"Don't let me..." Jandik gasped, blood foaming on his quivering lips, his eyes rolling up to lazily scan Regdar's face. "Don't let me...die here. It stinks."

Regdar forced himself to laugh and got a smile from the wounded tracker. He was rifling through his pack, crouching over the fallen watchman.

"You're not going to die here," Regdar reassured the man. "You're under my command, and I don't remember giving you any such order."

"Lorec..." Jandik coughed out, "and Samoth..."

Regdar's fingers found the vial he was looking for and pulled it out of his pack with a jerk.

"I'll deal with them myself," Regdar joked darkly as he peeled the wax off the cork. "Now, I want you to drink this...all of it."

"No..." the tracker mumbled halfheartedly, wiping sleet, blood, and dust from his hair. "Don't waste that on—"

Regdar pushed the vial past the tracker's lips and smiled again as Jandik greedily drank the contents of the vial. When it was empty, Regdar gently drew it away from Jandik's mouth. The tracker leaned forward, trying to suck any last drop from the vial.

"Easy," Regdar said, "you got it all. It should just take a—"

He stopped when he heard something he thought was an armored footstep echo quietly from the dark space behind the ruined door.

"Did you hear that?" Naull whispered as Regdar stood.

Jandik coughed, wiped his lips on the back of a hand, and coughed again. The second time, no blood came with it. The tracker took a deep breath.

Regdar put up a hand for silence and the group of survivors obeyed. As he waited for the sound to come again, Regdar scanned the corpse of Watch Sergeant Lorec, doing his best to see the ruined body of one of his men in terms of resources rather than emotion. His eyes settled on the sergeant's sword just when the sound came again. There was no mistaking it that time.

Regdar held his greatsword in one hand as he bent to retrieve the dead sergeant's shining, polished long sword. It was probably an heirloom, and Regdar quickly, silently promised himself to return it to the sergeant's family, but he had use of it first.

"Something's moving in there," Regdar whispered to the others, who had gathered behind him.

He flipped the long sword over in his grip and held it out, pommel-first, to Lem, the next in line among the watchmen. Lem took the sword, admiring its gleaming blade.

"I can't take this," Lem whispered. "This is magical, or I'm a son of a naga."

"Shut up and use it," Regdar replied, putting both hands on his own greatsword. "Stay right behind me. Whatever is in there, I want you to kill it. Understood?"

Lem nodded, then exchanged a worried glance with Asil and Drahir.

"Drahir," Regdar continued, "get up here with that lantern. Stand just behind Lem. Naull, I need you behind Drahir. Asil, stay back with Jandik and keep an eye on our exit."

"I'm fine," the tracker said as he staggered to his feet, leaning against the wall and wincing with pain. "That potion did the trick."

Regdar was about to protest when the sound of a pile of rocks shifting—it could only be that—echoed from the space behind the door. He knew the time for planning and talking was over, and he stepped across the threshold into darkness.

 

 

"Go on, fools," Vargussel murmured to the image in his mind. "Let the little one serve some function after all."

The parchment and the spell cast on it had been a ruse—simple but effective. It hadn't managed to kill Regdar but it was succeeding in its second mission: drawing intruders down the wrong path.

Vargussel watched Regdar slip into the shadows. The mage rubbed his hands together nervously in anticipation of the moment when—

The lord constable sank into a fighting stance and called out, Engaged!—whatever that meant.

The dread guard stepped up over a pile of rubble—stone, bricks, and wood piled three feet high—where one of the walls had collapsed, decades gone by. Regdar stood in a corridor that ran the length of the west end of the slaughterhouse's basement. To the lord constable's right was the ruin of two rooms that once served as storage but had come to be the watchpost of Vargussel's earlier effort in the creation of a magical construct.

The dread guard had cost Vargussel dearly at the time, but it proved too stupid, too slow, and too weak for his greater purposes. It could never wield the death ray but it could pick off unwary intruders.

Regdar easily deflected the dread guard's first attack but the construct fought on. It had no other choice, no survival instinct, no independent mind.

Vargussel sat back and watched.

