Matabar. Book II. Chapter 141. Fog and Blood (Patreon)

Ardan turned his face into the cold northeast wind. If you listened very, very closely, you could hear the rumbles of young thunder somewhere out there, on the very horizon where the sky tripped over the rocky shores of Swallow Bay. The Week of Storms was fast approaching the Metropolis. It was already knocking on the doors and windows of the palatial homes of the Old City and the skyscrapers of the New City.

When forces no decree could govern upended the tangled, inconsequential plans of mortals, people turned back to the old ways. Grandmothers and grandfathers brought dusty amulets out of cupboards and chests, amulets their own grandmothers and grandfathers had handed down to them.

For years, old stories and legends had been reduced to children’s festivals and foolish fairy tales. Now, all at once, even if they did not regain their former glory, they at least mattered for a moment. People whispered prayers to the Face of Light, prayers entirely absent from the first editions of Holy Scripture. The Church added them much later, once it realized it could never uproot people’s faith in the Old Gods.

People prayed to the Eternal Angels, unknown outside Galess. For the simple reason that they did not exist at all. Some of the Angels spoken of in the Empire were nothing more than Old Gods in disguise, given new names.

Ard stood and listened to that thunder. He heard the drums of heaven rolling under the storm’s dark boots, through the clouds overhead. He saw its sharpened spurs flash, their white sparks cleaving the gloom. In less than six weeks, night would retreat from the Metropolis, leaving behind only a whitish, almost milky twilight. For three weeks, the capital would know no night. But that would come later.

But now, in the darkest hour, the storm ruled the sky.

Ardan clung to that distant Shard as it nearly vanished from his palm, then turned south, toward his homeland, Alcade. Somewhere out there, among the forever-white cliffs, lay the sleeping sky he called home, the sky that remembered him from his earliest childhood, from the days when he had just opened his eyes and let out his very first cry while a wise she-wolf listened.

“Listen, northern land, to your cousin’s story.” Ardan joined the two Shards into one. As he felt his control over the explosive mixture of the two storms slipping away little by little, he blew on the finial of his staff.

The wind rose. It gathered strength and swelled, then swept across the steppe in a tidal wave. It ripped blades of grass from the earth and threw up rolling banks of dust, then suddenly became a dense gray Fog. So thick that you couldn’t even see your own outstretched hand through it.

The Fog spread like a thick blanket, settling over the steppe in an impenetrable shroud. It crept toward the houses, veiling them in a milky haze. The marksmen on the rooftops began shouting back and forth and pulling their jackets tighter around them. They turned up their collars and blew into their hands, which had gone cold all at once.

Ard staggered and broke his link to the Shards of Names. The Fog did not vanish, but it stopped spreading outward. Ardan had achieved his goal and covered the city with it up to the rooftops. He needed nothing more from those particular Shards.

The Fog would last only a few hours before the wind scattered it, but he could only hope that would be time enough.

Keeping low, Ardan darted forward in short bursts, timing each move for moments when the wind blew into his face and the sentries looked away. He reached the wall of the nearest house.

He bent down and slipped his hand into the gap where overlapping boards were fastened to an old stone foundation. The foundation still remembered the days when, in place of a city, only a handful of houses stood alone amid the endless steppe. But Ardan hadn’t come for the old stone’s stories, so he apologized to it and called to someone else. Or rather, to her.

The Dark had lived here since the last hammer blow died away, and it answered the Speaker’s call reluctantly. It had never known sunlight; even the muddled gossip of spiders sounded utterly foreign to it. So Ard had no trouble weaving a Veil from its tiny, almost insignificant Name, something one could hardly call a Name at all. Wrapped in a mantle of liquid darkness, Ardan stood motionless for a moment, adjusting to the weight bearing down on his mind.

He had learned only recently how to weave several Shards together. That was how the art of Aean’Hane always worked: at some point, he had simply realized he could do it. He still wasn’t used to the strain it put on his mind when he tried to sustain that focus.

Once he was certain his will would not falter and he would not lose his connection to the Name of the Darkness That Lives Between the Boards and the Foundation of the Little Steppe House, Ard set off through the streets. Fog and Veil did their work. No one saw or heard him. Even when the bandits patrolling the streets passed within a meter of him, they noticed nothing strange.

“Just what we needed, fog,” one of them complained, shivering in the cold.

“This damn cold’s worse,” Unslad said, blowing on his hands.

Bormor yawned and nodded vaguely northward.

“Maybe it blew in off the Great Glacier. I swear by the Eternal Angels, boys, the moment I’m paid, I’m off to the Islands. I’ll get myself a curvy, dark-skinned woman in Viroeyr. One who fucks like there’s no tomorrow. And then I’ll spend six months in bed with her without ever climbing out.”

