Brechalon by Wesley Allison Read Free Book Online Page A

use
their petrified comrade as cover. Looking in the other direction,
she saw that the wizard cursed with laughter had recovered and he
had been joined by two more.
    Seven wizards—well, six. That was a lot of
magical firepower. But then Zurfina looked across the station
platform. Directly opposite her was the open door of a train; not
the B511, but a train bound for somewhere else. If she could reach
it, she could get away. She glanced quickly around the corner
again. The smell of burnt bodies mixed with thick black smoke in
the air, but though there was plenty of the former, there was not
enough of the latter for Zurfina’s taste.
    “ Uuthanum,” she said, and a thick
fog began to fill the station platform.
    “ Maiius uuthanum nejor paj.” The
three wizards to her right suddenly faced a dog the size of a draft
horse, snarling and foaming at the mouth, and they felt their
spells were better aimed at it than any blond sorceress.
    Turning to her left, Zurfina cast another
spell. “Uuthanum uastus carakathum nit.”
    The cement that formed the other end of the
platform turned to mud. The petrified wizard, deprived of his
secure foundation toppled over onto one of his comrades crushing
him, while the other two struggled to pull themselves from the
muck. Zurfina shot out of the alcove and ran toward the train. She
had almost made it, when Wizard Bassington stepped into the open
doorway in front of her.
    She stopped right there in the open,
unbalanced, unsure now whether to run left or right or back the way
that she had come. She felt uncomfortably like an animal caught on
the road in the headlamps of an oncoming steam carriage. Bassington
didn’t move. He stared at her with his beady eyes. His eyes went
wide though when Zurfina reached up to snatch something out of the
air. Normal, non-magical people couldn’t see them, but he could—the
glamours that orbited her head were spells cast earlier, awaiting
the moment when she needed them.
    She crushed the glamour and pointed her hand at
the spot where Bassington stood, just as he dived away. The
entryway where the wizard had been, and the passenger coaches on
either side of him exploded, lifting much of the train up off the
track as metal and wood shrapnel and human body parts flew in every
direction. The flash knocked Zurfina herself back onto the cement
and sent her sliding across the pavement and into the far wall.
Before she could get up, she was hit with a dozen bolts of magical
fire, some but not all of them deflected by her magic shield. It
was a spell of weakening, followed by one of sleep though that
finally dropped her head unconscious to the ground. The last thing
she saw was Bassington’s hob nail boots walking toward her. That
was one thousand nine hundred sixty eight days ago.
    * * * * *
    Two thousand twenty one days ago, Zurfina
ducked into her lodgings on Prince Tybalt Boulevard. She had a
second degree burn on her thigh and blood ran down her arm from a
bullet wound just above her elbow. She bolted the door then
staggered across the room to the dresser. Opening the top drawer,
she pulled out a brown bottle of healing draught and splashed a
generous amount onto first the bullet hole and then the burn.
Finally she took a large swig. She turned quickly, raising her hand
as the door opened. But she lowered her arm again when Smedley
Bassington entered.
    “ I locked the door,” she said,
taking another swig from the brown bottle.
    “ Are you alright?”
    “ A fat lot you care, you bloody
bastard.”
    “ It’s not my fault,” he almost
whined. “I told you what would happen. It’s not too late. Go with
me to the Ministry of War. One word and it will be over. Everything
can go back to the way it was.”
    “ Not the way it was,” she spat. “I
wasn’t the Ministry’s lapdog before. That was you.”
    “ Zurfina…”
    “ Uuthanum,” she threw a quick
gesture in his direction, which turned into a knife in the
air.
    “ Uuthanum,” he said, sending