Cadderly bounded across the floor to the stairs, but then he was moving slowly, as if in a dream, barely able to put one heavy foot in front of the other.
The song played in his head. He instinctively pictured a page from the great book, a page describing focused magical energies, describing how to dispel such malevolent collections of magic.
A moment later he was moving again normally, free of whatever magical bonds had been placed on him. The door to his room was closed, as he’d left it, and all seemed as it should.
Cadderly burst through the door anyway. He found Danica, her breathing rapid, sprawled upon the floor, tangled in a pile of blankets next to the bed. Cadderly knew she was alive and not seriously hurt as he held her in his arms.
The young priest surveyed the room. The notes from the song seemed more distant to him and all seemed calm, but still the young priest wondered if someone had come in during his absence.
“Cadderly,” Danica breathed, suddenly coming awake.
She looked around her, confused for a moment, pulled the blankets high, and brought her arms in close—actions that struck Cadderly as curious gestures.
“A terrible dream,” Danica tried to explain.
Cadderly kissed her gently on the forehead and told her that everything was all right. He placed his chin atop Danica’s head and rocked her in his arms, his own smile widening with growing security.
Danica was unharmed. It had been only a dream.
FIFTEEN
A GOOD DAY TO DIE
As the night wound on toward morning, the guests in half of the eight private rooms at the Dragon’s Codpiece slept soundly.
Bogo Rath was simply too agitated to think of sleeping. Knowing what was to come, and knowing the part he’d played, the young wizard thought through the problems facing him that morning. Would Kierkan Rufo remain loyal? And even if he did, would the priest be able to carry out the mission Bogo had set before him? Things could get very troublesome at the Dragon’s Codpiece very quickly if a certain headmaster from the Edificant Library wasn’t properly and efficiently dealt with.
Bogo understood the merciless Night Masks well enough to realize that Ghost would hold him responsible if Kierkan Rufo failed. The wizard paced his small room, taking care to keep his footsteps as quiet as possible. He wished that Ghost would come to him then, or that one of the band of assassins would at least make contact to let him know how things progressed.
The young wizard resisted the urge to crack open his door, remembering that if he interrupted at an inopportune moment, he might well share Cadderly’s grim fate.
In his own room, Ghost sat staring out his window, bitter and full of rage. He hadn’t slept at all that night, after Danica’s mental discipline had defeated his attempted possession. He had wanted to be close at hand when the assassins roared in. He’d even been forced to go to the band that night and change their orders. Danica must die beside her lover.
For all the unexpected twists, the assassin remained confident that Cadderly would die that day, but even if the young priest fell easily, it had been a messy execution, filled with complications and unexpected losses. Vander had killed one man, and five others were missing in the foothills of the Snowflakes.
And young Cadderly was still very much alive.
And very much awake.
In his room, the young priest sat at his table, dressed for the coming day and flipping through the pages of The Tome of Universal Harmony. The hearth room had shown Cadderly many surprises earlier that night, and he searched for an entry that might help explain the sudden heightening of his senses, particularly his hearing.
Danica sat cross-legged on the floor beside the bed in quiet meditation, allowing the priest his needed privacy and taking some for herself. Hers was a life of discipline, of private challenges and trials, and though it was a bit early, she had already begun her daily morning ritual, working her inner being, stretching her limbs, and clearing her mind in preparation for the coming day.
Danica had discovered no answers for her strange experience earlier that night, and truthfully, she hadn’t sought any. To her, the encounter with the unknown other mind remained a dream. Since nothing else traumatic or dangerous had occurred, that explanation seemed to satisfy her.
“The sun has not even peeked over the horizon!” Headmaster Avery protested, managing with some difficulty to roll his bulky form out of bed.
“That was Cadderly’s wish,” Kierkan Rufo reminded him. “He desired secrecy, and I believe what he might have to say will be worth the effort.”
