The Darkness Before Them

Book 1: The Soulfire Saga

by Matthew Ward

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Dark Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

'The Darkness Before Them brims with magic, monsters and intrigue, and the depth of the world is wonderfully, enthrallingly complex . . . a delight' Ben Galley

ALL PATHS LEAD TO VENGEANCE

These are dark times for the Kingdom of Khalad. As the magical mists of the Veil devour the land, the populace struggles beneath the rule of ruthless noble houses and their uncaring immortal king.

Kat doesn't care about any of that. A talented thief, she's pursuing one big score that will settle the debt that destroyed her family. No easy feat in a realm where indentured spirits hold vigil over every vault and treasure room. However, Kat has a unique gift: she can speak to those spirits, and even command them. She'll need every advantage she can get.

Kat's not a hero. She just wants to be free. To have her old life back. But as rebellion rekindles and the war for Khalad's future begins, everyone - Kat included - will have to pick a side.

Set in a world of ancient myth and dangerous magic, The Darkness Before Them begins a heart-pounding adventure where a thief dares to seek vengeance - and finds herself on the path to war.

Praise for Matthew Ward

'Epic fantasy as it should be: big, bold and very addictive' Starburst Magazine

'Magnificant and epic' Grimdark Magazine

'Hugely entertaining' John Gywnne

'Incredible action scenes' Fantasy Hive

Also by Matthew Ward

The Legacy trilogy
Legacy of Ash
Legacy of Steel
Legacy of Light

Release date: November 7, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 544

Sample

Kat plunged, rope hissing through her gloves. Leering grotesques and arched windows rushed into the upper darkness. A heartbeat, and the tower’s wall gave way to the thick, jutting dais of its foundation, then to stone archways and corroded steel braces. And at last to the hollow, empty void.

Giddy with exhilaration, she clenched her fists and clamped her insteps tight. The rope’s sibilant hiss became an angry rasp. The sharp, warm scent of friction-scarred leather mingled with bitter chimney smoke.

Kat’s knees juddered as boots struck moss-crusted tile. Swallowing a gasp of relief, she let go. Too late, she realised she’d misjudged the roof’s pitch. She skidded backwards, grabbing at the rope. Lunging fingertips nudged it beyond reach.

Azra, one hand gripping a chimney’s coping stones and legs braced against the ridge line, grabbed her wrist. “Graceful as ever, darling.”

The wry, elegant crook of her lips belonged more to a privileged Overspire heiress than an Undertown skelder. Azra was always smiling, save when lost to fearful temper. Compromise and concern were alien concepts, whatever her mood.

Azra hauled Kat up to the relative safety of the ridge line. “Better?”

“Thanks.” Kat tested her balance, trying not to think about the plunge. “I left my stomach somewhere up there.”

A chink of concern broke through Azra’s smile. “Not your finest hour.”

Levelling her gaze, Kat stared across the city to settle her queasiness. Her vertigo didn’t care that she was high up so long as she didn’t look up or down.

Bathed in starlight and dotted by leaping watch-flames from torch house minarets, Tyzanta possessed an unlikely beauty. Over the centuries, strata upon strata of new buildings had been raised atop those that had come before, buried in turn as the wealthy sought escape from squalor. The broad-based spire towered over the crumbling tenements and bow-roofed warehouses of the Undertown slums, honeycombed with forgotten streets and encrusted with mansions, temples, ramshackle townhouses and overgrown gardens, all served in turn by tiered canals and spiralling roadways, and supported by a precarious tangle of archways, buttresses and struts that seemed always on the point of collapse.

With midnight past and dawn yet distant, Tyzanta slumbered, but was never truly quiet. Gusting wind carried owl-hoots and the trilling of nightjars down from nests in the spire’s overhang, the clop of hooves and the clamour of roaming drunkards rising from nearby streets. Beneath it all, the distant, breathy rush of waterwheels driving the mills, and the wheeze of furnaces that laboured whether sun or stars ruled the heavens. Only in the darkness beyond the city walls, where mesas jutted above central Khalad’s arid, ruddy plains and bristling black pine forests, did silence reign.

