Impossibly beautiful women reached with beckoning hands, overly muscled men clasped leaf-bladed swords, and all watched the newcomers with empty stone eyes. A few of the statues were not standing at all but lounged supine, draped across the edges of the stairs, leaving just enough room between them to approach the inner keep's doors. Mavere, impressed despite herself, could only wonder just how deep the baron's fascination with Imphallion's lineage and antiquity might run.
Yet the rest of Castle Braetlyn was not so well kept as were those magnificent sculptures. The structure flaunted its infirmity, an aging warrior who knew his best days were long behind him but dared anyone else to tell him to his face. Flaking mortar had been hastily patched, entire bricks replaced, and the brass chandeliers within the entry hall were polished well enough to shine, but not to remove the verdigris and tarnish that had long since set in. It was not the wear of true neglect so much as signs of a slapdash effort by servants who knew that they were hideously outnumbered in their battle against the castle's many years.
Servants in crimson-and-blue livery stepped aside for the knight and his two charges to pass, bobbing their heads in quick respect to the former but glaring from beneath heavy eyelids at the latter. The Lady Mavere, though she'd expected no warm welcome from the people of Braetlyn, felt her fingers curling into fists despite her best efforts.
Their guide shoved open a hefty wooden portal, and they were there. Before them stretched a sizable room, its stone floor draped in sea-green carpet scuffed paper-thin by years of tromping feet. An enormous fireplace- empty, during these warmer months-occupied most of the far wall, with a marble bust of a warrior's torso mounted above. Tapestries of seascapes and legendary heroics hung from the other walls, as did wooden plaques bearing weapons in modern steel and ancient bronze.
And standing before that fireplace, looking up from an open book in a bored stance quite clearly premeditated to show his guests who was in charge, their host himself: Jassion, Baron of Braetlyn. Not yet thirty years old, his narrow face bore the lines of a man twice his age. Save for a gleaming green ring, he was clad in unrelenting black. Hair the color of newly tilled soil was matched by equally dark eyes-eyes just a touch too wide, as if the man behind them could not tear them from some horror that others could not see.
'Your guests, m'lord,' the knight announced, waiting for only the slightest nod before he vanished from the chamber. The door shut behind him with surprising softness, as though afraid to startle anyone remaining within.
'So,' Jassion said, shutting the book with a much louder snap and tossing it carelessly into a nearby chair. 'Salia Mavere, in my very own home. I'm honored.' He apparently couldn't be bothered to even try to make it sound genuine.
'Thank you for receiving us, my lord,' she replied with a shallow curtsy. He acknowledged with a nod barely more perceptible than that he'd given his knight.
'Do you prefer Priestess, Lady Mavere? Or Guildmistress?'
'Just Salia will do, Baron.'
Jassion barked out a single incredulous ha! 'There's nothing just about any of you damn Guildmasters. Or anything you've done.'
Salia managed, with some small effort, to keep her smile plastered to her face, to show no reaction to the baron's childish outburst. Her companion, however, rolled his eyes dramatically enough for the both of them.
'I'm glad,' she bulled on, determined to remain polite, 'that you were able to see us without notice like this, my lord. I hope it's not too much of an inconvenience.'
Jassion shook his head and took a seat, very deliberately not asking his guests to do the same. 'I could hardly have been elsewhere, could I, Salia? Your soldiers have been squatting on every road out of here for three years.'
'You're not a prisoner, my lord. They're simply meant to ensure your safety, and to accompany you should you need to travel.'
Their eyes met in jousting glares, neither under any illusions about Jassion's internal exile. 'And do all Imphallion's nobles warrant such protection?' he asked.
'Only those who seem liable to attract trouble.'
Salia's driver shook his head and slumped into a nearby chair. In response to Jassion's furious glower, he merely offered a friendly wave.
'Why don't you take a seat?' Jassion offered between clenched teeth. Scarcely had Salia done so, placing the box she carried at her feet, than he continued. 'Shall we cut the shit, Salia? We both know damn well that I've had nothing to say to the Guilds since you dethroned the regent and sent me on this wonderful sojourn back home. You want something from me, and since you know that I'd sooner sit on a hot poker and then mount a horse than spit on you if you were on fire, I'm honestly at a loss as to what it might be.'
'How colorful,' the Guildmistress muttered. Then, 'First, my lord Jassion, I regret to inform you that I have bad news.'
'Oh, there's a surprise.'
'I fear Vantares has welcomed several of your fellow noblemen into the underworld, Jassion.'
That brought him up short. 'Who?' he asked in a startled whisper. 'Among quite a few others, Duke Halmon-'
'The regent's dead?'
Salia let that pass, even though both of them knew he'd not held that title for some time. 'And Duke Edmund.'
Jassion sagged back in his chair, one hand plucking at the cushioned armrest. 'I knew Edmund well,' he murmured. 'We fought together during the Serpent's War.'
'I know.' And then, her tone suggesting that she might actually have meant it, 'I'm sorry.'
'Cephira?' he demanded. 'I've heard rumors…'
'Some of which are true, I'm sure. They've taken several of our border towns, and if we're not formally at war already, I imagine we will be by the time I get back to Mecepheum. But no, they've shown little interest in our territories beyond the borderlands so far, and anyway, this was no Cephiran assassin.'
'Then who?'
Salia glanced once at her companion, who shrugged casually, seemingly more interested in picking at something under his nails than involving himself in the conversation.
'There were several survivors among the guards,' she said hesitantly, 'so most of what we know comes from them. The most helpful of them was a fellow by the name of…'
Marlo stood tall, back stiff as a spear, and tried to ignore the chafing of the hauberk across his shoulders, the sting of smoke in his eyes and chest. Many of the others were amusing themselves trying to stare down the other soldiers, but Marlo was new to the ranks of the Cartographers' Guild's men-at-arms, and sufficiently inexperienced- puffed up might have been a better term-that he took himself far too seriously for such games. The fact that he'd been chosen to stand guard over a secret summit between select Guildmasters and nobles of the realm wasn't doing his ego any disfavors, either.
Perhaps it was his disdain for the antics of his fellow soldiers, or maybe it was just blind luck, that caused him to look away-to watch aimlessly, so far as the clinging smoke and flickering shadows would permit-down the hall from which they'd all initially arrived. And thus it was Marlo who saw him first.
The young soldier was convinced that he was imagining phantoms in the dark, for how could anyone have followed them down here? Yet the figure refused to dissipate into the shadows; in fact, it was growing quite obviously solid, remarkably fast.
Marlo was reaching for his blade, drawing in a lungful of sooty air to shout warning or challenge, when the new arrival raised a hand. Marlo swore he saw a flash of bloody crimson from the vicinity of the man's chest.
Behind Marlo, half a dozen soldiers screamed, hands flying to their heads as though to hold their skulls atop their necks. Bone shattered, spraying blood and brains from within useless helms, and six men collapsed without ever knowing what had killed them. One of the bodies rocked back on its heels and slid to the floor, spasming muscles holding its hands aloft beside a head that simply wasn't there anymore.
Even as his brain gibbered and his limbs trembled, Marlo was moving, for he alone had seen the danger coming. Broadsword in hand, shouting something he could never later recall, he charged the invader. What part of his mind still functioned, and had not already been overwhelmed with horror, nearly shut down when he recognized the black-and-bone armor, realized who-what-he was facing. But even through a rising tide of terror,
