CHAPTER 15

“Elhared is dead!” Lucille snapped.

Crumley shrugged.

She shook her head and paced in front of the wizard. “No. This can’t be Elhared’s doing . . .”

“You paid for the expertise of the Wizard Crumley. If you find my insight distressing, maybe you need to hire another student of the dark arts. My best wishes in finding a student of Nâtlac who won’t use your own entrails to divine the answer to your questions.”

Lucille shook her head. “No, I don’t doubt your expertise.”

“Good. Lendowyn can ill afford peers so foolish with their own coin.”

“So you’re saying that this scroll was Elhared’s work?”

“I’m saying the author was one who cast the original spell.”

Wait a minute, I thought. The spell he cast on us came from a book. “Why is this a scroll?” I didn’t know when my question made the transition from my thoughts to Lucille’s words. I think the shudder came from both of us.

Eventually the identities will merge into a new consciousness.

Our identities.

Already those “couple of days” looked wildly optimistic. A couple of hours seemed more likely.

Crumley shook his head. “You both need to learn to listen. I said the hand that cast the reversed spell, not the one who wrote the original spell.”

“Huh?”

Crumley sighed. “This scroll isn’t an original work. The author copied passages, inverted them to create an undoing. Based on the additions—in a completely different style—it was written by someone who had experience casting the original spell.”

“It could have been Elhared. Damn!”

“Your Highness?” Krys asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Elhared’s still dead!” Lucille snapped. “He probably wrote this scroll a year ago, when he was planning his coup. Or maybe after he took Frank’s body and realized his plans had fallen apart.”

“Why didn’t he use it back then?” Krys asked.

Lucille sighed. “Maybe he liked Frank’s body. He was a pretty decrepit old bastard to start with.”

“Yes, yes. Is there anything else?” Crumley rolled up the scroll and slapped it into my hand. Then he started shooing us back to the stairs out of the workshop. “I need to get back to my studies.”

Yeah right, we thought, imagining the volume with the inappropriate illustrations. She reached up and took the pendant off of her neck. “Can you tell me anything about this?”

Crumley looked at it briefly and snorted. “It’s an hourglass—really a day-glass.”

“But the sand—”

“Runs slower because it’s fae sand. It tracks time under the hill. Nothing particularly strange or magical about that.”

“Can we slow it down?”

Crumley shrugged. “I can cast a stasis spell and freeze its movement entirely.”

“Yes—”

“But that won’t do anything about the elf-king’s ultimatum,” Crumley said. “Clocks may stop, but time marches on.”

“You know about—”

“Of course I do. What of it?”

She looked at the pendant and sighed. “How much time do we have left?”

He looked at the sand and said. “Under the hill, perhaps eight hours. Here in Fell Green, a little less than twenty. In the mortal realm, three days perhaps. Maybe four.”

“Maybe four?”

“This is not a precise timepiece, and the flow of time can vary. Is there anything else?”

“Your Highness,” Krys said, “the tea?”

“The tea?” Crumley asked with a puzzled expression.

Lucille turned around and said, “Yes, the tea.”

•   •   •

At least we accomplished one of our goals at the Wizard Crumley’s lair. He was able to instantly identify the substantive ingredient in the tea that Brock had made for Rabbit. As expected, the weed had more than simple anesthetic properties. It went by a number of names. The only one Crumley rattled off that I remembered later was “shaman’s flower.”

I tend to lean more to the descriptive than poetic.

“It’s effective in tea, or when chewed. But breathing in the smoke as it burns is most efficient.”

I couldn’t help but remember a particular den of thieves named The Headless Earl. I had incapacitated the inhabitants by tossing a bundle of herbs into a fire. A bundle that Brock had prepared for me. It had sent the whole population of the great room on an involuntary sprit journey.

“Also, the unadulterated herb is more powerful than the dash that your barbarian herbalist mixed into the mute’s tea, so mind the side effects.”

“Side effects?” Lucille asked.

“Drowsiness, euphoria, impaired judgment, prophetic visions, dry mouth, and in your case,” he pointed to Lucille, “acceleration of the personality assimilation that is already happening.”

“What?”

“This herb tears down the walls between your self and reality . . . your self and other selves. That’s how you hear a soul that’s already half left the world. But those walls are what keep you a separate self.”

“Great,” whispered Lucille.

Crumley didn’t even charge us extra when he gave Krys a large bag of the stuff, adding, “You can buy more anywhere. But remember,” he warned as he ushered us out of his lab, “if you do see something, it also sees you.”

Apparently he was very eager to get back to his studies.

The door slammed behind us leaving us back in the fetid alley that was half city, half swamp.

