Page 80 of Time's Fool

“She has her hands full, seems to me,” I pointed out. “And while she takes care of one danger, Morgan could slip away and cause another somewhere else. Unless we stop her.”

“And if this isn’t enough?” The ghost held up the potion bomb she was carrying, because I’d kept dropping it.

It was a sickly green, and designed to freeze a body in place, judging by what had happened to the Corpsman the bombers had hit with a similar one. It might even be the same spell the mages had used against Morgan on the bridge. The locals had seemed to enjoy looting the Corps’ weapons to add to their own.

In any case, our plan was to recreate that scene: freeze Morgan in place, thus making her current body useless, and prompting her to emerge to find another. And when she did, the ghost could show me some of those tricks she knew. There was no certainty of victory, as we were both in a weakened state, but two against one was the best chance we had.

I said as much, expecting an argument from someone who had informed me that her primary job was tending to the Pythian library. She spent her time reading tales of derring-do, not participating in them. And this was as dangerous for her as it was for me, perhaps even more so.

I didn’t have much left to lose. But she had a nice afterlife, work she loved, and her precious books with which to while away the centuries. She probably should have refused.

But instead, for the first time I saw her jaw set and an odd sort of gleam come into her eyes. “Yes, in fact,” she said. “Yes, it does.”

“Does what?” I asked, confused.

“Feel like something worth fighting for.”

I smiled slightly. “Then let us go find this bitch.”

That proved more difficult than I had expected. I’d assumed the worst to be behind us, with most of the fighting taking place at the other end of the street, back around the bend. When I’d looked in this direction from the vantage point of the roofline, that had certainly seemed to be the case.

Now, I wasn’t so sure.

The reason it had seemed so quiet here was that a pall had descended over this part of the road that darkened everything, even more than the night. From above, it acted like a black fog, deepening the gloom between buildings and disguising what lay below. From inside, it made it impossible to see the full length of the street, or even much above twenty paces in front of us.

That necessitated slow going, but that would have been true in any case. The fight we had left behind was more or less a standard magical battle, except that the mages were hampered by not wanting to kill the locals, even if they had been conspiring with witches. That sort of thing tended to annoy their royal benefactress, and the Corps preferred to avoid the queen’s temper.

But other than that, it was pretty much as I had expected.

This one . . . was not.

It did have some similarities with the other. There were smoldering buildings, where spell impacts had caused a hundred little fires and a few large ones. They burned through the strange, black fog dimly, but did not help to brighten our path, for the darkness appeared to eat their light almost as soon as it radiated outward.

There was also rain, which continued to bucket down but did not disperse the fog. And curses flying about here and there, lighting up the night in flashes for an instant, before being swallowed up, too. And thunder booming overhead, a distant, angry rumble.

But no people, except for the Corpsmen, who appeared to be battling a foe I could not see.

Their opponents held no torches or magical lights, causing them to be almost invisible in the darkness. I could only see them when they moved, and even then, it was more as a suggestion of a body than anything solid. And one not entirely . . . right.

They were too tall, too thin, too . . . extended. And their shapes changed at times, with an already long-fingered hand suddenly becoming something monstrous, with digits growing to half the length of my body. Before suddenly wrapping around a Corpsman and jerked him into the dark, his startled cry cut off almost immediately by the muffling fog.

The sight made me stumble back and hug a wall, not certain what I was seeing or if it was a threat to us as well. My vaunted experience stopped just short. And so, it seemed, did the librarian’s, who had just grabbed hold of my arm.

But not, I thought after a glance at her frightened face, as a substitute for Rhea’s tether. I was managing not to drift away on my own, although it was starting to seem like more and more of a good idea. But my prey was here.

If this is your last hunt, make it a good one, I thought savagely, and pressed on.

The dark creatures were all around us now, but still almost impossible to see, merely weird flutterings at the edge of my vision which were gone when I looked again. And what I did glimpse often didn’t make sense. They were like the distortions found in shadows when the light shifted, ephemeral and constantly changing.

Except for the one standing in front of a house across the street, not ten yards away.

I had almost failed to see it, despite the building being engulfed in brilliant green flames, because it wasn’t in constant motion like the others. But it was there, with the fire staining the cobbles except where its body blocked the light. I strained to see it more clearly, which should have been easy surrounded by such brilliance, but it did not seem to help.

Until a woman suddenly separated from it, the darkness falling away from her like a dropped cloak.

The librarian made some sort of sound at my side, but I was too busy wondering what I was seeing to pay attention. The woman was tall and slender, with long black hair and a dress that appeared to be made out of fluttering pieces of pale, rose-colored silk. It was scandalous enough to have had her arrested on a normal street, for it revealed more than it concealed.

But this was not a normal street, if it ever had been. And I did not think that she had to worry about the human authorities in any case. Not with the amount of power she was giving off.

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