An invisible dagger!
Danica’s foot shot up between her and the wizard, crunching his nose. Dazed, the man offered no resistance as Danica released his other arm, cupped her free hand over the back of his clenched fingers and yanked his hand back toward his forearm, pulling his arm in the other direction at the same time.
The wizard’s face contorted in agony. He tried to hold his only weapon, but Danica’s foot came up again and her hand continued to pull.
Pikel joined her a moment later. “Oo,” he said glumly, disappointed that the fun was already over. He heard the clang as the unseen dagger hit the floor, and he looked down for it, scratching his green-dyed hair.
Cadderly walked to the bed and motioned for Danica to lead her prisoner to it. “You can let him go,” the young priest offered.
Danica gave a quick, painful jerk as she released the wizard’s arms, and she pushed him, knocking him to a sitting position.
“We must talk, you and I,” Cadderly demanded.
The man glared up at him from the bed, an impotent threat, but Danica cuffed him anyway, on the ear.
She scowled and showed Cadderly her cut arm in answer to his surprised expression, and that seemed to satisfy the young priest’s nagging conscience.
“Dorigen sent you,” Cadderly said to the man.
“No.”
“I have ways of telling when you lie,” Cadderly warned.
“Then you detect nothing,” he replied.
“You were with the Night Masks, but you are not a part of their guild,” Cadderly remarked.
“You will die,” the wizard promised, drawing another cuff from Danica.
“Why have they come for me?” Cadderly asked. With no answer forthcoming, he added, “I could speak with your corpse, if that would please you.”
For the first time, the man seemed afraid. The sincere calmness of Cadderly’s tone gave weight to the threat, and because he wanted to grow to be an old wizard, he replied. “You—you got in the way,” the young wizard stammered, “at the library and in the forest. You forced Abal—” He stopped abruptly.
“Who?” Danica demanded, putting her face right up to Bogo’s.
“Aballister,” he admitted, “Dorigen’s mentor, and mine.”
Cadderly looked at Danica, concerned. Dorigen had been a powerful adversary. How strong might her mentor be?
“I came only to observe,” the stranger went on, “as I was told.”
“Oh?” Pikel cut him short, stepping past Danica, pushing her aside, and displaying the scorched hole in his leather tunic, the hole the wizard’s lightning had made back at the Dragon’s Codpiece.
The blood drained from the man’s face, and his growing desperation forced him to a desperate act. He shoved his hand into a pocket, grabbed a handful of pebbles, and flung them to the floor.
A burst of minor explosions went off, blowing in rapid succession and shooting variously colored puffs of smoke into the air. The pops did nothing to the companions, other than distract them. With a quick chant, the wizard diminished to the size of a cat and slipped between Cadderly and Pikel.
Cadderly tried to call out but couldn’t decide fast enough whether he should shout for his friends to stop the man or cry out a warning to the wizard. Danica finally pushed past him and Pikel, following the wizard’s expected path to the door.
They heard the door close—the smoke began to clear and the wizard, outside the room and man-sized again, began a new chant.
Danica stopped, wisely not going through the portal.
From behind the door they heard the man cry out in terror. The friends heard a shuffle of feet, a sickening thud, and something heavy slammed against the door.
Cadderly shook his head and looked away. The tip of Ivan’s double-headed axe protruded through the door, dripping crimson. As if that weren’t macabre enough, the wizard’s fingers, grasping helplessly and twitching, reached through the circular hole Pikel’s club had made in the door. Pulled by the unbalancing weight, the door slowly creaked open.
Pikel walked past Danica and opened the door the rest of the way, peeking around it and saying, “Oo” as he regarded the hanging wizard.
“I telled ye ye couldn’t trust a wizard,” Ivan, standing a dozen feet down the hall with his hands on his hips, asserted. He strode up to the door and motioned for the group to come out of the room.
The young priest couldn’t help but look over at the dead young wizard, a man probably not even as old as himself. “We never asked his name,” Cadderly remarked.
Ivan kicked the door closed, spat in his hands, and put one boot up beside the corpse for leverage. “Wondering what to put on his stone?” he asked.
