The Sentinel Mage

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE





“CHANGE WITH EBRIL,” Cora told her the next morning. “And show Petrus and Gerit where the assassins are.”

Innis nodded. She glanced around. Three soldiers had gone to retrieve the horses. Everyone else was gathered at the fire, checking weapons.

She walked across to the stack of supplies, pretending to rummage among the sacks as she eased her feet out of Justen’s boots. Ebril came up alongside her, whistling between his teeth. Innis handed him the amulet. “Here.”

Ebril kicked off his boots. His features wavered, solidified again, he grew taller, his hair became light brown instead of red. He bent to pull on Justen’s boots. Innis cast a glance at the fire. No one was watching them. She slipped the baldric over her head and laid it on the sacks, then let herself shift back into her own shape. The forest-green uniform grew baggy. She had to hold on to the trews to stop them sliding off her hips. “He’s asked Justen to call him Harkeld,” she told Ebril as he picked up the baldric.

Ebril stopped whistling. His eyebrows rose.

“When you’re in private.”

Ebril nodded, and headed back to the fire and Prince Harkeld. Petrus was already shedding his clothes. “Once the look-out’s dead, one of us will fly back,” Innis heard him tell Prince Tomas as he peeled off his shirt. “Don’t move until then.”

Tomas looked up from the arrows he was checking. “How are you going to kill him?”

“Tip him out of the cave,” Petrus said. “One of us will wait at the bottom, in case he survives the fall.”

Tomas nodded, and went back to his task.

Innis shifted. She stood for a moment in the nest of her shirt and trews, letting the sense of bird sink into her bones, then stretched her wings and leapt into the air.

The canyon floor dropped away beneath her. When she was level with the top of the cliffs, she glanced down. Cora was collecting their piles of clothing. In the distance she saw the soldiers returning with the horses. Petrus soared on her right, his feathers gleaming with the sheen of magic. Gerit was on her left.

They skimmed across the rocky plateau, gliding down into the mouth of the canyon from the northeast, out of the assassins’ line of sight. Innis landed on an upthrusting spire of orange-red sandstone and shifted into the shape of a skylark. Alongside her, Gerit and Petrus did the same.

They flew through the forest of rock, flitting from outcrop to outcrop. Innis landed again. She shifted into a lizard and scuttled up and over a lip of rock. Ahead, in their cave, were the six assassins. They were eating. She caught the scent of dried meat, of cheese.

She gave Gerit and Petrus a few minutes to examine the surroundings, then sidled back over the lip of rock and became a sky lark again. They followed as she flew, as she landed, as she shifted into a lizard. Her tiny claws scraped on the sandstone as she scuttled up to a shaded vantage point. There, tucked in his cave, staring south down the canyon, was the seventh assassin.

They watched in silence for several minutes. Innis felt a twinge of sorrow as she observed the man. Shortly, he’d be dead. His eyes would never blink again, he’d never rub his bearded face again, never breathe again.

She pushed the emotion aside, annoyed with herself. Sorrow, for a Fithian assassin? The man would kill her without a second’s hesitation—and certainly no regret.

She looked at Petrus. Be careful. But the words went unuttered; her lizard’s tongue wasn’t shaped for speech. She touched her shoulder to his.

Petrus nudged her back. He closed one reptilian eye in a wink and flicked his tail at her, a silent Be gone.

Innis backed away, leaving them to their task.





HARKELD DIDN’T OFFER to help saddle the horses; neither Tomas nor his men were easy in his presence any more. And yet today they’ll risk their lives for me.

No, it wasn’t him they risked their lives for; it was Lundegaard.

He looked down at the sand, scuffed it with the toe of his boot. Today Tomas would try to keep him alive. But once Ivek’s curse was broken, what would happen? If they met, would Tomas try to kill him?

He glanced at Tomas, saddling the last of the horses. You were a good friend.

Harkeld turned away. Cora was assembling a bundle. He saw clothes, boots, a baldric and sword.

“Ach!” Justen said. “Cursed things!”

“Put out the fire,” Harkeld said, turning to see the armsman stamping at something on the sand.

Justen bent, scooping up a handful of sand. “No scorpions on the Groot Islands, the All-Mother be praised.” He cast the sand on the fire and bent again. “Although we have this fly that bites—” He uttered a yelp and jerked back, shaking his hand.

“Scorpion?” Harkeld half-ran to his armsman’s side and grabbed his hand.

Justen’s face was screwed up in pain. “Son of a whore.”

Cora looked up. “What’s wrong?”

