she'd seen it, which shouldn't have surprised him. Same old Kit.

But everything else was different, much of it oddly so. For a known assassin to enter the palace was unnerving enough. To awaken in the imperial bedchamber, attended by dozens of physicians and nurses and servants, had almost been too much for him. But then Josey had appeared and everything seemed right again. Even now the sight of her, dolled up in full regalia as she officiated over the ceremony, made his pulse race. She looked every bit an empress. Her hair had been dyed back to something close to its natural color. A gown of crushed velvet in somber purple lined with snow leopard fur accented her complexion and set off the jewels dripping from her neck, ears, and wrists. She was every man's fantasy: young, beautiful, kind-hearted, yet tough enough to stand on her own. And as far beyond your reach as the moon and stars.

A graceful young woman stood beside Josey. Anastasia, a friend from some important family. Fetching enough for a blonde, but she was outshone by the empress. A stooped, elderly man in a plain gray suit perched at Josey's elbow. Earl Frenig's manservant had been squirreled away in the palace dungeons after his master's murder. Besides being a bit undernourished, the old codger was little worse for wear.

Hubert stood in the front row amid several palace ministers. Head bowed, his left arm in a sling, the new Duke Vassili was a hero. In Low Town they were calling him "Lord of the Gutters." Not the most charming title, but he had taken to it like a kitten to cream. Just days after taking over his father's affairs, Hubert had spearheaded an effort to revive the Thurim. Their first item of business was a salvo of bold reforms aimed at relieving the plight of Othir's poorest citizens, including a plan to rebuild the parts of the city destroyed in the fire. Together, Hubert and Josey were going to accomplish magnificent things.