Depths of Madness - Erik Scott De Bie [87]
"I'll watch her," Liet volunteered.
"No." Twilight shook her head.
"I," Gargan rumbled, drawing gazes from the other four. "I watch."
The silence lasted a long breath before Twilight finally nodded. "Very well," she said. "But you will watch her close, blade to hand."
"Blade to hand," Gargan repeated.
She turned away, casting Liet an angry glare, and slipped into the smithy. That gaze both thanked and warned him.
Unable to stand it, he looked away and thought he saw another of those black hands-with the eye in its palm- teaching out of a wall opposite the smithy. When he looked hard, it was gone.
Liet suppressed a chill.
The length of a candle later, Twilight sat naked, alone, and crying.
They had moved from the Forge into a larger complex, nearer the center of the city. With Twilight's talents at stealth leading them, they had evaded the bees who came to investigate the shouts. This new building-a mansion, by comparison- might well have belonged to Nega himself, the high arcanist. Twilight didn't really care. It may as well have been hers now. Its wards and defenses had failed (clearly not the mythallar's priorities) and possession of the manse, as in all things, passed to the strong and alive.
Twilight had found an ancient bedchamber for herself- complete with an eerie floating bed of withered velvet, powered by the mythallar. She had stripped off her worn, ochre-stained garments, feeling filthy in them, and flung herself on the blankets, daring them to crack and disintegrate. They had not, and there she remained.
Though the room was far from the others, she did not mind. In fact, it suited her, for here she could scream and curse in privacy, without any of them thinking her mad.
Not that she did so. The day was more one for weeping than for expressions of fury.
Her tears had formed a damp spot on the bed cover nearly the size of a buckler when the door opened of its own accord- magic, of course. She wondered what manner of monster had come to slay her. Fiendish lizards, perhaps, or one of the bees. Maybe even the troll, though she imagined she would have smelled Tlork's approach. Perhaps even whatever beast had attacked her in the night, unless that had been a nightmare. She didn't know-she didn't know anything anymore.
" 'Light?" came a soft, hurt voice.
A sigh. It was far worse than any of the possibilities she had considered.
"Why do you frown, love?" Liet stepped forward, undeterred by her discontent-yet another aspect of him she loved and loathed. "It makes you too pretty."
She wouldn't take the bait. Twilight just looked away. He stepped closer, seating himself on the edge of the bed. She let him disrobe, stripping to his smallclothes, and his shirt, of course. He reached to embrace her.
"Surely this incident has told you-"
Twilight shoved him and he tumbled out of the free-floating bed. Liet landed on his bottom with an unceremonious thump. He looked so adorable-and pounceable-but she ignored that observation.
"There are three possibilities," said Twilight, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. "One, that it is Slip."
"That's out," said Liet. He rose, winced, and dusted himself off. The stone must have been cold under his bare feet. Twilight couldn't say she objected to the view, and for that reason she cursed him again.
"Two," she continued. "One among us can defeat het spell and my sense."
"Certainly not," Liet said. "No one can tell lies from truths better than you, love."
Twilight didn't bother to correct him. "And the third…"
"That there is no spy," the youth said.
Twilight bit her lip, then her eyes narrowed. "Have I been acting strangely of late?"
Liet gaped. "You can't be serious," he said. His surprise was a lie.
"It could be me," said Twilight. Her voice came out calm, a lie to the turmoil within. "How long was I unconscious without the Shroud? Any of my foes could have done this. I could be acting under magical compulsion-a spell I'm not even-"
Liet caught the shadowdancer by the shoulders and shook her. "Nonsense!"
No one did that to her. No one.
She formed