“Right, Bormor.” Unslad gave a mocking snort. “Except she’d be the one fucking you—and not the way you’re hoping.”

“Yeah,” their companion chimed in. “I’ve heard women from the Islands have such bad tempers that you can forget about peace and quiet from day one.”

“I’ll knock out a couple of her teeth. That’ll make her more accommodating.” Bormor shrugged.

“Then there’s no point.”

“First off, she’ll be even more useful when I need her mouth. The rest of the time, I can just throw a rag over her. And if I ever get sick of her, I’ll slit her throat and get another one. I’ve heard their girls are fully developed by thirteen. Truth be told, I’ve always wanted to try a younger one. Especially since I’ll be on the run anyway. Maybe I’ll move to Dunsfield later. You can get anything there if you’ve got the money. The Confederates are crazy for crispers, after all.”

Ardan tightened his grip on the staff but refused to let his emotions override his better judgment.

“Bormor, sometimes I think,” Unslad drawled, “that when you were a kid, they didn’t just drop you headfirst down a staircase. They bounced your head off every step.”

“And I think, Unslad, you run that mouth of yours too much. If I get tired of listening to it, I might use it the way I’d use an Islander woman. Clear?”

Two rifle bolts clicked at once.

“Unslad, Bormor, should I tell Brick, or will you two settle down on your own?”

“And you...”

Ardan rounded the corner of the house and left the group of cutthroats behind. On the way to the inn, he encountered several more patrols, all of them discussing much the same thing.

Money, and how they would spend it. Most of their dreams were more or less the same. Drink, whores, gambling, and either the Islands or the Azure Coast. A few mentioned the Humpbacked Sea along the border between Castilia and Lan’Duo’Ha. But they were probably joking, because the Humpbacked Sea was, quite literally, about as far from here as a place could be.

At last Ard reached the street he knew so well. It felt as if only a short while had passed since he faced Rogov there in a shield duel.

Ardan cloaked himself in darkness, closed his eyes, and focused on his sense of smell. Shali had taught him that at times like this, all he had to do was breathe. Scents would tell him everything a hunter needed to know to keep from going hungry. A lynx might be small, but in the forest it seldom came back from a hunt without a kill. And though Ardan didn’t always master her lessons right away, he kept practicing.

The scents painted pictures in his mind in washed-out watercolors, almost as hazy as the night around him. And he raced among those pictures faster than his legs could ever have carried him. Silhouettes flickered into view, first on one side, then on the other.

A nutmeg tang on the palms of one of the bandits who had come out of a room where a young woman was crying.

The smell of cheap liquor from glass after glass on a table where creased, well-worn Sevens cards reeked of grease and grime.

The acrid sting of gunpowder, leading to a room farther on. Inside, the smell of copper set his head spinning. Several bodies, male and female, had been dumped in a heap, and the stink of ammonia told him someone had also pissed on them.

Ardan ran on.

He turned toward the service stairwell, following the sharp, acrid-sour scent of fresh varnish on the doorjambs, then ran down the stairs. Rubber-sheathed, Ley-cored cables ran along the wall, giving off a suffocating reek.

Ardan slipped beneath an oak door that was only sheathed in iron, not made entirely of it, as the regulations governing generation sections required. He veered to one side, past the reek of diesel, and finally reached the last door.

A harsh, clinging stench struck his nose at once. It was a mix of sour sweat, sweetish pus, the sharp odor of human excrement, and a hint of that same coppery tang of blood. Barely discernible beneath the smell of blood was the now almost entirely faded scent of perfume with a note of cherry.

All in all, there was virtually no chance Shpritz, Rogov, and Melin were being held anywhere but the hotel. That was exactly why Ard had come here first.

A scene flashed through Ard’s mind: three people on the floor, bound hand and foot. Three more… no, two, sitting at a table and calmly reading books whose pages still held a trace of printer’s ink.

Ardan opened his eyes and immediately snapped back to reality. He breathed in and out several times, trying to get the smells out of his nose, then carefully unfolded the case Tess had sewn, slid his staff inside, and slung the case across his back. Then he tightened the grimoire’s chains so the book wouldn’t swing against his legs, and quietly drew his father’s knife, careful not to let anything clank.

He stood for several moments, gathering his thoughts. Once his pulse had steadied, he pulled off his boots and set them carefully on the paving beside the foundation.

“Why is it always Ergar’s lessons on hunting two-legged prey that I end up needing?” Ardan sighed ruefully. He clamped the blade between his teeth, gripped the ledge, and pulled himself up with ease.

