Gharek reined her to a halt, considering whether it was wise to continue his scouting in another direction or make camp nearby and wait until morning to resume his hunt. He’d lose time with camping but trying to find anyone in this darkness while riding a spooked horse was an exercise in futility. Besides, he could make up the time in daylight. Siora was on foot, he on horseback. He’dcover far more ground in less time than she would, and the chance she’d outrun him if he spotted her was nonexistent.
He guided the mare to retrace her steps, and this time she readily obeyed the command, eager to put distance between them and the city that squatted like a pustule on the landscape. But she’d taken no more than a pair of steps when something wrapped icy fingers around Gharek’s spine and wrenched him backward. He flew off the saddle as if lassoed from behind and landed on his back. The ground beneath him vibrated from the beat of his mare’s hooves as she bolted past him into the labyrinth of trees.
He lay there for a moment, stunned and winded. The ice shard wedged against his backbone remained, though whatever had ripped him from horseback didn’t press him into the dirt. A few more breaths and he lurched to his feet, unsettled by his unusual clumsiness, alarmed by the violence of an invisible force that had so thoroughly unhorsed him. There’d been no trip rope to clothesline him, nor had he been riding fast when he fell. The lamp he held had fallen when he did, lost somewhere in the underbrush when its flickering light had guttered. Darkness hung thick enough to scoop with a spoon.
His muttered curses sounded loud to his ears as he peered into the sepulchral black, hoping he might spot the mare standing nearby or at least find a partially cleared path that led back to open pasture. He took a step only to suffer a hard clamp on his backbone, as if the icicle there had suddenly transformed into a shackle locked around his middle. Invisible tethers seized his arms and legs and he was jerked to one side and then the other as if by a drunken puppeteer with their hands on the strings.
Gharek staggered, struggling to keep his feet, struggling tofree himself from the bonds that held him in an unbreakable grip that both dragged and yanked him in the direction of Midrigar’s walls. He careened through the dark, along a jagged path that propelled him into tree trunks before spinning him away to tear through the underbrush. He tried planting his feet in the dirt to no avail, his boots carving skid marks as he was pulled along like a cur on a leash. His palms left bloody smears on the bark of those trees he tried to grip for purchase and was wrenched away with little effort.
The iciness slithering down his spine spread in creeper tendrils throughout his body, wrapping around his lungs and heart, his liver, even his tongue so that his curses and snarls slowly ebbed away and his struggles waned. Speaking was an impossibility, breathing a challenge, and he was reduced to nothing more than a grunting, shambling mute driven inexorably toward an ancient city of the damned and a fate he could not know but feared with every part of his soul.
His sense of a thing waiting, hungering for him, grew stronger with every drunken step toward the black silhouettes of buildings. The image of a landscape where deserts were bloodred, seas obsidian, and skies the yellow of bile filled his mind’s eye even as his vision sharpened with an inhuman accuracy.
He heard the rustle of movement and caught the flit of a shadow from the corner of his eye. Perspiration beaded his skin from the labor of turning his head even as his feet carried him relentlessly forward. The shadow rushed him, small, quick. Had he the ability to speak, Gharek might have bellowed his triumph at the brief glimpse of familiar delicate features and large eyes with their far-seeing, enigmatic gaze. Siora. Her name was a gurgle in the backof his throat. She raised her arms, gripping a stick like a club in both hands. Unable to dodge or deflect, he could only stare, helpless, as she swung the makeshift club. A bright flash of pain immolated the image of the strange landscape and snapped the puppeteer’s strings. Darkness.
CHAPTER TWO
Siora stared at her nemesis lying motionless at her feet. He had once been her employer and unlikely savior, a notorious and dangerous man who’d given her shelter and food, first as thanks, then as wages. To a homeless beggar like her, he had been a dark blessing—fearsome, fascinating, coldly calculating. A roof and regular meals bought a great deal of forgiveness, and she’d not been put off by his notorious reputation as the empress’s cat’s-paw. More fool her.