 

 

Naull could see the man who attacked Regdar but couldn't see his face. He was wearing a rusted but once grand suit of banded armor and an elaborately plumed helm with a visor that covered the whole of his face. The broadsword with which he deftly parried Regdar's bigger blade was undoubtedly enchanted.

The man was shorter than Regdar by a hand or more, and though the armor was heavy, Naull couldn't imagine the dark, rusted knight making the booming footsteps Regdar and other witnesses had described. Still, she'd learned not to judge a book by its cover, and she knew well enough that though he looked like a normal man, he could still be strong enough to flip over the bed. The holes in the floor had been carved with magic, and the young aristocrats had been killed magically as well.

Naull brought to mind a simple spell that she hoped might end things quickly. In the cramped, tumbledown space, Regdar was slashing at the knight with his greatsword, keeping Lem and the others back. Jandik looked like he was itching to fight but his wounds were still too painful, and he had trouble just keeping on his feet. From the others Naull could sense the same palpable feeling of relief that she was experiencing herself. They'd found their murderer and he was a man in armor, not a monster, not a godlike steel demon from some sewer-reeking hell.

Naull cast the spell, focusing all of its energy at the dark knight. She fully expected him to crumple to the rubble-strewn floor at Regdar's feet, fast asleep, but the armored warrior didn't oblige. To Naull it seemed as if the spell had passed right through the strange man as if he wasn't even there.

There could be any number of reasons for that, she told herself, but still….

She felt that sense of relief and hope quickly fading back to anxiety and panic.

 

 

Regdar banged another of the strange knight's attacks away while stepping back and to the left. He'd taken the measure of his opponent and found the dark knight strong and insistent, brave and relentless—but slow and predictable. He expected the knight to slash high at his throat with a cross-chest backhand, and that's just what the mysterious man did.

Rather than wave his own sword in front of himself to parry the slash, Regdar crouched and let the blow pass just over the top of his head. The dark knight was momentarily unbalanced with most of his weight on his right foot and his left foot almost off the floor.

Regdar let himself fall back on his rear as he kicked out with his right foot, slamming it hard into the inside of the dark knight's right knee.

The stranger's right knee emitted a loud snap and collapsed, sending him sprawling in a clatter of steel onto the top of the rubble pile. Regdar was surprised that the man didn't grunt, cry out, or make any sound at all either when his knee was dislocated or when he fell facefirst onto a pile of sharp stones and splintered wood. The dark knight's helmet popped loose when his neck snapped at the end of the fall and before Regdar could spin up to his feet, the knight was already standing, even though he was missing a head.

The helm rolled off the pile of rubble and came to rest against Regdar's foot but it was empty. In front of Regdar stood the knight, his weight on his undamaged left leg, his sword swinging into a guard position, and just an empty space where his head should have been.

It was no man, Regdar realized, but a suit of armor come independently to life.

The armor hacked down with its broadsword and Regdar bashed the blade away so hard the broadsword whirled out of the animated gauntlet and clattered against the ceiling before sliding to a stop behind the pile of rubble.

The animated armor turned at the shoulders, as if it still had eyes or even a head to house them, and looked for its sword. Regdar chopped into its pauldron. The force of the blow drove the armor suit down to the rubble.

It reached out a hand for Regdar's throat but the lord constable jerked back, freeing his sword from the twisted metal of the thing's shoulder, then punched through with the point of his greatsword into the thing's breastplate. The wide, heavy blade sank into the space where the dark knight's heart should have been, and the armor twitched in response, then fell still.

Regdar withdrew his blade with a tooth-rattling shriek of steel on steel and stood ready for several heartbeats until he was satisfied that the thing wasn't going to get back up.

"Drahir," Regdar called back over his shoulder, "take its sword."

 

 

Vargussel was beginning to get nervous. The intruders had dealt with the dread guard too easily. He'd hoped it would kill at least one of the watchmen but Regdar hadn't even given them a chance to fight. The young mage had wasted a spell on it, at least, and Vargussel could take that as a minor victory, but overall the construct that had cost him forty thousand gold Merchants had hardly even frightened them.