Bracing his feet against the sides of the window recess, he carefully slid the knife blade into the gap between the shutters and lifted the hook that held them closed. He slipped into the building and hurried to close the shutters behind him before the wind could slam them.

A girl sobbed in a puddle of blood amid yellow stains, her clothes in tatters. When the shutters creaked, she flinched and turned, terrified, but saw nothing. Only the shutters swinging closed. Ardan, meanwhile, felt the dead Ley’s pressure hammering at his mind with every passing second.

In less than a minute, he would lose concentration and the Veil would dissolve, so he couldn’t count on it. The girl huddled in the corner, frantically clutching at the ragged remnants of her dress and underwear, her eyes fixed blankly on nothing.

“Don’t touch me!”

Images of Magister Nata Lovarskay and the night at the Museum of the History of Magic flashed through Ardan’s mind.

Milar had shared his theory once or twice: criminals were only a step or two removed from animals. Ard, though, had seen what bandits and lowlifes did to those in their power… and he could only agree. Beasts did the same when they claimed another animal’s hunting ground or forced their way into its den.

They tore the males apart, strangled the young, and then made the females bear their attackers’ young.

And the matabar behaved exactly the same way in its endless wars over the Alcade peaks.

That was precisely why none of the Guardian Spirits of the matabar was a pack animal. So they would have no favorites. And the sole exception was Atta’nha, who treated every matabar as her own child but stayed almost entirely out of tribal life.

“Those thoughts can wait until tomorrow,” Ardan reminded himself, realizing this was only a way to distract himself from what had to be done.

Without breaking his concentration on the Veil, Ardan squatted beside the beaten, raped girl and blew sharply in her face.

“Who’s there?” She jerked to one side.

Ardan immediately severed his connection to the Name. Her eyes snapped wide open, and she screamed. Or tried to, anyway. She managed one short, sharp cry before Ardan covered her mouth with his palm.

“Sorry,” he said, then struck her in the temple with the knife hilt, one short, precise blow.

Hot blood began to run over Ard’s palm. Her eyes rolled back, and her body went limp. She was alive, of course. She would suffer from dizziness and nausea for a few days, and perhaps some memory loss as well. But that was unlikely.

The brief cry was exactly what Ardan had needed. He propped her up in the corner, went to the door, and flattened himself against the wall on the hinge side.

“Hey, little one,” a voice called out mere seconds later, the Tazidah accent unmistakable. “You’re that impatient already? Too bad I drew second. The demon-damned cards wouldn’t fall my way. One fucking Crown short. And after Tukhrad, it’s usually like sticking your dick in a bucket. Demon-cursed stallion. Then again, you nonhuman-lovers are used to that, aren’t you? Spend centuries living like nonhumans and you end up less than human yourselves. Galessian whore.”

The bandit seemed to be talking himself into a frenzy. Or maybe he enjoyed imagining the fear his voice put into her...

The door opened, and a young man stepped inside. Twenty-three, perhaps a little older. Sleeping Spirits, what kind of life had he led? Not even a touch of gray in his hair, yet already he’d been forced to flee his homeland and become a bandit on the steppe.

Then again, if the Sleeping Spirits didn’t already know, the Eternal Angels would find out soon enough.

Ardan slipped forward with ease. The Tazidahian stood in profile, and Ard clamped one hand over his mouth and nose. With the other, in a single motion, he drove his father’s knife into the base of the bandit’s skull, all the way to the guard. Maybe Ard wasn’t born to be a true Hunter, but he’d applied himself to his lessons, and Shali hadn’t been his only teacher. Ergar and Guta had taught him to start a fight by ending it with a single blow. They had pounded that lesson deep into his body and mind with paws and scored it there with claws.

He didn’t so much as twitch. He went limp in Ardan’s hands at once, and Ardan was already dragging him toward the same corner where the badly wounded girl lay unconscious. For one reason and one reason alone: the corner was on the hinge side of the door. When the door opened again, as it certainly would sooner or later, whoever looked in would need one extra moment to spot them.

And moments exactly like that added up to “luck” on a hunt.

Ard wiped the blade clean on the dead man’s clothes and set the knife between his teeth. He tried to brace himself, but the smell and taste of someone else’s blood hit him hard, and for an instant he nearly forgot he wasn’t in the vast forests of Alcade or on the mountain trails. Then he lowered himself into a crouch. He crooked his fingers at the middle joints and extended his arms along the floor. With his belly almost pressed to the boards, he crawled out into the corridor. He pushed off from the wall in a single leap and wedged his fingertips into the tiniest gaps between the ceiling boards. But even those gaps seemed three times wider than the tiny ledges and all-but-invisible handholds he’d had to use on the cliffs.

