Guilt plagued him, along with the harsh lash of self-recrimination. He’d thought Midrigar a tragic example of the Empire’s worst brutality, a dead city populated by harmless ghosts. How wrong he was.
Theagacinhad accused him of sheltering in a grave, and he had shrugged off her fear. He wasn’t afraid of ghosts. The Sky Below was dotted with numerous barrows in which his people sometimes took sanctuary with their livestock during dangerous storms and kept company with the occasional lingering shade.
Midrigar wasn’t a barrow or a necropolis; it was something much more. Something infinitely dark and malignant. Both prison and gateway, it trapped its dead and allowed things like the faceless hunter to cross over, find a different hunting ground from the one it stalked in some other, strange world.
“Oh, it will come back,” he said softly.
His declaration gave her feet wings. She flew past him, pausing briefly to shake her head when she crossed over the warding circle’s invisible barrier.
Azarion caught up with her. “We run for the gate we entered. No stopping, no crying for help.” He suspected those pleas would come from the opposite direction at any moment.
The trackers still called commands to each other, their voices fanning out in a widening arc as they searched for him. The monster had yet to attack, but it was only a matter of time.
As if it heard his thoughts, a piercing scream rent the quiet accompanied by the eerie buzzing. The witch blanched, her eyes black and wide.
Azarion gave her a none-too-gentle shove. “Run.”
Her back arched away from him. Whether from his touch or her response to his command, he didn’t know, but she bolted down the steps and into the street, toward the gate. Azarion loped beside her, looking back every few paces to see if they were followed.
More screaming threaded the wind, human made inhuman by an indescribable torture. In the distance, the dogs had gone silent.
They passed in front of the broken temple’s grand entrance with its impenetrable darkness. A final prolonged shriek rose and fell in hideous rhythm before abruptly dying. Azarion lengthened his strides, grabbing the witch’s hand and nearly lifting her off her feet as they ran.
The buzzing returned, a wetter, more saturated sound that came from their left. The hunter now hunted them. Azarion forgot the pain of his cracked ribs and the way his lungs burned with every panting breath.
The gate. The gate was so close and the creature eating the distance between them even closer. He gripped the knife in the hand not holding on to theagacin. There might well be armed survivors outside this gate, waiting with their arrows and their dogs. His chances of winning a fight against such odds were nonexistent, and the witch’s fate grim, but better that than death by Midrigar’s monster.
That wet, gurgling buzz filled his ears. Theagacin’s hair whipped behind her like a flag as they hurtled through the gate and whatever new threat awaited them in the shadowed tree line. The creature emitted its own shrieking fury behind them but didn’t follow. Azarion didn’t stop to look back but continued to run with the witch toward the forest.
A figure suddenly emerged from a clump of shadows cast by the trees. A Kraelian tracker, his bloodless features twisted in horror, raised his crossbow and aimed at Azarion. The witch gasped and wrenched herself free of Azarion’s grip.
He didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate, and flung the knife. The blade caught the man in the chest, hard enough to make him stumble back a step before falling to the ground. The loaded bow landed in the grass beside him.
Azarion slowed and skirted the fallen tracker before retracing his steps. The dead man stared at the forest canopy above him with sightless eyes. Azarion jerked the knife free and wiped the blade on the grass before resheathing it. He retrieved the bow, along with the quiver of quarrels beside the tracker, and gave a quick reconnoiter of the tree line, looking for another Kraelian tracker to materialize. None did so, and he turned his attention to theagacin.
She hadn’t run far on her own. He spotted her on her knees, leaning against the trunk of a sapling, her eyes closed.
The abomination behind Midrigar’s walls had ceased its screeching, and Azarion gave silent thanks to whatever deity listened that it was trapped there like the dead who had summoned it.
He limped toward the witch. With their race over and their safety assured, at least for now, the pain in his side nearly took his breath away.
Theagacinopened her eyes when he crouched in front of her, dark pools reflecting moonlight and fever. She ran her tongue across her lower lip, and her graceful throat flexed when she swallowed. “What if I had fallen or couldn’t keep up?”
He glided a fingertip along a valley made by the folds of her skirt. “I would have carried you.”
She continued to stare at him, saying nothing, until her eyes closed again and she sagged against the tree. Azarion caught her before she hit the ground. He lowered her gently to her side before taking a seat beside her. Sweat dripped into his eyes, steam rising off his skin in the cold air. He wiped his face with the hem of his tunic and pressed a hand to his side to ease the stabbing pain there.
Safety was a fleeting and a variable thing, but for now, they were safe from the horrors lurking in Midrigar and not far from where he had tied the horse. Azarion checked the witch and left her where she lay. He had no choice. If he tried to lift her, he’d collapse. He prayed to Agna for protection of her handmaiden and set off to retrieve his mount.
Misfortune still held him in its grip. The horse was gone, leaving behind a pair of broken reins hanging from a tree branch like stripped strands of ivy. Sometime during their deadly stay in Midrigar, the animal had spooked and freed itself by breaking its tethers. A trampling of grass and hoofprints created a half-moon around the base of the tree. Azarion suspected the otherworldly creature’s hideous screeching, along with the screams ofmurdered men, had carried far into the wood, frightening the horse so much it managed to snap the reins and escape.
Without the satchels he’d left behind in the city and the horse, they lacked transportation and supplies, and somewhere on the other side of Midrigar, a pack of hunting hounds likely still lingered, waiting for their masters to return.
Still, the Empire hadn’t yet caught him, he had escaped a thing that had wiped out those who hunted him, and he had his knife, along with a crossbow and quarrels. A stream ran not far away for water, and the trade road nearby was bound, at some point, to yield a traveler on horseback. It was just a matter of patience and time before he could replace the mount he lost.
For now he’d rest. Weariness had him seeing double, and pain made his stomach roil. Theagacinlay unmoving next to him except for steady, shallow breaths. He wished he could stretch out beside her, but it hurt too much to lie down. Instead, he nudged her carefully into his lap and reclined against the sapling. His eyelids drooped. Every bruise and cut inflicted by the empress, and the fighter he killed for her entertainment, ached. The forest surrounding him turned fuzzy in his vision. He blinked hard to stay awake and finally surrendered to an exhausted sleep.
Voices and a mule’s braying snapped him awake. Azarion straightened from a slouch and rubbed his eyes for a better look at his surroundings. Morning sunlight spilled through the trees’ newly leafed canopy, dappling theagacin’s sleeping features. High color dusted her cheekbones, and her lips were dry and cracked. Sure signs the fever still raged through her body.