Like the spire to which it clung, the building upon which Kat stood hadn’t been constructed to a particular plan so much as it had expanded in fits and starts when need and opportunity arose, swallowing outbuildings and overrunning gardens. The balcony along the ridge line – where a be-silked and languorous darling would once have taken the sunshine – now simply provided access to chimney stacks dotting mismatched roofs.

True firebloods – as the nobility called themselves – had long since retreated higher up the spire, leaving such dwellings to be claimed by upstarts purchasing their way out of Undertown. By all accounts Ardin Javar was very much the latter. But Kat was in no position to judge. Better a rising upstart than a debtor in free fall.

She fixed Azra with a glare. “Thirty yards, you told me. Forget to mention the other thirty, did you?”

Azra dismissed the complaint with an airy hand. “Must’ve slipped my mind.”

“You should have told me.”

“Would you have followed if I had?”

“I—” Kat sighed. “You know I wouldn’t.”

“And that’s why I didn’t tell you.”

Careless of the treacherous footing, Azra darted forward and kissed her on the lips, the warmth fleeting as she withdrew, her eyes shining with mirth. “Forgive me, dearest Katija?”

Kat maintained the semblance of a scowl only through supreme effort. It was hard to stay mad at Azra. “No.”

Azra kissed her again, lingering a heartbeat longer than before. “What about now?”

Kat hung her head, annoyance bleeding away. “You’re impossible.”

She smiled. “You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Kat had hated that smile at their first meeting a year before. A fugitive from her father’s creditors and in her naïveté an easy mark, she’d been on the sticky end of four-to-one odds after crossing the wrong people in the wrong part of town. Then, Azra’s smile had accompanied a helping hand out of the gutter and a desperately needed ally. Battered, bruised and with worse in the offing, the last thing Kat had wanted was a witness to her humiliation. Dislike hadn’t survived the ensuing brawl. Come dawn, it had been no more than a memory, dissipated by a fierce hangover.

Azra’s features were sharper than Kat’s and her deep bronze skin a shade paler, but matched hazel eyes and ink-black hair meant that most strangers mistook them for sisters. Kat didn’t see it. Even on her best day – tressed, perfumed and a well-cut gown clinging like a second skin – she felt ungainly by comparison. Fighting for balance on that rooftop, her bunned hair fraying in the breeze, timeworn coat and trousers damp with sweat despite the cold, she felt every inch the graceless lump. Azra looked stunning – of course – even with her breeze-blown hair writhing. But then so much of that was attitude, the unblinking elegance born of certainty in place and purpose.

Inevitably, the strangers who thought them siblings invariably judged Azra the elder. She might well have been – though as she was habitually evasive about her age, the truth remained a rare secret between them. By contrast, Kat knew her own time of birth, now some twenty-five years in the past, down to the second. Her father had wasted a small fortune commissioning horoscopes as birthday gifts. Not one had ever come to pass, except in the very broadest of terms. Had the reverse been true, he’d likely still be alive and she not forced to a skelder’s life on society’s fringe with all the other thieves, heretics, throat-slitters and debtors.

Azra picked her way along the ridge line with practised grace and clambered onto the balcony. Kat edged after her. An unconscious man lay beside the balcony door, gagged, blindfolded and trussed with Azra’s trademark efficiency.

But his absence wouldn’t be missed for ever.

Kat squatted beside the guard. With its simple black cloth and golden vine-leaf embroidery at collar and cuffs, his uniform aped those worn by House Bascari’s custodians. It was hard to imagine Tyzanta’s ruling family tolerating his unshaven and broken-nosed appearance, or the serrated dagger tucked into his belt. He might have passed muster elsewhere in the kingdom of Khalad. Kat’s father had claimed that all manner of standards declined the further one travelled the Copper Road towards the tumultuous province of Qersal. But this was Tyzanta… and the man clearly a thug, despite attempts to pass him off as something more.

