The Dreaming Hunt (5 page)

Leland swore and jumped to protect his man, snatching up a small, ceremonial shield no larger than a dinner platter as he passed by it. Diving forward, he was able to throw the shield in front of his man and deflect Gorath's first blow. But the second one caught Leland across the back. The worst of it was stopped by spine and ribs, but it was a large cut, and his body arched backward instinctively, contorted in fiery agony.

He had to move. Use the darkness to escape. But his right leg refused to jump when he commanded it to. He staggered, half fell toward the far wall, and banged loudly into the row of wooden chairs lined up there for petitioners.

Gorath corrected direction and ran for the noise. Dregs. Leland fell backward into a chair and rolled aside just as Gorath's sword skewered the chair back. In the second it took the changeling to yank the tip free of the wood, Leland reached desperately for a weapon, anything with which to defend himself. His hand brushed across a trophy upon the wall. Collected antlers shed each year by the Spirit Stag. He grasped one, and as he finished falling to the floor, it broke off in his hand. He took a desperate backhand swing with his left arm and slashed its pointed tip across the back of the rakasha's knee, partially hamstringing him.

Swearing viciously, Gorath swung his fist in Leland's general direction. Dregs. The rakasha had extended his claws. Like all cat changelings, Gorath had four razor-sharp claws embedded in his fists that could be extended upon command. Leland threw up his improvised weapon, but the blow was too strong, delivered with too much force for him to block it. Gorath's claws slid up the short length of the antler and slammed into his right shoulder, burying themselves in the muscles that controlled his arm. The rakasha yanked viciously, raking the claws through muscle and sinew, shredding the joint completely.

The limb fell useless to Leland's side as a gush of hot blood poured over his chest and down his back, his fingers frozen around the antler. The room began to spin and he grew light-headed in the span of a few seconds as his life's blood poured from his wounds.

He. Must. Not. Die. Kendrick needed him. No one else had the resources to mount a full-scale search for his son nor to recover him from the powerful nature guardian who'd kidnapped him. Leland clung to consciousness by the thinnest thread, fighting with every ounce of his will to overcome his wounds. To stand. To fight. To win.

Something hit him lightly in the chest, no harder than a sparrow's wing brushing against him. He felt, rather than saw, the gas cloud envelop him. And then there was nothing.

*   *   *

Gorath righted himself, swearing luridly. The landsgrave was supposed to be surprised by their ambush and not fight back, and certainly not with such ferocity. Leland Hyland was said to be an old man. Hells, he would hate to have faced the man in his prime.

“Are you alive, Gorath?” Mara called anxiously.

“Aye. The others?”

“I cannot see.”

“Jack went down first. Find him.”

As Leland's life expired, so did the darkness spell. Lamplight shone once more throughout the destroyed chamber. The hounds charged Mara, who was closest to them, and she threw all the remaining gas globes in her hands at the beasts.

Gorath leaped forward to the whimpering, burned creatures, slashing their throats open viciously.
Cursed, foul beasts
. They could bleed out like their master. With their last heartbeats, the three hounds dragged themselves on their bellies toward Leland's body, trying and failing to reach his corpse before they died with howls gurgling uselessly in their slit throats.

Meanwhile, three crumpled heaps marked where his brothers had fallen in the fight. “Heal them!” he ordered Mara urgently.

She was already racing to Niall's side, closest to her. She poured a potion down his throat, but entirely too slowly.

“Faster!” he bit out.

“I can only do this so quickly without spilling the potion and wasting it,” she snapped back. Niall groaned and rolled over at her feet. She moved to the next body and repeated the process with their brother Paco. But this time, nothing happened.

She swore and dug frantically in her pouch for another vial. Gorath swore, as well. Life potions were expensive and hard to come by. If Hyland weren't already dead, he would gut the man for killing his brother
and
for costing them a pretty pile of gold by having to burn a life potion.

Mara poured the potion down Paco's throat. Gorath held his breath until his brother lurched of a sudden, gasped violently, and commenced swearing.