Avery struggled to clear his throat of its nighttime phlegm and draw in a profound breath, never taking his curious stare off the man.
Rufo struggled even harder to remain calm under that searching gaze. He kept his breathing steady. So many things depended on his maintaining a calm facade, but beneath the calm front, turmoil boiled in Rufo. He honestly wondered how it had all come down to such a dramatic end. He had been used by Barjin when the Talonite priest had invaded the library several months before. He had been the one who’d kicked Cadderly down the secret stairway, nearly leading to the library’s downfall.
Rufo had never quite forgiven himself—no, not forgiven himself, but rather, had never quite been able to justify the action to himself. Self-forgiveness would imply that he held guilty thoughts for that treacherous act, and he didn’t. With every event that had come after Barjin’s invasion, Cadderly had become more Rufo’s rival, more his bane. In Shilmista, Cadderly had emerged a hero, while Rufo, through no fault of his own—at least, none that he would admit to, even to himself—had become a scapegoat.
Bleary-eyed, Avery stumbled across the floor and pulled on his clothes. Rufo was glad to be released from the headmaster’s gaze.
“Are you coming down with me?” Avery asked.
“Cadderly doesn’t want me there,” the man lied. “He said he would meet with you alone in the hearth room before Fredegar began his work.”
“Before dawn,” Avery muttered.
Rufo continued to stare at the portly headmaster’s back. He didn’t hate Avery—on the contrary, the headmaster had acted on Rufo’s behalf many times over the last decade. But that was behind them, Rufo reminded himself. Shilmista had undeniably changed the course of Rufo’s life, but looking at vulnerable Avery, he had to pause and consider just how drastically.
“Well, I’m off for the hearth room, then,” Avery announced, moving to the door.
He wasn’t even carrying his mace in the loop on his belt, Rufo noted. And he hadn’t yet prayed and prepared any spells.
“I truly wish Cadderly would be more … conventional,” Avery remarked, his obvious fondness for the young priest showing through, and that only strengthening the treacherous Rufo’s resolve. “But then that is his charm, I suppose.” Avery paused and smiled, and Rufo knew the portly man was engaged in some private recollection.
“Meet me in the hearth room for the morning meal,” Avery instructed. “Perhaps I’ll be able to persuade Cadderly to dine with us.”
“Just what I desire,” the man muttered.
He moved to the door and watched Avery descend the sweeping stairway to the dimly lighted hearth room then closed the door. Rufo’s part was done. He had set events into motion, as the young wizard had instructed him to do. Avery’s fate was the headmaster’s own to deal with.
The man leaned back against the wall, desperately trying to dismiss his growing guilt. He recalled Avery’s recent treatment of him, of the terrible things the headmaster had said to him and the threats to drive Rufo from the order.
For Kierkan Rufo, consumed by resentment, guilt was not a difficult emotion to overcome.
Half asleep in the common room of the inn two doors down from the Dragon’s Codpiece, his head resting on the ledge of the alley window, Pikel heard a distinct whistle. The dwarf’s grogginess held fast only for the few moments it took Pikel to remember what his brother would do to him if Ivan caught him asleep on his watc
h.
Pikel stuck his head out the window and took in a deep breath of the chilly predawn air.
Another whistle sounded, from the alley on the other side of the building he was facing.
“Eh?” the dwarf grunted, his instincts telling him that the whistles were surely signals. Pikel hopped up from his seat and ran to the front door, throwing aside the locking bar and hopping out onto the inn’s front porch.
He saw shapes pass out of the alley beyond the nearest building, move onto the veranda of the Dragon’s Codpiece, and slip through the open door.
Pikel started forward to better investigate when a movement close beside him stole his attention. A large man rushed up to him, sword slicing. The first hit bounced off the dwarf’s armored shoulder, not penetrating but leaving a painful bruise.
