Free Stalking Darkness by Lynn Flewelling Page B

his fingers at the nearest lamp. The wick flared up and by its light they saw Seregil sprawled in the middle of the room, his back arched awkwardly over the pack he wore, the strap of the battered wooden chest tangled around one leg. His eyes were closed, his face colorless beneath streaks of grime and blood.
    “Get water, a basin, and linen. Hurry!” said Nysander, going to Seregil and pulling at the front of his coat. Thero hurried off to fetch the required articles.
    When he returned a few moments later, Nysander was examining a raw wound on Seregil’s chest. “How bad is it?” he asked.
    “Not so bad as it looks,” said Nysander, covering the wound with a cloth. “Give me a hand with these filthy clothes.”
    “What happened to him this time?” Thero asked, gingerly pulling off the unconscious man’s boots. “He’s got the same sort of preternatural stench he had when he came back—“
    “Very similar. Fetch the things for a minor purification. And, Thero?”
    Halfway out the door already, Thero paused, expecting some explanation.
    “We shall not speak of this again.”
    “As you wish,” Thero replied quietly.
    Focused on Seregil, Nysander did not see the hot color that leapt into Thero’s sallow cheeks beneath his thin beard, or the sudden angry set of his jaw.
    Later, with Seregil asleep under Thero’s watchful eye, Nysander paid his nightly visit to the lowest vault beneath the Oreska House. He was not the only one who wandered here late at night. Many of the older wizards preferred to pursue their research when the scholars and apprentices were out of the way. Proceeding on through the long passages and down stairways, he nodded to those he met, stopping now and then to chat. He’d never made any secret of his evening constitutionals. Had anyone over the years ever noticed that he seldom followed the same route twice? That there was always one point, one stretch of blank, innocent wall, which he never failed to pass?
    And how many of these others, Nysander wondered as he went on, kept watch as he did over some secret charge?
    Reaching the lowest level, he wended his way with more than even his usual caution through the maze of corridors to the place, though his carefully woven magicks kept all from perceiving the box he carried.
    Satisfied that he was unobserved, he lowered his head, summoned a surge of power, and silently invoked the Spell of Passage. A sensation like a mountain wind passed through him, chilling him to the bone.
    Hugging the grimy box to his chest, he walked through the thick stonework of the wall and into the tiny chamber beyond.

CHAPTER 5

    A lec squinted as sunlight flashed off the polished festival gong under his arm. Shifting his grip, he struggled the rest of the way up the ladder braced against the front of the villa.
    “Really, Sir Alec, this is not necessary. The servants always take care of these details!” Runcer dithered from the curb, clearly embarrassed by this display of labor but powerless to countermand it.
    “I like to keep busy,” Alec replied, undeterred.
    He’d reluctantly resumed his public role at Wheel Street the day before. The Festival of Sakor began tonight and—Seregil or no Seregil—Sir Alec had to make an appearance.
    Runcer was stubbornly determined to defer to him as master of the house in Seregil’s absence, a role he was acutely uncomfortable with. He detested being waited on, but every servant in the house seemed to take it as a personal affront every time he so much as fetched his own wash water or saddled a horse.
    Grasping the wooden brace set into the wall, Alec slid the gong’s leather hanging straps over it. They held and it swung gently in the morning breeze, a rectangular battle shield displaying the elaborate sunburst design of Sakor.
    Runcer handed up a swath of black cloth and Alec draped it carefully over the shield face.
    Similar gongs were being hung all across the city. Mourning Night, the longest of the year, began with