A sentry crest in the likeness of the goddess Nyssa stared out across the balcony, her sculpted beauty and benevolent smile wreathed in the flames of her flowing hair, the silver-black prism of her eyes stark against otherwise pale stone. Kat’s left forearm itched, warning her that she’d drawn the interest of the hestic ifrît dwelling within the prism. Idle curiosity, at least for the moment. Hestics were thin scraps of soul, and lacked the sentience for anything more proactive than guard duty. Which wasn’t to say things wouldn’t go poorly if she crossed the threshold.

She nodded at the unconscious guard. “He give you any trouble?”

“Does he look like he gave me any trouble? Poor lamb never even saw me coming.” Azra shook her head in disappointment. “If we’re doing this, we need to do it now. Unless you’ve changed your mind?”

A piece of Kat longed to walk away – one did not lightly cross a man of Javar’s standing – but that meant losing the opportunity to clear the inherited debt that had destroyed her life. She’d done well to stay ahead of the temple bailiffs, but they’d find her sooner or later. They always did. If that happened she was as good as dead. Worse than dead.

She jerked a thumb back at the rope. “It’s not like we can go back the way we came, is it?”

“Glad to hear it. I’d hate to think all this suffering had been for nothing.” Azra tapped the prone guard with the toe of her boot. “His in particular.”

“You’re all heart.”

“And that’s why you love me.”

“Could be.”

Baring the guard’s forearms, Kat uncovered the black spiderweb tattoo on the inside of his right wrist. She pursed her lips, partly at the scarring from the artist’s amateur hand, but mostly because that same artist had made no attempt to conceal the curling geometric spiral of the soul-glyph within a pleasing design.

She removed her left glove and drew back her sleeve. Her own tattoo blossomed from the base knuckle of her middle finger, broadened across the back of her hand to a triangle at her wrist then wreathed her forearm in thin, graceful lines down to her elbow. Where the guard’s uneven tattoo was sullen and dark, Kat’s shimmered with a pale indigo flame that cast neither shadow nor warmth. Any halfwit with dinars and the right connections could have a simple glyph inked, but Kat’s aetherios tattoo was one of a kind. Her father’s greatest work. One she’d improved upon in ways he could never have imagined.

Holding her breath, she shut out the sounds of the streets and focused on her tattoo. Indigo fire rippled beneath her skin. Lines faded, leaving unblemished flesh. Others crept outward, rich and ink-bright, mimicking the soul-glyph in the guard’s tattoo. Or to mimic how his soul-glyph should have been, had its creator possessed a steadier hand.

“Can’t you hurry up?” muttered Azra. “It doesn’t have to look pretty so long as it works.”

Kat stifled a smile and nudged the last lines to completion. Azra might possess an elegance she’d never match, but this was hers, and hers alone. For all her swagger and savvy, Azra couldn’t do it. No one could. A skilled artist might add to a completed design across painstaking hours and craft a new glyph from the framework of the old. But wholesale manipulation of an existing tattoo? Let alone in a matter of moments? That was impossible. Kat loved accomplishing the impossible in front of Azra. It made them equals.

She reached for the door. Her forearm throbbed as the hestic ifrît’s curiosity darkened. Invisible still, it uncoiled from behind the sentry crest’s graven eyes. Kat tensed as tongues of soulfire grazed her skin, neither hot nor cold. Most folk couldn’t see the flames, much less feel their caress – they only witnessed the consequences of a hestic not finding what it sought – but Kat’s aetherios tattoo brought her deeper into the spirit world than most folk came before death.

The ifrît’s fires burrowed into her skin. The world boiled away into a black haze. She flinched at the hot flash of the hestic’s envy as it tasted the vibrance of her still-living soul. Barely sentient the ifrît might have been, but it was aware enough to know that it had once been a person and no longer was. It grew heavy with resentment, thunderheads building at the fault line of their entangled souls.