And still his muscles groaned, his sinews howled like ropes drawn taut, and pain flashed across his vision. The mutant’s venom might have lost some of its potency, but it still hadn’t entirely left his body. And Ard himself, though he trained regularly with kettlebells, was nowhere near as fit as he had been when he first came down from the Alcade peaks.

Long hours, sometimes entire days, at a desk piled with technical drawings did him no favors. His inhuman blood had always given him an edge, but over the past six months the mutant venom had blunted even that. So some of Ard’s clothes were now too small for him, which was why he understood Magister Tikhonov so well.

Ardan extended the claws on his feet, using them to grip the gaps between the boards. He pressed his chest and belly to the ceiling and crawled toward the hall. On the way, he reached the obstacle that had made Ergar’s lessons necessary. Clinging with only three limbs, Ard almost let out a hoarse cry of pain as he slammed his elbow into the junction box. He tore off the cover, then cut the wires with his knife.

The light flared, then immediately went out. The corridor, along with the part of the hall on the same circuit, went dim.

“What the—!” came a shout from the table, where the air smelled of alcohol and old playing cards. “Fucking Galessian subhumans can’t even get the wiring right! Tukhrad, go check it.”

“If I go check it, I’ll stop in on the whore while I’m at it. The cards aren’t coming my way anyway.”

“But you won the first hand!” a third voice said in a distinct, whistling Ngian accent.

Apparently that was why the bandits were speaking Galessian.

“And that was the end of my luck, same as always. The cards aren’t coming my way at all.”

“Fine,” the first one groaned. “Go. Once you’re done, everything down there will be torn to shreds anyway.”

“We’ll bring another one,” Tukhrad countered calmly. “We have to sit here until morning, so we’ll have time to go through another dozen. Good thing the neighboring houses aren’t far.”

“Wasting bullets on their husbands again.”

“We’ll get some target practice while we’re at it!” the third one guffawed.

“I’d rather shoot dogs than Galessians. Even that wouldn’t be as disgusting.”

“Nah, what’s wrong with you? Come on, feel bad for the dogs! Don’t you have a heart or something? He’s going to shoot dogs...”

“Yeah, you’re right... Guess I said more than I should’ve. Sorry, guys. My nerves are shot to hell.”

The most terrifying part was that Ardan could hear their hearts. He knew the Tazidahians and the Ngian weren’t lying. Everyone who’d spoken genuinely believed what they’d said. About the dogs. About the Galessians.

The Tazidahians laughed uneasily. Tukhrad hauled himself to his feet and lumbered toward Ard, switching on a handheld lamp as he went. Dim light spilled into the corridor, but there was enough of it to illuminate the floor and walls.

It never even occurred to Tukhrad that a threat might be lying in wait above him. And that was exactly why Ardan was waiting there, hidden.

The boards creaked beneath his heavy tread. He was as tall as Din Arnson and perhaps even more powerfully built than Alexander Ursky. He reeked of cheap cigarettes, bootleg liquor, someone else’s fear, and congealed blood that clung to him, crusting the folds of his pant legs below the knees.

Whistling a simple tune under his breath, he rolled his thick neck to loosen it, then rounded the corner and lost sight of the common room in the inn they’d seized. His accomplices could no longer see what was happening in the corridor either.

“Ahard, if you haven’t finished in there yet, you’ll have to make do with your hand,” Tukhrad drawled, his voice carrying both a chuckle and a veiled threat.

He swung the lamp from side to side, sweeping its beam down the corridor one way, then the other. A few moments later, just as Ard felt his muscles were about to give out, Tukhrad was directly beneath him. He was so close that, given another moment, a bead of sweat would have slipped from Ard’s brow and fallen onto the top of Tukhrad’s head. There was no telling what might have happened then. But Shali and Ergar had taught Ardan well.

“Unf...”

Tukhrad spotted the rivulets of blood running from beneath the door and began to say something in his own language. Apparently a curse, or something of the sort. Or perhaps he was calling for help. Either way, he tried to reach for his revolver, but couldn’t. He’d expected no real trouble in a city entirely under their control, and so he was holding the lamp in his right hand. The lamp swung. Its light slid across the floor, and then everything went still.

Ardan let his muscles go slack and dropped from the ceiling. He fell back-first toward the floor. As he fell, he seized Tukhrad’s chin between his palms and tucked his legs, twisting his body around. His momentum swung him down like a pendulum, his tucked knees counterbalancing the turn. Even a neck as thick as Tukhrad’s didn’t stand the slightest chance against simple leverage backed by distinctly nonhuman strength. The tendons snapped like taut strings, muscle fibers tore with a soft pop, and the vertebrae crunched like dry twigs breaking.

