Alashar Crywinds, with the tip of her bare left toe, rolled Shadow's head so she could see his face. He was handsome enough to make her frown. Destroying things never really made her happy. Destroying beautiful things almost made her want to stop destroying things altogether. Almost.
She pulled the sack through her belt, and shook it open. Her employer told her it was waterproof; the bloody head wouldn't soak through. He promised her she could even walk the streets of Karsus enclave without attracting attention. Of course, she didn't intend to stay in Karsus that long. She wanted to get back to loulaum, deliver her package, and be done with it all before her damnable conscience started whispering in her ear again. Profitable as it may be, she hated working for archwizards. She hated how insignificant they made her feel.
She sheathed her rapier and crouched, slipping her feet back to avoid the blood on the floor, which would have seemed impossible-would have been impossible-for most people.
"Excuse me," a voice behind her said. She stopped dead, not bothering to whirl at the intruder with her whip-rapier, not bothering to run. She recognized the voice. She was good with voices.
"Shadow," she said, turning her head slowly to see him standing in the high, arched doorway.
Someone was standing behind him, in the shadows of the dimly lit corridor. There was something familiar about the outline, but it was eclipsed in her mind by the presence of the man she'd just decapitated, whole and hearty, dressed in his signature black silks. She resisted the temptation to glance back at the head on the floor to be sure it was still there. It was.
"Damn," the archwizard breathed, "those things are a pain to replace-"
She let her hand slip to the hilt of her whip-rapier, and then heard him mumble something. When her hand stopped just a fraction of a fraction of an inch from the hilt, she knew she was paralyzed. She wanted to curse, maybe say good-bye to the world, but couldn't. She couldn't do anything.
"What a rness," Shadow said, stepping carefully into the room. The figure behind him followed, and if Alashar had been able to do anything but breathe shal-lowly, she might have screamed.
It was her. She was looking at herself, long auburn hair, crystal green eyes, dark green leathers, bare feet, whip-rapier, and all.
The room he brought her to was pure Karsus enclave. This insane city was full of buildings with floors on the walls and bridges where people walked on the top and bottom at the same time. Anyone not actually from there was always dizzy. "Down" seemed to be whatever the bottoms of your feet were touching.
This room must have been hewn from the solid rock of the inverted floating mountain. Four ornately carved pillars looked like spokes holding the whole thing together, but they didn't meet in the center. Each was about forty feet high, leaving a good twenty feet between the top of one and the top of the next.
Floating in the center of the huge chamber was a yellow-green crystal fully eight feet in diameter. It gave off a gentle, somehow disturbing glow.
Alashar's double had carried her here from Shadow's bedchamber. The true Alashar was still frozen in the crouched position, still almost touching the hilt of her whip-rapier, still unable to do or say anything. She rode along in a state of stunned awe at the perfection of the double, the attention to detail in what had to be an illusion.
On some level, she was embarrassed. Shadow must know her, and know her well, though she was sure he had never seen her before.
"You," Shadow told her conversationally after having her rigid form placed gently on the floor near the room's only piece of furniture, a well-organized desk, "are going to help me today. Help me with a bit of an experiment."
He stood behind the desk, shifting absentmindedly through a stack of parchment and paper sheets while he spoke. His voice was lively, as if he was really excited about whatever he was going to do to kill her. Of course he would kill her. She had already killed him, after all, for money. Revenge was actually a more laudable motive for murder than money.
"Usually when I catch an assassin alive, I send him into the demiplane of imprisonment."
She touched her whip-rapier. She felt the warm leather-wrapped hilt against the insides of her fingers. She tried to stand or stretch, but couldn't yet.
"But it never occurred to me," he continued, "to arrange some method for their retrieval. It was always a sort of… life sentence."
She could get her jaw to open just a little wider now. She made each small move as slowly as she could, so as not to attract his attention.
"I knew you were coming, of course," he said, turning away from her now to walk gingerly over to one of the huge pillars. "I have at least as many spies in Grenway's employ as he has in mine. Still, I must admit you are quite good. That simulacrum has… had successfully fended off seventeen major assassination attempts. Bravo."
She could finally bend her elbow a good three degrees, and now that he had his back to her, she started to strain, her sluggish muscles bunching, pushing hard against nothing, but a nothing that was still effectively paralyzing her. He had to know the spell was wearing off, or would be wearing off soon. Certainly, she hadn't much time.
Otherwise engrossed in tracing the pattern of one of the pillar's cryptic carvings, Shadow continued, "Anyway, I made up a simulacrum of you. Or, well, had one made at any rate. This way I can leave you imprisoned for a few years and use the simulacrum's link with you to pull you back out. Well, if the last few components are finished by then."
He glanced back at her. She stopped, but felt a bit of a teeter. She'd almost thrown herself off-balance, but it didn't look as if he noticed. He looked away again, shrugged, and said, "Actually, it could take twenty, thirty years. Honestly, it's not a high priority in my research right now. I'm still rather captivated by the demiplane of shadow, as you may have guessed. But perfecting a simulacrum-link with the prime material… home, as it were… is rather vital to that endeavor as well. Your having destroyed my own simulacrum will mean I'll have to stick around here until I get a new one together.
"Rather inconvenient, actually."
By conjuring some kind of big black disc under their tingling feet, he lifted both of them up toward the crystal in the center of the room. She was gaining greater movement, but so slowly she still wouldn't be able to defend herself before he did whatever he was going to do.
Below, Alashar could see the copy of herself staring blankly ahead, standing in her own customary pose, weight on her right foot, arms crossed over her chest.
Shadow almost never looked at Alashar, instead watching the gemstone nearing above them. "All you have to do is touch it," he told her, not really sounding too consoling. "You won't feel a thing."
They were almost there, an inch away, when he added, "As far as I know-"
Alashar grabbed him. Her elbow was shot through with pain, and it felt as if the joint popped, but her hand took a firm hold of his slippery silk robe. She felt him flinch. She wished she could laugh when he screamed out his own name.
Wherever they were, it was dark gray.
A cold wind whipped the hair around Alashar's face, and she forced herself to stand, releasing Shadow's robe. He stepped away. They stood together on a rolling plain covered in a sort of tall grass with small, sparse leaves. Sprinkled across the gray landscape were the shapes of trees, which ruffled in the wind but made no sound. The grass and trees seemed to blend together where they touched or overlapped.
Nothing had real substance; nothing had color.