Shadows Return

tears.
I can’t give up. I won’t!
    Composing himself cross-legged on the bunk, he closed his eyes and brought his hands up in the figure of seeing as he threw his mind’s eye once more into flight toward Riga.
    Give me some sign. Anything. Lightbearer, I beg you, guide my eye!
    He held the spell until his head throbbed and his breath gave out, and then broke it, gasping, to find blood streaming from his nose in twin rivulets. That had never happened before. He must be more exhausted than he thought. In fact, he was shaking badly and felt chilled to the bone. And when had the sun gone down? The room was so dim, and so cold!
    Thero…
    Startled, Thero looked around the little cabin. There was nowhere for anyone to hide, yet the faint, tremulous whisper seemed to come from all around him.
    Thero, help…
    “Who are you?” he whispered.
    Thero, can you hear…
    He knew that voice. Thero pressed his palms together, opening his mind’s eye again, but this time within the confines of the cabin.
    It was a strong spell for such a small space. Every detail of the tiny room appeared with razor-edged clarity behind his closed lids, and there in front of him stood Alec.
    Thero had seen only a few ghosts in his life, and never one so clearly. No shredding, rippling shade, this. Alec seemed almost as solid as life, except for the fact that Thero could see the faint outline of the door through him, and the edge of the window. He was dressed in strange clothing, and his chest was soaked with blood. His lips were moving, but Thero couldn’t hear him now.
    “Alec!” Thero’s voice broke but the spell held. “Please, let me hear you!”
    Alec faded almost out of sight, but his voice returned.
Help him! Save Seregil and the child.
    “Child? Where are they? Can you show me?”
    Show you!
Alec reached out and clutched Thero’s spirit by the hand in a crushing grip and suddenly they were flying, the sea and sky a blur around them, then the land under them. Not Riga. No, someplace miles to the east and south.
    I was looking in the wrong place all along!
…
hurry!
    Thero could see the coastline from here and far below, a few tiny specks of riders hemming something in.
    No, someone.
    He could see Alec on the ground now, pitifully splayed in death, with arrows in his body. He saw Seregil running, sword in hand, at more men than he could hope to bring down alone. And someone else, a blur of white, so indistinct, yet the sight of it sent a shudder through Thero’s very soul.
    What is that? Even from here I can feel it!
    Alec’s shade looked at him with such sad eyes, then he was falling, falling—
    “Thero, look at me!”
    Thero opened his eyes to find himself sprawled on the cabin floor with blood running down the back of his throat from the nosebleed. Micum was crouched over him.
    “Alec!” There was no sign of the shade now. The deathly chill was gone and sunlight was streaming in through the window.
    “You saw him, too?” Micum was looking panicked now, something Thero had never seen before.
    “I know where they are!” Thero told him, and burst into tears.
             
    “You fool!” Yhakobin shouted, not at Seregil but at the slave takers. “Kill him! Kill him now, but don’t touch the rhekaro or I’ll have your skins!”
    Seregil felt the arrows that struck his thigh and shoulder with no more concern than if they’d been gnat bites. His throat hurt, too, and perhaps he was screaming. Some part of his mind was aware of other shafts hissing around him, and the shouts of the men dismounting to stop him, but his vision had narrowed to one long dark tunnel and at the end of it all he could see was Yhakobin, sitting his horse with one hand raised as if to fend off the certain death bearing down on him.
    Two swordsmen dismounted to block his headlong rush. Seregil sliced the head off the first one with a single swing and plunged his poniard into the chest of the other. Not caring if he was dead or not, Seregil trampled him underfoot and kept on running.
    The alchemist tried to rein his mount aside, but Seregil sprang at him, dragging him from his horse. Throwing Yhakobin to the ground, Seregil hacked off one upraised hand, then plunged the point of his sword into the man’s belly and yanked it hard, spilling his guts on the ground in his fury. He could see the man’s mouth open, and guessed that he was screaming, but all he could hear now was a single clear, ringing note, too pure and piercing to come from a