Ivan started to say something to Cadderly, but Danica put a hand on the dwarf’s shoulder to stop him.
Cadderly wouldn’t have heard Ivan anyway. The young priest moved beside Avery’s torn body and wiped a tear from his gray eyes. Avery had gotten in the way of something that really did not concern him, Cadderly suspected, and the notion brought disgust to the young man, brought yet another layer of guilt to his growing burden.
But it wasn’t guilt that drove Cadderly but sorrow, a grief more profound than any he had ever known. So many images of Avery’s life flowed through the young priest. He saw the portly headmaster on the lane outside the Edificant Library, trying to enjoy a sunny spring day but continually hampered by Percival, the white squirrel, who dropped twigs on him from the branches above. He saw Avery at Brother Chaunticleer’s midday canticle, the headmaster’s face made content, serene, by the melodious song to Avery’s cherished god.
How different that fatherly face seemed in death, its mouth open in a final scream, an unanswered plea for help that did not come.
Most of all, Cadderly remembered the many scolding the headmaster had given him, Avery’s blotchy face turning bright red with frustration at Cadderly’s apparent indifference and irresponsibility. It took the insidious chaos curse for the headmaster to finally admit his true feelings for Cadderly, to admit that he considered Cadderly a son. In truth, though, Cadderly had known it all along. He never could have upset Avery so completely and so many times if the headmaster didn’t care for him.
Only then, standing beside the dead man, did Cadderly realize how much he’d loved Avery.
It occurred to Cadderly that Avery should not have been down in the hearth room at such an early hour, especially not dressed so informally, so vulnerably. Cadderly digested that information almost subconsciously, filing it away with the myriad other facts he had collected and scrutinized since his flight from the Night Masks.
“My Brennan, too,” Fredegar blubbered, coming to Cadderly’s side, draping an arm over Cadderly’s shoulder to lean on the young priest.
Cadderly was more than willing to give his gentle friend the needed support, and he followed the innkeeper’s lead across the floor toward the bar.
The contrast between Brennan’s body and Avery’s was startling. The teenager’s face showed neither horror nor any signs of surprise. His body, too, seemed intact, with no obvious wounds.
It appeared that he had simply, peacefully, died.
The only thing Cadderly could think of was poison.
“They couldn’t tell me how,” Fredegar wailed. “The guardsman said he wasn’t choked, and there’s no blood anywhere. Not a mark on his young form.” Fredegar panted desperately to find his breath. “But he’s dead,” the innkeeper said, his voice rising to a wail. “My Brennan is dead!”
Cadderly shuffled to the side under the weight as Fredegar fell into him. Despite his sincere grief at the sight of Brennan, the death had raised a riddle that Cadderly couldn’t leave unanswered. He remembered the horrible shadows he’d seen dancing atop Brennan’s shoulders that night at supper. He recalled Danica’s story, her dream, and knew beyond doubt that someone, something, had possessed the young man then discarded him.
Perhaps some lingering trace of what had happened remained to be seen. Perhaps telltale shadows remained on Brennan’s shoulders. Cadderly opened his mind and let the song of Deneir into his consciousness again, despite the continuing, painful throb in his head.
Cadderly saw a ghost.
The spirit of Brennan sat atop the bar, looking forlorn and lost, staring with pity at his distraught father and with disbelief at his own pale body. He looked up at Cadderly, and his nearly translucent features twisted with surprise.
All the material world around the spirit became blurry as Cadderly allowed himself to fall more into Brennan’s state.
Poison? his mind asked the lost soul, though he knew he had not spoken a word.
The spirit shook its head. I have nowhere to go.
The answer seemed so very obvious to Cadderly. Go back to your father.
Brennan looked at him with confusion.
The song played louder in Cadderly’s throbbing head, its volume becoming ferocious. The young priest would not let it go, though, not yet. He saw Brennan’s spirit tentatively approach the corpse, seeming confused, hopeful yet terribly afraid. To Cadderly’s eyes, the room around the spirit went dark.
