Metal shod boots cnked against the poured stone floor, alerting Sami to the arrival of a newcomer. She peered through the bars of her cell, watched as the shadow of an elf crossed the corridor.

  It’s time. It’s going to happen. They’re going to take me now.

  She thought about fighting. About scratching and biting whatever chunk of exposed flesh she could find, blinding her handler and sprinting off to somewhere, anywhere, where he might not reach her.

  Flight would be hopeless, of course. There was nowhere to run once free. She didn’t know how she had come to this cell, by which avenues, and the Thorns had the shadows. It would not take them long to locate her, and when they did, they would be that much more furious.

  I’d be as good as dead then. If I’m not already.

  “Remember, dear girl.” Aldeirel said as the figure closed in. “Do not struggle. Comply.”

  He fell silent as the guard came forward, and was surprised to find she was looking into a familiar face. The face of a man she had done work for recently.

  Lord Aren looked into the cell, found her there and gestured her closer. “Come now, girl. We haven’t much time.”She did not approach. Even with Aldeirel’s advice to guide her, she did not trust herself to approach those bars, did not think she would abstain—if pushed to it—from fighting. Knowing who he was did not change the nature of her thoughts. She could struggle against him, a sitting general on the Council of Liam who had served in the armed forces longer than she had been alive; or she could go quietly. If she struggled, she would die, but in her death there would be relief. That st scrap of knowledge, as life left her and her soul drifted away to face its day of judgment along Amorahiya’s heights, that she had escaped torture. That she would not have to endure ceaseless pain, the preamble to her eventual demise, as this man questioned her.

  “Come!” he commanded.

  She sat bolt upright.

  He unlocked the grate and slid it aside, and as he did, she stood and walked over to him—as obedient as a dog.

  “If you’re going to…just…do it now, please. I can’t take…can’t take—“

  “Quiet.” He said. “I will permit you to walk freely, knowing you have no knowledge of magic, but if you force my hand I will pce you in shackles.

  Do not think I will show mercy because you have served me before.”

  She followed in his wake, counted the turns, paid attention to the direction they traveled in at each intersection. Though the halls marched on straight for some distance after they arrived at any one intersection, he took a winding path with many turns, an effort to muddy her sense of pce, deny her any ease with which she might find her way out the next time she was taken from her cell.

  Glow bulbs provided light to see by, and dark stretches filled the space between them. In those stretches were housed many prisoners, who slithered back from the bars as the general passed, shielded their eyes as if they had been struck by sudden light.

  She lost count of the turns they had taken, lost track of where they were in retion to where they had started. She thought this was somewhere southeast of the point of origin, but it was impossible to know for certain. She had not known where her cell was in retion to the way the pace above was situated, and yet when they arrived at the entrance to the dungeons, the scattering of interrogation rooms near the bronze barred door, she thought—if she put her mind to it—she might be able to find her way out. Might use the faces of familiar prisoners to see herself at least this far, though to arrive here would be a dangerous pursuit for its own reasons.

  Lord Aren did not take her into an interrogation room, but instead disengaged the lock on the dungeon door, and ushered her into the hall outside.

  “Is this some kind of…mistake?” she asked.

  “What did I say?” he asked. “Be quiet.”

  He marched down the adjoining hall, which was better lit but in a state of greater disrepair. The telltale signs of ware were present in hairline cracks along the walls, narrow puddles and trickles of water from leaky pipes overhead. Down the adjoining hall and then another; they arrived at an unassuming door. Next to it, about halfway up on the wall next to it, was a single tile with a bck triangle gzed and fired into it.

  She had some familiarity with the codes the military used for their various levels of clearance, but she had never seen a symbol this color. Even the chamber where the Council of Liam met only had a blue triangle. She had thought it to be the highest level of clearance. She was mistaken.

  “Before we enter,” he said. “I know you have committed no crime. This is not personal, you understand. You were just in the right pce at the right time. It was easy to craft a narrative surrounding you which might see me to my ends.”

  “I’m being framed?”

  “Yes.” He said. “For the good of all of us who still have a sense of justice. My Thorns found the grimoire I pnted under your bed, a grimoire of death magic, and they have since returned it to me. If it ever came out that I was the one who pnted it, I suppose I would be executed. At least, that will be the end for me if I fail here.

  “Which leads us to you. Inevitably, you will be missed by someone, and that someone will come looking for you. You will be in control of yourself much of the time, but you mustn’t be seen in those times. You must never be found, you understand.

  “What I am giving you in return is a chance to become whole. A chance to remember what your betters compelled you to forget.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I’m afraid not. Now, let’s get this over with.”

  He pushed open the door, then nudged her through it, and closed it behind him.

  Several queer looks were cast onto him by the various women in these chambers. She was surprised by how many noncombatants were involved. More surprised by the small flocks of children they doted over. Some of those children were still of toddling age, while others were much older, and still the eldest couldn’t have been more than twelve.

  A point of irony, as her own memories became hazy around that age.

  Lord Aren led her forward, ignoring the expressions on those womens’ faces, the ones so intent to accuse him of some wrongdoing. To lump her in with him for her mere presence here.

  One hustled out of what appeared to be a cssroom. The tables and chairs were all pitiful things, tiny and unkempt, and toys and blocks covered the low shelving along the walls. The children sat at their tables with oil pastels and paper board in front of them. Some scribbled intensely on their boards, and the scenes they depicted were invariably dark. Homes rendered in dark shades with jagged shapes guttering in bright oranges and reds; animal forms, horses and cattle, with haunting, white eyes and blood leaking from their necks and fnks; and stick men with ropy piles of sickly yellow and green tumbling from their stomachs.