“Scorpion.” Harkeld examined Justen’s hand. The puncture wound was small, but the skin around it was rapidly reddening, swelling. “Does it hurt?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Justen said through clenched teeth.

One of the archers, checking his bow beside the still smoldering fire, uttered a choked cry. He jerked back, beating frantically at his leg.

“Everyone away from the fire,” Harkeld snapped. “And someone put the cursed thing out!”





HARKELD CROUCHED BESIDE his armsman. Justen was shivering. “Blankets,” he said curtly to one of Tomas’s soldiers. The man ran to obey.

The archer who’d been stung groaned. He stretched his leg out in front of him, grimacing, massaging his calf.

Tomas strode up. “What’s wrong?”

Harkeld glanced at him. “Two scorpion stings.”

Tomas swore under his breath. He looked at Cora. “Is it too late to call the shapeshifters back?”

She nodded.

“One of them’s coming now,” a soldier said, pointing north.

Harkeld followed the direction of the man’s finger. The hawk had dark plumage. “It’s the girl. Innis.”





INNIS LANDED BESIDE the neatly stacked supplies. Ten saddled horses stood waiting; the rest were picketed by the river. Everyone was clustered around something on the ground. Cora broke away from the group and hurried towards her.

Innis shifted, reaching for a blanket. “What’s wrong?”

“Ebril’s been stung by a scorpion.” Cora had lost her calm. Her voice was terse, urgent. “And one of the archers. Fly back and see if you can stop them.”

Innis didn’t bother to reply. She dropped the blanket. Magic surged through her. She pushed up into the sky almost before the shift was complete.

The campsite shrank rapidly behind her. At the mouth of the canyon she changed in mid-air to a skylark, plummeting for a moment, clawing with her wings to stay aloft. She sped towards the cave where the look-out hid, swooping over a fin of rock—

The cave was empty. Beneath it, on the rust-orange sand, the assassin lay sprawled. His legs were twisted at an impossible angle: broken. His face was raked by claws and his throat ripped out. Blood soaked into the sand, dark.

Petrus and Gerit stood beside the body.

Innis glided down and shifted.

“What’s wrong?” Petrus asked. He wiped a smear of blood from his face with one hand.

“Ebril’s been stung by a scorpion. And one of the archers.”

Her words hung in the air for a moment, and then Gerit swore: “Son of a whore.”

Petrus looked down at the dead man. “It’s too late to stop now. We have to go on.”





HARKELD SWUNG UP into the saddle and settled his baldric more comfortably across his back.

“Ready?” Tomas asked.

He nodded and looked back at his armsman. Justen lay wrapped in blankets. His face was pallid, shiny with sweat, contorted in pain.

“Then let’s go.”

They left at a slow trot—Tomas, five soldiers, Cora, himself—riding in silence towards Ner. The canyon curved, turning north. Harkeld glanced back once, and then kept his gaze grimly ahead. Justen had ridden at his side for the last month. Now Cora rode there. He felt unarmed, naked, exposed.

A low moan accompanied them, teased from the cliffs by the wind. Above, riding the currents effortlessly, was the dark hawk. Seeing her up there was oddly comforting. It made him feel safer.

Outcrops of rock pushed up from the sand ahead, pillars and walls of red-orange sandstone. They followed the hawk, making their way silently between the towering monoliths. A second hawk joined her. Petrus, his underwings and breast pale. All around them, the rock sang its eerie song.

Harkeld’s skin prickled. Somewhere in this maze were six Fithians. The sounds the horses made—the muffled clop of their hooves in the sand, the faint jingle of the harnesses—seemed to shout their presence to the assassins.

They skirted a long ridge of rock, passed from shade into sunlight again, and suddenly the desert opened out before them, an undulating orange sea stretching east, north, west.

Directly ahead, perhaps half a mile distant, a broken tower jutted from the sand. The river curved away to the east, hugging the cliffs. North and east, several miles into the desert, a vast hump of orange rock squatted in the sand.

“The catacombs are inside that?” he asked Cora.

She nodded. “Yes. But don’t worry; it’s daylight. The corpses will be dormant.”

The pale hawk peeled off, heading back into the maze of sandstone. Harkeld followed it with his eyes for a moment. Be careful.





GERIT WAS WHERE Petrus had left him: in lizard form, watching the six assassins in their cave.

Petrus glided past him—above the men’s line of sight—and swooped down to land behind a fin of sandstone. A moment later, a skylark flitted down alongside him. The bird folded its wings and shifted, became Gerit. “They’ve passed?”

“Halfway to the catacombs by now,” Petrus said. “How shall we work this? Sneak into the cave and shift into lions—”

Gerit snorted. “You want to kill as many as possible, that’s not the way to do it.”

