By the fire, Boren the bard and another dwarf leaped to their feet, weapons raised. Boren fell in an instant, blood spurting from his shoulder into the midnight air.
“Attack!” bellowed a deep voice. “To arms!”
Myrin struggled to rise, but the memory and magic had drained her. “Oof,” she said. Her head ached something fierce.
A wizened dwarf kneeled at her side-Elder Naros Ironhand. “Are you well, lady?”
Her head pulsing in pain, Myrin barely understood what was going on. She remembered Naros, the ancient clan leader of the Ironhands, who’d taken her on board his caravan after he’d recognized the name “Darkdance.” He claimed to have met a half-elf by that name out of Westgate long ago-could he be her relative?
At the moment, however, his murky recollections of her potential ancestor mattered less to her than the warhammer in his hand.
“I can fight, I-Ah!” Abruptly, the ache in Myrin’s head grew into blinding agony and she fell to one knee, grasping her forehead. The world blinked in and out of awareness as a patch of hungry nothing drilled into her mind.
Myrin shook the pain away and looked toward the fire, forty feet away. Dwarves were surging up from their bedrolls and cloaks, steel reflecting the dancing flames. They formed a rough circle, casting about for a foe. Within, the crumpled Boren lay moaning.
Myrin started forward, only to have Naros grasp her by the arm. “Stay behind me, girl.” He had drawn forth his holy symbol of Moradin the All-Father.
“I recognize and appreciate your generous offer of protection,” Myrin said, “but Boren’s hurt. I have to help.”
Hardly knowing what she was doing, Myrin drew her wand and traced a circle in the air, leaving a shadowy trail of magic. As she watched, the trail expanded into a door perfectly sized for her-like the door she’d seen in Methrammar’s memory.
“Gods above and below,” Naros said. “Wait-”
Myrin slipped from his grasp, tumbled through darkness-
— and stepped out into the firelight next to the injured bard. Sharp pain bloomed on her chest, running across her skin like a live ember. A line of runes streamed down her chest under her tunic, and a new tattoo appeared right over her heart: a door of shadow. A remembered spell.
Dizziness gripped her for a moment-the aftereffects of the teleportation and the sudden recall of the magic-but Boren’s welling blood gave her focus. A deep gash ran between the dwarf’s shoulder and neck. With a flick of her fingers and a spark of will, Myrin formed a hand of magical force and pressed it onto the wound.
“All will be well,” she said in Boren’s ear. “Have no fear. All-”
“No fear.” A voice behind Myrin set her skin acrawl. She turned around.
There, in the firelight, stood a dark figure. Myrin realized why she had not seen it at first: the creature’s charcoal black skin seemed as dark as the night. Smoke rose from its head rather than hair and the flickering fire glinted off lines of deeper black energy that traced along its skin to a pair of infinitely deep eyes. In those eyes … was
“You,” the creature said in a distinctly feminine voice. It-she-raised one finger to point at Myrin. Darkness flared around her hand. “You are the one.”
Myrin stiffened. Not another hunter-not now! Ever since she could remember, someone had been hunting for her. Worse, that meant this attack on Clan Ironhand was all her fault.
The dark woman rose, setting her cloak rustling in the smoky wind. Beneath the folds of the garment, the woman bore a long-handled axe. The black blade was pitted and jagged, pure murder in the crude form of a weapon.
“Please,” Myrin said. “Your quarrel is with me alone. Leave these others-no!”
The dwarves chose that moment to charge the dark woman from all sides, weapons leading. Seven stood against her.
Too few.
The woman stood unmoving until the first dwarf came within two paces. Then she swayed toward him, bringing her axe scything out from under her cloak. It whipped over her head and struck just below the dwarf’s raised maul. The serrated blade cut straight through the haft and slashed on, sending the weapon-along with the dwarf’s hands-flopping bloodily to the ground.
The dark woman stepped back, following the weapon’s momentum into the second brave-and foolish-dwarf. This one caught the dwarf full in the chest, but his brigandine deflected the potentially mortal blow. Still, the strike put him down, blood spurting from a deep gash in his chest. The axe whirred through the air, singing its own deadly song.
She parried one charging dwarf, who stumbled back cursing at the force of her blow. Fluidly, she lashed out with her rear foot to catch another dwarf full in the face with a crunch. His legs shot out from under him, and he flipped backward to land in the dust.
An unscathed dwarf managed a thrust with one of his two short swords, but the blade cut just wide of her flank. She slapped her arm down to catch the sword against her hip then turned sharply. The motion tore the blade from the dwarf’s hands and brought her deadly axe across to take the dwarf’s head off at the jawline. The brutal steel cleaved flesh like air.
The dwarf she’d parried-along with his two surviving companions, one of them bleeding profusely from the face, the other handless-staggered away. The woman wore a stony expression as her axe spun to a halt, the haft slapping against her free hand. She’d killed or maimed four hardened warriors in the span of two breaths, and her eyes had never left Myrin.
“Demon!” Naros charged forward, his holy symbol raised. “Begone from this place! Back to the Abyss with you!”
The woman glanced at him blankly.
Two dozen dwarves armed with swords, axes, and hammers encircled the central campfire. Elder Naros stepped forward.
“If Moradin does not frighten you, perhaps steel will.” He raised his warhammer. “You may be a fiend with that blade, but we will overwhelm you.”
The woman still had eyes only for Myrin. She raised her axe and the surviving dwarves shuddered. Idly, she set her weapon spinning like a whip over her head.
Myrin hadn’t the least idea what this creature was or who might have sent her. She didn’t know what the woman meant to do to her, but she had no choice.
“Stop,” Myrin said. “I surrender! Harm no more of my friends!”
“Ironhand!” Naros cried, ignoring Myrin’s attempt at bargaining. “Attack!”
These dwarves fared little better than the first group.
The woman moved among them like a threshing wind, her axe flailing about. The dwarves launched blow after blow against her, but none landed. She moved aside from some; others were turned aside by the haze of darkness that swelled around her. She was a zephyr of death in the smoky night air.
The dark woman strode through the horde of attackers like a wraith and raised her axe over Myrin. “Lady!” Naros shouted.
Magic flowed from Myrin without conscious thought. She thrust up her wand and the axe struck a shield of light that appeared between them.
The woman pulled the axe back, nodded in acknowledgment, then kicked Myrin in the belly. Myrin staggered back and collapsed, wheezing.
The woman strode forward but Naros stepped in her path. He struck the woman’s axe with his hammer and she fell back. “Flee!” he cried. “Flee, my lady!”
Myrin forced herself to one knee, gasping for the breath that had been knocked from her body. She had to do something-had to end the fight.
A spell came to her, then, rising unbidden from the depths of her mind. She didn’t recall ever having cast it herself, but she knew where she had
