The Warden

Chapter 17

The man's neck snapped satisfyingly as Charlan twisted his head sharply. She let his limp form fall from her hands. All about her soldiers and wights went about the delightful task of dispensing death.

Shafts of light came through the cracks in the floorboards above seemingly made solid from the motes that filled the basement. Great oak barrels of varying sizes occupied the corners and lined the walls, stacked atop each other. A typical tavern cellar. Far longer than it was wide, the room stretched past the beams from above and delved into the earth itself, its full dimensions masked by the lowlight.

Post-Waning architecture, how queer, Charlan thought. She grimaced as though tasting something foul, but still moved forward to continue her delicious task.

Though she may have been born some fourteen hundred years after the Waning had begun and had therefore grown up knowing the two starkly different styles, she still preferred the Pre-Waning edifices. Their seamlessness and congruency bespoke power and precision. The epitome of control. Post-Waning buildings, with their beams and boards, their plaster and pitches, their crooks and crannies, revealed and amplified imperfection. An utter lack of control.

Before the first mages had propagated the lie that only the select, the very elect as it were, could affect Works, cities, buildings, or any other structures had been Works, Greater and Lesser. The capital had been sculpted out of rock as individuals had willed their lifelight to reorganize their surroundings according to their desires. Most knew that places such as the capital or Hyrbn were old, but few but dedicated scholars or the mages themselves knew that those magnificent cities, so perfectly blended with their surroundings, had arisen millennia in the past.

Noble families such as the Domraes could afford to have a mage or a team of mages come and construct new structures. Those not of their station or circumstances had to make do with what resources they could, so they resorted to mortar and pegs and their paltry results.

Charlan dropped another dead man from her grip, having drained him dry of his lifelight. She had issued a general order to the wights who had accompanied her not to feed, but she as well as the other four had taken a sip here, a gulp there. In the frenzy of slaughter, neither she or any of the other Night Wights had very coherent thoughts as the ecstatic deed of death intoxicated their faculties as they went to their work with gleeful abandon. Surely, no harm would come from a little indulgence. One had to feed when one could.

Screams fled out from the gloom.

Night Wights had never marred the tranquility of the port city of Hana in all the four hundred years that they had terrorized the continent. Due to this seeming exemption, the residents had grown more than a little lax. They still took precautions to secure themselves, their livelihoods, and their families from wights, but nowhere near what other regions of Haimlant did. In the northwest, in the Forest Lord's domain of Haero, the rabble practically considered the observance of those customs and rituals nigh unto a religion. The failure of underlings and children in their adherence earned more than a severe look. The smugglers that the soldiers restrained and the wights decimated now learned the hard way why such strenuous precautions were necessary.

Searching out those concealed criminals in the obscure, yeast-soured air was not difficult. The wisest of the bunch had retreated as soon as the cry of night wight had arisen. Most now cowered behind barrels or crates, hoping to go unnoticed. Unfortunately for the smugglers, where human eyes failed, night wight eyes did not. That cavernous section, open to Charlan's eyes despite the lighting, stretched barely a dozen paces beyond the upper room's limits. Even if she closed her eyes, her mindeye clearly made out each person's lifelight, trembling like flames in the wind.

Much too easy, Charlan thought.

She tore down one of the aisles that the stacked goods formed. From the darkness, two bolts twanged from crossbows a second apart. As they hissed passed her person, Charlan pirouetted and snatched the projectiles out of the air as casually as one would take the next step in a dance. Coming out of her spin, aided by the added momentum, she launched the shafts back at the shooters. One cracked into a crate just in front of one. The other took a woman square in the forehead. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she fell without a whimper, her crossbow clattering from her grip. Her companion tossed aside his own crossbow to rip a behemoth of a knife from its sheath. Its tip wavered unsteadily in the air before him.