But before he even touched down lightly on the balls of his feet, Ardan relaxed his fingers and let his claws rake the entire length of Tukhrad’s throat, ripping open the arteries and trachea and scraping against splintered vertebrae. When Ard landed, Tukhrad was still standing. His head was bent unnaturally backward, the back of his skull touching his back just below the shoulder blades. His throat was torn open, and his head hung from a single flap of skin.

Ardan shook out his hands, rubbed his numb thighs with the heels of his hands to get the blood moving through his limbs again, then flattened himself against the floor once more. That was probably enough of Shali and Ergar’s training. They had taught him how to hunt: to dispatch his prey with a single blow, then take it as far from the trails as possible so he could sate his Hunger in solitude.

Another friend back in the forest had taught Ard how to fight…

Ardan blinked once, and his third eyelid drew a cloudy film over his eyes so no stray glint of light would give him away. He navigated by shades of gray in what would have been pitch darkness for a human. Then he switched off the lamp and darted forward on the balls of his feet without a sound. As he went, he tore the cable for the second circuit out of the wall.

“Fuck!” one of the bandits shouted at once. “Shit! Who’s there?!”

They might not have seen what was happening around the corner, but they couldn’t have missed the glow from Tukhrad’s lamp going out. Not to mention that the other half of the hall was now shrouded in darkness as well.

Ardan crawled beneath the tables with his belly pressed to the floor, weaving around chairs and rough wooden support frames. His gaze never left his victims. Guta had taught him never to leave cover until the last moment, when he knew for certain he could tear the nearest men apart before the rest could react.

Bears didn’t always hunt for food. Sometimes they fought. Why? Even Guta couldn’t explain it. He only ever said it was the dream of the Sleeping Spirits.

“We’ve got to sound the alarm!” the second Ngian groaned.

“Where’s the whistle… where’s the fucking whistle…” The Tazidahian groped around on the table with both hands, but in the pitch darkness he found nothing but cards and homemade wooden counters. “Fuck! I can’t see anything… I can’t see a fucking thing!”

“Then shoot!” the Ngian cried. “Just fire in every direc—”

He never got to finish the thought, either. Not a bad idea. Ardan pushed off the floor and rushed at the Ngian from the side, rising as he closed the distance. The Ngian might not have heard Ardan’s footsteps, but some animal instinct made him turn toward the threat a beat too late. The Ngian shouted and managed to fire several shots.

The pale flashes picked out Ardan’s face, drenched in someone else’s blood and utterly devoid of emotion. One bullet scorched his right side; a second passed barely half a meter from his shoulder.

Ard drove his shoulder into the Ngian’s chest and immediately plunged his father’s knife into the Ngian’s belly near the navel. Then he gripped the knife with both hands and hoisted the bandit off the floor, ripping his belly open as if gutting a fish he’d caught. The Ngian screamed and jerked convulsively. He couldn’t see what was happening, but he could feel his internal organs spilling out and dropping to the floor with a wet squelch.

The Tazidahian opened fire. The first bullet pulverized the head of the dead Ngian Ardan was using as a shield. The second punched through the chest. The third blew off the left leg, striking the joint dead-on. Ard felt the knife snag against the breastplate. Without a sound, he bent his knees, tensed his thighs, and leaped forward, taking the dead Ngian with him.

The last bandit tried to dodge the two bodies hurtling toward him. He almost pulled it off, too. He sprang aside, but he wasn’t quite fast enough. The dead Ngian clipped his accomplice and sent him to the floor. Ardan and the corpse came down together on the Tazidahian’s right leg, pinning it to the floor.

Ard wasted no time. He yanked the knife from the corpse’s chest and drove it hard into the Tazidahian’s shin. The bandit’s shriek drowned out the sound of the blade punching through flesh, shattering bone, and nailing his leg to the floor.

Again and again, the bandit cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger, firing his revolver in a frenzy at close range. Ardan swung the Ngian around by the shoulder, flattened himself on the floor, and counted the bullets. Three passed through flesh, changed course, and flew over his back. The fourth, unfortunately, ripped deep into the muscles of his lower back, and Ardan hissed through his teeth. Thankfully, it passed beneath the staff and spared Ard’s greatest treasure.

The dry click of the hammer was a welcome sound. The bandit’s cylinder was empty.

“Afh’da! Afh’da!” the bandit shouted. It was a filthy Tazidah curse with no concise, direct translation into Galessian.

Ardan endured the blinding pain and rose to his feet. Sleeping Spirits, if he’d used Star Magic, the bandits wouldn’t have slowed him down for even a moment. And they certainly wouldn’t have left him limping, even a little, with his own blood running down his legs.

