A withered figure moved through the adept’s gallery, his steps halting but his progress sure and silent. No small feat, given the maze of dubious treasure surrounding him, all of it shrouded in darkness. The only light came from the cloud-misted moon peeking through one of the upper windows.
The old man gave the moon a quick, unsentimental glance and, out of habit, looked for his moon-cast shadow.
For long moments he searched the dark marble floor in vain. Panic crept up his throat and tightened icy fingers. Had he finally died, and not quite noticed?
But no, there lay the shadow–thin and bent and so faint as to be almost imperceptible.
He blew out a relieved sigh and collapsed onto a handy bench. Rhendish, the adept whose manor this was, had placed the bench here for those who wished to contemplate a row of portraits–famous alchemists ranging from ancient Portian to last century’s giant, the lost prodigy Avidan Insa’Amid. Rhendish did not include his own likeness in this august company, but a careful observer could not fail to note that a space had been left.
The old man rocked to his feet, tottered, and caught himself on the iron bars surrounding three desiccated imps.
Skin like gray parchment stretched over skeletal jaws, which had dropped to reveal needle-sharp teeth. Tattered bat wings curved as if in flight, and the ropes holding them in place made the imps look like hideous, forgotten puppets.
He blinked rheumy eyes, certain that age and moonlight conspired to mock him. But no, the vision remained. Rhendish changed the displays of curiosities frequently, and for some
reason the adept saw fit to display these monstrosities, fey servants that Sevrin’s sorcerer lord had used up many years ago.
The surge of kinship he felt to these withered things surprised him. But then, old age
always comes as a surprise, and never did he feel so old as when he contemplated the remnants of Eldreath’s reign. Fewer and fewer of Sevrin’s people truly remembered that time.
He remembered it. He remembered it all too well.
The crash and tinkle of breaking glass came from a room across the courtyard, a faint sound carried by night winds and lingering magic. Red light flared in the adept’s workroom, followed by the swift, clanking footsteps of the adept’s clockwork guard.
Curious, he made his way to Rhendish’s workroom, moving through passages unknown to most of the manor’s servants. In a surprisingly short time he slipped into one of the
workroom’s curtained alcoves. He edged aside the heavy drapes and gazed in consternation at the sight beyond.
An elf woman sat on the edge of a metal table, her winter-grey eyes locked in a fierce
stare with a tall, fair-haired man who wore the sapphire tunic of an adept.
Rhendish gripped the elf’s wrist with one hand. The other hand held a tiny silver knife,
which poised menacingly over her bleeding arm. This had been sliced open to reveal not bones, but slim metal bars and the intricate mesh of clockwork gears that made her functional, if not whole. Several clockwork guards, some of them frozen in mid-strike, added a sense of tightly coiled menace to the grim tableau.
Nothing in the room moved, but the silence and stillness thrummed with intensity. The old
man could neither see nor sense magic, but he had no doubt that a silent battle raged between the elf and the adept.
The old man knew a frisson of alarm. Oh, he had no doubt who would prevail, but the
battle itself was worrisome. It proved that the elf knew Rhendish’s deepest
secret: The adept was a sorcerer as well as an alchemist. Not much of a
sorcerer, perhaps, but then, after enduring ten years of alchemical
experimentation, the elf wasn’t much of an elf.
Still, he almost had to admire a stubbornness that outlived both flesh and starsong. The
things the elf had withstood over the past ten years should have killed her a dozen times over. Even now, with her face as bloodless as moonlight on snow and her arm sliced down to her metallic bones, she put up struggle enough to raise beads of sweat on Rhendish’s brow.
The old man looked around for the source of the crash. This was an alchemist’s lab, and
spills could be deadly. Shards of glass littered the floor just beyond the alcove, but thankfully no stain marred the carpet and no alchemical stench rose from the shards.
Old bones creaked as he stooped for a closer view. His eyes narrowed as he noted a shard
of glass clinging to a familiar looking hilt. He slid one hand under the curtain and grasped the hilt.
As he lifted it, a blood-red drop fell from the shard and stained the hem of his tunic. He lifted the fabric to sniff. Blood, yes, but mixed with something else, something that smelled acrid and complex and certainly alchemical in origin.
He brought the shard closer to his face. The break was surprisingly smooth and regular, as if it traced a natural weakness in the blade. It looked very like the curve of a rose petal.
Suddenly he knew where he’d seen this hilt before.
He looked at the elf with growing respect and deepening concern. She’d substituted a glass dagger for the elfin Thorn. That was a clever trick, but it required more than cleverness. It required the services of both a skilled weapon smith and a talented alchemist.
Rhendish knew about the dwarf in Fox Winterborn’s band of thieves. He did not know that
one of his fellow alchemists had thrown in with the City Fox.
This was grim news indeed.
A sharp clatter of metal drew the old man’s attention to the workroom. Every clockwork
guard had dropped to one knee. Moving as one, they lifted mailed fists and thumped them to their chests in an unmistakable–and very elfin–gesture of fealty.
Rhendish released the elf’s wrist and backed away. Uncertainty twisted his handsome
features, but his face did not show the fear that would come with true understanding.
The old man understood all too well.
If the other adepts learned Rhendish’s secret, they would join forces against him and
drag him out to sea. They would find the biggest glacier within a tenday sail, and they would use weapons not seen since the defeat of Eldreath to melt a hole in that glacier twenty fathoms deep. Then they would drop the sorcerer into this hole and stand guard until it froze over.
Unless, of course, they could think of an even more unpleasant and final method of
disposition.
The details mattered not. Rhendish was powerful, but he didn’t stand a chance against the combined might of his fellow adepts.
There was but one solution: Remove the other adepts.
It did not occur to him to kill the elf. She would die, of course, but not until she
brought him the Thorn.
* * *
