Pertuli.

"Don't die," Ivy said, and her voice held a distinct note of irritation.

My brows furrowed. Why irritated? Perhaps her hurts were worse than confessed. Still, her advice was sound, so I hefted my sword and resolved to follow it.

She hastened toward the Inner Harbor, lean and fierce as only a wild-eyed tilwenna in spiky leather armor can be. If she could rally her villainous friends, so much the better.

Elders, keep Ivy safe. There was no telling how many monsters Perinor set loose. Thank Terrok that blackguard is dead, and Ivy can see to her own safety.

I shook off concern and started after Rip. His radiance glowed in the distance, moving at surprising speed and difficult to follow around the obstacles between us.

I poured on as much speed as I could manage in fashionably heeled boots, holding my sword's pommel down so its sheath would not slap against my legs. He turned down an alley near the market, and I raced hard to cover the distance.

That reptilian celerity is going to take him into trouble without me!

I rounded the corner and narrowly avoided a keening woman and her escort. They rushed past, and I cursed them both silently, but my heart wasn't in it. They were mere victims of the evening's carnage, if a bit tardy to withdraw.

I slowed to a jog, then to a walk. I had lost Riposte entirely. At the end of the alley, I condescended to deduction.

"If I were an immense, amputee horror, freshly hatched and with no thought but carnage," I reasoned aloud, "where would I run?"

I looked to my right. In the distance flashes of green fire showed signs that at least one wizard yet lived. There would possibly be tempting victims in the marketplace, I thought, and juicy radiance casters to devour. I looked to the left, and saw only darkness punctuated by amber streetlights. Alternately, I might go somewhere quiet to lick my wounds. Each enchanted light was surrounded by a peaceful nimbus of daytide radiance, a ward against night.

"I don't know my enemy well enough," I grumbled. Were I following Rip alone, the conundrum would solve itself—the nearest tavern could be found on the edge of Connor Square—but that was not the case.

I started toward the market. There, evidence suggested, at least one weresaur would be found, and where there was trouble, Riposte Clasicant was quite often in its midst.

The wizard had been busy.

The fire among the Connor Square stalls and wagons had been extinguished by a sudden, localized hail storm. Much of the square was paved by a sweating sheet of ice, and drifts of hailstones as large as pigeon eggs piled high in the affected corners.

I encountered three weresaurs, encased in solid ice.

I snatched my sword free, moonlight gleaming down its polished length. The wizard responsible may have immobilized the creatures, but I didn't trust them to stay dead once thawed. I departed only once black smoke sputtered from each cold-blooded statue out of a hole where I judged its reptilian heart to be.

Assuming Rip had tracked down his lizard, and including the one we slew outside the Orluz estate, we now could account for five of the monsters.

"This place," Rip had said when we had discovered the empty torture chamber earlier, "was full of 'subjects' last night. At least twenty of them." That meant there were at least fifteen more, somewhere.

A short tilwenna in tattered silks stumbled toward me, barefoot on the slippery ice and clearly in shock and unsure of her surroundings. Her clothes had been fine, once, but were now so badly damaged by soot and gore it was impossible to tell what kind of garment it had been, and of what color. Her radiance seemed wrong, somehow, like someone born with a talent for nighttide magic.

"Hello, miss?" I called, sliding to her side. "Are you hurt?" I approached respectfully, not wanting to startle her, but it was clear she was in desperate need of aid.

She turned slowly, as if lost in a dream. Long locks like dark honey hung in a matted mass of tangles that clung to her face. Dry tracks left in the gore on her cheeks showed where tears had run under dark, empty eyes until their reservoirs went dry.

I knew her, and recoiled.

"Cafilenniel?" I gasped. "Oh Elders, how...?"

"Pertuli?" she asked, a flicker of recognition sparking in the shadowy depths of her gaze.

"Yes! Cafi, it's me!" I cried, horrified at her condition and unsure what to do. Sweet Cafilenniel was one of the youngest tilwenna of House Ill'Enniniess in bloom, and her jubilant spirit was normally as irrepressible and bright as Spring itself.

I dropped my sword to take her into my arms, and the sound it made as it struck the cobblestones rang out like a bell. She cringed, holding her head as if haunted by visions she could not unsee. I rubbed her pale arms vigorously, trying to rouse her to the present. Wherever her mind had flown, it was a dark, evil place.

"Cafi—it's Pertuli," I pleaded. "Come back to me. Are you hurt?"

"Stand away, if you please, sir tilwen," a mild voice said to my right, the words colored by the rich, round accents of Kalibar. "She has contracted the curse, and is close to turning."

He was a tall man, with an active build and wearing the deep blue sar robes and turban of the desert people. His mustaches were long and white, hanging long in stark contrast over a short black beard. A clear stone glowing with reddish fire adorned a pin in his headdress, and in his hands he held ... the Staff of Drya!

This was no ordinary radiance user. The staff, a powerful weapon of the tilwen wizards, was infrequently bestowed on a human wizard for his or her lifetime as a reward for services rendered to the Forest of Light. Its winding length of polished, dark oak was relatively nondescript for a legendary artifact, but for the recognizable knob that twisted into two subtle horns at one end. Any human wielding the staff was to be honored not only as a tilwen brother but as hero of the people; near royalty.

