A girl stood breathless at the mouth of the alley. She seemed Magdalynn’s age and of the same fair and freckled complexion of the far-north of Nuw Gard. Her hair was red as sunset and grown passed her waist. Her clothes were silk robes the color of clover, patterned with pink and white flower petals. Yet her feet showed bare, rough and dirty—her eyes, wild and wide with fear. They were a green as deep as her breaths were shallow. Adnihilo took a single step toward her, without a thought, and she was gone.
The half-blood had to know who she was, where she’d come from, what she’d been running from when she stumbled into the alley and where it was she’d be running to. She could be my lead out of here, he thought, his legs pumping, his good arm clutching the other as he bulled through the crowds of pedestrians. “Wait!” he yelled, but she only ran faster, out of the alley and into a market. It was midday and the traffic thicker now in the inner city streets. The girl nearly vanished among the vendors and patrons before ducking under a pavilion too cramped for him to chase her. Adnihilo’s heart sank, but his legs carried him on, over a stack of crates beside the arched gate and onto the gabled rooftops. It was a madness he couldn’t stop, like a dog on the hunt. His feet slammed the tiles till the roof came to a sudden end. Below him lay an open courtyard, a garden with hundreds of loungers about pools, ponds, moss rocks, and trim grass. Like pigeons, they scattered as he flung himself among them, crashing their nest, hardly aware of their shouts as he landed, staring back toward the crowded pavilion. He waited, his knees aching, but the girl never came.
Defeated, the half-blood looked away and was rudely awakened to the scathing around him. A hundred Gautaman citizens were muttering, shouting, pointing, and scowling. Some looked scared, but others had rocks in their hands. A few wore swords. Adnihilo turned and turned again. There was no opening, just the same disgusted, flaxen faces. Slowly, they closed in, raving their queer language. Then he heard a familiar slur—felt a stone strike between his shoulder blades. Preferring panic to hesitation, he drew his sabre and slashed at the air in front and back till an elderly man dared to enter the human circle.
His eyebrows were white as his cotton robes, his beard wispy, his mustache in two pieces hanging at either side of his frown, and his eyes were hard, all around wrinkled. He made a kind of barking laugh that inflamed Adnihilo’s anger, even taunted him with flick of his fingers. A challenge, but when the half-blood lunged, he found himself tumbling backwards with a foot-shaped bruise forming on his chest. The elder laughed again, flicked his beard as if to mock him. Then the crowd joined in, and another stone was thrown, but the witch’s son was already charging, blind and desperate. He wouldn’t be beaten by an old man.
The blow struck before Adnihilo could swing—a finger solid as iron cracking one of his ribs and taking his legs from under him. He collapsed, awake but paralyzed by pain and made senseless save for the elder’s barking laughter.
After what felt like hours and hours of torture, Adnihilo came to in strange room with no clue as to how he arrived. All he knew was the ceiling above him, open rafters painted red, and a tapestry behind. Cautiously, he tilted his head to examine the banner: a tiger and leopard circling one another—one white with black stripes, the other black with white spots. And there was smoke wafting in front of the cloth, burning incense, pungent and portentous. Breathing the aroma felt like a knife. His back itched against a straw mat, his knees throbbed from the fall, and the muscles in his left arm squeezed as if they were trying to tear themselves apart. It took him a moment to grasp the significance of that last sensation, yet when he did, he gasped. “My arm!” His body gave a jerk, and the shock struck him like a bolt of lightning. The room went white, then slowly it retuned. His every nerve felt to be on fire.
He spent the next minute tilting his head toward his arm, sipping the air, excited and terrified at what he might find. When he saw, he loosed a sigh of relief. The limb looked intact as far as he could see, albeit bruised and burned in places, and riddled with dozens of long, slender needles. Adnihilo grinned. He could feel them, the stinging and ache of small, round burns, and the pressure of the needles puncturing. But can I move it? the half-blood wondered. Part of him was afraid to try, but the other parts couldn’t help themselves. He pinched—finger to thumb, thumb to finger—spread open his hand, then made a fist. Pain came with each movement, but it was a pain he could tolerate. He bit his tongue to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Only once he was certain he wasn’t asleep did he let himself believe, It’s real.
At once, his thoughts went to Adam. He had to show him this place, whatever it was. Then it struck him: the events in the garden, the fleeing girl, and the old man with white eyebrows and fingers of iron. How long had he been out, he wondered. The room was light and warm. Evening, he guessed. I have to get back. I have to