Panic wormed into Kat’s thoughts. Stronger hestics could bind an intruder or turn their blood to flame, the fires invisible until the victim began screaming. This one felt too weak for either, but even something as simple as raising the alarm would spin the night into disaster.

Even as that unhappy thought gathered pace, the hestic at last brushed the forged soul-glyph on her wrist – or rather, the shadow it cast in the spirit realm’s darkness. A heartbeat skittered by as the ifrît satisfied itself that the glyph marked her as someone it should allow to pass unmolested.

Sleep, Kat breathed wordlessly.

Sighing, the hestic bled back into the sentry crest. The spirit realm’s smothering darkness yielded to the mansion rooftop, leaving behind nothing but the ghost of its telltale lavender scent. Kat blinked the last of it away and found Azra’s hands tight about her own and her eyes taut with worry.

“How…” Kat swallowed to clear a claggy throat. “How long was I gone?”

“A solid twenty-count.” Azra’s voice trembled with accusation. “You’d stopped breathing.”

“I had not.” The rebuttal was instinct. Time flowed strangely when communing with an ifrît. Sometimes eternities passed between heartbeats. At others, heartbeats stretched to eternities. Kat forced a smile. “It was stronger than I expected, that’s all. It’s sleeping now.”

Azra scowled. “Marida should have warned you.”

“Warned me about what? That Javar values his privacy?” Kat glanced down at her tattoo. The skittering flames were dimmer. The hestic had taken more of the tattoo’s fire – more of her vigour – than she’d expected. She tugged her sleeve into place. “She’d expect us to know. We’re not children. And it could be worse.”

The scowl became a grimace, then bled away. “How?”

“We could be going in through the front gate.”

The front gate, with its high wall and never fewer than three of Javar’s thugs standing guard. There were quicker ways to die, but not many.

Kat eased open the balcony door and slipped inside. A lantern beside the inner door – the lumani ifrît sealed within diffuse almost to the point of dissipation – roused the room’s undulating contours to murky greys.

Musty air thick in her nostrils, she slid her feet along the threadbare carpet, the better to detect a loose floorboard before her weight set it creaking. Reaching the inner door, she spied a second sentry crest above the lintel. The stone was discoloured and pitted with age, the prismatic eyes cracked and lifeless. Whatever hestic had dwelt within the stone had faded to nothing long ago. Either Javar didn’t expect intruders to enter this way, or there was something else at work.

Kat opened the door and peered down the empty stairs. A warm glow suffused the lower landing from the archway beyond. No signs of life.

So why did she feel like she was being watched?

No. Not… watched exactly. It was more of, well, a presence. Some holdover from the hestic’s embrace? Hestics, lumani and most other household ifrîti weren’t generally a chatty lot. However, most had some notion of others in close proximity, in much the same way that while Kat never made eye contact with her fellow tenants and spoke to them only out of dire necessity, she was broadly aware of their existence.

Azra glided to her side. “Are we clear?”

“Yes. No.” Kat shook her head, hating to look indecisive. “Maybe.”

Azra sighed theatrically. “I’ve always admired your precision.”

“Let’s just be careful, all right?”

She grinned. “When am I anything but?”

Azra descended the stairs with customary grace and flattened herself against the archway’s flanking wall. Her expression uncharacteristically serious, she pressed a cautioning finger to her lips and jerked her head at the open archway. Kat slipped into place opposite. Noting muffled footfalls in the room beyond, she slid into a squat and eased her head around the corner.

Javar’s rumoured wealth was at last on display on that circular landing. A three-tiered crystal chandelier banished shadows from a thick carpet whose intricate gold, black and scarlet knot-work made it an expensive import from distant Phoenissa. Mahogany balustrading looped the outer edge of a double-spiralled stair. An extravagant waste of space, but the twin spiral was beloved of those who strove to prove their piety, representing as it did the goddess Nyssa’s mirrored aspects of Benevolas and Iudexas, forgiveness and judgement. The stained-glass window that filled the opposite wall with a glittering, flame-wreathed Nyssa Iudexas, armoured and cloaked for war, suggested Javar’s preference for the latter.