"Please, my friend," he said again, pity in his expressive eyes. "You must move away."

"I cannot," I said, my throat dry. "She is an innocent."

Dear, playful, adorable Cafi ... not a decade past childhood. She had lived seventy years within the sheltering confines of the Ill'Enniniess Hall, protected, like our imps, as a national treasure. If there was anything in Terrok that deserved to be incorruptible, it was she.

I held her close. The wizard could not understand. Staff or no staff, he was only human. Humanity had many children.

"I will keep her safe," I told him, looking at her. "We will—must—find a cure. For all the afflicted." She met my eyes, and I was drawn unwillingly into their black depths, heart racing.

As if feeding on my concern, a pale mist rose about me. In moments, the insubstantial market square faded away, resolving into a field of uneven earth, trampled and transformed into mud by the movement of countless feet. Nothing grew in that soil any longer; the crimes committed there caused Terrok itself to turn away in grief.

The broken and shattered remains of my people lay all about me. Armored tilwen bodies littered the ground as if a great battle had been fought there and lost. Formations of Migarian heavy cavalry wheeled in the distance, while monstrous humanoids of every variety fed on the dead nearby.

Two ogres fought over a tilweni's remains, each snarling and pulling on a leg until the body wishboned messily for their greed. Tilwenii are a delicacy among some humanoids but they needn't have fought; there were plenty to go around.

Ape-like boobaks, those intelligent killers from the East, loped in scores across the battlefield. Here and there individuals paused to club a moaning tilweni into silence before moving on with their clan, pressing their invasion west. Like deformed men, armies of kobaloi marched on hoofed feet in time to the beat of war drums made from human skin.

"This is your fault," a female voice said behind me. I turned to face an imposing tilwenna in battered plate armor. Her face was purpling slowly from an awful bruise, and her hair was made black with the blood of her enemies. As I watched, her face decayed; the bruise spread and rotted like spoiled fruit, withering away from right to left until it was nothing more than the grinning stare of an angry skull

She pointed her sword at me and accused me again. "Shirker! Deserter! Yours was the potential of ages. The blood of royalty runs in your veins, but you choose to be nothing—less than nothing—while your people are slaughtered by the thousands in Migar."

"B-baroness?" I stammered. "I couldn't! I had to stay; had to care for—" I didn't even know. My empty words died away as her body dried, shrank, crumbled. Until her armor fell to the ground and the dust within blew away on the wind.

A concussive blast smacked me into the air, and sent the mist into spiraling trails behind me. My limbs flailed as I landed hard on cobblestones. Stars reemerged, and the wind, no longer filled with the charnel stench of corpses, was blowing steadily from the west once more.

"Cafi!"

The tilwenna twitched and thrashed against the smooth redstone wall of the Tubarr palazzo, perhaps fifteen paces away, body smoking.

"Are you hurt, sahwan?" the wizard called, moving with measured steps on sandaled feet toward me, but keeping his eyes and staff on the girl. "You were enchanted by her poisonous stare. Very close to turning, indeed."

Turning? Awareness returned to me in a rush. Though my skin was on fire, I answered his question with one of my own. "Master wizard, is there any way to save one of the cursed?"

"Until the spawn of Sethos emerge, the curse may be removed by a mignonite priest, if they know the spheres to oppose," the wizard informed me. "Any priest of Yenah can do this, but to my knowledge it is not a rite often performed by clerics of The One."

"Wonderful," I croaked, watching Cafilenniel writhe. "I do not suppose you are a priest in addition to being an adventurer?"

"I am not," he agreed. "Though I wish to save this woman's life, sahwan, I have only accounted for five of the cursed and I am told there are twenty eight in the city. My magic will not last forever, even aided by the Staff of Drya."

So Cafi is expendable? I thought bitterly. I considered telling him to go; to leave her in my care, but what would happen if she caught me with her eyes again? I would be powerless to protect myself. What would he do, I wondered, if he came across Riposte?

There was a flash of light near the wizard that made me jump, and it took me a moment to realize it hadn't come from the wizard himself. It had come from the taller wizard now standing next to him.

"Oh, perfect," I groaned.

"Greetings, Pertuli Ill'Enniniess," said Toldek of House Redfeather with a deep nod. His placid face held no hint of the storm crow he was. He was worse than Rip; wherever there was trouble in all the world, Toldek Redfeather was at its heart; and there was only ever circumstantial evidence that he was not at its root as well.

"Well met, Master Toldek," I appended, ducking my head slightly as well. Toldek had a way to make a tilwenor feel inferior, even without considering his great height or the clouds of radiance swirling about him. Humans couldn't see that radiance, but I suspected even they felt the personal power he exuded.

"Lord Rhemmiel," the tilwen wizard said, turning to his friend, "I suggest you travel to the palace, where King Roggarth's men might avail themselves of your talents."