But he couldn’t afford to spend even a single Red ray. He had two war mages ahead of him, and only the Sleeping Spirits knew what else. His accumulators hadn’t magically replenished themselves after the last fight, and he had exactly three left for each Star.

The bandit hurled the revolver at Ardan’s face, but Ardan dodged it easily, letting the useless hunk of metal fly past his cheek.

Like a fly caught in a spider’s web, the bandit jerked from side to side. He pulled a broad military knife from its sheath, its blade partly serrated so a wound couldn’t easily be stitched shut.

“Anda ehra uh’farg... Over here, you inhuman scum, come here!” the Tazidahian screamed, choking on his own spit. His crazed eyes flashed as he waved the knife from side to side.

Ardan bent down, caught the man’s forearm, and wrenched the wrist around until the hand tore free as though he were snapping a twig.

“Aaaah!” the Tazidahian screamed. He stared in unspeakable horror at the broken bone jutting from what was left of his wrist. Blood gushed, and shreds of torn flesh clung to the bone. Only a moment ago, his hand had been there. “Aaaah!”

Ard clenched his right fist and raised it high over his head, intent on ending this as quickly as possible. Exactly as his forest friends had taught him for six years. On the hunting trails, there was no time for wasted motion and no reason to squander strength. You never knew what else might happen while the Spirits of Day and Night took their turns, or when you might need what you’d so foolishly thrown away just to indulge your emotions.

Except that a frightened woman’s voice refused to fall silent in his head:

“Who’s there?”

And the image before his mind’s eye refused to fade: the deputy sheriff lay there with a belly wound, helpless and furious, opening and closing his bloodied mouth without a sound as he watched the bandits do what they were doing to his wife.

Ard unclenched his fist and looked into the Tazidahian’s eyes.

But he wasn’t on the hunting trail...

“Come on... come on!” the Tazidahian shouted, with no idea what awaited him.

He tried to strike Ardan with his left hand, but Ardan brushed it aside as if it were a pesky fly, easily shattering the elbow joint with his knuckles. The Tazidahian screamed again, but the flood of adrenaline in his system kept him from blacking out. Sometimes the human body is its own worst enemy.

And who would know that better than a student at the Grand who had studied the healing arts for two years running?

Ard grasped the Tazidahian’s forehead, pressing his thumb and little finger into the man’s temples and bracing the other three fingers against the coronal suture.

“What... what are you doing, you monster?!”

Ardan didn’t answer. Instead, he let his claws slide free, extending them as far as he could using muscles in his fingers that ordinary people did not have. The Tazidahian jerked from side to side, blood flooding his eyes and ears. Ard’s feline claws tore open the skin, cut through the few muscles beneath it, and sank into the bones. Then Ardan tensed his fingers and began to close his fist.

The Tazidahian’s scream became a howl. His skull crunched, and his eyes bulged as their sockets split apart. Mucus streamed from his collapsing sinuses and nose, mixing with tooth fragments and foamy saliva. The howl became a shriek. A shriek with nothing human left in it.

Anyone else would already have died from such unbearable pain: his brain was literally being crushed in a vise that pressed against tissue never meant to feel anything. The Tazidahian should have died too. But something kept him alive. Perhaps it had something to do with the faint glimmer of Ard’s staff seeping through its cover, but no one would ever know.

Ard kept squeezing and squeezing. Ardan leaned close to the Tazidahian’s ear and, without caring whether the man could hear him or make out anything at all, said softly.

“So who’s the dog now, foreigner?”

Ardan straightened and relaxed his grip for a moment, allowing the body to betray its owner by drawing a hoarse, labored breath that would only earn him another round of torture.

“Ardi the wizard, want to hear what I wrote for the next song?”

Ardan sprang to his feet as if scalded and leaped aside. His heart pounded wildly in his chest. Tess’s bright, laughing voice still echoed in his ears, and the scent of spring flowers blooming beside the stream made his head spin.

Ard blinked until his vision cleared.

Then alarm cut through the pounding of his heart. The frantic gunfire must have drawn attention, and so must the dim slivers of light showing through gaps in the drapes over the inn’s windows. And Ardan had just wasted time he didn’t have in the first place.

But the Tazidahian was still breathing, his head misshapen, his face torn, his mouth twisted. He sucked in air and forced it out in hoarse, convulsive breaths, making pink foam mixed with fragments of bone bubble on his mangled lips.

Ardan stepped closer and said, and meant it.

“Forgive me.”

He wasn’t apologizing for what he was about to do, but for what he had already done. That had been unnecessary. Ardan raised his leg, bent his knee, then snapped his leg straight and drove his heel into the Tazidahian’s throat. The Tazidahian jerked and went still, gone to face the judgment of the Eternal Angels.

