Барб Хенди - First and Last Sorcerer

Brot’ân’duivé thrust up with both legs, arching his back.

A mute but sharp crack of bone answered his effort.

She went instantly limp with her head wrapped under his right arm. Then came the clatter of her blade upon the street. He waited for three calming breaths.

When he let the body flop to the street, he stood there looking at her. Dispassionately, his gaze traced from her open but blank eyes, with large amber irises, to the barely parted lips and then on to the neck, broken and twisted aside at an unnatural angle.

It had all taken too long and left him wondering why he had let it be so. When he turned away, a sharp pain in his left side halted him.

Brot’ân’duivé brushed aside his cloak.

He stared at blood soaking his tunic around a clean slice in the fabric. It was not that he had been wounded. This had happened more than once in his life, but not in recent memory against only one opponent. In fascination, he looked back at the still body in the street.

She had wounded him. Not severely, but still ...

A strange sorrow overtook him but not for her death.

Dänvârfij, “Fated Music,” lay still with empty eyes staring up at nothing. Like all of his people, when she had come of age, she had gone to sacred ground to face the spirits of their ancestors. By whatever one saw in that place—which was never to be spoken of—a new name was taken.

Brot’ân’duivé heard no music in the street or anywhere in this faraway city. For all the loyalists he had killed, he had felt nothing. They had become the enemy, serving a paranoid madman who endangered the people.

His regret was not that he had killed her. It was the waste of what she might have become. In that silent moment, without even the whistle of a bird in the dark, it was as if her name—her life’s truer purpose—would never be fulfilled.

Regret turned to an anger he could not suppress. Perhaps that regret had been there all along, for there was one other thing he had almost left behind. He returned to lean down over her corpse. After removing all her weapons, he searched for one specific object, found it, and held it up.

Smooth and tawny and oval, it had been grown from the very tree in which Most Aged Father had lived for perhaps a thousand years. It was a communication device much like one that Brot’ân’duivé carried for speaking to other factions of dissidents among his people. The ones carried by anmaglâhk on a mission had only to be pressed against the trunk of any tree to speak to Most Aged Father.

This was the last word-wood possessed by Dänvârfij’s team. Without it, they were cut off from their tyrant patriarch.

Brot’ân’duivé studied the smooth bit of wood. Instead of destroying it, he slipped it through the bloodied slit into hiding within his tunic. He retrieved his own stiletto, which he had also forgotten. He had forgotten or overlooked too many things this night.

Before joining Léshil and the others, he had one more stop to make, to retrieve a few things he had purposefully hidden.

He left Dänvârfij’s body where it lay.

Ghassan grew more concerned as he led Wynn and the escaped prisoners onward, enough that he abandoned following, watching from behind, and stepped out to take the lead. It did not help that the silver-gray wolf eyed him with what he guessed was suspicion.

Once the escape had been uncovered, an alarm had been raised inside the imperial grounds. He fervently hoped the prince remained unconnected to any of this. Ounyal’am was one of few allies he had left, and the prince was the only one with both political power and the placement to use it. But Ghassan had been shocked at the physical state of Magiere.

He had gone to great lengths to engage potential assistance in hunting Khalidah, but this barbaric, pale-skinned woman could not even walk on her own. Now he feared he had risked too much—including his prince—for too little. Worse still¸ by now the imperial guards would be searching the city for the escapees, and he had not yet reached the halfway point to his hidden sanctuary.

Everyone with him was out in the open. Though few citizens passed by in the streets this late at night, more would have been better in slowing the search by any guards.

“You two, down there,” someone shouted.

Ghassan did not look back. Dwellings along this street were built one against the next. There was nowhere to dash quickly out of sight.

“Ghassan?” Wynn whispered from behind him, still bracing up Magiere.

“We need to find another route,” he whispered.

He hurried for the next side street but stopped as two men in gold sashes appeared a block ahead.

“There! Quickly!” one shouted to the other.

Ghassan heard Chap snarl behind him, and then a howl carried from afar as if answering him. He recognized Shade’s eerie sound. What was the black majay-hì doing? Her noise would call every other guard within hearing.

He blinked slowly, and in the dark behind his eyelids, lines of light spread, but he never had a chance to finish with his gaze fixed on the first guard.

The man suddenly stumbled and fell hard.

There stood Chane right behind him. The second guard skidded to a stop beside his downed companion and turned. Instead of using his sword, Chane struck with his free hand. His fist cracked against that one’s face. As that second man dropped, he kicked the first in the side of the head.

Ghassan had no time for questions as the black majay-hì uttered another howl from somewhere. Chane pivoted sharply toward that sound, and his jaggedly cut hair swished over one glittering eye as he looked toward Ghassan.

“Go!” he rasped. “Now!”

Instead of coming to the group, Chane turned and ran down an alley in the direction of Shade’s howling.

Ghassan shook his head. Chane was going after the dog? This was a group of bizarre and unexpected loyalties, but Ghassan did not hesitate and fixed on an alley’s mouth halfway up the block.

“Everyone run!”

Chane followed Shade’s howl, and it ended abruptly. They had had to split up to further divide and confuse the imperial guards leaving the grounds. Only blind luck brought him to two more of those about to close on Wynn and the others. And now Shade was in trouble.

She would not have howled twice in a row to simply keep any guards from following her.

When her last howl ended, Chane lost his only certain way to track her. He bolted down a side street following the last sound she had made. The street did not run fully in the right direction, so he swerved into a cutway, veered again when he reached a back alley, and raced out across another street to where the alley cut through another block.

He stopped completely.

The alley did not go through; it was a dead end.

Something glinted ahead in its darkness.

Chane’s sight widened as he let hunger flood him. Near the alley’s blocked end stood two imperial guards with their backs to him. Whatever growled beyond them kept their full attention ... including a snarl and a clack of teeth.

He could not see beyond those guards, but he knew Shade’s sound was spurred by panic and anger. Both men had curved swords in hand, though one withdrew a step at Shade’s warning. Why did she not rush them and break through?

Something more was not right.

The one who backed up snapped something at the other, but Chane’s Sumanese was still too poor to catch the words. There were no wolves this far south, and these two might be confused about exactly what she was.

Chane crept in along the alley’s left wall. As he neared, he spotted something more.

A third guard was trapped in the dead end’s left corner, and his right sleeve was shredded and stained dark. His wide, unblinking eyes fixed toward something still blocked from Chane’s sight—likely Shade. Those eyes twitched toward a sword on the ground just out of reach.