"Very well," the Kalibarian answered, taking the tilwenor's request as a command. "Will you watch over the little one, there?"

"I fear she is beyond our help," Toldek said sadly. "Pertuli and I are capable of escorting her to Terrok."

"Wait, what?" I asked in alarm.

"Yes master," Rhemmiel answered, sparing me a sad glance. He thrust his arms out to the sides and uttered an unintelligible string of syllables in some arcane tongue. In response, his cloak flared out, rose over his back, and became a pair of immense eagle's wings. I saw it happen in the radiant spectrum, but the process left me mystified; magic was like that, sometimes.

Also, I was a little distracted.

"No!" I cried. "Toldek, do something!" I begged, catching hold of his tunic and pulling it toward Cafilenniel.

Toldek stilled me with a gesture. "I regret her loss, Pertuli," he said quietly, his face an emotionless mask. "But stopping this process is beyond my ability. Even tilwen lives come to an end."

I watched in horror as Cafi heaved, retching uncontrollably but producing nothing. It reminded me of the seizures Paolo Faranado suffered just before he ... changed.

"It isn't fair," I breathed. I tried to avert my eyes—the process was grueling, and violated Cafilenniel in unutterable ways—but part of me felt honor bound to stand vigil. "She is so young."

"Cafilenniel, daughter of Terristan Greenvine and Elfysta Berrythorn was Elfysta's second child," Toldek said. "Truly a blessing to the Berrythorn name. Her grandsire slew a wyvern in the Six Peaks more than four centuries ago, and single handedly stopped a kobalo raid in the buffer state of Owwum, among his many other adventures. While Cafilenniel lived she was a precious flower among Dragoskala's few tilwen children."

Cafi writhed in front of us, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My fingers clenched, my eyes dashed around for anything that might help. My tears started to fall, unheeded and irresistible. Toldek knew so much more about Cafi's family and name, that it shamed me to think that I knew her. Still, she was more than her lineage. She was my friend, and I felt honored to have known her.

Her mouth gaped as if she meant to scream, but no sound came. The emerging horror of the weresaur transformation allowed no expression of pain; no cries of regret or pleas for mercy. Cafi's mouth stretched; tore her cheeks down the sides as the first scales of the beast's snout emerged from her mouth.

"No, no, no, oh Elders, no." I wailed, doubling over in grief. Watching the girl split was worse than anything her fearsome gaze had shown me.

"Pertuli," Toldek said gently next to me, his hand on my shoulder. "Don't you think it's time to pick up your sword?"

I tore my eyes away to find the pace-long blade of silver, halfway between me and the monster that was tearing poor Cafilenniel apart. My breath caught as if I had seen a viper.

Could I do that? Be the hand that beat the monster to its prey and end her suffering? How could I not?

"Sometimes," Toldek said solemnly, "we do the duty required of us, not because it is expected but because in the end, there is no choice."

"You do it!" I rounded on him, shouting. "You're the wizard, here. You're almost an elder yourself. You're the one beyond emotion and temporal concerns ... you put her out of her misery!" My voice cracked and at the end my accusations were more begging than vehemence.

I wasn't a killer. Or a mage, or a hero... I was just me, Pertuli. Clever, selfish, care-free Pertuli of the most ridiculed noble house in all Dollif. Tilwen didn't play in human politics; it was beneath us. It was unfair that Cafi should be caught up in some sparking human plot, and it certainly wasn't fair that Toldek was leaving it up to me to put her out of her misery.

"I recently extinguished six weresaurs in Connorton, Pertuli," Toldek said in his quiet, powerful voice. "Their human hosts were Jona and Batsa Reacher, great, great grandsons of a just Teldorian high lord; Ramn Miller, whose thrice great grandmother saved Tiedde from kobalo raiders; Rose Amta, whose father defeated an ogre mage in a contest of wits and not only cheated it out of a magic ring, but later slew the ogre as well. Every one of the four were worthy descendants of Ska kings and chieftains, if you looked far enough into their lineage. The other two were too far gone for me to identify.

"I could snuff out the demonic force inside Cafilenniel," he continued, "but you knew her; loved her. It should be you. At my hands, her end would be a statistic. At yours, a mercy."

Numbly, I staggered forward. I didn't agree with Toldek. He could at least spare me the grief, I thought, though I immediately recognized how selfish that was. Cafi was in pain, if she yet lived. My fingers closed around my sword's grip.

Too late. A loud crack signaled the end as her skull yielded, and the black scales of the lizard's bulk ripped free from its mortal restraints.

It turned glowing red eyes on me, but this time I was protected by a lens of tears, and I swung.

I stood frozen, surrounded by the fumes that rose from the sizzling, silver-inflicted wound, and too numb to speak. It was over, but I did not save Cafi from her fate. I failed her.

Long moments later, Toldek spoke.

"You have other friends in danger," the giant wizard said at my back. "Other tilwenii, Ivy Tyne, and your friend Koray Clasicant, who is cursed already. I hope that if the time comes again, you do not hesitate."

There was a flash and the wizard was gone, leaving me in the smoking ruins of Connor Square.