Stalking Darkness

pressed his fists against his eyes until fiery stars danced behind his closed lids.
    “Thero, what did they do to you? Why can’t you use your magic?”
    Thero held out one arm, showing him the strange iron band.
    “These keep you from using your magic?” Alec reached out and felt the unnatural coldness of the burnished metal. Running his hands over them, he could find no sign of any seam, joint, or hinge.
    “Think so—” Thero shifted uneasily, wiping at his damp beard. “Not ’ertain. So much confused, nightmares, voices! ’don’t dare, A’ek, I don’t dare!”
    “You mean you haven’t even tried?” Alec grasped Thero’s arms, bringing the bands in front of his face. “You’ve got to try something, anything. For all we know these may just be a trick, something to cloud your mind.”
    Thero shrank back, shaking his head desperately.
    “You have to,” Alec insisted, feeling his own desperation creeping back. “We’ve got to get away from Mardus. There’s a lot you don’t know, but believe me, Nysander would want you to help me. If you want to make things right, then you’ve got to at least try!”
    “ ’ander?” Thero’s chest heaved as he looked distractedly around the cabin, as if he expected to find Nysander there. “ ’ander?”
    Sensing a chink in whatever madness held Thero, Alec nodded encouragingly. “Yes, Thero, Nysander. Concentrate on him, his kindness, Thero, all the years you spent with him in the east tower. For the sake of the faith he placed in you, you’ve got to at least try. Please.”
    Thero twisted the edge of the blanket in his fists as tears rolled from his mad eyes. “P’rhaps,” he whispered faintly, “p’rhaps—”
    “Just something very small,” Alec urged. “One of those little spells. What are they called?”
    Thero nodded slowly, still twisting the blanket. “ ’an’rips.”
    “That’s right. Cantrips! Just a simple one, a tiny little cantrip.”
    Trembling visibly, Thero half closed his eyes in preparation for the spell but suddenly looked up again.
    “You ’aid there’s some’ing I ’on’t know,” he asked with asudden flash of his customary sharpness. “What? I’s his ’sistant; why didn’t he tell me?”
    “I don’t know,” Alec confessed, getting the gist of Thero’s question. “He told us—told me so little I’m not even sure what it’s all about. But he swore me to secrecy. I shouldn’t have said anything at all, I guess. Maybe later, when we’re out of this—”
    Alec trailed off, suddenly wary. Thero was watching him intently, hanging on every word. “We’ll talk about it later, all right? Please, try the spell now.”
    “ ’ell me first! Could ’elp!” Thero insisted, and this time there was no mistaking the feral intelligence in his eyes.
    “No,” Alec said, slowly moving away, though there was nowhere to go. “I can’t tell you.”
    He tensed for some attack, but instead Thero slumped over sideways on the bunk like a discarded puppet.
    The cabin door opened behind him and Alec felt a wave of terrible coldness roll into the room. Whirling in alarm, he confronted a walking horror.
    It took a moment to see that the wizened husk had once been a woman. Lively blue eyes regarded him slyly from the masklike ruin of her face.
    “That is most ungrateful of you, boy,” she rasped, the cracked remnants of her lips curling back to reveal uneven yellow teeth, “but I think that you will tell
me.”

37
B EHIND THE L INES
    S tretched prone on the crest of the hill, Beka and Sergeant Braknil shielded their eyes from the drizzle and surveyed the little village below. There were large granaries and warehouses there, the walls of which still had the pale gleam of new wood. Empty wagons of all descriptions stood near a sizable corral. All this, coupled with the cavalry troop billeted just outside the wooden palisade, added up to one thing: a supply depot.
    “Looks like you were right, Lieutenant!” Braknil whispered, grinning wolfishly through his beard.
    Satisfied with their reconnaissance, they made their way cautiously back to the oak grove where the rest of the turma was waiting.
    “What’s the word?” asked Rhylin.
    “We found Commander Klia’s adders,” Braknil told him.
    “A good nest of them, too,” said Beka. “But only one nest, and it took us four days to do it. From the looks of it, I’d say it’s just one link in a supply chain.”
    “You think we should look farther before we go