“But we’d have the element of surprise—”

“For all of one second. Fithians won’t run screaming from lions, they’ll attack. While you’re ripping out one’s throat, the others will be slicing you up for steak.”

“Yes, but—”

“Less than a minute, we’d both be dead. And most of them would still be alive.”

Petrus closed his mouth.

“We need to get them out of the cave. Split them up.” Gerit crouched and began to draw in the sand with swift, jabbing strokes of his forefinger. “Here’s where they are. And this—” he drew several shapes, “—is what they can see. I’ll walk past, right here.” He gouged deep into the sand, marking it. “Let them see me.”

“But a throwing star—”

“It’s too far. Out of range.” His tone was curt, authoritative. Petrus heard the unspoken message: I’m senior to you. Don’t challenge my leadership in this.

Petrus nodded, his face carefully neutral.

“They see me,” Gerit said. “They rush down. But all they’ll find are footprints. I reckon they’ll split up to look for me.”

“And we attack them.”

“Once they’ve separated, yes. We can hunt them down one by one.”

Petrus frowned down at the drawing in the sand. “What if they leave a guard in the cave?”

Gerit shrugged. “Throw him out, like we did the other one.”

Petrus studied the marks in the sand. We need more of us to make this work. “We could thin their numbers first. Wait until one of them leaves to take a piss or—”

“You got water to drink while we wait?”

Petrus was silent. He was abruptly aware of how dry his throat was. Gerit was right; if they waited much longer, they’d need water.

“Our task is to kill as many of them as we can,” Gerit said brusquely. “And this—” he jabbed his finger into the sand, “is the best way.”





PETRUS WATCHED THE assassins from less than three yards away, his lizard’s body pressed flat to the sandstone. One was on sentry duty, a sword laid over his knees, looking outwards. The others played a game with small pebbles.

The sentry stiffened. “Hsst!” He pointed west.

All six men watched intently as Gerit crossed a stretch of sand, perhaps a hundred yards distant. He was shading his eyes with his hand, stumbling as he walked.

“Shapeshifter?” one of them said, when Gerit had disappeared from sight. “He’s naked.”

No other words were spoken between the men. They seemed to understand each other by curt gestures. The five who’d been at ease snatched up their weapons and clambered out of the cave, passing within a few feet of Petrus, pulling themselves up onto the top of the outcrop and then running soundlessly in their soft leather boots down the long sloping ridge to the sand. The sentry remained behind, his attention fixed unwaveringly on the view of rock and sand in front of him.

Petrus waited until the five men had vanished from sight, then he scuttled up behind the lone assassin. He paused for a moment, filling his mind with what he had to do: shift into himself, toss the man out of the cave, fly down, become a lion and finish him off.

Easy, he told himself, trying to believe it. He took a deep breath and gathered his magic. The cave shrank around him as he shifted.

The man must have sensed his presence. He half-turned, his mouth opening in surprise.

Petrus tackled the assassin, grabbing him around the chest, heaving him out of the cave.

One moment he was teetering in the cave mouth, wrestling with the Fithian, the next he was falling. He grabbed for his magic, but before he could shift, he hit the ground. The assassin’s weight drove him hard into the sand. Petrus distinctly felt his left thighbone snap.

The assassin rolled off him and sprang to his feet. A throwing star appeared in his hand.

Petrus shifted blindly, without any thought of what he’d become. The spinning blades sliced through the air a foot above him.

What am I?

The answer came as he huddled in the sand: a lizard.

The assassin towered above him. Petrus saw the man’s foot lift, saw the sole of a boot stamping down on him.

Again, he shifted in panic, without thought, swelling in size, knocking the man off his feet. Sharp, curving tusks thrust out on either side of his face, a long trunk hung where his nose had been.

An oliphant.

The assassin scrambled backwards, scuttling like a crab on the sand. Petrus lurched forward, raised his right foot and stamped down, crushing the man’s ribcage. Bones splintered and snapped beneath his weight. The man’s mouth opened. He uttered a sound of agony. With it came blood.

Petrus raised his foot again. The assassin didn’t move. He lay crushed on the sand.

Petrus lowered his foot. He swayed, steadying himself with his trunk. Pain and dizziness washed over him. He sank down on the sand. For a moment he lay panting, then he shifted back to his own shape.

By the All-Mother. His leg—

He gritted his teeth in agony and reached for his magic, placing his hands on his left thigh, letting the magic run from his fingers and burrow under his skin, through flesh and muscle, along bone and blood vessel.

