The stage rushing toward him. The whip and snap of his cloak. Stomach in mouth. Then Shadrak’s feet hammered into the sorcerer’s head, which slammed sideways as the neck cracked. He clung to the crumpling body to break his fall, then tumbled clear as it hit the stage.
The flare of magic. Sulfur. Sparks. Shadrak rolled and fired on instinct, and a sorcerer’s face exploded. Rising in a crouch, he found another target, but the five other sorcerers were frozen in place, wide-eyed with shock. Spells visibly bled away from their fingertips. None of them wanted to risk it. Their hesitation gave Shadrak time to kick one in the back of the legs and drop him to his knees. He wrapped an arm around the sorcerer’s neck and dragged him upstage, a shield against the crossbows in the loges.
“Fargin!” Shadrak yelled out into the auditorium. “Get your arse up here.”
“My vambrace…” Nils whined.
“Now!”
The sorcerer tried to wriggle free, but Shadrak sunk the choke deeper, eliciting a whimper.
As Nils ran for the stage, Ricard sprung at him from behind a seat. Shadrak fired.
“Shog!” Ricard cried as he flipped onto his back with a sickening thud. Splinters erupted from the wall beside the entrance curtain, where the bullet had struck. It took Shadrak a second to process what had happened: He’d missed, but Ricard had slipped in Doma’s blood.
Rattles sounded from the loges as crossbows took aim at Nils.
“Enough!” Shadrak yelled, jamming the barrel of the thundershot against the sorcerer’s temple. As if on cue, the man went limp and slumped to the floor. “Shog,” Shadrak muttered. He’d been a bit over-zealous with the choke.
As Nils reached the steps to the stage, the remaining sorcerers seemed to recover their wits. The words of a cant rolled from one man’s lips. The other three advanced on Shadrak, sparkling motes swirling around them, telltale signs of magical shields. He fired, but his bullet ricocheted off into the fly floor. A painted flat crashed to the stage in response, and the sorcerers’ shields vanished along with their concentration.
Nils barreled into the man uttering the cant, and rebounded as if he’d been struck by lightning. A crossbow bolt thudded into the stage at Shadrak’s feet. He dove for the cover of the wings, rolled, and looked straight down the barrel of a much bigger gun than his own.
The masked ex-Maresman.
Jeb.
“I’m jealous,” Shadrak said, setting the thundershot on the floor and standing slowly.
“As I should be of you lying with my woman.”
“Ilesa? You’re screwing—”
Jeb scoffed. “Would have been once, and she’d not have been able to help herself. But things ain’t what they were. Flesh of a putrid corpse would be putting it mildly. Hence the mask.”
“I’m sure it has its advantages,” Shadrak said. “I take it the Ghost didn’t enjoy your breath.”
Jeb chuckled. “Careful. Some people might take that as an insult. But no, he weren’t keen, but all it did was slow him down. Reckon he’s on his way here. I think he likes you.”
Footsteps behind. Shadrak raised an eyebrow for permission to look. Jeb granted it with a wave of his gun.
Shadrak turned.
“Ilesa.” She had hold of Nils by the earlobe, and he was doing a good impression of a sniveling four-year-old. The lad’s eyebrows were singed raw.
“Where’s Bekra?” Ilesa asked.
“I already told you—” Nils started.
Ilesa cuffed him on the side of the head. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
“I was only saying—”
“Well don’t.”
Ricard came up behind her. He shot a glare at Shadrak then dipped his head and spoke like an arse-kisser to Ilesa. “Said she had to go somewhere.” He rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Be out of town for a few days.”
Ilesa’s brow knitted as she turned to face him. Her hand strayed to the hilt of the sword at her hip, hesitated.
“I told her you wouldn’t be happy,” Ricard said.
The air shimmered around Ilesa. She shuddered, then streaked forward in a blur of scales. Ricard’s scream died on his lips as serpent’s fangs ripped into his throat. The snake recoiled, black hair sprouting from its scaly head, and then Ilesa was there once more, arms folded across her chest, watching dispassionately as Ricard frothed at the mouth and keeled over.
“Guess you made your mind up about him, then,” Jeb said.
“Thought he could play Bekra off against me,” Ilesa said with a glance at Shadrak.
He nodded. He’d seen this sort of thing before. On many occasions. The subtle plays for power that defined a guild. Bit by bit, scum like Ricard would build an alliance of the needy and the greedy, then at the slightest opportunity stick the knife in the boss’s back.
Ilesa walked back out onto the stage. Jeb wagged his gun at Nils, who followed her.
“Mind if I grab my thundershot?” Shadrak asked.
“Be my guest.” Jeb holstered his own gun, as if daring Shadrak to try something. His self-assurance was unnerving.
