deadly venom sprayed from the mouth of the huge, snakelike thing and fell to the floor, sizzling away into a fetid green vapor. The archwizard Shadow spun on his heel and brought his hands up, his fingers moving through a fast and complex series of patterns. The words he shouted at the beast meant nothing, but held great power.
The blast of fire singed Shadow's eyebrows, and the naga screamed in agony. The ball of orange flame was gone as fast as Shadow had conjured it, and smoke poured off the creature that was its target. The naga's rough, spiky hide was already black, and now it smelted scorched.
Shadow took three long strides backward, starting to smile, nearly bumping into the corner of his big four- poster bed. He stopped in front of the seldom-used dressing table when the damned thing laughed.
'Painful…' it hissed, its voice like gravel being scraped across steel.
Shadow's blood went cold. He hadn't been prepared for another assassination attempt today. It was a bad time.
The naga slithered forward, scraping huge furrows in the expensive wood floor, now scorched from the intense heat of the fireball. The poison still dripped from the corners of its mouth. Four huge gray-yellow fangs filled the gaping maw, and were too big to let it close its mouth all the way. When the poison hit the floor, there was more sizzling, more awful smell, more damage to the woodwork.
The archwizard's fireball had set the curtains behind the naga ablaze. A little dusty wooden sculpture of a dancing woman had fallen off the windowsill and was also on fire.
Shadow reached down to his long black boot and fumbled for the knife there. He had been given the knife for just this sort of eventuality.
The naga drew its hideous face back and seemed to grin as its throat filled with more of the poison.
Shadow actually gasped the word, 'No!' and the knife was in his hand. The blue-silver blade seemed to scream through the air, but Shadow knew he hadn't actually thrown it that hard. It crossed the span of his bedchamber faster than a crossbow bolt and sank into the naga's tough black hide with a wet cracking sound. When the naga screamed, the poison welled out of its mouth in a nauseating gurgle and drenched the thing's still-smoking body with the deadly liquid. It screamed again, louder this time. The knife was buried to its golden hilt, about halfway down the thing's twelve-foot body.
'Turn!' Shadow shouted, and something made the naga look down.
The knife twisted in the tight wound, and a quiver of pain and surprise ruffled through the naga's body. It grunted this time instead of screaming and called Shadow something that must have been a terrible insult in whatever dark pit the naga and its kin called home. The thing's blood was a pasty red, so dark it was almost as black as its charred skin.
'Turn!' Shadow shouted again, standing to face the naga and taking another step back away from it. He bumped the little nightstand, and it fell over. A glass shattered on the floor, and a bit of water started to mix with the droplets of blood that were beading on the floorboards.
The knife started to turn again and the blood seemed to pop out. The naga didn't scream this time either. It twisted its head down and latched onto the enchanted blade with its jagged fangs. The snake body quivered again with the pain of pulling it out. When the enchanted blade fell free of the wound, it was followed by a fast torrent of blood.
The sound it made must have been a laugh.
Shadow considered his possible escape routes. The secret door he had installed in his bedchamber three years ago, when everyone was having them installed in their bedchambers, was on the other side of the naga. He could turn invisible, but the thing could still spray the room with poison, and Shadow would be just as dead as if he'd lit himself with faerie fire. He couldn't teleport, and if he jumped out the window it would be a mile straight down off the side of Karsus enclave to the fields below.
He realized he was going to die right then.
Damn, he thought, Shadow wouldn't-
He stopped even thinking when the naga's head popped off its body and bounced twice on the floor before coming to rest. The body flapped and flailed, spraying black-red blood all over the sparsely furnished room. So much of it shot out when the headless body hit the floor that it put out the fire on the curtains.
'Shadow?' asked a woman who had come from nowhere to stand behind the twitching naga corpse. Her voice was the true opposite of the naga's, rich and lyrical.
She was standing almost against the far wall. The secret door hung open behind her, apparently not a secret anymore. In her hand was a rapier with a blade so long and thin it drooped when she held it still and whistled through the air like a whip at her slightest twitch.
'Are you Shadow?' she asked him again.
Coughing from the searing blast of fire, the spraying blood, and the stench of the boiling venom, he nodded.
The woman started toward him, her strides simultaneously guarded and confident.
'I suppose,' he started to say, 'I should thank you for-'
The sound of the whip-rapier shrieking through the air stopped him, and he was actually alive just long enough to feel his head hit the floor after mouthing the word 'Damn' on the way down.
Moments before and hundreds of miles away, the archwizard Grenway stood before a giant glass tank filled with a thick green semi-liquid that was moving with a life of its own.
'Very nicely,' the old man muttered to himself, turning in the cluttered laboratory and shuffling slowly to the great palantir that had been a gift from his third wife, just before he'd had her killed. 'Coming along nicely.'
He had only to think the name of the would-be assassin he'd sent after Shadow, and he could see everything she saw. The information he'd given her, about the tunnel that led under the wall, below Karsus's private gardens, then into the complex of rooms and laboratories inhabited by his foe, was so far proving to be quite correct.
She was running with almost supernatural speed down the dim, low-ceilinged passageway, and Grenway had to admire her physicality. This was something he had been able to admire only from afar, or for a price, since his own body tended to be little more than a frail, withering container for his vast intellect and even greater greed. Yes, he thought, quite a specimen this one. A shame, really.
He looked back over to the huge glass tank, as big as a commoner's house. Something heavy thudded against the inside of the tank. Grenway could see something solid and rough drag itself along the inside of the glass before disappearing back into the thick green medium.
'Soon,' he muttered to the tank's inhabitant. Grenway smiled and laughed for little more than a second before falling into a fit of ragged, sputtering coughs. Spittle hanging from his gray, stubbly chin, he smiled yet wider.
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