“Oooo!” Pikel exclaimed in surprise, backstepping the way he’d come. The man kept right with him, flailing away viciously. Pikel had no weapon—he’d left his club back in his room, not really believing Ivan’s growing suspicions that dangers were lurking just outside.
The man hacked away at him, driving him backward with every step. Blood rolled down one of Pikel’s arms, and he took a glancing hit across the cheek that drew a thin red line.
The relentless beating continued, and Pikel, nearly across the common room, had little distance left to run.
The lockpick had been silent. Headmaster Avery, his heavy eyelids drooping, didn’t even realize that anyone had entered the Dragon’s Codpiece until the assassins were upon him.
Then they were beyond him, slipping up the stairs as quietly as shadows.
Cadderly looked up from The Tome of Universal Harmony and glanced over his shoulder at Danica.
“What is it?” the woman asked, her meditation interrupted by the sheer intensity of the young scholar’s stare.
Cadderly lifted a finger over pursed lips, beckoning the woman to be silent. Something had called out to him, a distant song, a voice of impending danger. He took up his spindle-disks and his walking stick and started to rise, facing the closed door.
He hadn’t even left his chair when the door burst open and dark shapes stormed in.
Danica was still sitting cross-legged when the first assassin, sword in hand, rushed at her. The killer came in low, gaping in disbelief as Danica’s coiled legs sprang, her momentum lifting her into the air. She tucked her legs under as she rose, clearing the low strike, and descended on the bending man.
Her legs locked around his neck as she came down, clamping tightly, and she jerked herself to the side, dipping into a full bend and throwing her full weight right under the bending man.
The assassin saw the room spin, but his body had not turned.
Cadderly whipped his walking stick across in front of him and was amazed when he heard something—a crossbow quarrel, he realized—tick off it and fly harmlessly wide. He swung again in a wide, shoulder-level arc as two men bore down on him. Instinctively, Cadderly dropped to one knee and snapped his spindle-disks straight out ahead of him.
The ducking attacker came down right in line with the second weapon, catching the adamantine disks on his forearm.
Cadderly expected the man to immediately retaliate, for the young priest had not yet learned of the power of Ivan’s forging. Cadderly stared as the man’s arm folded—it seemed as though he had grown a second elbow—under the power of the blow.
But pausing to gape with a second enemy so near was not a wise choice. By the time Cadderly realized his error, realized that a spiked club was on its way down to crunch his head, he knew that his life was at its end.
Pikel managed to keep close enough to his pursuer so that the man hadn’t been able to extend his long arms and get in a serious hit. Still, the dwarf said “Oooo!” repeatedly, feeling the sting of a dozen razorlike slashes.
Pikel’s first thought was to go for the stairs, but he dismissed the idea, realizing that if he started up, he would rise to his enemy’s level and lose his desperately needed advantage of being down below the man’s optimum striking area. The dwarf veered to the side, backstepping faster, nearly tumbling over in the effort.
The man stayed with him, every step.
The killer stopped suddenly, and Pikel realized that he could not do likewise, leaving the dwarf wide open for a full-force roundhouse.
“Oooo!” Pikel screamed, desperately hurling himself backward through the air.
He collided with the wall before he’d gotten very far, and the assassin’s sword whipped across just under the breastplate of the dwarf’s fine armor.
Pikel didn’t even have the time to cry out. He bounced back off the wall and charged forward. The assassin held his sword level in front of him, and Pikel would have impaled himself, except that he grabbed the sharp blade with his bare hand and turned it aside.
Then Pikel was up against the man. He released the sword and wrapped the man’s arms in his own, pushing with all his strength, his stubby, muscled legs frantically pumping.
It was the killer’s turn to backstep, and Pikel drove forward, gaining speed and momentum. The dwarf could hardly see around the larger man. He aimed for the open door but missed, two feet to the left.
The inn suddenly had a second door.
Danica hit the floor harder than she would have liked, but she managed to scramble back under her victim fast enough so that the next closest assassin inadvertently sliced his sword into the back of his still-standing companion.