Of more immediate concern were the patrolling guards. Both had the droop-shouldered tread of folk going through the motions until shift end. They looped around the balustrade’s rightmost end and curved back towards the nearest stairway head.

Kat ducked out of sight and held her breath. The footsteps approached, passed and vanished behind the creak of a door away to her left. She gave them another ten-count, just to be sure, then followed Azra out onto the landing.

“West wing?” murmured Azra.

Kat leaned out over to the balcony to check the coast was clear. “So Marida said.”

Azra flitted across to an ornate doorway, the mirror of the one through which the guards had departed. It was easily half as tall again as she, embossed with the motif of a snake wound about a yew tree – the heraldry of some long-vanished fireblood family. No sentry crest graced its lintel. Presumably Javar hadn’t felt the need to ruin the plasterwork by having one installed.

She tried the handle. “Locked.”

Kat nodded. No surprise that Javar didn’t trust his minions with his inner sanctum. “We should have brought Skerrik.”

“He’d have fallen off the rope.”

More likely Skerrik would’ve refused to even attempt the descent. Like most skelders, he possessed a keen sense of self-preservation. The payment in kind Marida had offered for the night’s endeavour held nothing to entice him, and Kat didn’t have anything like the funds to make up the difference. “Can you get it open without bringing the household down on us?”

Azra splayed a hand across her chest, eyes wide in mock offence. “Honestly, darling. I’m embarrassed for you.” She unfurled a battered cloth roll from her belt and laid it in front of the door. After a moment’s consideration, she slid two lock picks from their pouches.

Kat made a slow loop of the landing. Through one of the stained-glass panels, she made out the adjoining atrium’s low roof and the high curve of the gate just beyond. Motion betrayed the presence of at least two sentries.

Drawing back, she peered up at the chandelier. She wondered briefly at the rage the lumani’s progenitor had known in life for it to blaze so bright in spirit.

Taking a deep breath, Kat drew as close to the chandelier as the balustrade allowed and reached out her left hand. The ifrît reciprocated eagerly, its light rippling with shadow as it extended what portion of its soul-flame it could beyond the chandelier’s prism. Kat adjusted her tattoo as they made contact, instinctively re-inking the design as she sought a soul-glyph the ifrît would obey.

Its invisible flames lapping about Kat’s forearm, the ifrît gladly shared what it knew, not in words or even images, but as slivers of light and patches of shadow that required guesswork as much as interpretation. A host of lumani dotted the three storeys, none of them as impressive – at least in the ifrît’s own estimation – as itself. Kat also read half a dozen echoes of hestic watch-spirits in immediate proximity, the exact locations rendered uncertain by the lumani’s contempt for soul-slivers that knew nothing of radiance. Further out, impressions grew ever more vague. The lumani was almost certain of a pyrasti sleeping in the feast hall hearth, sated by the embers from the evening’s fire. There might have been an ailing motic shackled to a broken-down clatter wagon out in the courtyard. The west wing remained a black, roiling abyss in its thoughts.

Undaunted, Kat pushed, wielding her tattoo’s soulfire as a goad. The ifrît’s mood darkened, the chandelier’s light dimming alongside.

Pride became angry pleading, the ifrît’s choking, wordless demands for freedom so overwhelming – so heartbreakingly reminiscent of the mortal being of which it had once been part – that Kat shot a defensive jolt of soulfire through its being. Wailing at her betrayal, the lumani hissed back into the chandelier with enough force to set it swaying, leaving Kat trembling against the balustrade.

Azra stalked across the landing. “Stars Below! What was that? You were supposed to be keeping watch.”

Tamping down a guilty pang, Kat pushed upright and stared at the west wing door, now ajar. “There’s something through there.” She glanced down at her tattoo, its flames noticeably weaker. Breaking free had cost her precious soulfire. “The lumani was afraid.”

