I ate all the leftover food I could find, then tightened my belt and made ready to leave. I was almost tempted to find another satchel, but caught myself before I could act on the impulse. When had I become so affected by human habits? I did not even have much idea of what I would put in it beside food, and that I could find for myself, as I ever had. I was still quietly chiding myself when I discovered that Fronsac had locked the door, and not just with the mechanical lock.
After all his talk of trust, that he would do such a thing to me came as an entirely unpleasant surprise. It shouldn’t have, of course. He was a wizard and a man, two aspects that were as treacherous as the other. Smashing the door was one option, but I had little doubt that doing so would trigger some other defence as well.
‘So be it,’ I said, walking across the room and vaulting from the balcony. It was on the third level of the palace, so perhaps he thought it was too high for me to jump from, but in that he was mistaken. The guards didn’t see me until I landed behind them, my legs soaking up the impact. I managed to whip myself in the face with the corner of my cloak but the guards seemed impressed nonetheless, so much so that one of them fell backwards.
‘The demon!’ shouted the one who was still standing, and I groaned as I remembered the Prince’s declaration that I was a criminal or worse. Whatever illusion Fronsac had put upon me had clearly ended the moment I left his room.
‘Easy now,’ I said, but he was already lunging towards me with his spear, fear and haste making it a wild thrust that a blind child could have avoided. I grabbed the shaft and wrenched it from his hands, then slapped him across his helmet with it hard enough that his helm rang like a bell. The other one was getting to his feet, but froze in place when I tapped him on the breastplate with the tip of the spear.
‘Tell Fronsac I am going to go find her.’ I repeated it until he nodded. ‘Now tend to your friend.’
I tossed the bar from the gate and slipped out into the city. Overhead, the clouds had begun drifting apart but still hung low and heavy, as if unsure what to do with the rancid water trapped within them. The rain that had fallen earlier had left foul-smelling puddles everywhere, not a few of which had the small, stiff bodies of dead birds poking from the surface. The attack had at least left the streets emptier than they should have been, and with the hood of my cloak raised I passed along them without incident, all the way to the city wall. Once I was as close to the outer wall as I could get without raising the alarm I stepped into the shadowy entrance of a boarded-up shop to watch the soldiers as they patrolled along the wall and the cleared ground before it.
From what I had seen and what Fronsac had told me, the Penullin camp was little less than a mile from the city. It was a sprawling, voracious thing that had consumed anything that could be eaten or made to be of use to the invaders for miles around. It was already larger than most of the surrounding villages and still growing as the various elements of their army caught up to the vanguard and established themselves.
One of those elements was the cabal of dark wizards serving General Novstan, a cabal that Fronsac said was led by Navar’s very own apprentice, the same man who had killed his sons. Precisely the man who they would take Tatyana to. All I needed to do was get out of the city, cross the open ground where both sides were happy to put a few arrows in anything that moved, then slip through the Penullin defences and then infiltrate the camp of the wizards who had recently blinded and quite nearly killed me, fetch her, then repeat the process. I felt a grin stretch my face at the thought.
Darkness would be my greatest ally. Come nightfall, I would cross the wall and make my way to the camp. I could see in the dark almost as well as they could by day, so I was confident that their guard posts would be all but blind to me stalking through the darkness. I pulled the planks from the shop’s door and slipped inside, momentarily gagging on the smell of rotten onions before I became inured to it. A cursory search revealed a few crusts of old bread, and after nibbling these, I sat with my back against the wall and began to slow my breathing. It would be a busy night no matter what happened, and I wanted to meditate and prepare my sorcery. Despite the dangers I was walking in to, I finally found the calm I sought and let my mind drift. Memories of Navar rose unbidden and I forced them away, unwilling to dwell on the years of torture I had suffered at his hand.
I was still fighting them off when I heard the hiss. Navar had done many things, but he had never hissed at me. I blinked the fragments of the dream away and looked around. It was sometime after dusk, and with the windows covered in planks the empty shop was almost perfectly dark. I woke my night vision and looked around again as the red tint washed the shadows away.
The hiss came again and as I turned I saw a swaybacked cat edging towards me, its head hanging low as if it were too heavy for its scrawny neck to support. I’d seen something like this before, and a single sniff confirmed my fear: necromancy. The cat stopped and hissed again, thickened blood dripping from its nose and mouth.
I stood and began to circle it, readying my sorcery as it turned to watch me, a pale luminescence flickering faintly within its eyes. It was definitely dead, so I felt no pity for it when I flicked out a thin whip of sorcery and decapitated it, the heat of the construct searing the stump with a puff of foul steam.
Its eyes continued to track me as I knelt down next to the head and used a combination of knife and sorcery to split the tiny skull. I fed a little more power into my vision as I examined its brain. It would have been far easier if they’d infected a human, but I had to work with what was given to me. It took a lot of patience, but eventually I found it: a pale, white hair curled within the base of the skull where the spine connected. I teased it out with a splinter of wood and watched it whip back and forth.
I burned it away with a thought and sat back. The clouds and subsequent display of thunder and lightning had been impressive, and while they had destroyed a few houses and a tower, that destruction had been an expensive diversion, not the attack. Neither Fronsac nor I had felt its intent because it had targeted low beasts like the cats and other vermin, and as such we had not perceived its threat. It seemed that Cardinal Polsson had not contented himself with feeding his worms to the Paladins, and had secretly recruited an army of creatures to spread disease, fear and chaos on his behalf. I made a mental note to ask Tatyana if the same thing had happened to the animals during the siege of Aknak, then cleaned my knife and kicked the corpse away.
The night had settled in, and it was time for me to become the hunter rather than the hunted.