by Heath Hudson

“Open the door man, it’s me.” the familiar voice of Will said through the small iron slit. Peel sighed shaking his head as he looked into Will’s reddened eyes.

“What are you doing man,” Peel said. “Your supposed to be on patrol. Can’t you do even that without fucking it up? You can’t get demoted much further man.”

“Just open the door dammit” Will replied. “It’s cold out here. I just need a few minutes to get warm and I’ll go back to paroling the grounds.”

“You really are useless.” Peel replied throwing the bolt to close the slit, and with a heavy sigh, opened the bolt which had held the big iron door secure into the stone wall. “They are going to find out… again, and you are going to end up pealing dods or cleaning latrines… again.” Peel pulled open the heavy door as he said. “I’ll be lucky if I’m not right there beside you.”

“Then lucky you shall be.” A shadow slipped through the door so quickly he couldn’t see who it was. Peel whirled in place his hand dropping to the close-combat knife on his belt, but a sudden pressure against his upper abdomen stole the strength from his entire body, and the breath from his lungs. He looked down to see the hilt of a knife handle buried there and what little strength he had left fled at the sight of it. Peel fell against the wall behind the door, his back smacking against the cold dark stone as his knees shook with the effort of holding him there. For several seconds he leaned, thinking about trying again for his combat knife, then his strength waned even further and he slid down the wall to sit against it on the floor.

Peel watched as the shadow pulled Will’s body through the doorway and silently closed it, then the stranger leaned Will against the wall right next to Peel. Will’s head lulled to the side and Peel found himself staring into his comrades dead eyes. Comrade, how odd to think of Will as a comrade, Peel had always hated Will. Peel closed his eyes, and tried to catch his breath, but the cold steel piercing his lungs prevented it, he felt his limbs go slack, and the cold shadow of death pulling at the edges of his very being. There was surprisingly little pain, he thought, and it was his last.

* * *

Corvin Fel let the soldier go fully still before he pulled free the blade which had taken his life, he wanted to be sure that no last breath, death rattle would escape him once his lungs were free to struggle for air again. With his lung punctured, it should be impossible, but Corvin had seen it happen before. He wiped the short, thick blade on the soldier’s uniform before tucking it into the sheath strapped to his chest.

As he rose up from the two dead soldiers, Corvin withdrew the one-handed caster from its holster at his waist, then thumped it in a tight fist against his chest. The air shimmered around him suddenly as tiny wisps of glowing, red light from beneath his combat vest signaled the activation of the spell form tattooed there. The shimmer seemed to fold around him, as though the air had come alive and was trying to constrict the life from him. It crawled over ever inch of his body, the folds and waves of distortion, like heat rising up from paving stones on a hot summer’s day. In three heartbeats it covered him completely, then the distorted edges showing the shape of his being gave one last ripple, and then vanished.

Corvin’s footfalls were the only sign of his passing, and those he took very carefully as he walked through the halls unseen. The remote entrance he had come through was in a distant, mostly unused section of the fortress, so it was a good long and careful walk before he began to see other soldiers. They, of course, did not see him as he passed. He followed soldiers on their rounds, always mindfully aware of their personal space and ready for any sudden changes in direction. The last thing he wanted was to bump into one of them. Each time a soldier he followed met another, he would change to follow the one with the higher rank. After a dozen or so switches and careful maneuvering through the maze-like network of tunnels and strange chambers, Corvin finally came to a huge security door, on the tail of the ranking officer in this section.

Under one arm, the lieutenant carried a file folder marked with stamps of secrecy and threats of court-martial for unauthorized viewing. Corvin was curious about the contents of the folder, but dismissed them, as they were not the primary reason for his infiltration of this strange facility. The soldier saluted the guards at the doorway and then proffered a small hard white square with tiny script printed on it. The soldiers guarding the huge iron doorway stepped forward and examined the white card carefully, then they saluted as well. One soldier then turned and gave a hand signal, visible to the guards on the inside through a small opening that was nearly two feet from one end to the other.

Whatever else they kept on the inside of this door, Corvin thought, they really wanted to protect it. After nearly a solid minute of a metal on stone grinding that produced a rumble that seemed to resonate up through his feet, Corvin watched the massive door swing aside. It exposed an entrance barely big enough to slip one man through, even after moving a bulk of cold steel that was as tall as five men, and thick as three. The lieutenant ducked his head as he slipped through, and in the half second that followed, Corvin holstered his caster and threw himself through the opening behind him, narrowly missing the lieutenant himself and two men on the other side of the door.

Silent and fast, Corvin was proud of himself and took a moment on the other side of the door to smooth the wrinkles from his combat fatigues, and to put a loose lock of his sandy brown hair back into place. He turned with a smile to find a half-dozen sets of eyes locked in shock upon his, mouths open, each belonging to a soldier who simply could not believe what he was seeing. Frowning, Corvin looked over his shoulder and down at the floor on this side of the door. There he saw a spell form for dispelling illusion carved into the floor in the careful script of the divine language.

“Well shit.” Corvin said with a sigh.