Danica watched the young priest closely, looking for any sign of weakness, but Cadderly appeared to control his emotions and accept his guilt.
“Just wondering,” he answered Ivan, giving a resigned shrug as though he had pushed the incident from his mind. “Get the body back into the room,” Cadderly instructed the dwarves.
He shook his head at the irony of one of his earlier statements, which he had made merely to scare his prisoner.
Cadderly could indeed speak with the strange wizard’s corpse.
There was only the lake and the empty street. Carradoon quieted considerably as twilight neared, and the morbid interest in the outrageous events at the Dragon’s Codpiece had finally dissipated. Only a few guests had remained at the battered inn, and with Cadderly and his companions out of the building, the place was quiet—too quiet for Kierkan Rufo.
The man stood in front of his room’s small window, the tilt of his stance making him appear almost like a diagonal crosspiece to the glass. Many moments passed, but Rufo didn’t move.
He’d gone too far, he realized, had crossed the line to the dark side of his nature. He doubted he could ever step back. He stood in reflection, trying to follow the course that had led to his horrible position. It had begun in the library, when he’d met Barjin and on the priest’s command sent Cadderly tumbling down the stairs to the hidden catacombs.
Rufo could excuse himself for that indiscretion, and all of the other members of his order, including Cadderly, had excused him as well. In the forest, Rufo had betrayed them once more, but he had redeemed himself, had come through in the end to provide his companions with the information they needed to ultimately win out. As in the library, the efforts of Cadderly and the others had averted disaster, had helped to cover Rufo’s weaknesses.
Avery lay dead downstairs. Rufo had put the headmaster in the path of a guild of assassins. Rufo had stepped over, had crossed the line. He tried to justify his actions, told himself repeatedly that he had been given no choice, that the assassins would have killed them all if he hadn’t cooperated.
The facts didn’t support his excuse. Cadderly, Danica, and the dwarves—where had those two come from, anyway?—had won, had chased off the band. If Rufo had gone to them soon after his initial meeting with the young wizard, their victory would have been more swift.
Avery would be alive.
The man whimpered and turned from the window, suddenly feeling vulnerable.
“He deserved his fate,” Rufo muttered, reminding himself of the way Avery had treated him since the trouble in Shilmista.
Avery would have held him back in his ascension through the Order of Deneir. The headmaster had even threatened to have him removed from the library. That was not justice, Rufo’s sensibilities argued, not when the headmaster held all the power and Rufo could only stand and let Avery’s whims determine his fate.
By the time Rufo crossed the small room and collected his pack, anger had replaced guilt. He had struck back at Avery in the only way he could. No one suspected him. The conspiring wizard had already fled, and Rufo had easily deflected the city guards’ questions. Even more comforting, Cadderly had apparently taken the guards’ conclusions for truth. The priest hadn’t asked Rufo a single question.
Rufo had to hide his smile as he paid Fre
degar, from Avery’s purse, for the time he’d spent in the inn. He explained to the hospitable innkeeper that he had to return at once to the Edificant Library and report the tragic loss.
It was getting dark outside when he exited the Dragon’s Codpiece, dark like the path Kierkan Rufo had stumbled down.
The four friends left the other inn a short while later, Cadderly tossing the fearful innkeeper a bag of coins to cover the damages and the cost of disposing of the wizard’s body.
“Where do we go?” Ivan asked, impatient to get on with the fighting.
“Back to the Dragon’s Codpiece,” Cadderly replied.
“What do we do when we get there?” Ivan said, not sounding happy about the choice.
“We wait,” Cadderly answered, trying to calm the volatile dwarf. “We have struck hard today. All of us need some rest.”
Cadderly’s extensive use of magic had drained him, and he wanted nothing more than to spend the next several hours in peace. After what he’d learned from the wizard’s spirit, though, the young priest wasn’t confident he would get his wish.
The air was chill outside as the night grew dark and the first stars made their appearance.
Cadderly knew it would be a long night.