"Think you killed it, Lord Constable," Vargussel hoped aloud. "Think that's what came for you in your bedchamber."

If Regdar was stupid enough to think that the dread guard was the assassin they were looking for, they might take their wounded and their assumed victory and go home.

This wasn't it, Regdar said to his men.

Vargussel hissed out an exasperated sigh.

"You may be suffering from late-onset intelligence, Lord Constable," he said to the image of Regdar, "but you've a long way to go before you get to me, and I've been smarter than you for a long time."

Grinding his teeth, Vargussel watched in silence as one of the watchmen retrieved the broadsword that alone had cost him nearly nine thousand Merchants. Regdar gathered his party around him, leaving his two wounded men in the anteroom, and pressed on.

The mage watched as they explored the ruined wing of the basement. They found the stairs leading up to the ground floor that had caved in and been blocked for decades. He watched them run through their elaborate rituals of listening, touching, feeling, thinking, and pondering at the first of two intact doors. Finally Regdar just kicked it in and Vargussel had to tap his fingers waiting for them to satisfy themselves that the room beyond was indeed empty.

They did the same for the second door, and Vargussel found himself yawning. They found the old stairs behind the second door blocked by another cave-in. They wouldn't get down to the killing floor that way.

"You'll have to come in the front door," the mage whispered, "just as planned."

Vargussel briefly wished for the confidence to laugh maniacally but instead he just set his chin on his hands and watched.

 

 

They regrouped in the anteroom, all eyes on Regdar, and Naull took a deep breath.

"What we encountered in the inn," Regdar said, "and what was described by witnesses was much bigger, much stronger than that suit of ghost armor."

"Dread guard," Naull said.

Regdar looked at her and she felt herself blush but didn't know why.

"It's a magical construct," she said. "Powerful mages use them as guards."

" 'Powerful' mages?" said Jandik, who could stand without leaning on the wall, though he still kept one hand pressed to his bruised midsection. "How powerful?"

Naull shrugged and said, "I'm not sure how to answer that. Its not as if there's a scale that assigns someone a number so you can immediately know the extent of his abilities."

"On a scale of one to ten," Regdar offered with a wink.

Naull shrugged again, and said, "Fifteen?"

The watchmen visibly sagged.

"Great," Asil whispered. "That's just great."

"You think someone's building these things and sending them out to kill people?" Regdar asked.

Naull shrugged a third time and said, "I have no idea. All we can know for certain is that the dread guard was built by someone and left in there with instructions to attack. The parchment with the explosive runes was put on the door by an equally skilled wizard. I don't know how long they sat there, but now that we're here, it seems they weren't guarding much of anything."

"And the dread guard, as you call it," Regdar added, "is smaller than what we're looking for."

Jandik took a deep breath and said, "It was a decoy."

Regdar nodded. Lem, Asil, and Drahir each took a step back. If Naull didn't know any better, she thought it looked like they were ready to run. She realized then that she didn't actually know better and they might be.

"There's only one other way out," Jandik continued.

All eyes were drawn to the door Naull and Regdar had been about to open when the parchment exploded.

Regdar, his greatsword still in his left hand, strode to the door in question and stopped within arm's reach of it. He glanced back and Jandik limped forward, holding a lantern. Lem and Drahir followed with their new magic swords, if a bit reluctantly. Asil staggered to Jandik's side and they ended up leaning on each other.

Naull ran through the spells she still had at her command. As if on cue Regdar asked, "Can you open this door like you did the one from the stairs?"

She had cast that spell and would need time before being able to cast it again.

"No," she said. "If it's locked the same way, you'll have to break it down."

"Anything on the other side," Jandik warned, "will know we're coming."

"There was an explosion in here that killed two men," Lem said.

"Yeah," Drahir added, "and some kind of snow storm."

"It was rain," Asil corrected.

"Actually," Naull said, "it was sleet."

The watchmen nodded and Regdar sighed.

'"Whatever's behind that door," the lord constable said, "already knows we're here."

Everyone but Regdar went pale.