“D… do… DON’T MOVE!” a soldier finally found his voice and screamed his command as he drew a caster from his hip and pointed it at Corvin. The other soldiers seemed to recover from their own shock from seeing a stranger simply appear as he darted through the security door. The rest of the soldiers drew their swords and knives and at least one other had a two-hand caster as well.

Corvin drew the caster and focused his mind on the two targets. He swung his arm wide and fast in an arc that passed both firing points and, at his mental command, the caster thrummed almost silently. In the spell reservoir, two prepared scrolls, rolled into tight cylinders, silently burned to ash at almost the same instant. The tiny script on the casters short length glowed red and the two spells chosen were flung to targets that Corvin had mentally selected.

Only a tiny flair of violet light haloed around the heads of both his targets before vanishing. The Lieutenant and one of the door guards each with a caster of their own, never saw the light. Their eyes had gone wide, and then dim before being able to perceive the caster discharge. Even as the light was fading, they were already dead and sinking to the floor.

The entire attack had taken only half a second, and before the two dead soldiers hit the ground, Corvin had holstered his caster and drew a long sword. The two-inch wide blade glinted in the dim light, it’s blunt, flat tip pointed toward the remaining soldiers, held at its full length at the end of his extended arm. In his other hand, tucked behind his back, a long curved knife was held at the ready.

“Kill him!” A soldier screamed as he tightened up his grip on his own sword and scrambled over a small desk to get at Corvin. Although the solider never cleared the desk alive, his comrades were shocked to action by his scream. They were forming up on all sides, tilting their arms back and preparing for various thrusts of blade even as their leader was cut in half in a spray of red mist and tumbled in two parts on both sides of the desk he had tried to jump over.

Corvin shifted his stance as several jabs and slashes came at him at once from different directions. He caught one on the long knife, which appeared from behind his back, side-stepped another, then parried and counter attacked on the last. With a twist he pushed the sword down to the ground with his own, then put a foot over the enemies sword pinning it to the ground while his blade whistled up and clove the head of his adversary. The chin-strap of his helmet let go and it split in two as a thin line of red blood appeared running down the middle of his face. Corvin was already parrying a second stroke from another sword and slipping free of an attempt to grapple him by a third soldier.

The man’s empty arms were left to grip a wide belly wound that Corvin’s knife left in his abdomen in his passing. He sank to his knees even as the soldier with the split head hit the ground next to him. A third man joined them, with no head at all as Corvin took it smoothly from his shoulders and slid around to put the three dying men at his back.

The last two soldiers in the room exchanged glances and swallowed hard. They knew they were outmatched, and they were afraid… but they were not cowards. The one on Corvin’s left lunged at him, while the one on his right ran in the opposite direction. Corvin sidestepped the attack and clipped the man’s throat with his knife as he passed in an attempt to run down the last man. The soldier fell in a bloody heap, hitting the ground just as Corvin leaped over a table and intercepted the man behind it, driving his blade deep in the man’s back and pinning him to the wall. It was, unfortunately, too late to stop the dead mans hand from falling across the spellform alarm trigger.

“Son of a bitch.” Corvin sighed as he sheathed his bloody blades. Alarm klaxons of deep booming rumbles shook the very ground and echoed down the hallways. He could hear boots running on the hard, cold, stone floors in rooms not far away. He could hear swords being drawn and orders being shouted. Corvin calmly picked up a long-barreled caster which the door guard had leveled against him earlier, and checked the spell reservoir. The tight scrolls inside were pinned with tiny red rings, marking them as incendiary.

They were not the quiet energy-suppression scrolls he preferred to use, but stealth was no longer a factor here, and the louder, more powerful scrolls would serve him better. Corvin Fel tightened his grip upon the long-barreled caster and trained it on the only other door in the room, besides the one he had come through. He could hear them coming, shouting orders, lining up in the hallway beyond, casters to shoulders and ready to slaughter their enemies. Corvin smiled as the door finally burst open.

* * *

Half an hour later, an iron doorway opened, plumes of smoke billowing outward, and Corvin Fel emerged, a cloth tied over the lower half of his face. Coughing, he pulled it free and took long drags of fresh air. He was covered from head to toe in other people’s blood, a few bits of unidentified fleshy blobs clinging to the straps that crisscrossed his body and dangling from the ends of the cloak that hung from his back.

He took a long, deep breath of fresh air after he had coughed his lungs free, then leaned against the cold stone wall. With his head tilted back he sighed contentedly, then looked down at the bundle in his right hand. A scrap of cloth was gripped there, a manicured corner woven of intricate symbols in the divine language giving way to ripped jagged edges. It glowed faintly and sparkled as the metal ribbons within glinted in the moonlight.

“I have it.” Corvin whispered into a small black box that he pulled from a pouch on his combat vest. “Tell Eretasi that I am on my way back.” He then twisted the box along its flat axis, changing the spell form inside it as he did so, from broadcast to receive then tucked it back into his vest.

He took a small, black stick from a pack of others like it from a different pouch, put one end in his mouth, then snapped his fingers over the other end. It caught fire, and he drew air through the stick, heating its tip to a brilliant glowing cherry as he drew deeply. He sighed again, a swirl of thick smoke swimming around his head, and smiled.

“I love my job.” Corvin Fel stated to himself. Then pulled away from the wall and began the long trek back to his master.