There: a jagged break in his thighbone. The sharp edges of bone had speared deep into his muscles and sliced his artery. Blood spurted with each beat of his heart.

Petrus hastily pinched the artery closed with his magic. He glanced around. Nothing moved except sand blown in eddies by the wind. The only sound was a muted wailing coming from the rock.

Hurry!

It took magic to persuade the spasming muscles to release their grip, and brute strength to pull the bone into place. Petrus was sweating, close to vomiting, by the time the edges of bone slid gratingly together. Panting, he glanced around again. No assassins, no Gerit.

With the bone back in place, he was able to patch the artery more effectively. It was a crude repair, thick and clumsy, but it would keep him alive. His leg needed more—the bone was still broken, the muscles still deeply sliced—but there was no time.

He turned his head at the sound of running footsteps. A man burst around the end of an outcrop, some twenty yards distant. Not Gerit; one of the assassins.

The man skidded to a halt. He reached for something at his waist.

Petrus shifted into the shape of a hawk and lifted clumsily up from the sand. His left leg trailed, making him list. A throwing star whistled past, clanging as it struck sandstone, almost hitting him on its rebound. He clawed at the air with his wings, hauling himself higher. Another throwing star sliced towards him. He veered—too slow—the whirling blades touched him, shearing feathers from his right wing—a puff of white—making him lurch in the air. And then he was out of range.

Five men stood on the sand looking up at him. His feathers drifted down towards them, spinning in the breeze.





HE FOUND GERIT lying on a ledge twenty yards up an outcrop of sandstone, a bloody slash down his hip, another across his chest.

Petrus landed awkwardly. He waited for a wave of pain to pass before he shifted. Something warm trickled down his right arm: blood. He had a shallow wound from shoulder to elbow where the throwing star had sheared the feathers from his wing.

He ignored it, leaning forward to examine Gerit’s chest. The gash was so deep he could see white rib bones. “What happened?”

Gerit grunted. “I almost had one, ouch—”

“Sorry.” He touched the edges of the wound again, exploring with his magic. It looked much worse than it was: messy, but not life-threatening.

“One of them must have doubled back. I only just got away. My hand...” Gerit grimaced. “If you could do something—”

Petrus turned his attention from the chest wound. Gerit’s right arm lay at an awkward angle, his hand half-hidden in shadow. “What—?” And then he saw: a throwing star was embedded in Gerit’s hand. “By the All-Mother, how did you fly with that?”

“Didn’t,” Gerit said, through gritted teeth. “Bastard got me when I was up here.”

He’d heard Fithians could throw their stars around corners, that they could hit targets they couldn’t even see—but he hadn’t believed it until now. Petrus shuffled closer. The throwing star pinned Gerit’s hand to the sandstone; one of the blades was buried in the rock.

A sound made him cock his head. Hoofbeats, echoing among the forest of sandstone. We should have set loose their horses before we did anything else.

“How many did you kill?” Gerit asked.

“One.”

“Five left.” Gerit pushed up on his left elbow. “Tomas’s men haven’t a chance! Get me loose. Hurry!”

Petrus took hold of the throwing star with one hand and Gerit’s wrist with the other. A quick wrench and both blade and hand came free. Gerit grunted, his face twisting in pain.

Petrus examined the wound quickly. One blade of the throwing star was embedded to the hilt in Gerit’s palm, the razor-sharp point protruding bloodily from the back of his hand. The other four blades fanned out like grotesque metal fingers.

“Take it out! Hurry! We have to—”

“It’s not that simple.” Bones and nerves and tendons were sheared, not just blood vessels.

“But—”

“You won’t be able to fight. I doubt you’ll be able to fly. Not unless I spend a lot of time fixing the damage.”

Gerit stared at him grimly. “How much time?”

“Hours.”

Gerit’s jaw clenched, then he jerked his head north, towards the desert. “Leave it, then,” he said. “Go!”

Petrus nodded. He released Gerit’s hand. He reached for his magic again, not the gentle magic of healing, but the more vigorous magic he needed for shapeshifting. It came slowly, grudgingly.

“Hurry!” Gerit said.

Shifting was a strain. Everything went gray for a moment. Petrus blinked and shook his head, taking a moment to orient himself. Then he hopped awkwardly to the edge of the ledge and spread his wings.

“Be careful!”

Petrus launched himself from the ledge, catching the updraft. For a few seconds he glided, and then he began to flap his wings.

The broken leg, the missing feathers, made him list drunkenly. He headed for the desert, crawling through the air, barely making headway, his muscles straining. I’m going to be too late.