Jian Jaharo. The scourge of the southern plains. The rare Vokian Sorcerer, and the even rarer Sorcerer-for-hire. The Pugilist, they called him. A man of such notoriety that even foreign-born Tiger and Panther were brought to immediate alarm at the mention of his name.

  He and Casso are sitting across from each other at either end of a short wooden table, with Tiger and Panther flanking on one side and Kyar and the Empty Man on the other. Kyar wears a near-constant smirk; the Empty Man does not sit and seems instead to almost sway in some nonexistent breeze, his chains rattling with each and every wayward motion. And Jaharo's expression is pure stone, hard and unblinking. Casso, Tiger, and Panther all watch as he takes up a small cup of dianhong tea—gifted by a terrified bystander, upon the bounty hunter's request—and brings it to his lips. Thin skeins crust across the surface of the vessel as Jaharo drinks.

  His control was incredible. Such a minute, precise application of Sorcery—performed with neither Locus Word nor hand sign, nor even with fire in his eye. The ice manifested there as nothing more than a subtle extension of his will. Very quickly Tiger was convinced that each and every rumor he had heard about The Pugilist was true. Which meant that they were all in a great deal of trouble indeed.

  Tiger glances back at their own supposedly-legendary mercenary—and really, he shouldn't have been at all surprised to see Casso just as drunkenly nonchalant as ever. The old man looks positively bored, even as—just beside him—Panther is the absolute tensest of human statues.

  "Well, shit," Casso sighs, settling into his chair. "How'd you find us?"

  To Casso, Jain Jaharo is a stark contrast. The so-called Pugilist remains strictly serious—his posture straight, his hands folded, his gaze cast at all times directly forward. Tiger can't even conceive of a smile on that pallid face. "How do you think?" Jaharo replies. "Oculus has eyes everywhere. Your old friends—" he jerks his head, indicates Kyar and the Empty Man, "—would have been quite lost without me."

  To which Casso makes a sound of wordless, irreverent disdain. "Pfft. Honestly, Jian, I'm surprised. I figured you'd never work for Taro Zohn again."

  "You were mistaken," says Jaharo, his voice suffused thick with venom. "Taro Zohn and I share a common grievance. The dead Empress disfigured us both."

  "Oh, yeah. I did notice that. You look like shit, by the way."

  "Thank you. Were I any less skilled a Sorcerer, I would be dead."

  "You were there?" Panther cuts in—to which Tiger shoots her a panicked look, and every other head swivels smoothly around to regard her. Panther is giving off just about every warning sign imaginable: her body is far too still and her face is far too placid, her fury displayed only in the narrowed slits of her eyes.

  "Oh, hello," Jaharo says flatly. "You must be the bodyguard. Yes, I was there. I watched the Empress die."

  "Who killed her?" Panther's voice is a bowstring drawn taut, ready to snap.

  "Nobody," Jaharo replies. "It was suicide."

  It happens so astonishingly fast. Even expecting it, Tiger's still blindsided—one minute Panther is sitting there still as stone, and the next she's standing upright with her cloak thrown back and the point of her dagger hovering just the barest fraction of an inch from Jaharo's face. And the blade does not in any way tremble or sway; it hangs there in suspending animation, perfectly frozen in time, awaiting only the most incremental of commands.

  "I don't believe you," says Panther.

  Even moreso astonishing is the fact that nobody moves in response. Nobody. Casso's eyes flick lazily to the blade; Jaharo stares, unblinking, right past the hilt of the tool and directly to the face of its wielder. Kyar snickers under his breath, and the Empty Man makes a sound at the back of his throat. But nobody moves. No-one is even one bit fazed.

  Then: "Sit down," orders Jaharo. "And be quiet. Adults are speaking." And then he turns right back to Casso, and pays the hovering blade no further mind. "You surprise me, Casso. You are the last person I would expect to turn traitor. I thought you were a professional."

  To which Casso just tilts his head back and takes three long, long swigs of his flask, before setting it down hard upon the table and then belching directly into Jaharo's face. "Come on, man," he scoffs. "I'm the definition of professional."

  "You are a dead man walking," corrects the Empty Man, in a voice like gargling barbed wire.