Out the other side, Danica ran to the foot of the bed, hooked the post in one arm, and spun around, hopping up onto the mattress. An attacker came up on the bed as well, at the other end, bearing down on the apparently unarmed woman.
Danica kept low and kicked straight out. She could hardly brace herself amidst the tangle of blankets, so her kick was not fierce, but neither could the assassin brace himself, so it didn’t have to be. The man stumbled in the tangle and lurched over. Danica came up under him, hooking her arm under and behind his shoulder, and heaved him away using his own momentum to launch him over the foot end of the bed.
She was up, grabbing the blankets as she went, knowing the sword-wielder was too close. She lifted the tangle of cloth out in front of her, smiling grimly as she felt it absorb the weight of the coming blow.
Caught in, and concerned with, the impromptu web, the assassin failed to anticipate Danica’s next attack, and her foot connected with his belly.
The agile monk let herself drop as the man lurched over, using the spring of the bed to lift her right back up, her forearm slamming against the stooping man’s face. Danica’s second arm, coiled against her chest, snapped out under the first, thumping into the man’s throat, then she reversed the angle of her first arm, flying high over her head in its follow-through, and came down diagonally at her stunned victim, blasting against his collarbone. He flew to the side, and Danica, temporarily free of any immediate threat, was hardly pleased by what she saw beyond him.
Again using the spring of the bed, the young woman leaped out, diving between the posts at the foot of the bed. She heard a heavy thump as a crossbow quarrel hit the wall right behind her.
The man she had thrown that way was back up and turning back to the fight, but hardly prepared as Danica’s shoulder-block launched him over the table to crash into the wall.
“Stop!” The word came from somewhere deep inside Cadderly. He wasn’t even aware of the magical strength it carried until the killer above him, already beginning his stroke, pulled his spiked club to a halt and stood perfectly still. The weapon hovered just a few inches above Cadderly’s head.
The command had no lasting power, and the assassin came out of it quickly, snarling and lifting his club for another strike.
Still acting purely on instinct, Cadderly lashed out in two directions at once, slamming his walking stick against the side of the man’s knee, and heaving his spindle-disks straight ahead to collide with the crumbling killer’s chest and send him flying backward.
“The balco
ny!” Danica cried, and Cadderly, seeing the group of killers—some cocking crossbows—still coming in the door, could hardly disagree.
Danica hooked his arm as she passed and threw open the door.
The song had started again in Cadderly’s head, somehow passing through the confusion and the many noises.
He grabbed Danica’s hair and jerked violently backward just as the woman took her first step out of the room. Fully caught by surprise, Danica fell back.
Cadderly snapped his spindle-disks across her angled torso, to meet head on with a thrusting dagger coming the other way.
Ivan’s disks easily won the contest, bending the dagger blade and crushing the hand that held it.
Cadderly recoiled quickly, felt the sting as the disks snapped back into his own hand, and whipped them straight back. They hit the wounded man in the chest, driving him over the railing.
The assassin reached out as he tumbled, grasping futilely at the rail. His hand hooked the balcony just enough to allow him to continue in his spin, to put his legs straight out under him so that when he fell the twenty feet to the ground, he landed flat on his back.
And he lay very still.
Pikel shook the splinters from his beard and hair.
“Me brother!”
The call, though emphatic, sounded distant, and was accentuated by the crash of shattering glass and splintering wood as Ivan, hearing his brother’s distress, ran full speed down the inn’s second story hallway and flung himself headlong through the window above the front door.
He crashed down with a groan, two feet to the right of Pikel and the stunned assassin, showering the two of them with glass and shards of broken wood.
The killer, up first, his back bleeding from many gashes, turned around to discern the newest threat. He saw the lower half of Ivan—the dwarf’s upper torso having plummeted right through the raised wooden decking—but he knew by the way the dwarf was flailing and cursing that Ivan would not be held captive long.