'Go on,' Burke said. 'I'll not have my only son disobeying my orders in front of all my friends.'
For a brief instant, Myrmeen was certain that she saw a face looking in on them through the first floor window, which may have had the consistency of steel but was still translucent. Then the face was gone.
Above, Reisz clamped his hand on Ord's shoulder. 'He'll be fine.'
'Go, Ord,' ^forina said, wiping away the tears that were suddenly streaming down her face. 'We'll be with you soon.'
Ord nodded sharply, then turned and vanished. They heard his footsteps recede and forina said, 'We'll be with you always.'
Burke stared into her eyes. 'You know, don't you?'
'I do,' she said, her chest heaving with grief. Burke took her hand. He was not going to last much longer. His injuries were too severe.
Suddenly a chorus of high-pitched squeals erupted from where the dead tentacled creature rested. Myrmeen looked on in horror as hundreds of fist-sized black pearls cracked open and a swarm of yellow-and-black dragonflies rose in the air. One of the creature's many layers of skin had fallen away in death, freeing the black eggs.
'We have to get out, now!' Shandower screamed as he hauled Lucius over his shoulder and began to climb.
Myrmeen watched Varina, who stared at the swarm as if its arrival had been inevitable.
'We have to go,' Myrmeen said.
'I'm not leaving him,' she said. 'I won't leave him to them.'
Burke touched her hand. 'You know what to do.'
'You be quiet,' she said, her hands trembling.
'Please,' he said, though he would not beg. 'I love you, my wife.'
'Don't make me,' she cried.
Krystin ran for the ropes. Both were free. Reisz already had helped Shandower and Lucius over the side. Without a look back, she started climbing. The swarm buzzed angrily and had started to drift in their direction.
'Myrmeen, go. This is private,' Varina said solemnly. 'I'll be right behind you.'
Nodding, Myrmeen crossed to the ropes and took hold of the one that Krystin was not using. Then she hauled herself upward.
Below, Varina took her husband's head in her hands and said, 'I love you.'
'Forever,' Burke replied.
Behind her, Myrmeen heard the sharp crack of bones snapping. She hurried up the rope and felt hands upon her, helping her over the edge, and suddenly she was facing a blinding white curtain of midday sunlight.
'Varina, come on!' Myrmeen shouted as she heard the swarm's flapping wings and high-pitched squeals. She pictured their razor-sharp mouths and talonlike claws; they would be like piranhas.
In the near darkness below, Varina rose from the body of her husband and quickly disrobed. She took her knife and opened several cuts in her flesh, then began walking in the direction of the swarm, diverting its attention from the Harpers who waited above.
On the second floor, Myrmeen saw this and had to be dragged from the edge of the ruined floor. Her last sight of her friend had been as the swarm descended upon her, covering her instantly. Varina never screamed.
Reisz shoved Myrmeen outside, to the gallery. 'Don't make her sacrifice count for nothing. Come on!'
Something in the kitchen caught her attention. She broke from him, tipped over a large oil lantern, and struck a piece of flint. In seconds the fire she had started began to bloom. Reisz dragged her outside and together they swung over the side and slid down the ropes that had been anchored by the fountain below. The others were already waiting.
'Where-where are they?' Ord stammered, looking back to the building, which already belched clouds of black smoke.
'They loved you very much,' Myrmeen said. Then she struck him in the solar plexus, just beneath the rib cage, with the stiffened fingers of her right hand. He collapsed in a heap, and Reisz loaded him onto his mount, securing him quickly as he eyed the burning building, expecting a new host of monstrosities to erupt at any time. Shandower took the first of two mounts that had been left behind by the deaths of Myrmeen's friends, and said, 'I know a place.'
'Show us,' Myrmeen said.
The Harpers rode out, Myrmeen taking one last look at the remains of her childhood quarters before she quietly followed the others to safety.
Nine
Alden McGregor had not anticipated a journey of discovery when he first began to shadow the Lhal woman and her companions. Their detour to the Knight's Kitchen for a last meal in the city before their long journey had not seemed out of line. Even the stopover at the Tower Arms had appeared innocuous enough at the outset; after all, they were pointed in the correct direction, riding toward the city gates. Then he heard the sounds of battle. From the vantages he secretly had taken, including a position outside the steellike glass of the east wing's first floor window, Alden had received his first taste of a world completely alien to his own, a world that apparently had existed side by side with his for a frighteningly long time. When the building was left a flaming ruin, Alden was relieved. There were monsters in Calimport, entire lairs of nightmarish creatures unlike anything he had seen except in his dreams. The past week he had dreamt that eyes were watching him, hard, flat eyes that stared at him as if he were nothing more than carrion. The eyes had grown from the walls in his dreams, burst from his flesh, and hung before him in the mists and shadows that pervaded his nightmares. They always appeared in sets of three pairs, a total of six eyes each time. A voice had accompanied his most recent dreams, a finely cultured voice that reverberated with power.
'You know,' the voice said enigmatically, 'don't you?'
Alden never thought much about his dreams, but after witnessing the battle at the Tower Arms, he had begun to wonder if demons could escape the dream world.
The blond teenager had followed Lhal and her people from the burning building. They had ridden for close to an hour, snaking through forgotten paths in the city, until they came to a one-story stone edifice. The building once had been a sewing shop, where dozens of women had sweated out the day to weave cheap imitations of fine clothing. One day the authorities had learned of the shop and closed it down. The place also had been a warehouse for a time, until fire had destroyed the contents several times over. Currently it sat vacant, the locals claiming that it was accursed. Alden smiled. A little bad luck and any location would be proclaimed as such. His mentor, Pieraccinni, had taught him that, and also that men make their own luck.
The long-haired man with the strange, arcane gauntlet had led Myrmeen and her companions through a side entrance to the building. Alden had sat in the darkening alley for a time, waiting for them to come out. When they did not, he decided it was time to return to the Gentleman's Hall and give a full report.
Before nightfall he was back on the docks, indulging himself at the expense of the many guards Pieraccinni employed as he circumvented their best efforts to keep out intruders. Distracting the forty-year-old mercenary at the kitchen entrance by preying upon his sole weakness, a fondness for cats, Alden watched the tabby he had lifted from a gutter several blocks away mewl piteously as the man bent down and fed it some kitchen scraps. He had slipped past the man and was inside the building so easily that the game was losing its allure.
Alden weaved through the service hallways and tunnels until he reached the private door that only he and Pieraccinni's ladies of the moment were allowed to use. He heard voices from inside Pieraccinni's rooms and was about to turn around when he recognized one of the voices. 'You know,' it said, 'don't you?'
Alden froze. The voice was the one from his nightmares. A part of him wished to turn and run from the Gentleman's Hall, but another more curious and insistent voice within him urged the young man to carefully open the marble door a crack and peak inside.
He saw Pieraccinni kneeling before a tall man with a black widow's peak, angular features, and a trim, athletic body. The man was cloaked in black leather and gray steel. There were three sets of eyes in his head, one set above and below the natural pair, allowing him to look to the front and each side at all times. Clusters of six