Regdar, greatsword still in one hand, kicked the door and kicked it hard. It didn't open but Naull heard the wood crack at least a little. She knew enough about the magic that was likely holding the door closed to realize that it would be hard, but Regdar could eventually kick it in.

The lord constable sighed and gave the door a second kick. Jandik held up his lantern in a hand shaking from fear, pain, and loss of blood. The effect was a flickering light that sent shadows twitching across the walls. Naull's hair stood on end. Lem and Drahir held their swords up and ready, their own shaking hands sending flashes of reflected light flickering across their enchanted blades.

Regdar kicked the door again, and there was a louder crack. One side of the door was bent outward, the wood cracking around the iron bands.

One more kick and the door broke inward with an echoing crash. Regdar shifted his greatsword into a two-hand grip and swung the blade over his head as he stepped boldly through the door.

Naull closed her eyes, tense, waiting for the sound of steel on steel or of another explosion, or the roar of some fell beast, but none of those things came.

"Come in behind me and watch your step," Regdar said. "There's something strange in here."

 

 

Vargussel absentmindedly rolled a piece of parchment between his fingers until he'd made a long, thin tube of it.

They're in, he thought.

His mind descended into a flurry of unspoken curses, many of which he was embarrassed for even thinking.

They had broken through the door into the slaughterhouse and were steps from his laboratory. What was worse, the damnable woman had set them thinking along a course that brought them closer to the truth than they knew. Yes, someone had built the dread guard, and yes it was a decoy, and yes whoever it was was a powerful wizard, and yes that powerful wizard had built it with the express purpose of killing certain young suitors for the hand of fair Maelani. That last bit might have been a piece of the puzzle still missing for them but still they were farther along than Vargussel would have liked.

Regdar stepped through the door ready for anything but there was nothing there yet. He stood on a wooden platform twenty feet above the killing floor. The platform was built against the southwest wall of the huge room, and there was a flight of wooden stairs that emptied onto the killing floor itself.

Regdar couldn't see the stairs and neither could Vargussel. The steps were cloaked in a thick, roiling gray mist—a fog of Vargussel's own creation.

The mage watched Regdar scan the room. He saw the lord constable's eyes linger on the twisting fences that once led streams of cattle to their doom. He saw his rival's eyes trace the path of the steel tracks on the ceiling from which dangled chains on the ends of which were rusty meat hooks, their grisly loads long since gone.

The far side of the large space was shrouded in gray fog that reached halfway up the high walls and was placed just so to conceal Vargussel's laboratory along with his mightiest creation.

Come in behind me and watch your step, Regdar said to his charges. There's something strange in here.

The others wandered in behind him, and Vargussel was pleased to see the masks of fear on all their faces. The wounded tracker was having difficulty walking despite Regdar's healing potion and was relegated to holding a lantern. The other wounded watchman stood arm-in-arm with the tracker, and they helped each other along.

They were the first to follow Regdar onto the platform, and Vargussel sat up, holding his breath in anticipation. The wounded tracker spotted the low railing on the north end of the platform and steered his companion toward it, obviously hoping to rest their weight against it. They made it two steps before the whole north half of the platform gave way.

Vargussel laughed, and when he clapped his hands, the rolled bit of parchment he'd been fiddling with wafted to the floor. The wounded men fell in a cloud of dust and rotten wood, twenty feet to the killing floor. Regdar backed up a step, regaining his own balance and leaning up against the south wall. The young woman poked her head through the door and said, What happened?

The floor collapsed, Regdar told her.

The exchange demonstrated everything Vargussel thought was wrong with the fools. Obviously the floor had collapsed.

The lord constable looked in the direction of the stairs, eyeing the fog with reasonable suspicion.

Looks like stairs over here, he said to the woman, again mastering the obvious.

I don't like that fog at all, one of the watchmen said from the safety of the anteroom.

Regdar looked at the stairs again and stepped away from the wall.

Neither do I, the lord constable said, but he went to the top of the stairs anyway and stepped into the fog.

"Go ahead," Vargussel whispered, placing the palm of his right hand over the amulet that controlled the shield guardian.

The mage sent a portion of his thoughts into the amulet, through the link, and to the construct. Now, he sent. They come.