Changing Of The Guard (Book 6) (5 page)

Ansel had been following Yaragath for the past several weeks, tailing him through Whitestone and watching the mage fall into the depths of depression the likes of which he couldn’t understand. He had been separated from his order, certainly. And Toreans had chased him unmercifully for months afterward.

But he still had his magic.

And that meant he was still dangerous.

Which was why Ansel was sitting here in one of the darkest corners of a rot-gut tavern outside Whitestone.

“Who the hells are you?” Yaragath said.

“A messenger.”

The older man laid his head back and peered at him through his drunken haze. “From who?”

“Why do you drink so much, old man?”

“I see,” Yaragath grumbled, then lifted his mug to his lips. “My wife sent you.” His chuckle was brief.

Ansel was nonplussed.

He was an assassin, a job that never bothered him because he figured they all deserved to die somehow. He didn’t mind the idea of killing a defenseless man. He was a professional, after all. He spent days or weeks or months arranging his jobs, and specifically setting up circumstances to leave him with no exposure. In that light, killing a defenseless man was the entire idea.

But, in the quiet times, Ansel described himself as a messenger of judgment, a man who carried out tasks that must be done.

Killing a man was meant to be a punishment.

Yaragath was Koradictine, and should pay for his transgression against the order.

But this man was a hollow shell—he had given up, he had nothing left worth taking in extractment of the justice that Ansel needed to feel good about his chore. Yaragath seemed to have already punished himself, and, to the best of his knowledge, Yaragath had no wife.

The idea annoyed him to the point that he now found it difficult to arrange his mind in such a fashion as he could kill the old man.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“What?” Yaragath replied.

He had probably forgotten Ansel was there.

“I asked why you drink so much.”

Yaragath gave a throaty laugh. “How old are you?” he finally mumbled.

“Old enough,” Ansel replied.

“Hmm.”

“I’ve been on my own since I was eight.”

“Good for you, son. Good for you.”

The old man’s tone raised a hackle along Ansel’s spine, but he didn’t say anything.

Yaragath gazed intently toward Ansel. “You never lost no one, have you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Kids. Parents. Hell, friends for that matter. You’ve been alone since you was …,” he looked at Ansel with a pleading question.

“Eight.”

“Eight. Right. I seen boys like that … bet you never had a friend your whole life.”

Yaragath reached for his pipe, missed once, then scrabbled his fingers along the wood to get hold of it. He put the stem in his mouth and pulled, releasing smoke from his nose.

“Who did you lose?” Ansel asked, uncomfortable being under Yaragath’s analysis.

The Koradictine’s eyes grew unfocused again. “I had a boy.”

“What happened?”

“Magewar.”

“Was he Koradictine, too?”

Yaragath started, and peered at Ansel. “Did I say I was Koradictine?”

“Sure,” he lied. “You told me about how you made it all the way from apprentice to commander.”

The old man grunted.

Ansel sat quietly.

“I shoulda paid more attention.”

“What happened,” he said. “To your boy.”

“Lectodinian cut him down before he could get his spell away.”

“Hmm,” Ansel grunted.

“I told him!” Yaragath said, slamming his hand against the table. “I told him, again, and again. Speed. A mage in battle has ta cast quickly. He wouldn’t lissen, though. My fault. I shoulda taught him better.”

The dagger felt heavy in Ansel’s hand. He wasn’t sure he could do this.

“But I got ‘im back,” Yaragath’s eyes glittered conspiratorially.

“How?” he asked, hope rising.

Yaragath leaned into Ansel’s ear and gave a yeasty whisper.

“I followed the Lectodinians and picked them off one-by-one.” The old Koradictine’s eyes glimmered. He grinned, almost as if he knew it was what this lithe stranger needed to hear.

“One-by-one,” he chuckled. “Very slowly.”

The blade slipped between the mage’s third and fourth ribs, slicing upward to find his heart.

Yaragath’s body shuddered. A question came to his expression—followed by a sarcastic grin. “Maybe you did come from my wife,” he said as he slumped against the wall, his pipe falling to the table again.

Ansel withdrew the blade and slid from the bench to walk into the wintry night.

He had a report to make, and he wanted to be long gone before anyone noticed the pool of blood that would soon spread over the tavern’s dirt floor.

Cara had been climbing all morning.

She was tired, and she was cold.

She didn’t have anyone to blame but herself, though. She had, after all, volunteered specifically for this mission on purpose. But who would have thought that a Koradictine wizard would choose to live in the bleakest mountains north of Victory Fields, a piece of ground where no mammal could exist without a layer of blubber a hand's width thick and where even the simple act of removing your gloves to strike a fire threatened frostbite?

This went a long way toward explaining Yorl Maggore and his eerie idiosyncrasies.

Below her, the mountain fell sharply into open space that seemed to have no bottom. The air was sharp and biting, burning her nose and searing her lungs with each intake. Her legs ached, and her arms felt like they could fall off any moment.

She reached up and grabbed a ledge. She used her pick to leverage herself over the edge.

Yorl’s home stood starkly against a sky saturated in blue. It was a castle made of stone, with three towers connected by flying buttresses. Sunlight cut through the arid air and reflected off snow in a way that made the gray shale scintillate with shadow and silver.