  "E.M., Kyar. Been a while."

  "Been too long, old man. What did I tell you?" Kyar leans forward, his grin widening and sharpening. "If you hang us out to dry again, we come and find you. And then we kill you slow."

  "Oh, is that what it was?" Just like Jaharo with Panther, Casso doesn't spare the bowman even a sideways glance. "Shit. I thought you said something completely different."

  "I wonder," Jaharo interrupts. And without looking, he reaches up and pushes Panther's dagger gently aside; after a reluctant moment, Panther flips it and sheathes it, and the whole of her disappears beneath that cloak once more, and as she returns to her seat the heat of her gaze diminishes by not one single degree. And the bounty hunter continues: "I wonder what brought you out of retirement, Casso. I do not think it was Taro's offer. Nor do I think that you are guarding these two out of some misguided sympathy. You don't even know what sympathy is. You are barely even human." One ice-crusted finger taps again, and again, and again against the table in militant rhythm. And somehow, all the while, Jaharo never seems to blink. "So. I think it follows that you are working for her."

  "Ibis is dead," says Casso.

  "I agree," says Jaharo. "So she paid you in advance. But what could she possibly have offered to a creature like you? I wonder. And I do have a theory. Should I say it out loud?"

  And then silence builds like a thunderstorm between the two men. The air itself seems to hum; it feels as though the ground might at any moment split open beneath Tiger's feet.

  "Nah," says Casso, finally. "I'll just tell ya." At which point he leans forward—winces—and audibly farts. "That's my payment," he answers, settling back into his seat and taking yet another swig from his flask.

  For a moment Jaharo just stares, as the old man drinks. Then—"I don't know why I bothered," Jaharo sighs, rising to his feet. Every eye tracks closely his ascent. "You have always been useless for conversation, Casso. Just a simpleton who happened to be born with a knack for killing. But now you are just another victim. And talking to victims," he places one palm flat against the table, "is just such a fucking waste of my time. So let's cut this short—freeze."

  Jaharo's right eye bursts into cerulean flame; every ear pops as a sheet of frost races out across the table—at which point, all at once, everyone moves. Casso kicks the Sorcerer hard in the shin and somehow already has a knife in hand, a knife already racing in horizontal arc towards Jaharo's neck as Panther hurls a dagger right into the Empty Man's chest and the Empty Man falls back with purple blood arcing up into the air, and as Kyar's balled and distended fist is slamming down and shattering the table into shards of ice and splintered lumber. And just as all this is occurring, Tiger has one hand over his mouth and another outstretched. "All of you—" he shouts, "—just burn!"

  And even as Casso's dagger rebounds against a sudden buffer of ice coating the side of Jaharo's neck, already the Sorcerer is turning to Tiger and replying, "Frost."

  The air—no, the space itself—contracts between the palms of their hands, all oxygen sucked right into that wobbling partition as the two Sorcerers pit everything they have into what Shalasharans call a clash and Vokians call a schism. A whole contest plays out right there, blink-and-you'll-miss-it, impossible to see and impossible to ignore. And then two seconds later Jaharo has won, and he dismisses Tiger with a scoffed, "Amateur," and a violent invisible shockwave to follow. Tiger is blown right back and through the nearest table; everything and everyone else save for Casso is pitched right into the air, for Casso's weapon and hand have since been frozen to Jaharo's neck.

  "You used to be quicker," Jaharo chides. And suddenly his right fist is encased in a thick chunk of ice like an armored gauntlet; his left grabs Casso by the collar whilst its opposite careens forward with a right hook liable to crack the old man's skull. To which Casso, who suddenly has another knife, breaks his frozen hand free and sends the Sorcerer leaping away from an underhanded slash that would have gouged him wide open.

  "Keep your hands offa me!" Casso snaps, hawking and spitting on the ground between them. He has a blade in each hand now; he flips them both to upside-down grips with oil-slick ease. "This is a nice coat!"

  To which Jaharo doesn't bother to reply—he just puts up two ice-covered fists, like a prized boxer, then exhales a cloud of frost and charges right in.

  Panther, meanwhile, is already back on her feet.