Ard bent down and tugged the knife free from the last bandit’s leg in the inn lobby. He could already hear dozens of feet pounding toward the front doors. He spun around and sprinted for the stairs leading to the generation section.

Ardan flew down the steps. In one motion, he unbuckled the strap, swept the cover off the staff, and stuffed the cover into his pocket. He immediately manifested a seal. A torrent of snow burst from the head of the staff. It widened by the moment, gathering force until it formed an Ice Wall low enough for the stairwell and a couple of meters thick from front to back. It would hold the bandits back for exactly as long as he needed to...

Ard sighed.

He hated it when Arkar turned out to be right: “Sooner or later, every plan goes straight to hell.”

Ardan turned to the control panel for the generators, machines built on the principle of “probably nothing will blow up,” and spent a while searching for the master switch that would cut the power. But... there wasn’t one. The engineers hadn’t installed a master cutoff on the panel. Worse still, they hadn’t even bothered to add safety mechanisms, voltage fluctuation monitors, fuel-level sensors in the chambers, or, of course, so much as a hint of a fail-safe system.

So it was hardly surprising that the two Blue mages weren’t keeping Rogov, Melin, and Miss Shpritz in this room; they had them just beyond the connecting door. The reason was simple: they were drawing power for their shield spells from the generation section, so they weren’t the least bit worried that someone might shut it down.

Ardan could sever the main cable run, of course, but it would make little difference. Generators that powerful would keep running for almost another hour even without auxiliary control systems, pouring Ley into the surrounding area. That was enough to sustain the shield. And if Ardan decided to destroy the generators themselves, he’d give the Blue mages the chance to send him to the Sleeping Spirits on the spot.

That was precisely why the bandit mages were in no hurry to leave their hiding place, despite the sound of gunfire and the darkness. They believed the conditions were ideal. By and large, they were.

Footsteps had already begun clattering overhead again. From the sound of it, someone had run out into the street to spread the news. Ardan looked at the generators’ enormous iron housings. Inside them were some of the greatest technological achievements of Imperial Star science, inventions that had changed the world completely and irrevocably.

If it weren’t for the hostages, he’d power his own spell from the generators and destroy the Blue mages’ shield... after which they’d still turn him into what was left of Chaz Nalensky. And if Ard drew on the generators for war magic as well, he would almost certainly hit the hostages.

“Ahgrat.” Ardan couldn’t help himself. “Professor Convel is absolutely right when he complains that they hand out engineering licenses to anyone and everyone.”

Seven times out of ten, Ard came across appallingly shoddy work by Star Engineers, especially far from the capital. Usually, though, he managed to turn other people’s mistakes to his advantage. Now everything was exactly the opposite.

Ardan turned toward the door and took stock of what his senses were telling him. He couldn’t even call on Skusty’s science. If he risked turning a Speaker’s gaze on the Ley this close to the generators, at best he’d black out.

So all he could count on was the tingling in his fingers and... his own engineering skills. He was relying on both in a bandit-besieged city, with a national catastrophe liable to strike at any moment, while a dozen bandits were already hammering at the ice barrier with their axes.

“No. More. Business trips,” Ardan ground out as he opened his grimoire and pulled a pencil stub from its holder.

In theory, he should make it back to the capital just in time for exams. For some reason, though, he had a feeling that the Shield Charms and Star Engineering exams, at least, would prove easier. And not quite so deadly.

Ardan feverishly reworked the Misty Helper, adding new nodes and removing old ones. In effect, he was rewriting the seal from the ground up, planning to actually power it from the generators.

Luckily, when you had an almost limitless reserve of power, breaking something was far easier than picking the lock, which had been like trying to bore a hole clean through a brick wall with a screwdriver.

“An array to tap into the free energy in the Paarlax Field. A matrix to recalculate incoming parameters,” Ardan grumbled, scribbling complex formulas beneath the main version of the Helper as he went. “A nested free runic array to overload the fundamental node. Add a static recursive function for exponential power consumption...” Ardan looked over at the generation section. “And pray the Mages’ Guild hasn’t issued licenses to complete idiots.”

When he was done, Ardan nicked one of the cables and stepped back and to the side. He pressed himself into the corner, used up one accumulator in each Star, and manifested a Universal Shield as powerful as he could make it. Then he took several steadying breaths and struck the floor with his staff.

A scarlet-and-black seal flared beneath his feet. Threads of greenish mist streamed from the head of his staff, forming not a hand with a quill or stylus, but a clawed paw. After absorbing the rainbow light pouring from the damaged cable, the paw passed straight through the doors and...

