“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Fine.” She sat up and grimaced. “You?”
I levered up on one elbow and inspected my legs. Nothing broken, though my ankle throbbed terribly and one wrist ached where I’d caught the stone at a bad angle. “I’m all right.” I rubbed my wrist and looked around. The Abbey garden was quiet, but the red light beyond the walls was growing brighter and the sounds of distant shouts rose and fell with the wind.
“Where do we go?” Julienna asked.
I struggled to my feet. Wydrick’s words still lingered in my ears, poisonous with hope. Edonarle burned around us, the dragons were nowhere in sight, and traitors might lurk at every turn, but one slim advantage remained. Wydrick’s master wanted our heartstones. Badly enough to trade for them?
“We need weapons,” I said, “and armor. Both are back at the townhouse.”
“Won’t that be the next place they look?”
“Aye, so we’ll have to be quick.”
She nodded to the Abbey. “Fastest way is through there. We can cut through the Court of Four.”
“Do you think you can call the dragons?”
She looked up as I helped her to her feet. No familiar shadows circled in the sky above, or anywhere nearby. “I can try.”
“Try on the way. We need to keep moving and I don’t want to give away our position.”
The garden beyond the paving stones was well tended but thickly grown, with trees and shrubs fighting trellised vines in masses along the narrow pathways. My heart skipped more than one beat as we rounded a corner and alarming shadows loomed ahead of us, only to reveal themselves as statuary or the waving, leafless branches of a beech when the moonlight filtered through the clouds.
The door to the Abbey opened inward on silent hinges and we slipped inside. The back corridors were dark and quiet, but there was light ahead and we groped toward it like blind women. The darkness lessened, rolling back to the dim shadows of the nave pricked in the distance by the light of lanterns. Gray-and-white-robed cantors huddled around the base of the Fourfold statue.
“Who goes there?” Master Pennaret’s booming voice rang out. He left the circle of cantors with a lantern in hand, lifting it high so the light fell on our faces. “Identify yourselves!”
“We’re friends. Friends!” I said, shielding my eyes. “Julienna and Aliza Daired!”
“Dear gods,” he muttered, and lowered the lantern. “Ladies, what’s going on? What happened at the palace? Not half an hour ago a hundred courtiers came running from the Half-Moon Court as if their lives depended on it, saying something about assassins . . .” He trailed off as if hoping I would correct him. “Is that true? Is the High Cantor all right?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see if he got out.” Quickly I told them everything that had happened. There was a chorus of indrawn breath from the cantors as I described the true form of the thing that had been styling itself the Silent King.
“For six hundred years?” one of them said. “This creature has been plotting against Arle all this time? But why?”
“Because of Saint Ellia,” Julienna said. “She freed it from its prison. Somehow it thinks it’s repaying the favor.”
“And it has people in the city,” I added. “Vesh, lithosmiths, maybe some of the Rangers.”
“Are all of them ghast-ridden?” another man asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Merciful Mikla shield us,” Master Pennaret said, signing himself with the fourfold gesture. He turned to one of his acolytes. “Ring the bells. Those who don’t know what’s happening need to be warned.” The acolyte took off running for the stairs to the bell tower. “People will be scared, confused. Some may be hurt. We’ll offer them shelter here.”
Another murmur from the cantors. “All of them? Sir, what if the ghast-ridden decide to slip in?” the first man asked.
“All of them,” Pennaret said firmly. “Open the doors. Bring lanterns, blankets, and water, and send someone to the House of Beeches. We may need physicians close by.” He touched my arm as the cantors scuttled away to their various tasks. “Lady Aliza, Lady Julienna, what will you do?”
The crash of the bells shook the Abbey, momentarily deafening us. The air throbbed with the uncoordinated cacophony for a full minute before lesser bells around the city began to pick up the warning peal.
“We’re going to fight back.”
The Avenue of Kings stretched before us like the last ghastly mile before the gallows. I could see the gates to the Daired townhouse from the Court of Four, white and inviting in the moonlight. Julienna crouched at my side in the shadow of the wall. Her whistled summons had failed to draw the attention of the dragons, swallowed as it was by the shouts of a city wakened to war. Somewhere in the distance a direwolf howled. She gripped my arm.
“Tekari! In the city!”
I swore. We ran for the gates, keeping close to the buildings on one side. The townhouse was unlocked, and there was no sign of Teo or the other door warden. The door too hung a little ajar. “Careful,” I mouthed as we slipped inside.
Lamps burned low in their sconces, casting the front hall into a dim twilight. At first glance it looked unchanged, but Julienna pointed to the floor. Smears of blood led from the bottom of the stairs toward the back of the house. “Caldero!” she cried, and followed the blood.
We found the steward lying across the threshold of the dining room, his eyes open and staring, his neck and chest scored by dozens of narrow claw marks. Blood pooled beneath him. Julienna covered her mouth. I pulled her away.
“Weapons! Get your swords,” I said. “Now!”
She checked herself, starting for the stairs to the armory. My heart pounded in my ears as I ran for our chambers, dulling the sounds of commotion flooding in from nearby streets. The hall upstairs was dark and quiet, the doors closed as we left them. I eased the door to our room open, half expecting overturned tables, slashed and bloody curtains, and waiting Tekari, but it too looked untouched. I snatched Brysney’s knife from its place on the dresser and knelt to get the oakstone box from the bottom of the wardrobe.
On the other side of the bed, a shadow flitted across the ground. Every hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I snatched the box and stuffed it in my pocket, wielding my knife with the other hand.
“Who’s there?” I whispered.
There was a rustle and the sound of chirruping laughter.
“Show yourself!”
A hagsprite loped out from around the bed on all fours, grinning at me. Its long tongue quested out from between silver teeth. I lunged at it, but it avoided my knife with ease, scuttling backward on its grasshopper legs with a throaty chuckle. A second later it dashed out the door and out of sight.
I didn’t sheath my knife. There was never just one. A sudden gust of wind sent the curtains blowing into the room, fluttering like ghostly moths in the moonlight and twisting around the racks of weapons near the window. Without turning my back to the door, I pushed aside the curtains and peered out. Nothing but bare balcony and empty courtyard and rising smoke beyond.
I let the curtains fall just as a monstrous pale shape filled the doorway.