  Nobody expects her to move quite so fast; nobody understands that this whole time—the sit-down, in addition to the twenty-four hours waiting in that veritable cell—Panther has been absolutely raring to go. She has taken her heart's inexplicable proclamation—I WANT TO LIVE—and closed her fingers around it, has made a fist of it. It burns like a furnace within her and now, finally, all that heat has somewhere to go.

  And so she is upon them in moments. And so she sprints forward, rolls over the Empty Man's rising back and descends upon Kyar like a calamitous storm, ducking a swing from that bladed blow and then leaping up with a snap-kick in response. Her boot meets chin and keeps going; for just a moment, it is above the bowman's head, at which point she brings it right back down and cracks his skull a second time. One more spinning roundhouse to the side of the head drops Kyar like a man dead on the spot; in one smooth motion Panther is already whirling around and hurling a dagger at Jaharo's skull, to which the Sorcerer—on some impossible impulse—pivots on his heel and smacks the projectile away with an icy fist. And then he sidesteps a slash from Casso and batters the old man with a trio of rapid-fire jabs to the gut; the two of them have been embroiled in blistering hand-to-hand combat all the while, knife meeting frozen gauntlet time and time again, and Panther is just about to leap in and help the old man when she hears an unmistakable rattling of chain behind her.

  Instinct takes over. Just like Jaharo, Panther gauges where the dagger will be on sheer intuition and turns to knock it away with her arm-bracer just a moment before it would have penetrated her skull; thus the dagger goes up and away, only for the Empty Man to whip that same chain right back down in well-planned retort.

  Iron bites flesh; Panther feels the pain etched in a diagonal line from her forehead to her upper lip, skirting like a river around the contours of her nose. She feels, too, the white-hot agony to follow as his venomous blood seeps in—feels what must surely be a whole menagerie of boiling worms crawling beneath her skin, or perhaps just a series of million-degree miniature suns. And so she staggers back, face marred and dripping. Halts after two steps, braces herself on her back foot. Glares between bloody fingers at that bandage-wrapped creature on the other side of the room.

  The Empty Man's chains writhe about him like living tendrils.

  "Bastard," says Panther, without emotion. And then she rushes him.

  Now, Panther has never been the type to study her losses. But she does internalize them. Deeply. And it is in those waking, restless twilight hours that an insomniac knows so well that those losses replay in her mind, over and over and over again. And in the rare occasions when Panther does sleep, well.

  Panther even fights in her dreams.

  And so this Panther is a thousandfold more dangerous than the one the Empty Man had first encountered. This Panther has relived their first battle ten thousand times over. And this Panther races right in, navigates that labyrinth of flying—poisoned—metal with a whole acrobat's routine of leaping handsprings and midair corkscrews, sliding in at the very last moment to evade a decapitating blow before leaping right up and carving the mercenary's torso wide open. Purple ichor spurts; Panther darts back, allows not an ounce of the vile stuff to make contact with her skin, holsters her dagger and unsheathes her sword—and then she awaits his counterattack.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  She doesn't have to wait long. The Empty Man unleashes hell upon her, sets loose a whole whirlwind of flying steel that Panther meets without hesitation, pivoting and pacing and deflecting blow after blow with sabre and bracer both. Time and time again, red-hot sparks sting her skin. Time and time again, his knives come just a hair's breath from ripping her apart. And every second the agony of her wound seems only to compound.

  And then finally, inevitably, Panther slips up. It was bound to happen—the Empty Man has her right where he wants her, far enough away that she cannot touch him but close enough that he has free reign to inflict himself upon her. And though she's figured out the trick by now—to watch neither the chains nor the blades, but the hands—at the end of the day there is simply too much information for her eyes to track. Too much visual calculus required to find out where each blade is going. So now one of his chains comes down directly upon her bracer, not the blade but the chain itself, and thus there comes a blur of grey as said chain wraps itself once, twice, three times around her elbow and the dagger locks tight into place.

  And thus she is trapped. The Empty Man yanks with inhuman strength; Panther is pulled off her feet, is brought right down to the floor between them.

  "Caught you," the Empty Man rasps, tossing the other dagger back behind him before snapping it forward and sending it racing to split her skull in half.