Cara slipped behind a boulder to rest.

She had served alongside the Koradictine in Arderveer. That assignment had been two hellish months of taking orders from him, watching the way his tongue ran wetly over his bulbous lips every time they met, suffering through his leering smile whenever she first walked into any session, and seeing his strategies fail to achieve what they might have if the mage had the balls to make any real decisions.

Her skin crawled at the mere thought of his touch.

It was
his
ineptitude that let the Torean god-touched mage slip away. Things would have been different if she were in command that day. As it was, she had re-deployed her Lectodinian mages all on her own. Otherwise, they may actually have lost Takril, the Torean ruler of the city, as well as the god-touched.

Still, she was the one who paid for the loss with a stint in the underplanes.

She would not forget that.

Ever.

Cara patted the weapon beneath her bearskin coat. It was a long dagger, magicked in her own laboratory with a sorcery augmented by black powers from those underplanes she was now so familiar with. It was attuned to Yorl’s body. That magic had cost her dearly—she would be paying the demon for months. But it had been worth it. The blade squirmed and made her stomach turn with its corruption. Maybe, she thought, she had done
too
good of a job on it.

Dismissing the thought, she peered around the boulder.

She reached for her link and gathered magical energy about her. As the magestuff flowed, Yorl’s castle lit up with wards. Cara pressed her mind to leverage proper points, and she molded sorcery around the foundation of his security spell. With a coordinated pull, she removed their linkages, and the Koradictine’s magic fell apart.

The hardest part was over.

She straightened and walked to the castle.

The door opened easily. It was warm inside, and she removed her bearskin overcoat, leaving the weapon free and available for her left-handed pull. The steel seemed to throb at her side.

Yorl Maggore was immersed in watching a pair of rodents mate when she found him.

His first expression was surprise.

Then, when recognition hit, his smile became its familiar leer.

Her magic flared, showing him an image of her dancing before him, wearing filmy clothes of Koradictine red.

Cara handed him her sword then, and stepped back to watch.

The illusion still smiled, and still danced as it ran fingers through his greasy hair. It kissed him as he gripped the weapon closer with one hand and ran his other hand over her thigh. One of her illusion’s ghostly hands drew a line from his sternum, along his neck, and up his jaw bone to his chin. Then slowly, excruciatingly slowly, it lifted his chin skyward to expose the pasty white jugular.

The blade flared purple as he raised it upon himself.

The coppery smell of fresh blood filled the room.

The expression on Yorl’s face when Cara left was pure horror.

It made her very happy.

Chapter 3

Zutrian Esta stood before a map of the plane he had spread out over the long wall, listening carefully as the commanders’ reports came in.

The plan was working even better than he hoped.

He had been right to hold his mages back, to regroup and train, and to strike with guerilla forces in the dead of winter when surprise was on his side. A blue flag jutted from the map in each place where a Lectodinian had bested a Koradictine. The map was almost completely filled with blue. Over the past week, the raids had systematically removed over two-thirds of the Koradictine order from this side of Adruin.

His revenge was nearly complete.

He grimaced at the red flags pinned to de’Mayer Island. Only Ettril and his small collection of mages remained, so it was upsetting that he could not get a report on Ettril’s whereabouts.

But, regardless of whether Ettril Dor-Entfar lived or if he died, the Koradictine order would never again be a power on this plane.

So, yes, it was a very good day.

But still, he wondered.

Where could the Koradictine High Superior have gone?

Chapter 4

Hirl-enat spoke to Neuma with an icy edge to his voice.

“Who do you think you are? Ettril is gone, and Quin Sar is dead. That leaves me in command here.”

Neuma kept her cool and paused for effect, noting Fil’s watchful eye. Fil, sitting as always in silent examination, would ensure everything that happened in this tent would get out to what remained of the order. She hadn’t expected Hirl-enat to be this ambitious, but if she played this right, it could work out even better. Garrick would still take care of Ettril, Hirl-enat would be gone, and the order would be hers.

Garrick’s absence from Dorfort changed the time scale, so she could be patient with Hirl-enat’s petty ego while he painted himself into a corner.

“Who do I think I am?” she said. “I think I’m the one with the plan. But if you have better thoughts for dealing with the Toreans
and
the Lectodinians, then I suggest you put them forward now.”

The older mage pursed his lips, his bushy beard bristling around his mouth. She took great delight in his pained expression. The elder wizard was one-upped, but didn’t want to show it.

The three of them were alone. High Superior Dor-Entfar had disappeared. Worse, while searching for Ettril, they heard reports of mages who suffered scuffles with the Lectodinian sect. She worried about that the most. It meant the Lectodinians—who had emerged from the battle at God’s Tower essentially unscathed—had likely decided that the Koradictine order was at its most defenseless now, and that Zutrian Esta, High Superior of the Lectodinians, had begun to press his advantage.

If true, it was imperative they get back to Badwall and hold onto the Canyons and their surrounding regions, or else the Koradictine order as they knew it could be swept away.

Neuma’s plan was the best they could manage while they were out here in the middle of nowhere. In a nutshell, she suggested they split—one mage casting magic that would transport them to immediately to calm the disquiet in Badwall, the other two taking the several-day journey to the Vapor Peaks to request counsel with the Lectodinian leadership.