her legs one in front of the other but felt as if she had sacks hanging from her belt sash. The shadows were drawing nearer. The air grew chill, the moans more pronounced.
She could not go on. Casting the sunrod as far from her as she could, she staggered off in the other direction. She didn't make it far before she sagged against a tree and tried to catch her breath. She heard the shadows moaning behind her, around her, but dared not peek out.
A hand closed over her mouth, and panic caused her to utter a muffled scream. She went limp; her body had no strength left with which to fight.
'Quiet,' said a voice, and she recognized it as that of the dark man from the caravan. He removed his hand from her mouth.
She could not understand his presence, but fear caused her mind to work slowly.
'What are you doing here?' she whispered at last.
'Fiddling around the edges.'
He grinned, the smile of a madman, and touched his hand to her belly. A stabbing pain wracked her abdomen. She screamed, doubled over. The shadows heard and answered her scream with moans.
'Who is she speaking to?' one of Brennus's homunculi said and cocked its head.
The other homunculus leaned forward and peered into the face of the scrying cube. 'I thought I saw someone.'
Brennus cast several divinations in rapid succession to determine if Erevis Cale, perhaps invisible and warded, had come to Varra's aid. He had not. But for the shadows, she was alone.
'She speaks to herself,' Brennus answered. 'She is terrified.
And she may have just lost her child to the strain.'
Rivalen waited for moonset, then pulled the shadows around him and flew into the cool night air high above Selgaunt. The city stretched out below him, its torchlit thoroughfares like glowing snakes. The Elzimmer River looked like a black gash in the plain, a jagged, open wound. A few ships floated in the harbor.
Rivalen looked northeast, toward Ordulin, toward the Shadowstorm. He could not see it but knew it was there, summoned by Volumvax the Mad.
Shar had not chosen him, and his dreams had died in the darkness of her secrets. He looked into the moonless sky and shouted his rage into the void.
Varra, still gasping from the memory of pain, said, 'What did you do?'
The man nodded at her belly. 'Mind that child.'
Varra stared, dumbfounded. 'Child?'
'Yes, child. Worry over it later. Go now. They are coming.'
But Varra was too stunned to move. She was with child? How could she not have known? How could he, a stranger to her, have known? She stared into his handsome face.
'Who are you?'
The moment she asked the question, she felt a nervous flutter in her stomach, fear that he might answer her truthfully.
He looked down, smiling, and poked a finger through a hole in his leather jerkin. 'Interesting question.' He sighed and looked up. 'I am an actor. And we have a mutual acquain shy;tance. Let us leave it there.'
The shadows moaned, and she felt the cold of their coming.
'Come with me,' she said. 'We can hide.'
He shook his head. 'I must leave this place. But you cannot come with me.' He pointed over her shoulder. 'There is safety there. Trust me. Do you?'
From his expression, she thought much depended on her answer. She nodded, and he smiled. There was sadness in it.
'Then run. Now.'
She looked around the tree, and the shadows saw her. Their red eyes flared, and a dozen black forms streaked at her. She looked back at the man, and he wasn't there. She had no time to think about where he'd gone. She turned and pelted through the underbrush, cracking tree limbs, stum shy;bling, cursing, but never stopping. The thought of her child, Erevis's child, pushed her. She felt the shadows on her heels, moaning, reaching with cold fingers to drain the life from her flesh and that of her child. They were right behind her, closing, haunting her steps.
She burst through the trees and into a meadow of flowers. She did not slow. The shadows moaned, the sound right behind her. She heard the tinkling of distant bells and thought herself going mad.
'Where? Where?'
Tears mixed with sweat on her face. She had trusted the dark man, but he was a liar. There was no safety, only flowers and death. Her legs gave out and she fell amid the blooms. A shower of silvery pollen floated into the night air.
The shadows swarmed over her. Menace and cold chilled her. She screamed at their touch, felt it pulling the life from her flesh, turning her cold. She curled up, placed her hands over her stomach, over her child, and wished that she were somewhere safe, anywhere where she could raise her child in peace and light.
Brennus stared into his scrying lens. Shadows leaked from his flesh.
'Where did she go?' one of his homunculi asked, peering into the scrying lens.
The other sagged with disappointment. 'They were going to kill her.'
'What happened to the flowers?' said the first.
Brennus shook his head and watched the meadow for a few moments more. Every flower in the glade was black, wilted, dead, and the woman was gone.
The shadows wheeled about in frustration, then darted off.
Puzzled, Brennus cast a series of divinations through his scrying lens, thinking that perhaps the woman had turned invisible or otherwise masked her presence. But no, she was gone. He tried to refocus the eye of his lens on Varra, wherever she'd gone, but the lens showed only gray.
'How?' he said.
Both homunculi shrugged.
Brennus turned the scrying lens back on the meadow and studied it for a moment. He pulled the darkness around him, let his mind feel the correspondence with the darkness in the meadow, and transported himself there.
He materialized at the edge of the meadow. The dead flowers crunched under his boots. Were the flowers somehow involved in the woman's escape, or were they killed as a side effect of whatever magic the woman had used? A divination revealed the residuum of powerful magic, but he could not determine its nature. He attempted a magical trace to deter shy;mine where she might have fled, but the spell showed him nothing.
'Where are you, woman?'
He could not leave the question unanswered. He spent the next hour scouring the surrounding forest, the meadow, casting one divination after another. He found nothing until one of his minor spells showed the faint glow of-
'There is something buried there. Retrieve it.'
His homunculi squealed, leaped from his shoulders, and fell over each in their effort to please him. Both tore through the dead flowers, the soft dirt, until they pulled something from the ground.
'Mine!'
'Mine!'
They pulled at the small, dirt-covered item-a chain perhaps, or a necklace.
'Enough,' Brennus said, and took it from them.
The homunculi stuck their tongues out at each other.
Brennus saw that they had indeed unearthed a necklace, coated in the sediment of years, probably something dropped accidentally by some elf or traveler. He whispered the words to a minor cantrip to clean the piece, and when it lay exposed in his hand-a platinum necklace with a large jacinth charm-it chased from his mind