Everything went dark.
“By the gods,” Cadderly heard Danica whisper.
“Oooo,” Pikel moaned.
A thump on the floor beside him jolted Cadderly awake. He was kneeling on the hard floor, but beside him, Fredegar was out cold.
In front of him, young Brennan sat up, blinking incredulously.
“Cadderly,” Danica breathed. Her shivering hands grasped the young priest’s trembling shoulders.
“How do you … feel?” Cadderly stammered to Brennan.
Brennan’s chuckles, as much sobs as laughter, came out on a quivering, breaking voice reflecting astonishment, as though he really didn’t know how to answer the question. How did he feel? Alive!
The young man looked to his own hands, marveled that they again moved to his command. Fists clenched, and he punched them up into the air, a primal scream erupting from his lips. The effort cost the lad his newfound physical bearings, though, and he wobbled and swooned.
Ivan and Pikel rushed to catch him.
Cadderly steadied himself suddenly, his gaze snapping back across the room to Headmaster Avery. The determined young priest rose briskly, brushed Danica aside, and stalked to the corpse.
“They took out his heart,” Danica said to him meekly.
Cadderly turned on her, not understanding.
“That is their usual method,” the young monk, familiar with the dark practices of the wretched Night Masks, replied. “It prevents an easy recalling of the spirit.”
Cadderly growled and turned back to Avery, back to the task at which he would not fail. He called up the song, forcefully, for it would not readily come to his weary mind. Perhaps he should rest before continuing, he thought as the notes continued on a discordant path. Perhaps he had pushed the magic too far for one day and should rest before delving back into the spiritual world.
“No!” Cadderly said aloud. He closed his eyes and demanded that the music play. The room blurred.
Avery’s ghost was not there.
Cadderly, though his material body did not move, looked all around the room. He saw marks of blackness, supernatural shadows, on the floor beside the bodies of the dead assassins and sensed a brooding evil there.
The spirits were gone, and Cadderly got the impression their journey had been forced, that they had been torn away.
Would they receive punishment in an afterlife?
The thought did not bring compassion to Cadderly. He stared hard at the puddles of residual blackness. He thought of recalling one of those lost spirits, to question it about Avery’s spirit, but dismissed the notion as absurd. The fate awaiting those souls had nothing to do with what awaited the goodly headmaster.
With sudden insight, Cadderly reached with his thoughts beyond the parameters of the room and sent out a call to the Fugue Plane for his lost mentor’s departed spirit.
The answer he received did not come in the form of words, or even images. A sensation swept over Cadderly, an emotion imparted to him by Headmaster Avery—he knew it came from Avery! It was a divine calmness, a contentment beyond anything Cadderly had ever experienced.
A bright light gave way to nothingness.…
Ivan and Danica helped the young priest to his feet. Cadderly, coming fully from his trance, looked at Danica with a most sincere smile.
“He is with Deneir,” Cadderly told her, and the joy in his voice prevented any reply.
Cadderly realized that his headache had flown. He, too, had found contentment.
“What do ye know?” Ivan asked him, and Cadderly understood that the
dwarf was not speaking of Avery’s fate. Danica also looked at the enlightened young priest with curiosity.
Cadderly didn’t answer right away. Pieces of the puzzle seemed to be falling from the sky. Cadderly looked over at the dead assassins then looked to Brennan and Fredegar, in the thick of an unabashed hug.
Cadderly knew where he would find more of those tumbling puzzle pieces.
The passing hours came as a reassurance to Ghost, who sat quietly in his room, going about his day as routinely as he could. Massacres were certainly not a common thing in Carradoon, but these were troubled times and Ghost was confident that the news would grow stale soon enough. Then young Cadderly would become vulnerable to him once more.
Thoughts of abandoning the mission had crossed the assassin’s mind soon after he’d learned that Cadderly had escaped—and that many of his Night Masks had not. He dismissed those thoughts, though, choosing instead to personalize the kill even more. He would get Cadderly, get him through one of his friends, and the young priest’s death would be all the sweeter.
