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from seeing what they d found, their heads tipped back, eyes closed. Keening.
He did not want to see. He did not want to see. But he had to look.
He moved forward, sword still in hand, heart in his throat. His eye caught on
the cascade of copper hair, unbound, on the slump of slender shoulders, on
eyes still open that stared forward, unblinking, already developing the
dullness of death. On blood still red in places, in others drying to black so
much blood.
Oh, Molly, he whispered. I m sorry. I m so sorry I ll make this up to you.
He pushed past his men, touched her cheek, stroked her hair. His fingers slid
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along the back of her neck to find the clasp of the Vodi necklace, and instead
found nothing.
He stared at her body then, and at his men kneeling around her, and he
bellowed, Up. Up and find whoever whatever did this. We have no time to
mourn the killer has the Vodi necklace.
The keening snapped off into silence, and Birra leapt to his feet, dragging
his sword from its sheath. He looked like he wanted to run it through himself.
I did not see, he said. I thought only of my duties, to mourn her passing I
did not think to check&
Seolar waved him out the door without a word. For this failure for this
horrible, total failure, he would have every right to demand the lives of
every man who served him. He could not speak to these men into whose hands he
had entrusted everything. Everything. He could not find words beyond rage.
He ran out into the passageway; he had no idea what he hunted, but he tried to
think as his enemy must be thinking. Her killer had stolen something of
immeasurable value; he held the fate of worlds in his hand. He would, Seolar
thought, stay as far from sight as he could, take the safest passages out no
matter how he had come in. Not for now the question of how he had gotten in he
could have used magic for that and almost certainly had done so; now only the
question of how he might get back out. On his way out, he would have no magic
in his arsenal.
For all its vastness, Copper House had only four doors that led beyond the
outer grounds: the front gate, the service gate, the soldiers gate, and the
secret gate.
He grabbed captains and quickly assigned them to each of the four. The
captains stopped their searching of the subterranean passages and fled upward,
dragging everyone with them, heading for the four gates that would offer the
bastard egress.
Seolar stayed behind. He did not want to go back in to see her body. But her
body might be everything the worlds had left of her; if the killer had wanted
her dead not just once but for all time and if he had succeeded in taking the
necklace off of her before she died, then the veyâr had lost. With no Lauren
and no Molly, they would move quickly to extinction as the dark gods hunted
down the last of them and destroyed them.
The worlds would keep on dying, too, Seolar thought but the veyâr would not be
around long enough to see that.
He took a deep breath, stepped back into the cell, and went to Molly s side.
He knelt beside her, scooped her into his arms, and lifted her with some
difficulty. Alive she had been light; in death she seemed to be three times
her living weight. With tears starting to blur his vision, he positioned her
so that her head rolled onto his shoulder. He could not bear to see the horror
of the vast, dark gash that ran from one side of her slender neck to the
other. With her so arrayed, he started for the ramp that led upward, thinking
to put her in the bed they had shared, to rest until the women could clean the
body, hide the wound, and prepare her for burial.
Something big and fast moved in the darkness ahead of him, and Seolar caught
the blink of pale yellow eyes and a sense of two shapes blurred over each
other, as if he could see both a man and something vastly different and far
more terrible. He hesitated for just an instant, his arms full of Molly and
his sword out of reach, and in that instant the creature man or beast bolted
up the nearest ramp.
Oh, gods forgive me, Seolar muttered, letting Molly s body slide to the
floor in a heap. He drew his sword and charged up the ramp in pursuit. The
creature outran him, though since he grew to manhood Seolar had been able to
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