  In the face of her own death, Panther doesn't even blink. "You sure did," she says. And then she returns the favor. And then, with no warning at all, she yanks the Empty Man right into a cataclysmic headbutt—a headbutt she might have actually felt if her whole face was not currently on fire.

  Well. That headbutt has confirmed her suspicion that what's inside the Empty Man is not quite bone. It's something a bit squishier, a bit less sturdy. And more to the point—for twenty-four hours Panther has been obsessively honing each and every one of her blades. And so it is no surprise, when her sabre whips up, that the Empty Man's arm—the one to which she is bound—goes right off at the elbow.

  She doesn't give him even a moment to lament. She just kicks his legs out from under him and puts her sabre right through the back of his head, pinning him to the floor like a butterfly on a board. And of course, she doesn't believe for even a second that the Empty Man is actually done—but all those thoughts are made utterly moot as without warning, from the surrounding cloud of dust, Jian Jaharo leaps forth to annihilate her.

  Tiger is sick and tired of this shit.

  Is that fair to say? I think so. I think that Tiger is so very, very, very sick of being on the floor, sick of bleeding from his eyes and his mouth, sick of his head spinning and his ears ringing and his vision growing dim. Stars, his ears aren't just ringing—they're roaring like twin oceans at either side of his skull.

  Tiger's sick of it all. So sick that he's mad; so mad that anger overrides agony and has him right back on his feet, bracing against a chair, dimly aware of panicked bystanders streaming past as he watches the muted theater of Kyar's bow clashing against Casso's knives, and Jaharo hounding Panther much as a shark hounds wounded prey. She's fighting hard, yes, but Jaharo is fast and he is relentless, hammering her again and again with blow after blow. Those icy fists are now dripping with Panther and Casso's blood; Jaharo catches her sabre with one hand, the blade failing to penetrate the ice, and cracks his other fist against her skull—and oh, damn it all, Tiger's right back where he was in the red atrium. And in the southern gatehouse. Damn it all, was it always going to be like this?

  One final time: Tiger is sick. So sick that the roaring in his ears was suddenly coalescing into something almost like words. Pareidolia, they call it—the mind's tendency to find familiar patterns in the random, the inanimate, the ambiguous. Surely that's all that this was. And yet...and yet suddenly Tiger was certain, so certain that these were the same ten thousand swirling voices from all those tortuous half-remembered dreams, and suddenly those voices were converging into one voice, his voice, and that voice was speaking now like thunder in his head:

  I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

  I DON'T WANT YOU TO MOVE.

  SO DON'T MOVE.

  SO—

  "—don't move!" Tiger roars.

  And then everyone stops.

  Everyone and everything.

  For three whole seconds. Not a muscle.

  Tiger's eye burns bigger and brighter than ever before.

  And then, once again, Casso is the first to act.

  "Tiger!" he snaps, slamming shoulder-first into Kyar and hurling a knife at Jaharo's back, as the seventh prince sways and nearly collapses. Only—wait a minute, no, this isn't nausea, this is strength. This is vitality flooding Tiger's body, a surge of power that has him now standing firmly on his own two feet. "Try shadow!" Casso shouts, ducking as one of Kyar's thundercrack arrows splits the air above him.

  And all the while, Jaharo—though briefly stunned—has heard that knife whistling in from a mile away. "Ice," he commands with one upraised fist, and thus does the moisture in the air freeze to one solid pillar. The blade rebounds; Jaharo shatters the wall with a crack of his fist, then turns to a reeling Panther and commands, with a slash of his palm, "Rain." And thus every one of those fragmented shards of ice goes hurtling down like minuscule daggers upon her, gouging her face and shredding her cloak and digging deep furrows into her armor.

  "It doesn't work like that!" Tiger shouts back, as Casso closes in on Kyar and harries him with a vicious pair of slashes. "I can't just say a word and expect to—"

  "Just do it!" Casso barks, as Kyar's malformed arm comes very close to swiping the head from his shoulders.

  Any other time, Tiger wouldn't even have bothered. The premise was ridiculous. Shadow was just a word; he couldn't even begin to visualize what that was supposed to do. It wasn't as though he could just speak anything he liked into existence.

  But, right now...right now, Tiger did feel like he could speak something into existence. Right now Tiger felt like he could do absolutely anything at all.