Ghost was a bit dismayed when he saw Bogo depart, more because he wanted Bogo to serve as a scapegoat if Cadderly and his friends closed in on the truth than for any practical services the wizard might provide.
The wicked man looked out his window at the afternoon sun’s reflection on quiet Impresk Lake. He saw the bridge to the island clearly. Masons huddled out there, in boats and on the structure itself, studying the wide hole.
Ghost shook his head and chuckled. He had already contacted Vander telepathically, back at the farm, and learned from the surviving Night Masks that Cadderly had created that hole. Four assassins had returned to the farm—four out of fourteen.
Ghost continued to stare at the gaping break in the great bridge. Cadderly had beaten them. Ghost was impressed, but he was not worried.
Every detail of the battle scene came together in the overall picture he was beginning to form in his mind: Avery’s presence in the hearth room, where he should not have been; the curious, continued absence of Kierkan Rufo, who had come down from his room only long enough to identify Avery’s body and answer the city guards’ few questions; even the peculiar scorch mark on Pikel’s tunic registered clearly in Cadderly’s thoughts.
He spoke with Brennan, though the young man’s recollections were foggy at best, dreamlike. That fact alone confirmed Cadderly’s suspicions of what had happened to Danica. The young priest made a point of telling Brennan to keep out of sight, and bade Fredegar not to tell anyone that his son was alive again.
“We must press on quickly,” Cadderly explained to his three companions, gathered around him in an out-of-the-way room. “Our enemies are confused for now, but they are stubborn and will regroup.”
Danica leaned back in her seat and placed her feet on the table in front of her. “You are likely the most weary among us,” she replied. “If you’re ready to continue then so are we.”
“Oo oi!” Ivan piped, before Pikel got the chance. The yellow-bearded dwarf offered his surprised brother an exaggerated wink, and Pikel promptly tugged hard at Ivan’s beard.
Though it took him and Danica several moments to quiet the boisterous brothers, Cadderly was glad for the distraction, for the break in the exhausting tension.
“You have spoken with the guard?” Cadderly asked Danica when order was finally restored.
“Just as you suspected,” the young woman replied.
Cadderly nodded as another piece fell squarely into place. “The wizard won’t be there for long.”
“But are ye ready to battle the likes of that one?” Ivan had to ask.
Cadderly chuckled and stood, straightening his trousers, still moist from his dip in the lake. “You make it sound as if I’m going alone,” he quipped.
Ivan was up in an instant, bouncing his huge axe atop one shoulder. “Can’t trust that type,” the dwarf explained, wanting to clarify his atypical hesitance. “Dangerous sort.”
“Can’t trust an angry priest, either,” Cadderly retorted, taking up his walking stick and sending his spindle-disks into a few short up-and-down snaps.
“Dangerous sort,” Danica finished for him, and after the sights the young woman had experienced that day, the tremendous magical powers Cadderly had revealed, the words were spoken without any hint of sarcasm.
TWENTY
I TELLED YE SO
Bogo Rath paced anxiously in his small room. He kicked a basket aside and watched a cockroach skitter across the floor, seeking the shadows under the bed.
“Flee, little bug,” the young wizard muttered.
Bogo flipped his stringy brown hair to one side and ran his fingers through it repeatedly. He was the little bug.
He looked out the window, which was too small to get any real view, but enough to tell him that the afternoon light finally was beginning to wane. Bogo meant to leave the city at twilight, disguised among the host of beggars that departed Carradoon every evening.
Outside the gates, he could conjure a magical mount, and his ride to Castle Trinity would be swift and unhindered. The thought of getting far from Carradoon, from the young priest and his cohorts, appealed to Bogo, but the thought of facing Aballister did not. Even worse, if Ghost succeeded in finishing the task, the assassin’s return to Castle Trinity would cast an unfavorable, cowardly light on Bogo.