TWENTY-ONE
PIKEL BAIT
Cadderly paid his friends’ banter little heed. He sat at his small table, in front of The Tome of Universal Harmony, pushing the pieces of the mental puzzle closer together, seeking information from every memory he could summon. Cadderly lingered on the image and the sensation of Avery’s spirit, on the divine joy he knew the dead headmaster had found. The young priest’s doubts, which had followed him through all of his spiritually bereft life, could not penetrate the holy barrier of that sensation. Cadderly’s logic, founded on information he could see and test with his own senses, seemed ridiculous when compared to the serene smile of Avery’s ghost.
The foundation of Cadderly’s existence had once again been violently shaken, and yet the young priest felt no remorse or sense of loss. Quite the opposite—the mystery of it all gave Cadderly a sense of hope beyond anything he had ever known. Rather than deny what he had felt, the young priest would simply have to expand his foundation to include wonderful new revelations.
Cadderly’s unconscious chuckle turned Danica and Ivan, who sat on the bed, toward him, and their stares, in turn, awakened the young priest from his musing. Cadderly shrugged, not knowing how to begin to explain.
“Peoples,” Ivan grumbled, but Danica nodded to the young priest as though she understood what Cadderly was going through.
Dear Danica, Cadderly thought, and he had no doubt she knew, and that she approved.
Pikel crept along the first floor of the Dragon’s Codpiece, slipping in and out of the shadows in search of the cupboards. It was late, and the dwarf was hungry, having missed three out of four meals during the course of the exhausting day.
“Hee hee hee,” the dwarf tittered when he found biscuits and sweet dough. He dropped the amulet Cadderly had given him into a pocket and rubbed his plump hands together briskly, his cherubic dimples revealing his glee.
The dwarf sported an armload of food as he ascended the makeshift stairway to the second level, each step on the stairs that he and Ivan had put back together helping him to justify his filching.
His smile disappeared before he got back to Cadderly’s room, though, and as a puny human approached him a moment later, half a biscuit fell out of his mouth.
Danica and Ivan struggled on the bed, the young woman proving, to Ivan’s disbelief, that her concentration could prevent Ivan from taking her hand down in wrist wrestling. The mighty dwarf, his bright red face framed by his yellow beard, pushed and yanked vigorously to the side, but the woman’s arm, tiny compared to Ivan’s gnarly and corded muscles, did not budge an inch.
“You have met your better,” Cadderly remarked to Ivan, which only set the dwarf into a deeper frenzy. He hopped up on his toes and pushed with all his strength, moving the bed several inches, but Danica’s position remained unchanged.
The sudden and somewhat loud scrape of the bed set off silent alarms within Cadderly. The young priest had made no secret of the fact that he and his friends were back at the inn, but he didn’t want to give his potential enemies too much information.
“Quiet!” he whispered harshly, and remembering Pikel, he closed his eyes and sent his thoughts to the missing dwarf. He expected to find the same sensations—hunger mostly—waiting for him, but when Cadderly made contact, through the power of the telepathy-enhancing amulet, his eyes popped wide open. The sensations were vague, as expected, but instead of distant thoughts of muffins and ale, Cadderly visualized hunched, black shadows.
It was not Pikel on the other end! Images of Brennan and Nameless filtered through Cadderly’s rising sense of panic. The young priest broke contact and jumped from his seat.
“I’ll get ye yet!” Ivan snarled at Danica, oblivious to Cadderly’s alarm. The dwarf tugged her arm to the bed as she came from her meditative state, and he growled victoriously until he noticed that Danica paid him no heed.
Danica scrambled over the bed, past Ivan. The dwarf turned to see her and Cadderly exit the room, and realized then that the trouble likely involved his absent brother. Not pausing, even long enough to locate his axe, Ivan half-crawled, half-ran out the door in pursuit.
Poor Pikel had never felt so weak! He stared, dumbfounded, at himself, or at his body at least, or at whatever the monster was that had stolen him.
Holding the weakling body by the throat in one hand, Pikel’s body reacted to a rumble down the hall and seemed to realize that Pikel’s friends would soon be upon him. The thought brought an evil chuckle to his dwarf lips. He slapped aside Pikel’s new, human, skinny arm and reached into one of his pockets, producing a small packet.