Some might say she had a choice to make: club him to death while he lay helpless and steal the horse still lingering nearby or render aid. In her mind, the moment she’d whacked him with the stick, she’d chosen to help. Had she wanted him to die, she would have simply stood aside and watched as an invisible and powerful entity of malevolent purpose dragged him through one of Midrigar’s broken gates, never to trouble her again. She knew deep in her bones that what waited on the other side of the city’s walls offered neither a quick death nor a clean one.
Gharek of Cabast had pursued her across the fracturing Krael Empire, an untiring nemesis in his quest to exact revenge on her. A quest that had become the crusade of the devout. He’d held to the snarled promise he’d made months earlier that she’d find nosanctuary in the Empire, no place where he couldn’t track her. For one cold-blooded moment, she’d been tempted to stand by and watch as he was reeled in like a hooked fish, a silent, terrified scream stamped on his features. If he died, she could reclaim her life once more, such as it was. Beggar still and scourge to some, but no longer hunted. Then the image of Estred’s face had risen in her memory.
The young girl, intelligent, sweet, and loving, had inspired the violence of a rock-throwing mob simply for the crime of her appearance. Empire society was merciless to those considered lesser, broken, or strange. She needed a parent as ruthless as Gharek to keep her safe, to guard her. Siora might condemn him for his many heinous acts, but she remained undecided regarding his motivation for them. Parental devotion honed to a lethal edge cut multiple ways, and she’d often pondered whether or not she’d go to the same lengths as him to protect a beloved offspring, especially one as vulnerable as Estred. She’d once told a draga that nobility was the indulgence of those who only had themselves to consider. In that moment she’d embraced the idea as a way to justify her own betrayal of Gharek. The best of intentions sometimes had the sharpest teeth and spilled the most blood.
Gharek was heavier than his slim build led one to believe, and Siora muttered soft curses under her breath as she dragged his limp body through the brush and away from the shadows cast by the city. He’d wear a wealth of welts and scratches by the time she got him a distance she deemed far enough away from whatever foulness had bewitched him and attempted to drag him to an unseen lair.
The invisible tethers binding and pulling him across theground had snapped when she’d struck him senseless, a sound not heard by the ears but by the soul. It was followed by an enraged howl that nearly sent her fleeing pell-mell in terror in the opposite direction. She planted her feet instead, shivered like a sapling in a storm, and watched as a pulse of muddy yellow light burst from behind the city walls. Shades cast by the trees suddenly bent at strange angles. A low thrum, like the far-off beat of a war drum, vibrated the earth beneath her. The sickly luminescence pulsed to the slow pump of a poisoned heart and for a moment hulked over the battered battlements in twisted shapes carved from malice and ancient night. Even the moon seemed to draw farther away and the stars dimmed, as if repulsed by the sight.
By the time Siora paused from dragging Gharek across the forest floor, her clothes were wet with sweat and he looked as if he’d been mauled by a pair of angry wild cats. Midrigar was no longer visible, and the music of insects and frogs had replaced the funereal silence surrounding the city.
She laid him in a patch of clover. A pair of fireflies flashed bright as tiny lamps over his head, and a spider scuttled across his chest to disappear into the grass. Normal creatures in a normal part of the wood.
Siora leaned against one of the trees to catch her breath and wipe the perspiration from her face with her skirt hem before retrieving the abandoned lantern Gharek had dropped. An inquiring equine nicker sounded close by. His mare ambled toward them. Not a brave horse but a loyal one. She hadn’t gone far when she bolted. With any luck, Siora could coax her close enough to grab the reins. A horse with supplies meant fast travel, something to eat, and maybe abelshaor two.
Her empty stomach rumbled its support of the idea, and Siora clicked her tongue against her teeth to coax the mare closer. Though the wait was excruciating, she stayed in place and let the horse come to her. She didn’t dare leave Gharek unattended, at least not as he was—still unconscious but also unbound.
