“Ho, Harlan, where are you? Can’t see a thing in this powder brew!”

“I claim its paw, Ellon. It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen.”

“Where in the name of the Saint is it?”

There was a silence, heavy with fear. The powder smoke refused to clear; in fact if anything it was growing thicker by the moment. The arquebusiers blundered around, terrified, sure that the shifter had somehow called up a fog and was still alive in the midst of it, biding its time.

“Sorcery!” one wailed. “The beast lives! It’ll be at our throats in a moment. This is no gunpowder smoke!”

Their sergeant tried to rally them, but they made off, some dropping their weapons, seeking only to get away from the unnatural smoke. They scattered, shouting, whilst the folk who lived on the street shuttered their windows despite the heat of the night and knelt behind locked doors, quaking.

S LOWLY , my little comrade, slowly. Look into him. Can you see the heat? Is that the radiance of his heart, beating yet? Yes! See how the bright bloodlines clot and heal themselves, the darker holes knit together and close. And there is the eye rebuilding itself, pushing out again like an air-filled bladder.

Bardolin was trembling with strain. Casting was difficult enough at the best of times without having to relay it through his familiar. And now the creature was edging out of his control, like a tool slipping in sweat-blurred hands. It wanted to come home to its safe, quiet shelf, but Bardolin was making it approach the great body that lay seemingly inert on the ground with its blood a thick sticky pool around it.

A hairy piece of meat slithered across the stones and reattached itself to the shifter.

Bardolin was lucky in the powder smoke. All he had had to do was thicken it, and the still, humid air of the night had done the rest. But now he was attempting something more difficult. Mindrhyming, through the minute skull of the imp. The familiar acted as a buffer, a cut-off, but a frail one. Its heart would fail if it suffered much more stress this night, but there was not much time. The fog was thinning, and the patrol would soon return with reinforcements.

Shifter, can you hear me? Are you listening?

Pain agony light blooming in my skull the muzzles pointing at me rend them tear them drink sweet blood dying. Dying.

Shifter! Listen to me. I am a friend. Look at me. See the imp before you.

The yellow eyes blazed, shot with blood.

“I see you. Whose are you?”

The imp spoke with its master’s voice, quivering with relief. Its brain was near overload. “Bardolin. I am the mage Bardolin. Follow the imp and it will lead you to me.”

The huge muzzle worked. The words came out as a growl.

“Why should you help me?”

“We are brothers, Shifter. They are after us all.”

The shifter raised its blood-mired head off the cobbles and seemed to sigh. “You have the right of it there. Lead on, then, but go slow—and no crevices or cracks. I am no imp that can crawl through keyholes.”

They moved out, the imp scampering ahead, its eyes two green lights shining in the dark, the shifter a hulking, shattered shape behind it. After them the cadenced step of the city patrol came echoing up the street.

T HE imp was barely conscious by the time it returned, and Bardolin immediately popped it into a rejuvenating jar. The shifter entered the room warily, the candlelight shining on the broken places in its body that had not yet mended. Its heat was overwhelming; a by-product of the sorcery which kept its form stable. Hunched with pain though it was, it towered over Bardolin like some black, spiked monolith, the saffron-bright eyes slitted like a cat’s. Its horn-like ears scraped the ceiling.

“I thirst.”

The mage nodded and sank a gourd dipper in the pail he had prepared. The shifter took it and drank greedily, water running down the fur of the bull-thick neck. Then it slumped to the floor.

“Can you shift back yet?” Bardolin asked.

The creature shook its great head. “My injuries would kill me. I must remain in this form until they are healed . . . I am called Tabard, Griella Tabard. I thank you for my life.”

Bardolin waved a hand. “They took away my apprentice today. Tomorrow they will take away me. I have brought you a momentary respite, no more.”

“Nevertheless I am in your debt. I will kill them tomorrow when they come for you, hold them off so you may escape.”

“Escape? To where? The soldiery have Abrusio sealed off tighter than a virago’s bustle. There is no escape for the likes of us, my friend.”

“Then why did you aid me?”

Bardolin shrugged. “I do not like wanton slaughter.”

The shifter laughed, a hideous sound in the beast’s mouth. “You say that to the likes of me, a sufferer of the black disease? Wanton slaughter is half my nature.” The creature sounded bitter.

“And yet, you do not kill me.”

“I . . . I would not harm a friend. Like a fool I came down out of the Hebros, seeking a cure for my affliction, and arrived here in the midst of a purge. I killed my father, Mage.”

“Why?”

“We are a simple folk, we mountain dwellers. He tried to force me.”

Bardolin was puzzled, and the beast laughed again. “No matter. You will understand in the morning maybe. For now, I am hurt and weary. I would sleep here if you’ll let me.”

“For tonight you will be my guest. Is there anything I can do for your hurts?”

“No. They heal themselves. It takes a lot to kill a full-blooded shape-shifter, though no doubt your magicks could do so in a trice. Those stinking militia thought to use me for their sport, and before I could stop myself the change was upon me. Then the hue and cry began. Six of them at least I slew. I was fortunate. Some of them have taken to using iron balls in their arquebuses. That would have been my end.”

Bardolin nodded. Iron and silver were the only things which disrupted the magical regenerative powers of a shifter. Golophin had presented a paper on the subject to the Mages’ Guild only the year before, little knowing it would soon be put to use.

Bardolin yawned. His imp stared dreamily at him from the liquid depths of its jar. He tapped the glass, and the little mouth smiled vaguely. It would be recovered in the morning. Some mages, it was rumoured, had bigger jars made for themselves to rejuvenate their ailing bodies, but there was the cautionary tale of the treacherous apprentice who had not followed instructions and had left his master in the jar to smile dreamily for all eternity.

“I’m for bed,” he told his monstrous guest. “You are safe here tonight; the imp made sure you were not followed. But it will be dawn in less than four hours. If you wish to make good your escape before then you are welcome.”

“I will be here when you wake,” the shifter insisted.

“If you will. The soldiers usually come midmorning, after a hearty breakfast and a tot of rum.”

The shifter grinned horribly. “They will have need of their rum if they are to take us.”

Us? Bardolin thought. But his bed was calling him. Perhaps tomorrow night he would be sharing a pallet of bare stone with Orquil in the catacombs.

“Goodnight, then.” He tottered off to bed, an old man in need of rest. The Dweomer always did that to him, and working through the imp had been doubly exhausting.

H E woke up, though, in the dark hour before the dawn with a name going through his head.

Griella?

And when he crept downstairs, instead of the monstrous, bloodied beast, he saw sleeping on his floor the pale shape of a nude young woman.

FOUR

T HE fire was brightening as evening drew on. The storm had blown itself out and the sky was a washed-out blue with rags of sunset-tinted clouds scudding off along the darkening horizon. Northward the Thurian Mountains loomed, dark and tall, and to the south-east the sunset was rivalled by another red glow that gave way to a black smoke cloud like the thunderhead of an approaching tempest. Aekir, still ablaze even now.