“Hurry, Mar. He went down first,” Gorath snarled, pointing at his closest brother in age, he of the mangled face. He must have bled out after Leland shredded him with that cursed thorned club.

She moved to their last brother's side and crouched beside the corpse, taking in the massive pool of blood that had spread a full body's length beyond their kin. “No use even bothering with healing potions here. I'm going straight for a life potion.”

A
second
life potion?
Curses upon Hyland and all his kin
.

Mara poured the second expensive potion down Jack's throat, but nothing happened.

“What's wrong?” Gorath growled, prowling over to take a closer look.

“I got to him too late. He's dead.”

“You mean he's going to have to resurrect?” Gorath demanded in fury.

“That's the way of it.”

He was going to dismember the landsgrave's dead corpse and burn the pieces—

Curses. This was not how Hyland was supposed to die. He had to clean up this mess and do what he had been paid to do. He knew as well as anyone the danger of crossing Anton Constantine. Anton was vicious and merciless to any who dared stand against him. He might have been deposed as governor of Dupree and be a fugitive, but he still had power and resources. One would never know from whence came revenge once Anton was well and truly provoked.

He swore some more and satisfied himself in part by trashing the remaining furniture, smashing what was still intact into kindling.

“By the Great Beasts, what a fiasco,” Mara muttered as she strode over to Hyland's corpse to examine it. “Did you have to kill him, Gor?” she complained. “I don't have any more life potions. The Slaver's Guild has an order in effect to capture him and bring him in to face charges of treason. Bringing him in would earn me great rewards and go a long way toward getting me a promotion in rank.”

He needed to distract her. Draw her away from Hyland's body so he could do what had to be done. “Do you need to go be with Jack's spirit and offer it field resurrection? The sooner he's up and around, the sooner we can all be quit of this place.”

“Good point.” She hustled across the room and knelt at their brother's side, blessedly with her back to him.

Furtively, Gorath pulled two vials out of his pouch. He poured the first, a life potion down Hyland's throat. As the man drew a gasping breath, he coughed to cover the sound and used the butt of his belt dagger to knock the landsgrave unconscious. Then, carefully, he unsealed the second vial and poured the viscous, red-black fluid inside it down Hyland's unresisting throat. With a single, long inhalation, the landsgrave died. For good this time, if Anton's description of the poison's effect was accurate.

He stuffed the empty vial back into his pouch just in the nick of time, for Mara came over to stand beside him. She stared down at the landsgrave's corpse. “Odd. He seemed so determined to live. But I do not sense his spirit hovering near his body. It is as if he has already moved beyond the Veil.”

“Huh. Odd,” he echoed. At long last. His family's debt to Constantine was paid in full. The Kithmar clan was finally free of Anton. Exultation roared through him.

“I'll feed the servant a forgetting potion and then slit his throat. You start hauling in the other bodies,” she ordered irritably. She gave the landsgrave's corpse a kick with her booted toe on her way past him.

Gorath hoisted the first body from the wagon over his shoulder, a badger changeling corpse in a torn and bloody Dominion tabard, and carried it into the landsgrave's house. He dumped it next to the pool of blood where his deceased brother lay and headed back to the wagon.

Why Anton wanted to frame the fierce changeling horde that was the Dominion for this murder was a mystery to him. Gorath supposed that, if he'd had no clan of his own, mayhap he would've gone into the wilds in search of service within the Dominion. But as it was, he dumped another body—this one a wolverine changeling—on the floor with a shrug. The four parallel red slashes emanating from an animal paw that made up the Dominion's symbol gleamed up at him from the creature's black tabard.

Too bad they could not get Anton to compensate them for the expensive life potions they had been forced to use. Not to mention if Jack's spirit didn't have the sense to approach Mara for a field resurrection, they would have to pay the Heart richly for resurrecting their brother. Sure, the poor didn't have to pay, but the Kithmar were well known as successful—and rich—slavers. They would be expected to give lavishly to the Heart's coffers in return for their brother's life.

