Free Conqueror’s Moon by Julian May Page B

and bones behind.
    The glow of his pendant winked out.
    Snudge took a shuddering breath. For a time be did nothing but draw in sweet air, resisting a powerful urge to spew up his supper. Then he fumbled for the fallen lantern, found and lit it, and stared in wonder at his handiwork.
    A human being once alive was slain by him, as dead as a crushed ant or an arrow-shot stag or a chicken with its neck wrung. He felt no remorse, no fear, no sense of relief at escaping whatever perilous enchantment had threatened him— only an empty numbness. Almost without thought he pulled out his blade, wiped it on the wad of torn fustian lining he had crammed into his belt-wallet, and sheathed it. Blood oozed forth from the small wound, not as much as he would have expected. It slowly soaked the man’s linen shirt, but was kept from leaking onto the floor by the waxed leather jacket.
    The pendant on the sorcerer’s breast had become a square of ordinary translucent stone, blue-white in color, curiously carved.
    A moonstone sigil.
    Snudge had read of such a thing in one of the books purloined from Vra-Kilian back at Cala Palace. Sigils were rare artifacts of the Salka monsters, having conjured into them the power of the Beaconfolk. The only human beings possessing them were members of Moss’s Glaumerie Guild, a league of master sorcerers. A sigil could generate a single magical function. This one had obviously produced the strong covering spell of invisibility, but one that could be penetrated by the wearer’s windsight, as ordinary couverture could not.
    After a moment’s hesitation Snudge unfastened the gold chain, slipped off the sigil, and thrust the thing into his wallet. The valuable chain he replaced on the dead man’s neck, buttoning his shirt and jacket over it.
    Snudge was not that kind of thief.
    He took the body by the arms and dragged it over the water-splashed floor into a corner. A few pallets of stuffed sacking had already been laid out as beds for Skellhaven’s men. He arranged the corpse in a fetal curl on one of them, face to the wall as though sleeping, then pulled off the seaboots and set them neatly to one side. He used the wad of fustian to mop up the spilled water as well as he could. Perhaps the floor would dry before anyone else came. He put the sodden cloth into the bucket.
    Now I must search, he thought, strangely calm, to see whether any talented person heard the sorcerer’s death-cry.
    Shutting his eyes, he became one with the wind again, seeking any trace of awareness, any thin strand of oversight focused on the dead man, exploring nearby first, then outside the castle, and finally sweeping along a narrow path three hundred leagues northward to Royal Fenguard. The effort drenched him with sweat and weakened his muscles so that he almost collapsed. But no magical adept watched from afar, and no ordinary person had heard the brief commotion in the stable and started out to investigate its source.
    Deveron Austrey, mankiller, opened his eyes. After his strength returned, he stepped into the dim corridor and used the lantern to examine his clothing, making certain there was no trace of blood. Then he started back to the repository tower, moving slowly like one half-asleep, taking the bucket with him until he could abandon it safely inside the secret passage.
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five
    Prince Conrig and Vra-Stergos sat together in a dark part of the ducal library sectioned off by tall stacks. The Companions’ drunken picture-dice game was still proceeding noisily out in the middle of the great round room. The armiger named Saundar Kersey played the lute while Belamil Langsands sang “Brown-Eyed Wenches of Garveytown” in a sweet young tenor. A clock-candle burning atop a nearby reader’s carrel indicated that the ninth hour after noon was three-quarters past. Conrig had only just returned to the tower from the solar after the council of war ended. He described to his brother what had transpired at the meeting.
    Stergos