“Boygo,” he muttered. He figured he had better get used to hearing that name. Aballister and Dorigen would not soon let him forget his cowardice. The lone consolation for the young man was the fact that he had arranged the library headmaster’s death.
The cockroach skittered back out for an instant and zipped across the floor and under the folds of the over-sized curtain.
“That will silence them!” Bogo said to the roach. Especially Dorigen, who had been so humiliated in Shilmista Forest.
A smile found its way through the tension on Bogo’s boyish face. He had killed a headmaster!
A glance at the window told him it was time to start for the western gate. He selected the components for a spell that would alter his appearance and placed them in a convenient pocket then took up his pack.
He put it right back down when he heard chanting in the hall.
“Fire and water,” Cadderly said in an intense, monotone voice. “Fire and water, the elements of protection. Fire and water.”
Danica and Pikel stood in front of the young priest, between Cadderly and the door. Danica flipped her hair out of her face and looked at the stairway, at the top of the crouching, nervous innkeeper’s balding head. Every so often, the man peeked over the top stair, fearful for his property.
Still, Cadderly had easily convinced the man to let the three up the stairs to the mysterious stranger’s room. Danica looked at Cadderly again, who chanted more forcefully with his eyes closed and his hands waving up and down in front of him, creating a magical tapestry. The young priest had shaved his beard before they had left the Dragon’s Codpiece, and he appeared much like his old self.
And yet, he didn’t. Danica couldn’t explain it, but somehow Cadderly appeared more confident with every move. His encounter—whatever had happened—with Avery’s spirit had put a sense of calm on top of that growing confidence.
Danica hadn’t questioned him about it, but she sensed that Cadderly walked with the knowledge that his god was with him.
“Fire and water,” Cadderly chanted, “the elements of protection.”
As one of his hands came up, he loosed a few drops of conjured water against the door. As the other came up right behind, Cadderly sent from it a gout of flame. The fire hit the wet door with a hiss, the signal for Pikel.
“Oo oi,” the dwarf chirped and slammed his club like a battering ram against the door.
The weapon popped cleanly through the thin wood, creating a fair-sized hole but not forcing the door open. As the dwarf retracted his club, Danica realized Pikel’s mistake. She reached over the dwarf, turned the handle, and easily opened the door—out.
“Oh,” the deflated Pikel remarked.
A chanting from inside the room joined Cadderly’s continuing prayer when the door came open. The wizard held a small metal rod in front of him, a conductive component that Danica had seen before.
Pikel had, too, and both he and the woman dived to the side, expecting a burst of lightning.
Cadderly didn’t move, didn’t flinch. An almost transparent, slightly shimmering field of energy appeared in the open portal.
The man’s blast struck it with fury, the lightning driving hard against the barrier, sizzling and throwing multicolored sparks, sending a spiderweb of green and orange energy across the breadth of Cadderly’s field to burn at the door jamb. When it ended, a tiny pool of water lay at the base of the intact defensive field.
Wide-eyed, the frightened wizard began another spell, as did Cadderly.
The man pulled another component and began a fast-paced chant.
“Sneeze,” Cadderly commanded.
The wizard complied, and his spell was disrupted.
The stubborn wizard growled and began again.
“Sneeze.”
“Damn you!” the young man cried, wiping the wetness from his face.
“You could not be farther from the truth,” Cadderly replied calmly. “Shall we continue to play this game?
“Dispel!” Cadderly cried suddenly, his face twisting to an angry glare. The shimmering field in the doorway disappeared, and Danica and Pikel burst into the room.
He must have realized his mistake. He should have continued to “play” as the young priest had called it, continued to force Cadderly into a defensive posture in the hope that his spell repertoire would outlast the priest’s.
Danica dived straight ahead, came up in a leap, and jolted forward with her landing, too fast for the surprised man to react. He threw his arms out, but the monk wrapped them, bringing her arms up through the wizard’s then down and around, locking him fast.
He did twist one wrist, though, cutting a line of blood on Danica’s sleeve.