Mercer was nowhere to be seen, but he gaped anyway: Ramita Ankesharan was directly below him, standing beside another hole in the floor of that room. She began shrieking with loss.
Malevorn turned to Darice and pointed a finger down, yelling, ‘
Get her!
’
*
Huriya strode along the corridor, only a dozen yards behind Ramita and the fleeing vizier. Inside her, Sabele was ranting, but she kept the old Seeress clamped down. Her blood was up and she wanted the vizier in her grasp – she wanted to rip him to pieces for daring to strike at her.
But here at the death, she found her feelings for Ramita more ambivalent. They had grown up as sisters, shared almost every moment of each other’s lives from their childhood on. She knew her bloodsister’s shape, her smell and her moods, as well as she knew her own. Ramita still mattered to her, and Sabele had divined that their futures were entwined in complex ways.
I will make you one of us, sister. You shall be my handmaiden and we’ll be together for ever, as we always wished.
She raised a hand, but Ramita darted inside a door and Hanook interposed himself, blazing fire at her – illusory fire; she smiled and swatted it away, not reacting to the pseudo-pain that seared though her. But he’d slowed her, and he used that stolen moment to slam and seal the door.
Behind her more of the pack poured into the house, now led by Elando in his fanciful bat-guise; an idiot, poorly trained and reckless – and that, she was beginning to realise, was the same for most of the pack. She’d not known how poorly equipped the Dokken were to deal with properly trained magi. They’d been raised in the wild in small numbers; they were self-taught and most were illiterate. They couldn’t use periapts to focus their power, and many of them had only a very basic knowledge of the gnosis.
‘The city watch are coming, Seeress!’ Elando gabbled at her. ‘There is a patrol in the plaza outside!’ He had absorbed the soul of Medelos on the rooftop, but she doubted Elendo had the wit to use the pure-blood gnosis well.
‘Then we must finish this,’ she told him. Behind the door, she heard Ramita cry out in despair. ‘Break this down,’ she commanded.
And take the first blows for me.
Elando and his shifters leapt to do her bidding.
She wondered vaguely where Malevorn was.
*
When a bulky wolf-woman dropped through the hole in the roof, Ramita froze in shock – but the Dokken had misjudged, and went straight on through the hole at Ramita’s feet, vanishing into the room below. For a second Ramita just gaped, then someone roared outside the room behind her and everything happened at once.
Hanook had just entered, his face a mask of cold purpose stretched thinly over grief. But he acted with alacrity, strengthening the wards on the door while Ramita concentrated on the hole in the ceiling. When the next dark shape leapt through she was ready. She slapped her hands together, employing Earth and sylvan-gnosis on the timbers behind the plaster.
Even as the attacker began to drop through, her spell caused the whole roof to ripple like water and flow inwards, slamming the hole shut. She was too late to prevent the first shapeshifter coming through, but the closing stonework caught the second as he was halfway through and crushed his midriff. His legs thrashed then went limp, as the first attacker landed, a lion-headed man, who roared—
—then died in a wave of mage-fire from her hands, and Hanook’s. The charred corpse crumpled and fell smouldering to the tiles, even as something hammered on the door like a battering ram.
Then from below, clearly audible through the still-open hole in the floor, the wolf-woman bellowed in fury, what sounded like a ton of crockery smashed, and a young male voice shouted in pain.
Alaron!
Then the sound of two infants bursting into tears reached her as well, freezing her heart.
*
Alaron had opened his mouth to call up to Ramita when something dropped past her, straight through the hole in the ceiling, and landed before him like a falling statue. As the ayah recoiled, the twins still wrapped in her arms, he confronted the newcomer: a massively muscled naked woman who was shaking her wolf-head. She was dazed and bloodied from the fall, but as he watched, she physically pulled herself together – then she growled, and leapt at him.
He couldn’t dodge, not with the ayah and the twins behind him, so he stood his ground, though the shifter was far bulkier than him and howling in bloodlust. She was cloaked in shimmering shields, vivid in his gnosis-sight, and there was a non-too-subtle blast of mesmeric-gnosis in her howl that would have paralysed any normal human.