  The children expanded on those images, fixed them in pce. Her stomach tied itself into a hard knot at the sight of them.

  “What the fuck?” she whispered.

  “Indeed.”

  The woman approached, blocked them from going any further.

  “Hi, sir. Are you here on official orders?”

  “Is anything about this pce official?” he replied.

  “I…I see your point. What I mean is did Lady Therien send you?”

  “Lady Therien has no bearing on my being here.”

  “Then I think I need to ask you to—“

  He cmped his hand onto her shoulder. Bck shadow passed under his palm, and Sami just caught the edge of it as it traveled across her cvicle and faded into the base of her neck. She colpsed, eyes wide and dull, mouth still open around the unspoken word.

  Leave.

  She wanted to.

  More shadows spiraled out from under Lord Aren’s feet, thin lines that zigzagged cross cssrooms, stopped just short of the other women there, pinned them against the walls where to flee would be almost impossible.

  He marched forward, dragging Sami along with him, until the arrived at a broader chamber at the end of the short hall.

  He looked to one side of it, and she followed his gaze to a mass of solid quartz which rose to level with her hip. Every facet and bar glowed with a blue-tinted light. His gaze cwed across the floor to settle at their feet, and she saw they cast no shadows. A dozen men and women were shackled and bolted to the far wall, and they did not cast shadows either. They were all of different races, some human and some not, and all of them shared the same violently blue eyes, eyes like lightning.

  “You have taken a great risk in coming here.” The central figure among them, a bald, jua man said. “You may have staked your life against it.”“We have a common enemy, Watcher. The one who did this.” He gestured to Sami. “I would see her pulled down, if you could be convinced to help me.”

  The jua man chuckled. “And how do you expect me to do that?”

  “By riding her.”

  Several gazes shifted to her, each beset by curiosity.

  “What will come of our bodies?”

  “I will deal with them.”

  “And them?” the jua man cocked his chin in the direction of the cssrooms. “Your witnesses are many.”

  “I believe you are capable of handling them. It need only appear I was never here. Long enough that they presume you all to be dead.”

  “But we will not be?”

  “You will appear to be for a time. And your bodies will be moved into a safe pce when they have seen fit to dispose of them.”

  “And the woman? The Shield?”

  Stony anger dispced the pcid expression on his face, and the Watcher smiled at that.

  “You didn’t know.” He said.

  “No, I’m afraid I didn’t. We have a pn for you, if you’ll hear it?”

  The Watcher shifted his position, pnted his fist against his knee. He sat cross legged, leaning forward to get a better look at the general, ignoring Sami completely.

  “Who is we?”

  “My agents operate from within and outside the pace. Some under another man’s control often conspire with us. I need you to kill a certain few—“

  “I know of whom you speak. I have seen it.”

  That fast. Sami thought. They were able to read a sitting general that fast. What will they do to me?

  Comply. The word listed through her mind in Aldeirel’s thin voice. Do not struggle. Comply.

  “Will you handle them, then?”

  “What’s in it for us?”

  A cold grin spread across Lord Aren’s cheeks, a grin that did not touch his eyes. “Freedom.”

  “And for you, I suppose it will be…regime change.”

  “Nothing so straight forward, no. Rather, in exposing her secrets, I intend to put a leash on her. She will not be able to move as freely in the wake of the work you do, and we will all be better for it.”

  The Watchers’ gazes, one after another, shifted to Sami. Her head snapped back as if struck by twelve arrows. She colpsed first to her knees, and then to the floor.

  Lord Aren bent over the servant’s prone form. Along the wall, the Watchers slumped over, each and every one falling face first onto the ground.

  He checked the girl’s pulse, satisfied himself that it was still there, that she had not been driven into shock by the invasion of her body by twelve foreign souls, the minds that accompanied them.

  He stood, and marched over to the wall, where he examined each of those lifeless bodies, concocted a narrative for them.

  Behind him, the girl climbed shakily to her feet. As he turned toward her he found a woman whose eyes shone lightning blue like any of those Watchers, an unnatural, unsettling shade.

  She leered at him. “You might regret this, you know.”

  “I have many regrets in this life.” He responded. “What is one more?”

  She nodded, and ambled down the hall as casually as if she was taking a stroll through the garden. On her way down, she looked to each of the women in those rooms, and one by one they were struck down by the Watcher’s gift, their memories of these happenings erased.

  Lord Aren called on the spirits, the Celestial Choir, listened for answering echoes from those he needed.

  “Tanc seyan absires, Oe, ab a eyo, Simiel, miyo speltet elrarat, gair0 seyan grundanas. Zente, orang mi, Ravana, mor grundael dem eya draem nguyae tehirian sei. Mas sei ojian gan miyo secairet sei ojiv.” He whispered in a rush.

  Song bsted through him, and power leaked out through his fingertips as he pced his hands on each of the bodies, repeating the instruction to the spirits each time. When he was finished, he walked away, leaving each of those bodies a corpse for whoever found them.

  He would find some way to have their bodies apprehended, some pretense for setting his Thorns on their path, perhaps. Or there were those rebels in the city.

  It may be time to let Aldeirel out of his cage.