Барб Хенди - Between Their Worlds

NIGHT HAD SETTLEDover the city of Calm Seatt, where a silent figure lay flat atop a darkened, closed shop. Hidden beneath a voluminous, dusky wool cloak with a full hood, his attention was fixed on the mist-hazed, erratic shapes of the city’s rooftops. The watcher raised his head and stiffened at a sight in the distance.

A black silhouette dashed down the sharp slope of a shake roof. Upon reaching the eaves, where the lamplight below showed its tunic as forest gray, it leaped, seeming to hang in the air for an instant. It arced across the gap of a narrow street and landed without a sound upon another building’s top. As it raced onward, it was not alone.

The watcher spotted other figures here and there across the night landscape of city rooftops. One and then another appeared below on the only street visible from his vantage point. They darted out of cutways and alleys, only to vanish from sight on the street’s far side. The watcher’s sagging hood turned in the direction where all those figures raced.

Amid a gap in the cityscape sat a bulky and squat four-towered castle shaped like a block with a hollow center for its inner courtyard. When he looked again for those other figures in the night, all were gone but for one. It dashed up an alley parallel to that one visible street. As with the others, the last figure turned out of sight toward the castle.

The watcher rose, towering over the clay and tile chimney behind him.

He would have been nearly a head taller than an average male, should he have been seen among such. When a soft whistle came from somewhere below, it did not startle him. He walked to the roof’s edge, crouched, and looked down.

Below, in the alley behind the shop, two cloaked figures raised their hooded heads to him, but the mist’s shroud and the alley’s shadows hid their faces. Even so, he knew their clothing, which had been chosen to blend in with the local population.

One was clearly male, though not quite as overly tall as the watcher, and wore a tawny brown, hooded cloak, its wool turned fuzzy by age and wear. He carried a long and narrow canvas bundle on his back, lashed over his right shoulder and across his chocolate-colored felt vestment by a length of the bundle’s binding cord. A quiver protruded above his right shoulder, its arrows’ fletchings made from crow feathers, and in his right hand he carried a strung and readied bow with subtle curves.

The second figure was shorter, less than average in height, and female. A soiled wool skirt of dark green showed below the hem of a faded burgundy cloak. She carried nothing but a shuttered lantern, and the narrow fingers of her gloved hand clutched its handle too tightly. Perhaps she shivered, though there was little chill in the air, and she tried to close her cloak more tightly with her other hand.

The watcher, prepared to drop over the roof’s edge, paused and looked up, as if sensing something nearby. He looked back in the direction opposite from where those flitting silhouettes had gone. At first he saw nothing he could pinpoint.

What had seemed a crudely shaped, overly tall smokestack in the distance suddenly shifted position. Another figure moved across that other roof two blocks away, barely visible in the night mist.

It was a puzzle, for this could not be one of the others who had gone ahead. And what had at first looked like a broad tin rain shield atop the false smokestack now appeared to be a wide-brimmed hat, dark in color to match the lone figure’s midlength cloak. The figure drifted in the mist and then suddenly dropped, plummeting from sight between the buildings.

The watcher hesitated, uncertain.

Looking back to where the first silhouettes had vanished, he saw no sign of them anymore. They were the ones he had been waiting for, and his attention could not be divided. He dropped over the roof’s edge, landing lightly in the alley with no more sound than a boot’s toe tapped upon the damp cobble.

“They have found her for us,” he whispered, passing his companions without pause. “She has finally reappeared.”

Barely glancing both ways as he stepped out of the alley’s mouth, he moved quickly across the mainway with his followers close behind. Not a sound rose from his footfalls, though not so for the other two. Though the tall male moved with care, the smaller female’s feet clapped carelessly on the street stones in her rush to keep up.

The watcher never paused at their noise. There was no one near enough to hear them, nor to see his face when a street lantern’s light briefly touched him.

Dressed in a dark dun cloak, he wore a jerkin that was common and weatherworn. A black wrap of cloth hid the lower half of his face. What skin was visible was darkly tanned, and the lantern’s light sparked in his large amber eyes, framed with the creases of age.

The right eye stood out the most.

Four ridges of straight, pale scars streaked at an angle through a feathery eyebrow, then skipped that eye and continued down across his cheekbone. The scars finally disappeared beneath the black face wrap. His right amber eye peered through those scars, like a furnace coal burning through caged bars, and out into the night.

He paused before entering the alley across the way, ushering his companions ahead, and the other male made too much noise in clambering up the back eaves of a shop. The watcher held out a hand to stay the female, who uttered a frustrated sigh as she halted. Then he stared down the mainway called Old Procession Road to where it met the gate of an inner bailey—all that was left after the city had grown in around the old, small castle.

The watcher crossed his arms and slipped his hands up opposing sleeves. When he withdrew them, each hand gripped the hilt of a long, silvery stiletto, pulled from their hidden sheaths.

Brot’ân’duivé—the Dog in the Dark—Greimasg’äh, a Shadow-Gripper and master among the Anmaglâhk, glared intently toward the Guild of Sagecraft. He then slipped into an alley with both blade hilts settled in his hands—but lightly, always softly, for a kill.

MAGIERE TRIED TOremain expressionless. She sat on a stool, amid her friends and loved ones, in an alcove within a catacomb below Wynn’s home—this Guild of Sagecraft in a land far from her own.

The alcove was sparsely furnished, with only a faded oak table and a few stools, but broad archways nearly filled all four of its narrow walls. In one corner stood a tall staff with a leather sheath covering its top.

Magiere barely glanced at her surroundings.

She didn’t think of wanting to go home, to her own home, left behind for so long. She wasn’t even thinking of Wynn in her long gray sage’s robe, still crouched in one alcove archway, or whether Chap—a silver-gray dog like an oversized wolf—had answered the little sage’s last question.

“What happened to you ... all of you ... in the Wastes?”

Hopefully, Chap hadn’t yet answered her. Not that he could’ve in the brief moment that had just passed. Even using the mental “voice” by which he could speak only to Wynn wouldn’t have been enough. Too much had happened for a quick or easy response. But Wynn couldn’t know this. She’d simply asked what anyone might after being apart from her friends for a whole year and seeing the changes in them. Now that they were all reunited, it was just like Wynn to blurt out the first thing that popped into her head.

But even this wasn’t what plagued Magiere. For as soon as Wynn asked her question, Leesil, Magiere’s husband, turned away from everyone and stared blankly into an empty corner of the alcove.