But he had been pummelled constantly by Malevorn Andevarion and his obnoxious pure-blood friends at college, and the past year had been one terrifying encounter after another. If there was one thing he was good at by now, it was ignoring terror. Instinctively he blocked her mesmeric-gnosis and fed his kon-staff with energy, planted his feet as Yash had shown him and launched into a driving lunge. The staff struck her shields with a blast of concentrated force as she slammed into him – and kept going. He felt like a bush in the path of a boulder.
Kore! She’s got to be a pure-blood!
The impact drove him staggering backwards into a wall of shelves that collapsed behind him in an avalanche of smashing crockery. The shifter battered him onto his back with head-slamming force, and only his automatic back-shielding kept his skull from fracturing on the stone floor. But his staff bent almost in half, then pinged back, barely still in his grasp. The woman loomed above him, and with a terrifying backhanded blow, tore out the ayah’s throat. The nursemaid went down silently, even in death shielding the twins with her body.
The two infants wailed in terror, and the sound galvanised him. He rose and thrust with his staff, slamming the wolf-woman backwards. Perhaps it was just the unexpectedness of the blow, but it was enough to hurl her into a heap of broken crockery with a crash.
She climbed to her feet, salivating, as he gripped the staff and kindled gnosis.
She’s a shifter, she’ll be all Earth and hermetic
… He sought the point where Air and theurgy met again –
illusion
– conjured an illusory knife, and threw it at her heaving breasts. She shrieked as the ‘blade’ seemed to imbed in her chest, reeling backwards. Such an attack could induce heart failure, and as she reeled, clutching at her chest, he thought for a second it might work. But all it purchased was a moment in which he put himself between her and the twins again. The giantess swiped away the blade, the illusion winked out and her amber eyes locked on his. Something like words rasped from her bestial maw as she bunched her muscles to leap at him again.
Then with a smash that filled the air with billowing dust and shook the floor like an earthquake, half the ceiling dropped on her head.
*
The door and walls were giving way and Hanook looked shattered. The ceiling above was beginning to crumble from the shapechanger’s assault and Ramita could feel Huriya’s mind inside her own:
Sister
, she was calling,
do not fear. I have come to help you
.
What makes her think I’m that stupid?
The twins’ voices below were tearing at her and when she looked down, she could see the huge beast-women beginning to clamber towards a defiant Alaron. She did the only thing she could think of: she used Earth-gnosis to collapse the floor onto the head of the wolf-woman and used kinesis to ride it down as it dropped.
She felt rather than heard the woman’s cry as she was crushed beneath the tiles.
Hanook fell with her, keeping his balance with surprising grace. Even as the floor shattered on impact, she was spinning to face Alaron, who was surrounded by fragments of stone and wood and plaster, all hanging in the air about him as his shields protected him and those behind him.
Ramita heard herself wail with desperate elation as she launched herself at the twins, lying in the dust behind Alaron and screeching for her.
She was sobbing deliriously, the boys in her arms, when Alaron regained her attention. ‘Hey!’ he shouted, ‘Ramita, we’ve got to move.’ He pulled Nasatya from her reluctant grasp. ‘Come on!’
‘Shukriya, Al’Rhon bhaiya,’ she babbled, overcome with relief. ‘Thank you so much!’
He saved my babies
…
It took a few seconds for her to push her emotions aside and realise again what was happening. The rumbles and crashes from every direction told her the building was being torn apart from all sides as Huriya and her Dokken tried to reach them. Some still hammered on the door to the room above, where they’d been until she collapsed the floor. Then she noticed the poor ayah was lying by the crushed wolf-woman, her head almost torn off. She clutched Dasra to her. ‘Dear gods …’ she whispered, utterly appalled.
‘We must escape,’ Hanook said, composed again. ‘Follow me!’ He led them through the scullery and out into the kitchens, then down the corridor beyond. When she turned to the stairs leading up, the vizier gripped her arm. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we must go the other way.’ He looked Ramita in the eye. ‘To the palace.’
From above, the sound of a door splintering jolted through them.
‘Of course,’ she replied, wondering if even the mughal’s soldiers could protect them. They hurried after the vizier, Alaron taking the rear. He had Nas clasped to his chest, a satchel over his shoulder and his staff in one hand. His sword appeared to have been lost.