***

Ardan shook his head. His awareness returned like an image flaring to life on a movie screen. From the center outward, the murky, jittering picture gradually sharpened. His ears rang painfully, and the stone dust had left his throat raw. He waved a hand in front of his face and banged his palm hard against something metal.

He shook his head again and blinked until his vision cleared, then went still for a moment. Metal brackets were embedded deep in the brickwork beside him, barely five centimeters away. Only moments before, those same brackets had held together the oak planks of the storeroom door, an exact copy of the one that had “guarded” the generation section.

Ardan spun toward the generators themselves and immediately raised a hand to shield his face. All three housings were already ablaze with bright, rainbow-hued fire, hundreds of shades of the Stars’ primary colors flickering within it.

Whoever designed this section hadn’t even allowed for a sudden overload on the main grid!

“I’ll definitely sign Convel’s petition to have licenses reviewed every ten years,” Ardan promised himself.

They had fifteen minutes left. Then the generators would explode with enough force to leave nothing of the hotel, not even its foundation.

As he passed the staircase, Ardan cast a quick glance at what remained of his Ice Wall. The smell and the racket from the lobby told him the conflicting seals must have drawn power from the same source, set off a blast, and blown the ice barrier into shrapnel that slashed everyone upstairs.

His best Shield Charms at the ready, Ardan peered into the storeroom. Through the mist that had seeped in from the collapsed ceiling, he saw Rogov and Melin lying on their sides. Their hands were bound behind their backs: each man’s right wrist was tied to the other’s left, and each left wrist to the other’s right. If either man tried to move, he would yank the other with him, disrupting any attempt to use Ley without a staff. Shpritz lay beside them. All three were breathing, but they looked in bad shape. Brick shards had ripped their clothes and cut their skin in places; some had even lodged in their flesh. None of the wounds, however, was life-threatening or required immediate attention.

Absurd as it sounded, the shield had done its job. In fact, it was still doing it. On the far side of the cave-in, caught in the full moonlight, a huge ape head blazed near the wall. It looked something like the one Major Mshisty had conjured in the Nightwalkers’ quarter.

Probably some kind of auxiliary shield the Blue mages had taken cover behind, or, more likely, a protective amulet that had activated. There was no time to break through it. Nor was there time to find out how soon the mages would come to. Ardan had to hope the bandits had staged the scene convincingly. He scanned the veil of dust and haze. Across the room, he spotted Rogov’s staff and Melin’s, bent but unbroken.

He snatched them up, rushed over to the captains, and sliced through their bonds with the blade barely grazing their skin. Shpritz, though, hadn’t even been tied up...

Once he was done with the ropes, Ardan sheathed the blade, pressed one palm to Rogov’s face and the other to Melin’s, and sent a brief flash of Ley through his fingers, using up his only Red ray.

“Ah-h-h,” Melin groaned.

“Ringing...” was all Rogov could force out.

Ardan gritted his teeth, worked one arm beneath Miss Shpritz’s body, grunted with pain, and heaved her onto his shoulder. Then he scrambled over the rubble and up to the street. Fortunately, the explosion had driven the gunmen on the rooftops into cover. They had no idea what to expect next.

When Ardan turned to go back and help Rogov and Melin, he saw, to his surprise, that they had already gotten out on their own. All that war mage conditioning had its advantages after all...

“Gentlemen, I—”

“Do you know how... to fight, not in duels but in... group combat?” Melin asked, swaying from side to side and stumbling now and then as he leaned on his bent staff.

“No,” Ardan admitted.

Oddly enough, neither captain seemed the least bit troubled by not recognizing him.

But that was a worry for tomorrow.

“Then stay out of the way,” Rogov ground out as he turned toward the cave-in, brushing away the dust caked on the engraved seals on his staff. Of course, no one had left them their grimoires. “If they start shooting, take care of the bullets. Leave everything else to us.”

“And don’t jump in, no matter what,” Melin reminded him. “If you do, we’ll all die.”

Ardan nodded without a word and dragged Miss Shpritz, who still had not recovered, over to the wall of the nearest house. There he manifested a version of Orlovsky’s Shield rewritten for the Blue Star, at a cost of two Blue Star rays. Dozens of translucent discs began to shimmer in the air before him and Miss Shpritz. By then, the other two mages had also climbed free of the rubble, and they were in far better shape than Rogov and Melin.

Ard had tried to ask Aversky what group battles between mages looked like, as opposed to mass battles, where everyone involved generally ended up dead. But Aversky had never had the chance to tell him. And the Sleeping Spirits knew that Ardan had never expected to learn the answer to his question in precisely this way.