The anger in Azra’s eyes hardened to determination. “Then we’ll handle it. We—”

She broke off at muffled footsteps drawing nearer behind the east wing door.

Kat winced. “Go.”

Azra darted into the west wing, scooping up her lock charmer’s tools without breaking stride. Kat cleared the threshold with moments to spare. The soft click as she tugged the door shut came just ahead of its counterpart’s creak from across the landing.

The only light in the corridor was that which crept under the door or around the windows’ heavy drapes – barely enough to shape the oil lantern hooked beside the architrave. As the patrol’s footfalls retreated, Kat fished a matchbook from her pocket. A hiss-scratch, a waft of sulphur, and she coaxed the lantern to greasy life.

“See?” breathed Azra. “Nothing to worry about. Except Javar’s taste in decoration.”

“I tell you the lumani was afraid of something.”

“All the more reason to get this over with.”

Kat nodded unhappily. Distance from the lumani made it easier to untangle its glut of emotions from her own. Ifrîti were echoes of living men and women, instinctive slivers of soul that existed only in the moment. It was foolish – even dangerous – to accept their worldview without question. Very probably the lumani, like the hestic on the balcony, had read the absence of other ifrîti in the west wing as portending danger and poisoned her with its own uncertainty.

Beyond the next door, the corridor branched into a suite of rooms every bit as dark and lifeless. Dust sheets lay atop dressers, chairs and tables. If Javar didn’t trust guards to patrol his sanctum, he certainly wasn’t about to give the cleaning staff full rein.

While there were prisms aplenty among the darkened chandeliers and another in the cold hearth of Javar’s private dining room, their ifrîti had long since dissipated. Even the bold lumani in the stairway would eventually fade into the misty netherworld, there to languish until Nyssa judged its sins redeemed and permitted rebirth.

At the corridor’s end, they at last found the room they sought.

“That’s what I love about the wealthy,” Kat murmured, “they don’t like to show off.”

“Of course,” Azra replied, deadpan. “One must be discreet.”

“Wouldn’t want to be thought gaudy.”

“Blessed Flame, no.”

The room was a shrine to old glories, its altar of worship a tall glass cabinet against the far wall. Within stood a wicker mannequin in blackened lamellar scales and an ash-white tabard. The crest of the Alabastran temple – a mirrored indigo and gold flame – gleamed at the centre of its chest. A white cloak flowed from gilded pauldrons.

Raised platforms flanking the carpeted approach held what Kat took to be other mannequins, three to each side. Though protected by sheets rather than glass, the outlines of shoulders and heads were unmistakable.

Smaller cases lined the wall to either side, given over to polished and gem-set weapons. Two scimitars. A flanged mace. A rounded silver shield with a brass rim. A straight short sword of the type favoured in the northern cities, seemingly crafted from polished black stone, rather than steel. A ritual flamberge, the rippling blade almost Kat’s height. Smaller cabinets held jewellery. One piece in particular urged her along the aisle: a ring of reddish gold, the metal wrought in an endless spiral. The communion ring was least of all the treasures in that room, but it was the only token by which Marida’s help could be bought.

Tension bled from Kat’s shoulders. “This must have cost Javar a fortune.”

“Not really.” Azra tugged at a sheet. It came away in a spill of dust, revealing a wicker figure in black robes of judgement. Another tug and a second sheet slid away, revealing a more elegant iteration of the same. “They’re all his.”

Kat blinked. “Javar is a templar?”

“Was. I thought you knew. I thought everybody in Tyzanta knew.”

“I’ve only been here a year, remember?” Kat retorted. “I thought the only way a templar retired was through death.”

“Thirty years ago Javar got it into his head that Nyssa herself had charged him with freeing Undertown from House Bascari’s tyranny.” Azra’s eyes gleamed with scandal. “Roused half the slum before anyone took him seriously.”