They took us utterly unprepared
, she thought, shuddering.
It is a miracle we are still alive.
They hurried after Hanook through the silent halls of the servants’ quarters. Though they saw no one, they could hear voices: the screaming echoed down through the whole level. ‘My people,’ Hanook gasped, ‘they’re being slaughtered—’ For a moment he was overcome, but then he shook his head and set his jaw. ‘We must see you safe, Lady.
Come!
’
Hanook led them to the same hidden door he’d taken Ramita through before, to meet the mughal. He opened it with a gesture, and after they’d entered, sealed it behind them. He turned to Ramita and Alaron, his face almost preternaturally calm. ‘Lady, you know the way.’ He pulled a key from around his neck – the one that opened the door at the other end of the tunnel – and gave it to her.
‘No,’ she protested, ‘you
must
come too.’
The vizier shook his head. ‘They will find this door and they will break it down in seconds if there is no one to maintain the wards. The tunnel is only half a mile long, and they can move much faster than us. Someone has to remain to slow them down.’
Ramita and Alaron stared at him. Then Alaron, his face utterly white, took a step forward. ‘Then I will do it, sir. You are too valuable.’
She felt her heart thud with terror at the thought of losing him.
Hanook shook his head. ‘No, young man, I am old, and you have all your life.’ He turned back to the door with a grim look on his face. ‘And you have reasons to live. They killed mine.’
Ramita seized his hand and kissed it. ‘I wish we could have had more time.’
‘I too, widow of my grandfather. I too.’ He smoothed her hair affectionately. ‘Now go.’
*
Huriya stalked the vizier’s palace in absolute rage while her remaining kindred, while seeking the fugitives, wrecked everything they could lay their hands on. The servants were all dead now, their souls gone to replenishing the pack’s gnosis, but she was furious with the surviving pack-members, and she made sure they knew it.
How could they have escaped?
Those outside had seen nothing – no shutter or outside door had been breached. She was shaking with anger, so livid she could barely think.
We’ve lost more than a dozen in here, and they’ve still escaped!
‘Huriya,’ Malevorn Andevarion called to her.
She whirled to face him and spat venomously at him. ‘What is it, you slugskin
bakrichod
?’
He didn’t flinch. ‘You’re wasting time and effort: they’ve gone to earth – literally! It’s the only place they could have gone: downwards. Bring all the pack downstairs and look there. There must be an escape tunnel.’
Her rage boiled, but she had to admit he was making sense. And there were soldiers outside now, with archers and spearmen. Those of the pack who’d been stationed out in the plaza had been driven inside and a full-on assault was inevitable.
‘Very well. Do it!’ She turned, seeking Wornu and Hessaz, and found them timidly hovering in her wake. Their usual bravado had been completely undone by the terror of facing actual, real magi.
‘Get everyone down here,’ she ordered them. ‘Look for a tunnel!’
Malevorn dared to speak to her again. ‘Free my gnosis,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m one of you now.’
She whirled on him and stabbed a finger. ‘I still don’t know if we even need you, Inquisitor! Perhaps your soul might better serve us as food after all?’
‘Oh, fuck off, Seeress,’ he sneered. ‘Impressed with your kin? Half of them can’t even shield while casting another spell. Even the most incompetent novice ever –
Alaron bloody Mercer
– has been carving them up like
humans
!’
It felt too much like truth. ‘We’re doing our best! Bu—’
‘Your best? Well,
bravo
, you! Don’t you see? You people aren’t anywhere near as powerful as you think you are. You’re only up against some street-girl and Alaron
fucking
Mercer and you still lost!’ He jabbed his finger into her chest. ‘You
need
me, Huriya. I’ll swear any oath you like, just for Kore’s sake, free my gnosis!’
‘For
Kore’s
sake?’ That word killed any momentary temptation she had felt. ‘How can I trust any oath you might swear to your false gods, Inquisitor? Come with me!’
Malevorn threw up his hands in utter disgust and fury and stormed away. But he didn’t go far, instead hovering like a moth about her fire. She summoned the pack with her mind and set them, yammering in frustration and fear, to scouring the lower floors.