  And so: "Shadow," he intones. And then he feels it moving within him—and just a second later he drops to his knees, hacking and coughing, and he vomits forth neither food nor bile but smog, a billowing cloud of black smoke that swarms and undulates like a living thing, spreading with incredible speed to envelop the entire room.

  And then all goes dark.

  Tiger can't see a thing. Tiger literally cannot perceive the hand at the end of his wrist, past a certain point. Everything around him is sheer formless black; all sound is muted, as though he were underwater. There are faint suggestions of movement, somewhere—but as Tiger fumbles about, blind and unknowing, he has not one iota of sense for the shape of the world around him. Everything feels foreign and unfamiliar. Everything feels wrong.

  And then, abruptly, there comes an grip of sheer iron around his wrist. Tiger looks up—sees Casso with both his irises shining like lanterns in the night—and then, before Tiger can speak or ask or even so much as think he is yanked right away, right through what must be the door, and so the last—and first—thing he hears is just the ding! of that little silver bell.

  And then the whole world explodes.

  Well, that's not exactly true. But Tiger's world most certainly does explode into all the color and sound and detail he had previously been missing in such violent, abrupt fashion that the seventh prince might as well have been clubbed upside the head. Outside the inn, on the grey streets of Baijo, he and Panther each drop to their knees with eyes squeezed shut against the sheer sudden overload of it all.

  "Come on, dammit," Casso snaps, apparently unfazed. "Move or die." And then, with a final jerk of their wrists, he's off—and so, half-blind and blinking, Tiger and Panther stumble after him, away from that building still gushing black smoke from every door and window and errant little crack. They do not turn to look, as they flee; they do not see as thick sheets of frost begin to swallow every iota of that structure whole.

  Time passes. Faces, buildings, clouds streak by. Much is lost to delirium and exhaustion. They follow Casso and they do not think. And then finally, somehow, they end up in some manner of abandoned building at the outskirts of the city as armored boots thunder by just outside. And so, finally, the three of them are afforded a moment to catch their breath.

  Time continues to pass. The day draws low. Night soon approaches; then, Casso says, they will move. Only under cover of darkness will they put the city of Baijo behind them.

  They're in grim shape. The blessings of food and bed and bath have all been undone. Panther and Casso each sport a whole collection of discolored bruises; Panther's face, too, is marred by a dozen small cuts and one enormous wound that takes hours to properly close. The Empty Man's poison, it seems, is not lethal—but the pain lingers nonetheless. Thus Panther dresses her wounds in characteristically stoic silence whilst Casso paces back and forth with hands on hips, restless in a way that Tiger has never seen him before. "We're gonna be late," is all he had to say, when Tiger dared inquire. At one point the old man hunches over and coughs up a whole chunk of clotted blood—a byproduct of whatever he did to his eyes? Tiger doesn't even have the energy to ask and not get an answer anymore.

  For Tiger, all the while, has just been laying there in a trance. Wondering. Pondering. Replaying that moment again and again in his head, turning that puzzle over in his hands and running his fingers along every surface, every contour, every edge. Back at the inn, he was—for just a scant few seconds—able to recall every one of his nightmares with eidetic clarity. And now, once more, they are gone.

  Finally he can no longer help it. His curiosity consumes him. And so Tiger declares, apropos of nothing, that, "I've been dreaming, lately."

  Casso stops dead in his tracks. His eyes slide right to Tiger. And Panther's eyes, too, flick up at the old man's sudden interest. "Go on," says Casso.

  "There are always these—voices, though I can never quite remember what they've been saying." Tiger leans his head back, feels his skull touch against cold brick. The sudden chill grounds him, roots him to the earth. Keeps him from floating away. "Back there, I heard them again. Clear as day. And they were...I don't know how to describe it. Thinking my thoughts? It felt like myself talking to myself, if that makes any sense at all. And they...I? Told me exactly what I needed...or wanted...to do."

  "You're talking about that don't move stuff," says Casso. Now Panther was watching very closely indeed—for she, more than anyone else, had found that sudden paralysis fiercely unsettling. Terrifying, even. In truth she lacked a proper word for how she felt and would never attempt to voice it aloud.

