Behind them, the slope appeared just as they’d left it, with Zahnya and her minions working hard at the spell. She was smiling to herself in a way Havilar didn’t like.
“Do you trust her?” she asked Vescaras.
“Not a bit,” he spat. “ ‘Ten hours,’ my broken chamber pot. We have six at the outside.” He turned to his colleagues. “So we’re out of here in three.”
“I haven’t got another bead,” Havilar reminded him.
“Which is why we’ll have to be clever,” Khochen told her. “But first, we find Dahl and your sister.”
“We need to fan out,” Daranna said. “Khochen, take the dragonborn and his friends-”
“No,” Mehen said. He bared his teeth, tapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth repeatedly before saying. “You want to capture her, I want it to be safe and easy. So you put one friendly face in each of your groups.”
Vescaras and Khochen exchanged glances. “We’ll be cautious, goodman,” Vescaras said. “There’s no need to worry.”
“There is no need to worry because I or Havi or Brin will find her and make sure you keep your word,” Mehen snapped. He turned to Havilar. “Much as I don’t want to leave your side.”
Havilar hugged him awkwardly. “I know. Be careful.”
“Everyone, be careful,” Mehen said, looking past her to Brin. “I’ll go with Daranna.” The elf didn’t look pleased at that, but she nodded at one of her scouts and the three of them moved east and along the wall, down into the camp below.
“Very well,” Vescaras said. “Lord Crownsilver, you are with me.” He gestured to one of the scouts, an elf woman with reddish hair, as well. “Come on.”
“Do you think,” Havilar murmured, as Brin hugged her tight, “that this could be the last time we do this for a long while? I’m getting sick of it.” He laughed softly.
“Let’s try. I’ll see you soon, I promise.” Havilar watched him head along the northern edge of the invisible wall’s curve, tailing Vescaras and the elf. If this were a chapbook, she thought, he would definitely be getting hit by an arrow soon. She shook the thought from her head and turned back to her assigned allies.
“Come on, Ebros,” Khochen said to the remaining scout, her laughing eyes on Havilar. “This will be fun.”
“Your ladyships,” Rhand said as he crept over the threshold. For all the deference he showed the girl with no name, there was only cruelty in his smile. Sairché’s pulse became a voice shouting in her ears. “How are you getting on?”
The girl sitting beside the window looked up at Sairché with luminous eyes and smiled slightly. Panic rose up in Sairché, and there was no trick, no clever turn, no magic ring that could save her.
My doom, Sairché thought. Lords of the Nine, damn you, Lorcan.
The girl’s gaze inched its way over Sairché. “She is less amusing than I would have expected for a devil.”
“A cambion,” Rhand corrected, “my lady.”
She sniffed and Sairché’s pulse became a voice shouting in her ears, Run, run, run. “Where’s the other one?” she said. “The tiefling you mangled.”
Rhand’s expression tightened. “Still absent. But she’ll return, I’m assured, the day after tomorrow. Isn’t that right, Lady Sairché?” Sairché couldn’t speak, couldn’t find the clever words to string together. Damn Lorcan, damn Rhand, damn Farideh and Glasya and Asmodeus too. Every muscle of her body felt flooded with fear and adrenalin. She was a deer in the wood, too startled to move, and after a full day of the Chosen of Shar’s company, she felt as if she were dying.
“It sounds as if your experiment has failed, Saer Rhand,” the girl said.
Rhand cleared his throat, nerves Sairché had never managed to inspire in him clear even at a distance. “Not failed. Delayed.”
“I was told,” the girl said loftily, as the world threatened to roll over Sairché and smother her, “to assess the usefulness of keeping your camps going.”
“Yes, my lady.”
You have lived this every day, Sairché reminded herself, gazing down at the floor. She thought of each of her surviving half sisters in turn, the terrible tortures they’d gladly heap on her, one by one. It kept her sane, it kept her in the little room and not drowning in the void that threatened her mind. But still she could not bear to speak.
“You are not a very popular man within the Church. No one powerful left to speak for you.”
“Save you,” Rhand said. “My lady.”
“I don’t speak for you,” the girl said. “In fact, I think it is plain that this experiment is not worth the resources of Shade. I am ordering you to destroy it and return to the city.”
Sairché spared a glance for Rhand. His rage was enough to push aside the plain discomfort he’d worn since he’d entered the room.
“You don’t have the right,” he said.
“Don’t I?” the girl said. “I believe you’ll find you owe me your obedience, just as Shar intends.” The feeling of looking into an unending maw intensified. Sairché squeezed her hands into fists. Megara would spit me like a lamb, she thought. Oenaphtya would just cleave me in twain. Tanagra would stake me to the ground and let Malbolge deal with me. .
Beside Sairché, Rhand gave her the uncomfortable impression of one of her worse sisters about to snap. The girl smirked at him. “Order my veserab saddled.”
“It hasn’t been recovered,” Rhand said. “And if you think I’m ending this on the whim of a-”
“Saddle yours, then,” the girl said. “And call for carriers. I intend to leave. Take care of your experiment, or you will find yourself answering to people much more powerful than you.”
Rhand started forward, all inchoate violence, but he stopped just past Sairché, his eyes locked on something over the nameless girl’s dark head.
Sairché dared to look up-feeling the girl’s eyes still on her, still shrinking her down into something small and unnecessary-and followed Rhand’s gaze to the winking bluish light that hung in the air over the center of the camp.
Magic, Sairché thought. And not his.
Rhand swallowed, but the rage in him didn’t fade. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll let you know when the carriers have arrived.”
The girl watched him leave, a smug smile playing on her mouth. Her luminous eyes fell on Sairché once more. “How droll you assumed a mere archdevil could stand against the might of the Lady of Loss,” she said. “If you find your tongue. devil, perhaps you can tell me another funny tale.”
The scroll lay in a box, buried only a few inches under the packed earth floor of the tiny hut. Dahl levered it out of the hole with the blade of the stone spade Armas had found him. The half-elf stood silent and watching in the doorway.
“Half-done,” Dahl called. Armas said nothing. “You can start looking for the components in the thatch any time,” Dahl added. The fledgling Harper stood silent. “Armas?”
Armas jerked at the sound. “What?”
“Components.”
“Sorry.” Armas stepped into the hut and sighed, reaching up for the roof.
“Your friend. . do you think she knows what she’s doing?”
Dahl opened the scroll to find a very detailed spell and smiled-gods, he loved this. “Which part? The sorting?”
“Aye.”
Dahl shrugged, his eyes on the lines of runes before him, the diagrams, the list of components. “Seems so. Tharra and Oota made it sound as if she picked people they knew had been Chosen. Though with any luck, it won’t matter to us.” He glanced up at Armas, realization dawning on him. “Oh. . You’re one of them?”
Armas kept his eyes on the thatch. “She stopped me as we left.”
“Oh.” Dahl looked back down at his scroll. “Well, many blessings.”