I can control them briefly.
Good. I’ll distract Sagash. Talk to Anne, get her on side.
Silence. I suddenly realised that Sagash had finished speaking—what had he just said? “I can understand why you would have reason to be upset”—blatant lie, but whatever—“but revenge seems a rather unprofitable way to resolve this.”
“Revenge is irrelevant.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Anne start slightly, look down at Crystal, then back up. “Maybe some sort of compensation—”
“No,” Sagash rasped. “She is a liability. I see now that I was in error to have taken her in. A mistake I will now correct.”
“There is one other thing you might want to consider,” I said. Crystal, we’re running out of time, get on with it! “My old master has expressed an . . . interest in Anne.”
“Your master does not rule here.”
“But you could—”
“Enough,” Sagash rasped, his voice final. “I am willing to allow you safe passage, Verus. That can be revoked.”
There appears to be a problem, Crystal said calmly into my head.
Fix it!
Anne refuses to believe me when I tell her this is your idea. Apparently she doesn’t trust me. Crystal’s voice was ironic. I can’t imagine why.
“I see,” I said, and bowed my head slightly to Sagash. “Very well.” I turned away and looked down at Anne. “Anne? Do as she says.”
Anne’s eyes widened slightly. Do it, I thought.
Four of the shadows started to move towards Anne, acting on Sagash’s unspoken orders. An instant later Darren started to walk in the same direction. Sam gave him a puzzled look.
Anne’s head came up sharply; she’d caught something in his body language. Sagash gave Darren a dismissive look. “Stay.”
Crystal’s voice spoke into my head. Three seconds.
I shifted slightly, slipping one hand into a pocket at an angle Sagash couldn’t see. Darren was still heading towards Anne and so were the shadows. Sagash started to say something to Crystal, saw that Darren hadn’t stopped, looked at him in annoyance. “You are not—”
Now, Crystal voiced.
Everything happened at once.
The first two shadows reached Anne, claws extending. As they did, Darren blasted them with two bolts of death magic, one after the other at point-blank range. The spells were constructions of kinetic energy, giant wide-finned darts designed to tear through constructs, and they did just that. The shadows disintegrated, the magical effect which animated them failing. Sagash’s eyes went wide in sudden fury and his hand came up, darkness gathering just as I threw a condenser right at him.
Sagash saw my throw and switched focus instantly. Death mages like Sagash are combat specialists, and virtually every spell they can cast is designed to either protect them or kill someone else. They’re very good at what they do, and I had absolutely no chance against Sagash in any kind of fight. Nothing I had would so much as scratch him.
But Sagash didn’t know that.
Sagash’s first spell was a shield, a translucent bubble of black energy coming up around him. The condenser hit it and shattered, mist flooding out to cover him and a forty-foot sphere of the balcony in fog. Sagash’s second spell was a defensive one too, and so was the third, protective effects wrapping around his body and immunising him from anything that the fog might be carrying. And by the time he’d figured out that the fog wasn’t actually dangerous, I’d vaulted the railing and dropped to the floor below.
The shadows which had been going for Anne were crumpled heaps, dissolving into smoke. Sam was on his knees, clutching at his head, and Crystal’s eyes were locked onto him as she hurried towards the exit. Darren was moving ahead of the two women and covering them, his movements stiff and mechanical. All the other shadows, a dozen or more, stood silent and still; Sagash hadn’t yet given them new orders.
I ran for the exit. Darren reached it first and halted with a jerk. A spell flickered at his hand, wavering between the shadows and Crystal. “Anne,” Crystal said; she didn’t take her eyes away from Sam and her voice was tight with strain. “Get rid of him.”
Anne hesitated, and I felt a surge of death magic from behind. I had just time to dive left before the spell exploded between us.
The few times I’ve been hit with high-level battle magic I’ve never felt it. You usually don’t even know whether you’ve been hurt until afterwards; the amount of destructive power is so far out of human scale that your nervous system doesn’t know how to handle it. Your perception of time distorts, leaving blank spots in your memory. With hindsight, my best guess is that it was an area attack, some sort of blast or vortex.
The next thing I remember is scrambling to my feet. I felt as though I were farther to the left than I should have been, but the doorway in front was open. Anne was up and moving and the two of us ran for the exit; I caught a glimpse of a body to one side and then we were into the corridor and out of Sagash’s line of sight.
It wasn’t until the second corner that I realised someone was behind me. I turned, still dazed, fumbling for the sword at my belt—
—and Crystal gave me an irritated look as she brushed past. Dust and dirt caked her left side and there was a bloody scrape on her cheek, but she didn’t look seriously hurt. Keep moving, she said. We were out in one of the corridors—I hadn’t had a chance to map it but Anne was leading the way.
As we reached a corner a keening, whining sound went through me, so high-pitched it was on the edge of hearing. I could feel a trace of magic in it, but couldn’t tell what it was. “What was that?”
“Shadow call,” Anne said, at the same time that Crystal said, “A command to the constructs.”
“The gate—” Anne began.
“No.” I shook my head and pointed to an arrow-slit window in the corridor. “Look.”
Anne looked as though she’d rather be running, but Crystal moved to my side. The window gave a narrow view out of the south side of the castle towards the main gates and the bridge. For a moment all I could see was the skyline over the buildings, then I saw a dot against the clouds, rising up from the edge of the castle. Then another. Then . . .
That didn’t look like dots. It looked like a cloud. “Anne?” I said, not looking at her. “How many of these shadows does Sagash have exactly?”
Anne let out a breath. “That would be . . . all of them.”
“They’ll surround the keep and form a perimeter,” Crystal said. “I hope you weren’t planning to use the front door.”
“Incoming,” I said. The shadows from the duelling hall were moving. “That way.”
We hurried down a turning and to the right. In the futures spread out ahead of me, I could see the shadows moving through the corridors of the keep, their straight-line paths becoming a blur of combat when they intersected ours. I looked at Anne. “I can get us out through the tunnels if we can make it to the ground floor.”
“The main stairwell is trapped,” Crystal said.
“There’s a back staircase that way,” Anne said.
I glanced through the futures. No shadows, it looked clear . . . wait, someone was there. Huh. I gave a sudden wolfish smile. “That’ll work.”
A side door took us into a narrow stairwell. I got halfway down, paused for two seconds, holding my hand up for Crystal and Anne to wait behind me, then walked down onto the landing and turned. At the bottom of the stairs, just turning in from the main corridor, was Ji-yeong. She was on her feet, battered and limping, one sword sheathed and the other scabbard empty. She was just about to start up the stairs when she saw me.