  "I've never even heard of Sorcery doing something like that," Tiger mutters, partly to himself. "I just...I don't understand anything anymore. I feel like my head is fraying apart."

  Casso regards him flatly, for a moment. Then: "You've been somewhere that people shouldn't be. Panther's conduit is closed. Yours isn't. That left you exposed. Stuff like this—it happens, after an experience like that. Weird dreams. Voices in your head. Sudden flashes of inspiration. I mean that's where all Sorcery comes from, isn't it? Revelations—" he snaps his fingers, "—outta nowhere."

  Panther says nothing. Just watches.

  "...damn you, Casso," Tiger eventually replies. "Damn everything about you. You make me feel like such a stupid child. Like all of the things happening to me, to us, aren't even half as insane and horrendous and unfair as they actually are." He glares up at the old mercenary, with bloodshot eyes. "You act like this is all just so fucking normal."

  Casso holds his gaze for a few seconds—offers Tiger only his usual disinterested stare—and then, unexpectedly, the old man's expression softens. And he is forced to look away.

  "...look, kid," Casso says, in a voice much unlike him. "I've been in this game a long time. No matter where you are, I've probably been there. Whatever you're doing, I've probably done it. And I've seen...plenty of things that no-one should ever see. So, I don't know. Try and take some comfort in that. If you can." He pops the cork on his flask, takes a long swig. Sighs, tucks it back into his coat. And concludes: "Or just don't ever be sober."

  "But how do you know?" Tiger sputters. "How do you know all these things about Sorcery, and the Other Side? Casso, who taught you all this?"

  But Casso's expression becomes very much like a portcullis slamming down. The gate is definitively closed. The time for questions—for any conversation at all—has passed. And so Tiger is left to just sit there and stew, his head awash with so much ambiguity that he doesn't even know how to sort it anymore. He never discovers more, never gets any closer to understanding. All he ever gains is more pointless questions.

  There is, however, one sole point of clarity amidst the storm. Tiger wants to face Jaharo again. Badly. For all the bounty hunter's obvious skill, the application of his Sorcery was brutishly simple—as was often the case with Specialists. Jaharo, like many others, had devoted himself to just a singular aspect of Sorcery with the sole intention of using it as a weapon. Just like Obelan. Tiger thinks to himself, then, with some small satisfaction, that his older brother would wipe his ass with the likes of Jian Jaharo.

  Tiger had studied for his entire life at the legendary Akkazanakka Institute—the indisputable forefront of Sorcery for all of Shalashar, which was in turn the indisputable forefront of Sorcery for the entire world. Tiger had studied under the many of the most powerful Sorcerers alive, and plumbed deep the archives of those who were not. Tiger's knowledge of Sorcery was broad as an ocean; Jaharo's was narrow as a pin. Sure, the bounty hunter had won their clash—the argument he presented to the universe had been simply more compelling—but ever since the words don't move had ripped themselves from Tiger's throat, the seventh prince had felt more capable than ever before. More powerful. He felt like he could smother Jaharo in a second clash. And even if that were mere delusion, well, belief was just as important a factor in Sorcery as anything else. The most important factor, even—after all, it wasn't as though Sorcery operated under any rational logic. It was for very good reason that the writings of history's greatest Sorcerers were all nigh-indecipherable gibberish.

  Tiger could not help but wonder, then—had he somehow widened his own conduit? Had he somehow wrenched open his connection to the forces of the Other Side even further?

  At which point all these grand delusions are cut short as Panther, finally, takes it upon herself to pose the obvious question. "So," she speaks, drawing everyone's attention at once. "Where are we going?"

  At which point those grand delusions, already dead, are now left buried and forgotten as Casso answers, "Shalashar, obviously." And then: "What? All this time we were pushing north, where did you think we were headed?"

  But all Tiger and Panther can offer in response, to that, is a pair of utterly bewildered stares.

  Because what lay between them and Shalashar was nothing short of total war.

  End Credits Theme

  wrote; I cannot overstate how good it felt to bang this one out in one go (plus a second day for all the edits). Anyhow—much of the action in this one was conceived to the ending song above, which may or may not be apparent in the sort of start-stop nature of that fight. Who can say!