“No! Wait—I’ll be with you in . ..”
“I said go! And take Forral with you. Tell him to get—oh, never mind. Make him get on the bloody boat, Shia, if you have to knock him unconscious and drag him on board. That way we’ll all have a chance of surviving this. Do it!”
“Take care then, my friend!” Shia looked around to see Forral looking around, craning his neck for a sight of the Mage.
“Come on, man!” Tarnal was shouting. “We have to go! Get in or be left behind!”
“I can’t—Aurian is missing!” the swordsman shouted.
“Get in the boat” Shia roared at him, using all the mental force she could muster. “Aurian is coming!”
Forral turned toward her. “What the . . . You . . . ? Did you ... ?”
“Yes! Now get in the cursed boat, human, before I rip out your guts. Aurian told me to tell you.”
An obdurate expression settled on his face. “I’m not leaving withou ...”
With a snarl, Shia sprang at him, knocking him backward so that he staggered into the boat, pushing it out into the shallow water. Tarnal shot out an arm and dragged him on board. Shia and Khanu looked at the boat, already crowded with passengers, and an unspoken message passed between. Plunging into the water together, they set off swimming toward the waiting ship. Two cats whose great claws were designed for dealing with the cliffs and craggy escarpments of Steelclaw, it was nothing to swarm up the side of a wooden vessel. The other ship had already left. Even as Tarnal, the last of the boat’s passengers, climbed aboard the larger craft, the anchor came rattling up, and strong men, with the help of long poles, began to move the ship out of harbor.
The Mage was enraged at the foes who had inflicted such terrible wounds upon her friend. She took her anger out on the enemy, and felt a grim satisfaction as they fell beneath her blade. Then, as she neared the boat, she saw a sight that pierced the red haze in her brain and left her thoughts exposed with a raw, ice-cold clarity. Two soldiers were stalking Wolf, and had him backed into a crevice in the cavern wall. Aurian could see blood on his mouth and on his fur, and had no idea whether or not it was his own: she only saw the danger to her son. Hearing him whimper with fear, she drowned the piteous sound with a shriek of anger so loud that every skirmish in the cavern faltered for an instant.
Wolf’s assailants never knew what hit them. The Mage was pulling her sword out from between the ribs of the second man almost before the first one’s head had time to hit the ground. Unwisely, though, she had drawn attention to herself with her battle cry, and clearly, the enemy had decided it was time she was stopped. Already, several of them were beginning to close in.
“Can you run?” Aurian demanded of her son.
“I—yes ...”
“Then run!”
They ran, with Grince and Frost pelting at their heels. But they were never going to make it. A group of soldiers was almost treading on their cloak hems, and another knot of foes was running around to get between them and the boat.—The one gap narrowed ... closed ... The Mage found herself running into a thicket of swords. One of the enemy shouted something, but it was impossible to hear through the agonizing buzzing that permeated her skull. Aurian wiped sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand. The air seemed to be growing darker; thicker. When had it turned so cold? It was becoming harder to see the outlines of the soldiers—but surely their faces were contorted with stark terror? Surely they were backing away? Breaking—running! With a jarring, high-pitched snarl, a great black shape glided over the Mage’s head and swooped down upon the fleeing soldiers, settling over a group of three terrified men like a hawk on its prey.
As the Death-Wraith fed, the paralysis dropped from Aurian and her will came back to her. Turning to the mesmerized Grince, she slapped him hard. “Get out of here—now!” she shrieked.
The Mage, the thief and the wolf arrived together at Aurian’s hidden boat. A single, hunted glance over her shoulder told Aurian that the Wraith had risen from the lifeless bodies of the soldiers and was looking for more prey. She saw the smoky red eyes glance in her direction—and then the Wraith deliberately turned away from her and vanished into the tunnels, hunting the fleeing warriors.
Scooping up her son, Aurian hurled him aboard. At Grince’s encouragement, Frost jumped in after him, and together, the Mage and the thief pushed off, then scrambled over the side and into the boat, careful to avoid the blue-limned body of Chiamh. Aurian remembered afterward that the water felt very cold where it had flooded in over the tops of her boots, but at the time she was oblivious of such details. Snatching up the oars, she began to row as hard as she could, in an attempt to speed the craft out of the cavern.—Gevan had stopped taking part in the fighting. For some time now he had lurked in the entrance to one of the passages, looking out in horror at the scenes of carnage and slaughter that were taking place in the main Nightrunner cavern.—He wished he hadn’t come, now. If only he had stayed safe in Nexis, or at least waited on the boats until the fighting was over and the bodies had been cleared away. It would have been one thing to walk into the empty Nightrunner complex and load his pick of the booty onto his new boat before setting off back to the city and a prosperous new life. It was quite another to see folk he had known since childhood being forced to fight or flee for their lives, and being cut down before his eyes.
There was little guilt attached to Gevan’s discomfort—he simply felt that if he did not witness the massacre, he would not have to distress himself with unpleasant memories, and would soon be able to forget the part he had played in destroying the community. It wasn’t his fault, anyway—Yanis was to blame.—Gevan had been growing increasingly dissatisfied with the Nightrunners since Yanis’s father had died. He had been Leynard’s second-in-command, and as far as he was concerned, Yanis owed him—favors, respect, attention, and the extra share of the booty that he had once enjoyed. The new Nightrunner leader, however, had clung stubbornly to ideas of his own—which included being his own man, for better or worse, and not letting his father’s old companion run things just because he had the advantage of years. Gevan had been nursing his grudges for over ten years, since Leynard had died, and his resentment had taken on a life of its own, growing, like any other living entity, by the day.—Notwithstanding his other reasons of wealth and respectability, Gevan had truly betrayed the Nightrunners in order to be revenged on Yanis, and that was why, when he saw the leader escaping, he could barely contain his wrath.
“There he goes! The Nightrunner leader! Stop him—he’s escaping!”
The nearest group of soldiers had run out of opponents and were gathered near the top of the beach, picking over the Nightrunner corpses for weapons, adornment, and coins. Gevan ran up to the nearest one and grabbed his shoulder. “Yanis is escaping. You’ve got to stop him!”
Unhurriedly, the warrior got to his feet, drew his knife, and rammed it into Gevan’s stomach, angling the blade sharply upward. The astonishment hit him an instant before the pain. Even as he crumpled, with a thin scream of agony, scrabbling in vain at the fiery torment in his guts, he could not believe what had just happened.
The soldier spat, and he felt the gob of warm slime go trickling down his face. Then he could no longer feel anything. As Gevan went spiraling down into darkness, the young soldier’s voice followed him. “Lord Pendral said there’d be a reward for the one of us as spitted you, once you’d brought us in here,” he said. “I reckon it might as well be me.”
D’arvan, finding himself alone and hopelessly outnumbered, had done the only sensible thing—he had barricaded himself and as many Nightrunners as he could rescue inside his chamber, and used his magic to disguise the door to look like part of the cavern wall. Much to his relief, one of the Mortals he had sheltered was Hargorn; Maya would never have forgiven hm if he had left her old friend to die—not that there seemed much chance of that. D’arvan had pulled the bitterly protesting veteran from the thick of the fray, where he was taking on three soldiers even though blood was pouring down his arm from a long but shallow slice where he’d been caught by the tip of a sword.—It was a long time before they dared emerge. Hargorn, with his arm bound up, was still cursing and haranguing the Mage for his interference when they had heard screams of abject horror, and the sound of stampeding footsteps running back up the passage toward the exit. D’arvan shuddered. There was only one thing he could think of that might terrify experienced soldiers to that extent—and the Gods only knew what would happen now, if the Death-Wraith was on the loose and uncontrolled.