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Shoulder muscles on fire, Breia slipped through the opening. The Golem turned its eyes on her. She did not look at it, nor at the crumpled indigo heap beside it. Terrano lay still beside the empty chest.
“Tee!” The scream hurt her throat. He opened his eyes and lifted his head. Blood ran from his temple, but he managed a crooked smile. Relief weakened her limbs. “Can you move?” He bared his teeth and sat up, swiping blood from his eyes with his sleeve. The Golem growled, a sound between a belch and a drain. Wrapping the mantle tightly about him, Terrano braced his back against the wall and pushed himself to his feet. The Golem’s hand extended toward him, brushed the mantle. Terrano turned his shoulder, and the enormous fingers slid from his back. Astonished, Breia heard a faint hiss, smelled the stench of burning flesh.
The Golem howled, snatched its hand back, and lowered its repulsive head. Terrano half-slid, half-stumbled along the wall toward Breia. Just before he reached her, a gobbet of green expectorate jetted from the Golem’s mouth, coating Terrano from shoulders to hips. In the same instant that Breia grabbed Terrano’s wrist, the Golem’s hand closed around the slimed mantle.
Terrano choked. A phlegmy chuckle gurgled in the Golem’s throat. It pulled Terrano toward the fissure. Terrano tried to prize Breia’s fingers from his wrist, but she would not let him go. His face darkened. The Golem’s grip squeezed the breath from him, and Breia was drawn along with him, her boots sliding on the stone. In sudden inspiration, she leaped forward and released the clasp of the mantle.
The garment slid from Terrano like a shed snakeskin. He heaved in a great breath and tumbled forward. Confused for a moment, the Golem stared at the smoking mantle in its hand. Long enough for Breia to drag Terrano the last few feet to the door. She pushed him through the gap and threw herself out, landing on top of him in an inelegant tumble of arms and legs. He groaned and lay still, apart from the heaving of his chest. Gray-green fingers scrabbled at the doorway.
Breia rolled off and lay beside him, regaining her own breath. She turned her head and looked at him. His eyes were closed, his face bloodied and bruised. “It can’t get any farther out without killing one of us, right?”
“Not one inch,” he breathed. “Without us, it’ll be long gone before morning. Returned to the depths it came from.”
Breia nodded. She rolled over and stood. Setting her shoulder to the door, she pushed it closed and latched it. “And now?” she asked, dropping to her knees in the mud beside him.
He opened his eyes and licked blood from a split lip. “You mantled me.” His tone was incredulous.
“And I released you from it.” She shrugged and looked away, out toward the peaceful village. “Think nothing of it, Tee. It protected you. That’s enough.” His attitude stung her. Delayed reaction to the evening’s events rose in her chest. Tagrin and four comrades, lost to the Golem. Tears prickled her eyes.
Mud squelched beside her. Terrano sat up with a soft gasp of pain. His shoulder rested warm against hers. “I owe you, Princess. A new mantle, among other things.” He turned her face toward him, his fingers gentle beneath her chin. “And if you should choose to employ it as you did your last, that’s well enough with me.” His arm came around her shoulders.
Exhausted and sad, kneeling in cold mud beneath the stars of early spring, Breia turned and embraced the man who called her beautiful.
WHILE HORSE AND HERO FELL by Sarah A. Hoyt
Sarah A. Hoyt lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons, and a multitude of cats. She’s the author of a Shakespearean fantasy trilogy (Ill Met By Moonlight, All Night Awake, Any Man So Daring). She’s currently working on a couple of projects. Her mystery series featuring the Three Musketeers (written as Sarah D’Almeida) will debut November 2006 with Death Of A Musketeer.
I WAS A COMPUTER nerd, and she was the world’s most beautiful witch. She was in bad trouble, and I had to save her.
Which did not really explain why I was crawling on my belly along the second floor of the headquarters of the Magical Legion. Nor did it explain the mackarov in my hands, the Glock in my underarm holster, and the two tempered blades on ankle holders.
I was not a man of action. All right, I was-through a series of mistakes-a member of the Magical Legion. But my job was to sort, file, and enter into the computer four hundred years’ worth of records on legionaries, on operations, and on supernatural outbreaks combatted without ever disturbing the normal world.
I did not go out into battle, I did not throw hexes, I would not know how to weave a spell, and I had absolutely no power with which to power a jinx.
What I did have was the gun butt growing warm in my hands and an intimate knowledge of the layout of headquarters. It wasn’t as easy as it might seem, since the thaumaturgically expanded space co
I was crawling on my belly because I knew-from diagrams and records I’d entered-that the magical sensors started at knee level and went all the way to the ceiling. They would give an alarm at my unauthorized entry. And then they would activate spells to make me into a pile of steaming cinders. But the floor couldn’t be activated because that would make the joined spaces fall apart.
I wriggled down the hallway co
The Madrid warehouse had been divided with the sort of partition used to make multiple cubes out of vast offices. The only light came from above, from skylights set into what looked like a corrugated tin ceiling. In the middle was an empty area, which was set up exactly the same as the hallway back in Denver. Sensors at ankle level and above. I crept on my belly and counted the doors set into the openings of the cube.
Three, four, five. The sixth belonged to Lyon Zaragoza, the greatest invoker in the Legion. The man I needed. The man who-whether he knew it or not, was going to help me.
I took a deep breath. There would be no sensors on the door or the wall opposite. Just in case a magician woke up, sleep befogged and forgot to turn on his own personal protection before opening the door. If he were so crazy as to take a step down the hallway like that, then he would die. But there was no reason to thin the perso
The narrow space in front of the door being safe, I pulled all of myself into it, till I was kneeling in front of the door. Most mages were paranoid enough that they had their own personal alarms in this area-ethereal eyes roving above and watching for intruders, ears that amplified every sound, or simply a floor hex that rang of intrusion.
So it had to be done quickly. I’d dressed carefully, for quick movements, in loose black sweat pants and a black T-shirt. The elastic fabric molded to me as I jumped and, in a smooth movement, kicked the door open. I didn’t hear any alarms, but then I wouldn’t. The alarm would be tuned for Lyon Zaragoza’s ears only.
I don’t know if that’s what woke him or the sound I made as I slammed the door open. But he sat up in bed, with a springlike motion, as I entered his room. And I had my gun out and pointed at him.
He’d made his room cozy by moving it to another time and another continent. Once through the door, I was in an all-stone cell, from which the rounded window of a medieval building opened onto endless fields and vineyards in gently rolling hills. I glanced at it and had a hard time not staring at the pastoral scene in the moonlight. There was no way in hell that was anywhere in the world in the twenty-first century. Damn it, they weren’t supposed to do that. I’d read-and archived-the regulations about time travel. Strictly forbidden. Almost as forbidden as making your fellow legionaries practice their magic at gunpoint.