lit the way. My uncle had imported them from the city of
Solanthus – glass spheres with magical light in them that
never went out. Always the best, he liked to say. Always
get the best.
No one was outdoors as we approached. The place
hadn’t changed a bit since I was here last.
Orun pushed back his oilskin cloak and undid the strap
on his axe.
I needed nothing but my hands.
We mounted the steps, slowing down, and reached the
door. I hesitated, sensing my prey so strongly I felt I could
touch him.
He was inside on the right. That would be my uncle’s
private study, to the side of the entry hall. Maybe he was
holding everyone hostage, or he’d broken in and was
borrowing a few things for his own use.
I wondered if, when I met him, I’d ask him why he’d
killed me before I killed him.
I raised my hand and knocked hard, three times, and
listened to the echo. Then we waited.
The lock clicked. The front door heaved, then pulled
open. It was our elderly manservant, Roggis. His face
went white when he saw me, his eyes growing big and
round.
“Evredd!” he gasped. “Blessed gods, what happened?”
“I’m home,” I said softly as I pushed past the old man
and went in, Orun at my heels. The entry hall was brightly
lit. The great curved stairs to the second-floor bedrooms
ascended from either side of the room.
Something inside me tore free. I wanted to see my
killer’s face, NOW. The study door was closed, but I was
there in a moment, with the door handle in my hand,
pulling it open.
The cabinet- and bookshelf-lined study was before me. Yellow light
fell from the globes hanging from the ceiling. Only one person was in
the room, sitting at the center table’s far end with a pile of ledgers in
front of him. He was big, fleshy-faced, with a hooked nose and a
receding hairline. He looked up with irritation as the door swung open.
My MURDERER, sang the cold in my blood.
My uncle, said my eyes.
“Can’t you – ” he began, before he actually saw me. He leaped back
from his chair, knocking it over. His face went slack with terror. He
grabbed for something on a stool beside him.
“Uncle,” I said. I couldn’t believe it, but I knew it. HE had killed
me. “What – ”
My uncle swung around. He held a heavy wooden device in his
hands. He pulled the trigger. A dwarven-made crossbow. The bowstring
snapped.
The crossbow bolt slammed into my chest with the force of a mule’s
kick, tearing through my right lung and breaking a rib. The impact
knocked me back several steps, almost into Orun, before I caught
myself.
The bolt didn’t hurt a bit.
I ran and lunged across the table for my uncle, my fingers out like
claws.
He flung the crossbow at me, missing, and dodged back. My fingers
locked on his clothes, ripping them. I tried to get to his throat.
There was faint popping noise in the air, a flash of light. My uncle
was gone.
In his place stood a waist-high dwarf, clad in filthy black clothing. I
held his torn shirt in my hands. His mushroom-white face showed only a
dirty blond beard, watery blue eyes that bulged out like goose eggs, and
a black-toothed mouth that was open like a wound. He was the ugliest
dwarf I’d ever seen, and he gave out a shriek that would have sent me to
my grave if I hadn’t already been there. My uncle … a destroyed man . . .
The Theiwar had used an illusion spell to disguise himself. I knew then
what must have happened to my uncle, and why he had seemed to have
changed lately. And who had really killed my cousins. Likely, they’d
begun to suspect something.
GARITH’S GONNA LIVE LIKE A HUUU-MAN NOW, the hobgoblin had said.
“Garith!” shouted Orun from the door. The dwarf shut it behind
him, cutting off Roggis’s cries in the hall outside.
Panicked, the Theiwar ran under the table to escape me. I shoved