Irritated at the high cost Hyland had inflicted upon them, he picked up one of the side chairs and gave it a good heave. It smashed satisfyingly into a wall hanging, tangled with the tapestry tassels, and tore the entire hanging down from the wall. On the way down, the rod crashed into an oil lamp and knocked it out of its sconce. The lamp's glass reservoir broke, splashing hot oil over the crumpled tapestry cloth. The burning wick landed in the midst of the heap, and the whole flared up in flames.

“Gor.
Ath,
” Mara complained through clenched jaws.

He went over to the tapestry and grabbed a corner of it with the intent to pull the thing outside. But as he yanked, a shower of sparks and burning embers flew up, some of them alighting in the curtains. The thin, expensive silk ignited, and within the space of a breath, a wall of flames climbed toward the dry, old wood of the rafters.

“You've set the place on fire,” Mara snarled. “Put it out before the whole manor goes up in smoke and all our work is for naught. Hurry.”

He searched for a bucket of water near the hearth, but none was at hand. “Sorry, sister,” he mumbled, not feeling sorry at all.

“We have to get out of here before the village rouses and the locals come to put out the fire. The whole point of this was to make people think the Dominion did it.”

Grumbling, he ducked out past the fire, which had spread to three windows and several chairs. He dumped the last body as flames climbed a second wall now and licked hungrily at the ceiling.

“You'd better hope your fire does not destroy the details Anton insisted on,” she huffed as they gathered their surviving brothers and ran for the woods.

“To the Void with him,” Gorath panted back.
To the Void with all those noble types
.

 

CHAPTER

4

Will sat warily, and Rosana did the same beside him. Nothing about this ritual had gone well so far, and a looming sense of foreboding clung to the circle and its occupants. Lenora looked vaguely gray about the edges, and Raina frankly looked exhausted. But as soon as the thought occurred to Will, she got up from her stool and moved around the little table, reaching into her belt pouch as she came.

“Let me bind your arm, Rosana,” she murmured. “It's still bleeding.”

Will watched anxiously as Raina swabbed away blood still trickling over Rosana's wrist and fingers. A long, narrow cut along Rosana's forearm became visible.

“There is nothing unusual about the wound?” he asked anxiously.

Raina glanced up at him. “Nay. It's just a cut. Her blood is the unusual bit.”

“How so?” he started.

Without warning, Raina froze. Her knuckles went white, and Rosana made a tiny sound of protest. The blond human girl's gaze was distant, horrified, staring at something he could not see. Since when did she receive visions?

Rosana groaned, and he lunged forward to grab her as her legs began to collapse.

And then a vision flashed into his mind's eye. A glimpse of darkness so vast and black and empty as to suck the very soul from a man.

“What the—” he gasped.

Men's voices shouted nearby, but trapped in the vision Will only peripherally registered swords swinging clear of sheaths.

“No!” Lenora called out strongly. “Do not interrupt the circles! Stay where you are!”

Will blinked hard, forcibly jerking his mind back from the margin of the abyss. The Heart's common room came into focus once more. But it was as if two entirely separate places occupied the single space. A shadow of that other place, an endless black void, overlaid the Heart common room with its wooden floors, broad beamed ceilings, plaster walls, and anxious-faced healers.

Ephemeral creatures were taking form throughout the room, passing over from that other realm into this one, quickly gaining form and substance. He reached reflexively for his staff, but it was not slung in its usual place across his back. Will swore and snatched Rosana's dagger from its sheath as he leaped in front of her.

A transparent humanoid man dressed in white robes with a long white beard and carrying a lit lantern stood near the Heartstone. The Royal Order of the Sun guards dived to put themselves between him and the stone, but the apparition merely smiled gently as they passed through his ghostly image.

A commotion on the other side of the room caused Will to turn sharply. Rosana cringed against his side as a man dressed all in black, as grim and forbidding as the man in white had been welcoming, appeared momentarily. The apparition held a black scourge coiled in his right hand, the hungry, braided leather whip deadly looking. The man stood with his feet braced apart, his left foot a little forward, his weight back as if he prepared to flay someone.