Филип Этанс - The Death Ray

Regdar shrugged and turned to examine the door. There was no obvious lock, just a big, heavy, iron ring.

“Why am I getting a bad feeling about this door?” Regdar asked no one in particular.

“Because you’re not an idiot,” Sergeant Lorec answered, then seemed to remember himself. “I mean, because you have good instincts, Lord Constable.”

Regdar waved off the young man’s embarrassment and briefly pined for Lidda. She could have examined the door for traps, removed them, then picked the lock. Regdar sighed at the thought that what he needed right then was a thief, but he was surrounded by the watch.

“I’ll open it, milord,” Lorec said, squaring his shoulders.

Regdar smiled, held his shield up to cover his face, and said, “I’ve got it, Sergeant, but thank you.”

Reaching around his shield, Regdar tugged at the iron ring, but the door held fast. Nothing shot, squirted, exploded, or hissed out at him, and he didn’t drop dead or burst into flames, so Regdar had to assume it was just locked.

“Stand back,” he said.

The two men pushed back to the top of the stairs, the others giving way behind them.

Regdar whirled and kicked the door hard just below the iron ring. The blow sent a resounding thud echoing down the stairs and tendrils of electric pain tingling up Regdar’s leg. The door didn’t budge.

“You hit that hard, milord,” Lorec said. “It damn well should have opened.”

Regdar rubbed his leg and called for Naull.

By the time she made her way up the stairs through the others, Regdar’s leg was beginning to feel normal again.

“I’ve heard there are spells to keep a door closed,” he said.

Naull looked at the door, took a long, deep breath in the stale but not odorous air, and said, “One or two. I had a feeling we’d be in a position like this, breaking into a murderer’s secret hideaway and all.”

She stared at the door and whispered a string of nonsense words. It seemed to Regdar that they should have echoed more in the confined space. Once spoken, the words fell dead as if they had weight.

There was a click, then a creak, and the door eased open a few inches.

Regdar put out a hand to push past Naull, startling her.

“Jandik,” he said, “bring that light up.”

The tracker came forward and Regdar carefully drew his greatsword. He stepped through the door into a wide room made from mortared flagstones. There was another iron-bound oak door in the wall to his right and a third across the room. A single sheet of parchment was nailed to the door on the other side of the room. Regdar could just barely make out what looked like writing from across the dimly lit room. Otherwise the space was empty and seemed not to have been used in some time.

Jandik stepped in next to Regdar and they both examined the floor. Thick dust was everywhere but there were obvious tracks—furrows almost—connecting all three doors.

“Looks like either one,” Jandik said, “or both.”

As the others filed into the room, Regdar said, “Sergeant Lorec, take Jandik, Asil, and Samoth, and go through that way.” He pointed at the door with the parchment nailed to it and Lorec started crossing the room immediately. “Naull, Lem, and Drahir will come with me this way. Bring me that parchment first, though,” he added.

Lorec was already there. Regdar saw him reach for the parchment while leaning in to read it from Samoth’s lanternlight.

The sergeant’s hand never made it to the parchment before it was blown off in a blast of air, fire, wood, iron, dust, blood, and shattered bone.

Regdar was pushed back and fell sprawling against the wall, only dimly aware of pain and heat, screams and grunts.

“Damn you,” Vargussel muttered to Regdar, though the lord constable couldn’t hear him. “Have you no intellectual curiosity at all?”

The explosive runes were meant for Regdar, but who knew the lord constable would send some lowly watch sergeant to read it?

Though it was hard for Vargussel to see through the clouds of dust and smoke filling the room, he could see Regdar scramble to his feet, virtually unharmed. The young woman was coughing, waving away the smoke, but also still standing. One of the watchmen at least seemed to have survived, and he ran out of the room, coughing and gagging.

The smoke continued billowing and Vargussel could just make out the shape of a man laying on the floor, his skin and clothing ablaze.

Vargussel smiled at the fact that he’d hurt them at least—maybe enough to turn back their little expedition into his private affairs. He stopped smiling when he heard the woman begin casting a spell.

She ran through it well, managing not to cough, and Vargussel cursed her the whole way.

What will it be? he thought. A gust of wind, a wind wall…something to blow away the smoke?”

The room filled with pelting, fast-driving sleet. The dull crystals were driven by a strong wind, falling almost sideways in the confined space. The few watchmen that still stood scurried around in a panic as the woman tried to assure them that it was “all right” and that they shouldn’t panic.

“Sleet storm,” Vargussel whispered, then thought: This one has a flair for the dramatic.

It didn’t take long for the conjured storm to clear the room of smoke, drive the dampened dust to the floor, and put out the fires.

Vargussel shrugged. At least he could see better.

The runes did their work well. The sergeant was dead. His right hand was gone completely and his face was a blackened, ruined mass of scorched flesh. The watchman who held the lantern for his sergeant had been thrown back a good eight feet and lay crumpled on the floor in a position only someone with a broken back could accomplish.

One of the others seemed to have stabbed himself through the thigh with his own sword. He sat against a wall, twitching, shivering in a pool of freezing sleet, bleeding.

Japdik , Regdar called to the man as he slipped across the floor to him. It’s all right. You’re going to be all right .

That made Vargussel laugh.

“Don’t let me…” Jandik gasped, blood foaming on his quivering lips, his eyes rolling up to lazily scan Regdar’s face. “Don’t let me…die here. It stinks.”

Regdar forced himself to laugh and got a smile from the wounded tracker. He was rifling through his pack, crouching over the fallen watchman.

“You’re not going to die here,” Regdar reassured the man. “You’re under my command, and I don’t remember giving you any such order.”

“Lorec…” Jandik coughed out, “and Samoth…”

Regdar’s fingers found the vial he was looking for and pulled it out of his pack with a jerk.

“I’ll deal with them myself,” Regdar joked darkly as he peeled the wax off the cork. “Now, I want you to drink this…all of it.”

“No…” the tracker mumbled halfheartedly, wiping sleet, blood, and dust from his hair. “Don’t waste that on—”

Regdar pushed the vial past the tracker’s lips and smiled again as Jandik greedily drank the contents of the vial. When it was empty, Regdar gently drew it away from Jandik’s mouth. The tracker leaned forward, trying to suck any last drop from the vial.

“Easy,” Regdar said, “you got it all. It should just take a—”

He stopped when he heard something he thought was an armored footstep echo quietly from the dark space behind the ruined door.

“Did you hear that?” Naull whispered as Regdar stood.

Jandik coughed, wiped his lips on the back of a hand, and coughed again. The second time, no blood came with it. The tracker took a deep breath.

Regdar put up a hand for silence and the group of survivors obeyed. As he waited for the sound to come again, Regdar scanned the corpse of Watch Sergeant Lorec, doing his best to see the ruined body of one of his men in terms of resources rather than emotion. His eyes settled on the sergeant’s sword just when the sound came again. There was no mistaking it that time.