Jaseela ducked the half-giant’s clumsy grasp, then slipped down his back, still clinging to her dagger. The blade opened a long gash in the guard’s throat, then suddenly came free. The noblewoman dropped the rest of the way to ground, her arm soaked with dark blood.
The half-giant spun around. He held a massive hand across the gash in his throat, but could not stop the flow. Bright red bubbles appeared between his fingers. He gurgled an unintelligible threat and lifted his free hand to strike.
Realizing that even a wounded half-giant could crush the noblewoman with just one blow, Agis took a deep breath and prepared to help her. With a little bit of luck, he could use the Way to save Jaseela and no one would ever know.
The noble focused his thoughts on his energy nexus, then made a fist and turned the knuckles toward the guard’s chest. In his mind he imagined a mystical rope of energy flowing from his nexus into his arm. Agis mentally shaped the energy he had summoned into a huge fist. He drew his arm back and punched at the guard, simultaneously releasing his psionic attack.
The invisible fist struck its target square in the chest. The half-giant rocked back on his massive heels, but did not fall. Instead, he shook his ponderous brow and peered more closely at Jaseela, then slapped her with the heel of his open hand. An astonished cry escaped the noblewoman’s lips as the blow sent her crashing into the suphouse wall. She collapsed to the ground, and the half-giant reached down to pick her up.
Agis cursed himself for being tentative and subtle when he should have been bold. He had used the Way not because it was the best method of saving Jaseela, but because he was afraid to overtly involve himself in the revolt. Jaseela had shown no such hesitations. She had seen what was right and done it in an instant.
As the half-giant’s fingers closed around Jaseela’s limp body, Agis drew his dagger and climbed onto the edge of the balcony. “Up here!” be called.
The half-giant looked up, blood still seeping from between the fingers clasped about his throat. Agis dropped off the balcony. He landed on the guard’s shoulder and stabbed at his foe’s eye with all his might. The dagger sank to the hilt. The half-giant screamed and spun away, spilling Agis onto the cobblestones next to Jaseela. The huge brute plucked the dagger from his eye and stumbled away in pain and shock. A few steps later he finally dropped to the ground.
Agis turned to Jaseela. The noblewoman’s eyes were closed and her breathing shallow. He ran his hand over the back of her head and felt a huge knot forming where it had struck the wall. She was covered with blood, but he could not tell how much of it was hers and how much was from the dead guard.
Agis poked his head into the shadowy door of the Red Kank. “Caro!” he yelled. “I need you!”
Though he had no doubt the other three nobles were also inside the suphouse, he did not bother calling them. If he was disappointed in himself for letting Jaseela attack alone, he was disgusted with them for abandoning her altogether. Besides, he and Caro would have an easier time getting the noblewoman out of the Elven Market if there was more than one group of nobles for greedy pickpockets and vengeful templars to follow.
As Agis turned away from the Red Kank, he saw that the elven merchants had fallen upon the templars. He knew the elves were more interested in stealing the bureaucrats’ fat purses than resisting Kalak’s oppression, but he was glad for the diversion. The more chaotic the scene in Shadow Square, the less likely templar informers would be to take note of him and Jaseela.
Agis gently stretched the noblewoman out on the cobblestones, then kneeled at her side and checked once more for obvious wounds. As far as he could tell, all of the blood had come from the half-giant.
Caro stepped out of the suphouse. “What happened?”
“No time to explain now,” Agis said. “I’m going to need you to keep Jaseela from being jostled as we leave. Do you feel well enough for a little pushing and shoving?”
The dwarf nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
Without further comment, Agis laid his hands on the ground next to the noblewoman, then called on his psionic powers to create an invisible bed of pure force beneath her. His fingers and hands began to tingle, and Jaseela’s body rose off the ground. Agis laid a palm on her stomach to keep her stable and used his other to take her hand. He stepped toward the alley through which he had entered the square, thinking he might be strong enough to keep her levitated until they had left the Elven Market.
When Agis lifted his eyes from Jaseela’s unconscious form, he found himself facing a large man wearing a blue robe, a white scarf pulled across his face. The brown eyes peering out from beneath the white brow seemed as ancient as Caro’s, but there was a depth and power to them that Agis found both alarming and awe-inspiring. In one hand, the wizard held the noble’s bloody dagger, and in the other he carried the obsidian-pommeled cane that Agis recognized as belonging to the old man who had given him directions to Shadow Square.
The figure offered the dagger to Agis without saying a word.
“You?” the noble gasped.
The sorcerer ignored the question and placed the dagger in Agis’s hand, then turned to go. The senator caught him by the shoulder. “Wait. We’re part of this now. We want to help.”
Using his cane, the sorcerer knocked Agis’s hand away. “We don’t need your help.”
With that, he took a single step away from the nobleman. Before Agis’s eyes, the old man’s body grew translucent and faded from sight.
SIX
DEBT OF HONOR
Rikus stood atop a peninsula protruding from a cliff of orange shale. A cool breeze danced over his face, and tall, wispy rods of ruby thornstem scratched his bare shoulders. At his back lay a vast plain of rusty desert mottled by delicate clumps of white brittlebush and green globes of tumbling spikeballs. Before him hung a void filled with still, ashen haze that stretched from below the cliff to the zenith of the sky.
The mul had been peering into the gray murk for a long time-he couldn’t say whether it had been minutes or hours or days-hoping for some glimpse of what lay on the other side. So far, the curtain had not parted, and he was beginning to think he was looking at the Sea of Silt.
Rikus did not remember crossing the desert at his back, and he had no idea how he had come to be standing on this cliff. The last thing he recalled was seeing his friends rush to his rescue as the gaj burned his mind. He feared that his lapse of memory was due to damage caused by the creature’s attack.
To the mul’s right, the gray haze finally stirred, churning itself into an oval eddy as tall as a man. Rikus stepped away and raised his fists to a fighting guard, prepared to defend himself. The eddy simply continued to whirl.
“Step through,” spoke a voice at Rikus’s back. It had a smooth, melodious timber that was neither male nor female.
The mul turned. A vaguely human shape stood beside him. The figure wore a gray burnoose with the hood pulled over its head so that neither its face nor eyes were visible. It held its arms before it, its hands neatly folded into the opposite sleeves.
“Who are you?” the mul demanded. His heart was suddenly beating hard with confusion and fear, and he did not like the feeling.
“No one,” came the reply. The figure lifted an arm and pointed toward the swirling eddy. There was no hand at the end of its sleeve. “What are you waiting for?”
“Nothing,” Rikus answered, staring at the sleeve.
“Then you have found it.”
Rikus stepped toward the figure. “What’s happening here?”
“Nothing,” came the reply.
The mul scowled and peered beneath the shadows of the hood. When he saw only empty darkness, he reached up and pulled the hood away.
The figure had no head. Even the burnoose’s collar was as empty as the sleeves and the hood.