Krys hefted her bag of shaman’s flower and looked at us. “What do we do now?”

Lucille lifted the pendant that hung around our neck. The sand might have been close to the two-thirds mark in the tiny hourglass. “Back to the inn,” Lucille said. “We’re running out of time. If Elhared authored that scroll, he isn’t the one we want. We need to find who could have found it and given it to the elf-prince.”

“What about . . . you and Frank?”

I felt Lucille bite her lip.

“Your Highness?”

“Our priority is stopping a few wars.”

“But—”

“No,” Lucille snapped. “One thing at a time.”

•   •   •

We made our way out of the damper part of Fell Green in silence. For all of Lucille’s protests about our priorities, I knew she must be dwelling on the same thing I was.

We were both living on borrowed time. Sure, Crumley said that the author of the scroll could separate us. But the author of that scroll was stone cold dead. Elhared died at my hand, and I had made pretty sure of the fact at the time. Gone along with my old body.

Then something occurred to me . . .

Krys grabbed our arm and shook it, breaking me out of the hopeful thought. Lucille turned at Krys’s strained whisper, “Problem.”

Krys looked down the path ahead. Lucille continued raising her head until we saw the half-dozen large men, all wearing the spiked, skull-embossed black armor of the elite Grünwald Royal Guard.

“Never goes wrong in the way we expect,” Lucille muttered, appropriating my own personal motto.

We ran.

That was our only real advantage. The men outnumbered us three to one, outweighed us six to one, and, with their swords out, bested our reach by Lucille’s full height. But we could outrun them. Lucille darted directly away from them, Krys on our heels, and they broke into a lumbering run behind us. The surrounding crowd and few open-air merchants around us all melted away, leaving the street barren ahead of us. That was a good thing, since it made the other six Grünwald soldiers stand out as they rushed us from the other direction.

Lucille took the only escape route we had, a narrow alley between an inn and a stable. The good news was that the alley would be too narrow for any of the overlarge pursuers to engage us at better than one-to-one odds.

Bad news, they were obviously driving us in this direction and a trio of like-armored thugs blocked the opposite end of the alley, forcing us to draw up short. Lucille spun, but while our pursuit had been slower than us, they hadn’t been slow. That end of the alley was blocked now as well.

Krys drew her sword and placed her back against ours. Lucille drew her own weapon, a dagger that would have seemed substantial if it wasn’t for the size of our potential opposition. I felt a sinking feeling when I realized she held it in her off hand since I still controlled the other one.

Damn it.

I felt her grit her teeth as our eyes darted all over, looking for some escape. Nothing obvious presented itself.

“Well, well, well,” came a smarmy voice from the shadows to our right. Lucille spun around to face the speaker and I felt around her belt for some other weapon. I couldn’t find anything.

“If it isn’t the Princess of Lendowyn,” continued the speaker as he walked out of a shadowed alcove about ten paces away from us. King Dudley had lost some weight. He was still short as one measured such things, but he appeared to have lost the doughy softness that defined the prince I remembered.

“Dudley,” Lucille spat.

Dudley smiled humorlessly. “And I’m afraid you have the advantage there, Princess. What should I call you? Who are you this fine day?”

“I am a representative of the Royal Court of Lendowyn,” Lucille said, the dragon leaking into her voice. “If you value what is left of your kingdom, you will stand down and retreat with your dogs.”

Dudley laughed.

I did not like that at all.

“My kingdom?” he finally said, choking off his laughter before it became something hysterical. “My kingdom, you say?” He wiped tears from his eyes. He stared at us, and I could see the amusement drain away leaving nothing in his eyes but a smoldering hate. “Oh,” he whispered. “You don’t even know.”

“Know what?” Krys said from behind us.

“You brought all of this down upon me and mine,” Dudley continued to whisper, voice hardening. “And you don’t even know what you’ve wrought.”

“I’m warning you, Dudley,” Lucille said, “let us go or—”

“Or what!?” Dudley screamed at us with such force that it gave even Lucille the Dragon pause. “Or your armies again march across Grünwald? Is that it? Is that your threat?” He walked in front of us, stepping in a wide circle around us. He made a couple of gestures with his hand and out of the corner of Lucille’s eye I saw black armored men swapping their swords for crossbows.

Not good.

“Why do you think I care?” Dudley asked us. He gestured palm down, and the crossbowmen knelt and braced.

“You’d sacrifice your kingdom for vengeance?”

He had circled until he faced us, his back to the opposite wall. “Thanks to you,” he whispered, “I have no kingdom.”

His hand dropped, and the crossbows fired.