That couldn’t have gone down well. Alabastra wasn’t permitted to raise soldiers of its own. Instead, they purchased the services of armed custodians from a city’s ruling house – an arrangement that kept the firebloods wealthy and the Alabastran temples protected. To retain an air of control, Alabastra sometimes elevated a sufficiently pious and reliable custodian to the honorary rank of templar. Such men and women served as liaisons between Alabastra and the firebloods. By his actions, Javar had betrayed both masters.

“What happened?”

“The countess made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Javar chose wealthy turncoat over penniless corpse and gave her all the names she needed to… settle things down. It didn’t stop the hierarch excommunicating him.” She spread her arms. “I’d say he’s not let go of his past.”

“So much for him being a man of the people.”

“Principles are expensive.”

The chamber no longer resembled a shrine to glory and achievement, but their tomb. No wonder Marida wanted the communion ring. She and Javar were deadlocked for control of Undertown, neither able to oust the other in a war that saw lesser gangs used as proxies. At the very least, stealing a beloved tie to a forsaken past was spite. At best, it was leverage of a singular sort.

“I’m surprised they let him live,” said Kat.

Azra flashed a smile. “He’s worth more as an example than as ashes on the wind. That’s Khalad. You find your place or one’s found for you. The world goes on either way.”

“You sound like you approve.”

She shrugged. “Why not? It’s elegant. Life should be elegant.”

“Even when it’s unfair?”

“Don’t be tedious, darling. ‘Unfair’ implies rules, and we both know there aren’t any.”

Kat flinched, but no amount of wishing could change the facts. Probity should have prevented Alabastra from bleeding her father white, gobbling up possessions and property to satisfy ever-growing debts. The conventions of friendship should have demanded that Kat’s peers, the sons and daughters of Zariqaz’s ruling elite, rally round when she inherited those debts, but they’d feared Alabastra more than they’d loved her. Likely they’d not loved her at all. Yes, Azra was right. There were no rules. Not any that mattered. You found a place or one was found for you.

And she’d be damned if she’d let anyone else decide her fate without a fight.

She smashed the glass with her dagger’s hilt and snatched the ring from its velvet cradle.

Something rippled free of the spirit realm.

“Kat!” shouted Azra.

Too late, Kat realised there had been an ifrît in the west wing the whole time, but she’d been too busy looking for hestics and lumani to see it. The thing that had awoken when she’d touched the communion ring was an order of magnitude stronger. Searching for trees, she’d missed the forest.

She spun around just as a mannequin lurched down from its pedestal.

Its thrashing arm sent a neighbour crashing to the ground. A swathed hand ripped at the dust sheet. With a rasp of tearing cloth it yanked a section free, revealing a sun-bleached, pitted skull, the bone scrimshawed with dark, geometric glyphs. Indigo fire blazed in empty eye sockets and coiled along jerking arms as the corpse ripped away the remainder of its shroud, laying bare layered lamellar armour.

Kat’s heart skipped a beat.

A koilos. Javar had set a koilos to guard his private shame?

Benevolent Nyssa, but they couldn’t fight that.

She glanced at the frozen, gaping Azra. “Run!”

The koilos uttered a soul-shivering shriek and lumbered forward, fire swirling behind. Ill-fitting lamellar rattling and clacking against fleshless bones, it shouldered Azra into a weapon case then bore down on Kat. Heart pounding, she feinted left and flung herself right, ducking low under a flailing arm.

Skeletal fingers clamped about the back of her neck. She yelped, her heels furrowing the expensive carpet as the koilos reeled her in. Breathless, she shattered the lantern across its head and fumbled for her dagger. It came free of its sheath on her second attempt. Spinning her about, the koilos transferred its grip to her throat and hoisted her high. She screamed defiance and stabbed at the flames in its left eye socket.

With its free hand, the koilos twisted the dagger from her grip and flung it away.

Lungs heaving for breath that wouldn’t come, Kat clutched at the koilos’ arm and scrabbled for a connection with the ifrît bound within the glyph-etched bones. Hopeless. Divi