Stalking Darkness

down. As he stooped to inspect the mess more closely, something in the shadows beneath the workbench caught his eye, stopping his breath in his throat.
    Alec’s sword.
    He dragged it out and examined it closely. Dark stains along its edge showed that Alec had put up a fight before losing it. Gripping it by the hilt, Seregil was surprised by a brief, irrational burst of anger.
    I told him to stay at Watermead!
    The door to his bedroom was shut, but bloody footprints led inside. Taking a jar of lightstones from a nearby shelf, he kicked the door open and tossed them in.
    An unearthly yowl burst out from inside and Seregil raised his sword in alarm. It came again, ending in a drawn-out snarl. Following the sound, he saw Ruetha crouched on top of a wardrobe, eyes glowing like swamp fire. She hissed at him, then leapt down and scuttled away toward the front door.
    Nothing appeared to have been disturbed here except the green velvet curtains of his bed. He never used them, but someone had pulled them shut all around the bed. Someone who’d left the bloody foot marks on the carpet.
    Seregil’s breath sounded loud in his ears as he forced himself across the room, knowing already whose body he’d find when he pulled the hanging aside.
    “No,” he said hoarsely, unaware that he was speaking aloud.
“No no no please no—”
    Gritting his teeth, he flung the curtain aside.
    There was nothing on the bed but a dagger—a dagger with a hank of long yellow hair knotted around the hilt. Seregil picked itup with shaking hands, recognizing the black horn grip inlaid with silver; it was the knife he’d given Alec in Wolde.
    For one blinding second he seemed to feel Alec’s thumb on his face again, reaching to smudge over the clean spot on his cheek.
    “Where is he?” Seregil hissed. Grabbing up his sword, he rushed out into the sitting room again. “You bastards! What have you done with him?”
    An evil chuckle erupted beside him and Seregil froze, scanning the room. The laugh came again, lifting the hair in the back of his neck. He knew that voice.
    It was the voice of the apparition that had dogged him through the Mycenian countryside; the one he’d fought through a fever dream the night Alec had torn the wooden disk from his neck.
    But this time there was no black, misshapen specter. The voice issued from the writhing lips of Cilla’s severed head.
    “Seregil of Rhíminee and Aurënen!” Her glazed eyes rolled in their sockets, seeking him. “We found you at last, thief.”
    Diomis’ jaws gaped with the same terrible voice. “Did you think we would allow you to escape? You have desecrated the sanctuary of Seriamaius, and defiled his relics.”
    “The Eye and the Crown.” It was Rhiri now, who’d never had a voice in life.
    “Thief. Defiler!” Thryis spat out, her withered lips curling back in a leer.
    “Defiler! Thief!” the other heads cried in moaning, joyless chorus.
    “Aura Elustri málrei,”
gasped Seregil, watching the grotesque performance with a mixture of outrage and revulsion. “What have you done with Alec? Where is he?”
    They made no answer, but Rhiri’s head tumbled to the floor and rolled at him, snapping its jaws and laughing, followed by the others.
    “Forgive me, all of you.” Feeling as if he were trapped in the worst of nightmares, Seregil raised his sword and hacked at the heads until only a scattered mass of hair and brains remained. In the midst of it he found four small charms, charred human finger bones wrapped with nightshade vine.
    Choking back a wave of nausea, he cast a suspicious eye over the bodies, still slumped together on the couch.
    “You deserved better than this,” he whispered thickly. “Somehow—somehow I’ll make this right.”
    Going back to his bedchamber, he pulled out his old leather pack and thrust in a few essentials. Then he wrapped Alec’s dagger carefully in a large scarf and slipped it inside his tunic.
    In the sitting room he took Alec’s bow and quiver down from their hook over the bed and put them by the door, not allowing himself to wonder whether they would ever be needed again. The sword he slipped into his own sheath; he had no plans for sheathing his own until he was well away from here.
    Skirting the mess on the hearth, he pulled the box of loose jewels on the mantelpiece free from a puddle of congealed blood and upended it into his pack. The spoils of years of casual pilfering tumbled out, glittering in the unnatural light of the