“Oooo,” Pikel wailed. He nearly swooned, thinking the item to be some horrible magical thing and suspecting that his life was at its end.
He watched his own body bring the packet up between them. But whatever inhabited his body broke the packet over itself, over the dwarf body, instead.
“Eh?” Pikel queried, for the imposter dwarf’s face was covered in blood, blood from the packet.
With one arm Pikel’s body lifted the puny form from the ground and hurled Pikel’s new body across the room, where he slammed into a wall and slumped to the floor.
The false Pikel, too, fell back, leaning heavily on the wall perpendicular to the door, and groaned.
Enraged Ivan grabbed both Cadderly and Danica by the backs of their tunics and hurled himself past them as soon as he discerned where Cadderly was leading them. The dwarf, without his deer-antlered helmet, hit the door head first, bursting into the room.
Staggering, Pikel lifted a shaking finger and pointed accusingly across the room at the slender human form crawling around the base of the wall.
“Me brother!” Ivan roared, and he charged across, hands leading to throttle the weakling killer.
Danica, too, followed the imposter dwarf’s trembling finger, but Cadderly came into the room more slowly, warily, paying full attention to the apparently wounded dwarf.
He had brought the song of Deneir into his thoughts. He saw the shadows crouched on Pikel’s—on the imposter’s!—shoulders.
“Ivan!” he cried, and trusting in the song, he whipped his adamantine spindle-disks straight into Pikel’s face.
The dwarf flew back against the wall, real blood mingling with false on the green-dyed beard. “Oooo,” he moaned.
Across the room, Ivan let go of the weakling and came rushing back to throttle the new target.
Cadderly hadn’t released the dwarf from his knowing gaze. He watched the shadows break apart then melt down into Pikel’s shoulders.
Ivan caught his brother in both hands and hoisted him off the floor, slamming him against the wall.
“Oooo,” Pikel moaned again.
“Hold, Ivan,” Cadderly said calmly. “Pike
l is back where he belongs.”
Cadderly nodded to Danica, and she turned to face the assassin again, ready to spring at him in an instant.
“You have nowhere to run,” Cadderly said to the strange little man. He walked up to join Danica. “I know you.”
“Shouldn’t have made the damn disks so fine,” Cadderly heard Ivan say behind him, to Pikel’s continuing groans. The young priest glanced back to see Ivan tending Pikel’s bloodied face.
When he turned back, the shadows were gone from the puny assassin’s shoulders. Cadderly’s gaze darted around the room, fearing that the man had stolen one of his friends’ identities once again. His three companions appeared the same, though, looking to him for direction—and with confusion, apparently recognizing the young priest’s sudden distress.
“Who are you?” Cadderly muttered under his breath when he turned back to the weakling man. He let the song of Deneir sound louder in his mind, and studied the aura of the new identity.
He felt a cold wind, pictured a rocky, forlorn shore backed by towering mountains. Huge ice floes dotted the bay, waves breaking against their invulnerable sides, and a giant ship sat quiet in the calmer waters near the shore, awaiting the mighty arms that could pull its monstrous oars.
Cadderly looked into the weakling’s face and saw true fear and unexpected resignation.
Danica sensed that the puny man was about to dart for the door, and she tensed for a spring to intercept him. A whisper came into her ear, though, a magical message from Cadderly. She looked at her companion curiously.
The little man broke for the door. Danica went for him, as did Cadderly, the two getting conveniently tangled, enough for the man to get by.
Ivan dropped Pikel hard to the floor, wincing at his brother’s ensuing groan.
“Halt!” Cadderly cried, looking to the fleeing man. That command was not aimed at the weakling, though, and it carried the weight of considerable magical energy.
Ivan stopped in spite of himself and the man rushed out the open door. Danica halfheartedly took up the chase, as Cadderly had instructed. She came out the front door of the Dragon’s Codpiece a few moments later, saw the man turning a corner one way, and purposely went the other, to return empty-handed after an appropriate amount of time had passed.