The page still lay beneath the settee. Ashenath enjareen nether pendarthis.
“Stay here,” Dahl said. Farideh swayed on her feet as he dropped close to the floor and fished the page free. He twisted, trying to right himself quickly as he’d made it under, and ended up with his back to the fight.
A ruddy, scruffy man with an enormous tattoo of a skull on a black sun radiating around the hollow of his throat was on them. Blood flowed from a cut on his cheek and soaked the shoulder of his shirt, but he looked nothing but gleeful as he closed on the Harper and his treasure.
She tried to shout. The poison surged again, boiling up her arms and slowing her tongue. Tricking her eyes. The skull’s sockets seemed to glow, and the whisper of shadows seemed to surround him.
The man’s boot came up and stamped into the center of Dahl’s chest as he turned, throwing him backward onto the floor. He crushed the page in his fist and Farideh heard the cough of the air going out of him even at her distance. He lay there, stunned and breathless as a caught fish, as the man leaped down, raised his sword to make the final stroke-
It hardly felt real, Farideh would later think. Like a dream, perhaps, thin and slow. The poison tried to pull her down into the darkness and the man moved as if he had taken no notice of her, grinning wide enough at Dahl’s weakness to display the gap of a missing eyetooth. All around there were screams and flashes of magic and the clang of blades, but here, it was as if there were no one else in the world but Dahl and the assassin.
A blaze of fire caught the man in the middle of his chest and set him crashing backward into the wall. The world refocused. Dahl gasped air. Farideh looked down at her hands, and the lingering flames licking the spaces between her fingers. More, so much more, they promised. Cast, cast, cast.
Dahl eyed her as she hauled him to his feet, somehow both grateful and furious. He shoved the crumpled page under his jerkin-Ashenath enjareen nether pendarthis. “To the door.”
There were a score of bodies between them and the exit-all bladed, all eagerly watching them. They want the page, too, she thought. They want the stone. Dahl picked up the fallen man’s sword and started grimly toward them, but Farideh seized him by the arm. With a soft gasp, she stepped into the split between worlds and pulled him with her, out to the other side. No sooner did they step free of the portal, but she cast it again.
Run, run, run, the pulse of her heart shouted, even if the pull of the Hells wanted to drag her back, to make the black-clad assassins suffer. To burn off all the poison in the process.
The effort of the spells and the effects of the poison hit her at once, and she stepped free of the split into the entryway, dizzy and panting and off-balance. She crashed into the wall, nearly taking Dahl with her.
“Hrast,” he swore, and he caught the blade of a very surprised-looking woman on his own. He ran her through, and it was his turn to pull Farideh on, urging her to run out into the dark night.
She lost track of where they went-her head was spinning and every turn was surely the one that would bring her back to the terrible erinyes of her dreams. Every shadow was full of the strange assassins. Every panting breath thrumming with the page’s maddened song. Ashenath enjareen nether pendarthis. When Dahl halted at a street corner, considering both directions, she was sick again.
“Havilar,” she gasped. “We’ve left her. We have to go back. We have to go back now.”
He shushed her. “Master Zawad has her. You need to calm down. We’re nearly there.” She followed after as they moved quickly down one street, then another. The smell of the docks, wet and fishy, rose in the air. Her stomach turned. A voice in her thoughts screamed at her to go back, Dahl was wrong, Havilar was still back in the middle of all those blades. But even if she’d wanted to listen, she couldn’t have found her way through sprawling Waterdeep, and so she could only follow Dahl and fight the rising sense of panic, the farther they went.
They turned up a wide street, and for a moment, Farideh was certain she was losing her mind as an enormous stone face appeared at the end of the street. Shining white, even under the cloudy sky, the fierce visage of a helmed warrior, seemingly sunk to his neck in the pavement, scowled across the distance at them, his mouth a dark portal.
Gods, she thought, it’s getting worse.
Dahl strode straight up to the mouth and rapped on the door. It whipped open and they were rushed inside by a wizened old man leaning on a cane. One wild eye fixed Farideh with a penetrating stare.
“Two of ’em, eh?” he said. “Someone having a sale?” He chortled to himself.
Dahl made a face. “Thank you, Goodman Thort. We need a cure-”
“Oh calm yourself, boy. The priest’s already told me. Come along.” The old man beckoned Dahl and Farideh through the jumbled shop that took up the entirety of the head’s interior. Down a dark and narrow flight of stairs. Through a door, and into a crowded little room where Havilar, Brin, Tam, and a dark-haired woman were waiting. All of Farideh’s panic came unraveled and she rushed across the room to Havilar.
“Shar and stlarning hrast!” Tam shouted. “Where in the Hells have you been? You,” he said to Farideh, “lie down. They’re hunting down an antidote.” She sat on the narrow cot he indicated and pulled her feet up.
“I took the longer route,” Dahl said. “I wanted to be sure none of them followed.”
“Are you all right?” Havilar asked her, as she sat beside her. Farideh nodded-but no, no she was not all right. She wanted to scream or throw up or at the very least vent the churning, sickly magic from her. “They said you were poisoned.”
There were no devils. Sairche hadn’t found Havilar. Her arms ached and her stomach twisted but the world wasn’t trying to upend itself anymore and it was all right for her to lie down, even if there wasn’t a single inch of her not vibrating with energy. “I’m all right now,” she said instead. “You?”
“Fine,” Brin said. “We ducked the worst of it.”
“I,” Havilar announced, “beat the aithyas out of one of those pissers with a tray and a bottle of zzar. It should count for two at least. Then Mira threw me a sword and I helped get us out.” Farideh looked up at the woman with the angular face and eyes that glittered darkly. She was a little older and a little shorter than the twins, her armor was a great deal better, and her expression was a great deal sterner. She looked familiar …
“A pleasure,” she said, and Farideh couldn’t have said if it was or it wasn’t.
“Well met,” she said.
“They should have had no one to follow,” Tam was saying. “Thank the gods none of you are dead! What part of our plan did you misunderstand?”
“Your plan,” Dahl said.
“And what? You were so set against something you did not author that you decided to throw together this ill-prepared mess? By all rights your entire team shouldn’t have made it out alive.”
“I was prepared,” Dahl said hotly. “I had Master Vishter arrange a safehouse, and all of their things are stored there with enough for a few days. I was only coming to provide support.”
“And be seen by Shadovar agents,” Tam fumed. “If it was too dangerous for me, it was too dangerous to bring in inexperienced-”
“I wasn’t expecting stlarning assassins to fall out of the windows! Were you?”
“We are not having this discussion here,” Tam hissed. To Mira, he said, “Do you have any idea of where Rhand would go? Of where those artifacts would lead him?”