While the mare took her sweet time reaching her, Siora scanned the blackness that painted the forest and turned the trees into whispering obelisks. Gharek lay as the dead, though there were no ghosts roaming this woodland for now, not even Siora’s father, for which she was profoundly grateful. Coincidences were rarely so in her experience. Gharek’s struggles as he resisted the demand of his invisible captor had been much like the pitiful spirits discovered in the abandoned barn she’d entered two days earlier, the horror etched into his face just like theirs as he tried to grab on to anything for purchase and slow his unwilling journey toward Midrigar.
She had stopped at the farmstead in search of sanctuary and found the monument to a nightmare etched into a plaster wall. The overwhelming sense of something old and avaricious had made her back out of the provender room only to pause as an ethereal swarm of terrified ghosts descended on her. Siora had fled the barn, her own screams trapped in her throat. Hiding in the forest surrounding Midrigar had been a matter of choice driven by desperation. The thing that ate ghosts lingered in the damned city. She felt it in her bones the moment she stepped into the woods. But who was the greater threat? An unseen malice that hunted the dead or a vengeful cat’s-paw who hunted the living? She’d chosen the woodland.
Gharek’s own cries had been no more than feral grunts trapped in a frozen throat. The barn was a distance from Midrigar, but Siora was as certain as the sunrise that she’d witnessed the trapping of another unwary victim by the eater of ghosts. Why and how it had chosen a living man to attack was anyone’s guess, as was her own resistance to its summons. Still, the idea of its power and its reach froze the blood in her veins.
A whuffle and snort sounded close. Gharek’s mare emerged from the deeper darkness, at first a shade of indeterminate shape, then a graceful head, long neck, and slender legs as she picked her way toward her fallen master. Siora casually caught the reins in one hand and patted the mare’s neck. “Hello, love. Kind of you to return.”
The horse stood docile, lowering her head once to nudge Gharek with her nose. He gave a soft groan but didn’t move. Siora spoke softly to the mare as she wound the reins around a low-hanging branch before pillaging the packs tied to the saddle. She found a length of rope as well as a knife, flint, and a lump of tinder fungus. She used the last three to relight the lamp so she could see to bind Gharek’s hands and ankles.
She watched his face as she worked, treating the annoying flutters in her gut as simply fear at being this close to him once more. He looked different since she’d last seen him. Still handsome but more haggard, with a scruffy beard hiding the planes of his face and his hair clipped much shorter than she remembered. The beard still didn’t hide the pinched tightness of his mouth, though his closed eyelids obscured the intensity of his gaze. His changed appearance didn’t surprise her. Siora might be hunted by thecat’s-paw, but the cat’s-paw was hunted by everyone now. He’d need to disguise himself if he wanted to go among people anywhere in the Empire.
The knots would hold long enough for her to get away and far enough down the trade road before he’d have the means to track her again. She’d be long gone with his horse, his supplies, and his coin. She wasn’t a thief, at least not by trade, but she’d be a fool if she left behind those things that made it easy for him to catch her. Some would say she was a fool for bothering to save him in the first place.
It would have been wiser to have been done with the bindings and put distance between them as soon as possible, but she set caution aside for a moment to slide her fingers along his nape and scalp. The lump left by her striking him promised a nasty headache when he woke and one more reason he could add to his list for taking revenge on her. His skin was warm under her fingertips, his hair like down feathers. Siora caught her breath and yanked her hand back, mortified at those brief observations. She lunged to her feet and wiped her hands on her skirt before returning to the mare.
Gharek’s saddlebags contained enough rations to last her more than a week if she didn’t indulge and supplemented them with begging and shade-speaking if necessary. The coin he carried she’d reserve for other purposes such as bribery. Blindness and denial were expensive services but necessary ones for those like her who were on the run.
The saddle strapped to the mare’s back had a very low pommel, a cantle, and stirrups to aid the rider in keeping their seat. Siora was glad for the last. She was a small woman, and this was a tall mare. A stirrup would provide the leverage she needed toclimb atop the horse’s back, and Gharek had tied them low to accommodate the generous length of his legs. As long as the mare stayed still enough, Siora could climb onto the mare without much difficulty.
Surprisingly, the horse proved to be disagreeable to the idea. Every time Siora slipped her foot in and grabbed the saddle, her four-legged companion shuffled sideways with a protesting snort.