Shadrak scooped up the thundershot and checked it. “Empty,” he said with a sigh. And no way to reload it. For a fleeting moment he shut his eyes, mourning the loss of an old and trusted friend. He was about to sling it away, but something stopped him. A hope, maybe, that he’d find more bullets one day, or perhaps he just needed a memento of better times. He thrust it into the back of his belt.
Jeb followed him onto the stage. The four remaining sorcerers formed an attentive semicircle in front of Ilesa and Nils. From the loges, crossbowmen watched with narrowed eyes. The guild members who’d taken cover in the auditorium were perched on the edge of the stage, talking in whispers.
“Restrain them,” Ilesa said, nodding to a couple of them, who immediately jumped up and approached Shadrak and Nils, pulling leather straps from their pockets.
“Now wait a minute!” Nils said.
Ignoring him, one of the henchmen roughly fastened his wrists behind his back. Shadrak didn’t even bother protesting as the other man did the same to him.
“No struggle?” Ilesa said. With a smirk she added, “That’s twice in one day you’ve disappointed me. Got to face facts, Shadrak: you’re a midget in more ways than one.”
“But Jeb said…” Shadrak clamped his mouth shut as heat flooded his cheeks. She’d baited and hooked him, made him look a right scut. Well, she wasn’t getting the last laugh. He told her so with a narrow-eyed glare. She was going to suffer for this, and he told himself Kadee wouldn’t mind this once.
“Now,” Ilesa said, pressing a finger to Nils’s lips and cocking her head to make it clear she was talking to Shadrak, “convince me why I need to delay killing you both.”
“Me?” Nils howled.
Ilesa slapped him upside of the face. “Quiet, boy. Let the grown-ups talk.”
“But—”
She kneed him in the fruits and he dropped to his knees with a grunt. Tears spilled down his cheeks.
“Because you need me to find this Bekra bitch?” Shadrak said.
Ilesa shook her head. “Nope.”
Shadrak glanced at Jeb. “Because Mr. Mold here can’t get the job done anymore, and you were lying about being disappointed?”
Now it was Ilesa’s turn to look angry. She took a step toward him and Shadrak flinched. After the snake thing he’d just witnessed, there was no telling what she would do.
“I have no problem watching,” Jeb said nonchalantly.
“Sicko,” Ilesa said.
“I don’t deny it.”
The man who’d bound Shadrak’s wrists chuckled.
“What’s so funny, Barrin?” Ilesa asked.
“Jeb,” Barrin said. “What you said about him.”
“Sicko?” Ilesa said, stern as a Wayist matriarch.
Barrin licked his lips. “And what he said after. Well funny that. Nice one.”
“I wasn’t joking,” Jeb said.
“Uh,” Barrin stammered. “No, you see, what I mean is—”
“Where’s Doma?” Ilesa said, peering out into the auditorium.
Barrin swallowed thickly and glanced at the man standing behind Nils. “Nikos?”
Nikos winced and mouthed, “Thanks, mate.”
“Well, Nikos?” Ilesa said, spinning to face him.
“Dead.” Both Nikos and Barrin looked at Shadrak.
“I was aiming for Ricard,” Shadrak said.
Ilesa held his gaze for a long moment, her warring thoughts written on her face. Finally she said, “Good. Saved me the trouble.”
Barrin chuckled again but quickly stopped when Ilesa flashed him a glare.
“Anyone else in cahoots with Ricard? You, Barrin? Didn’t you used to play seven-card together?”
“Hated the scut,” Barrin said.
“No you…” Nikos started, then trailed off. “Yeah, he was a tosser. Well rid of him we are.”
“And that cow Doma,” Barrin said.
Nikos nodded, but there was no disguising the flush of his cheeks, the furtive looks he flicked between Ilesa and Jeb.
“So,” Ilesa said, gaze taking in the assassins in the loges, her henchmen dotted about the auditorium, the sorcerers on the stage, “does anyone want to tell me where this ‘somewhere’ is that Bekra has gone to?”
“She has the ring,” one of the sorcerers said.
“That is not what I asked.”
The man stepped back and lowered his eyes.
Ilesa raised a hand, fingers stretching into dagger-like talons. “I’ll ask again: Where the shog is Bekra?”
“Why don’t you try the wizard eye?” Shadrak said.
“Because, of course, I never thought of that,” Ilesa said. “It’s not all-seeing, you know.”
Light spilled in from the top of the auditorium as the entrance curtain parted.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?”—A voice like thunder.
A tall man stepped through, staff clutched in one be-ringed hand. He was robed in scarlet, salt and pepper beard braided into a trident, hair wound into spikes.
“Oh, shog,” Nils muttered.
He didn’t need to say more. Shadrak never forgot a face: Arecagen, Principal of the Academy, and the most dangerous sorcerer in New Londdyr.