The Night Parade by Scott Ciencin Read Free Book Online

the window. “W; must leave.”
    Myrmeen followed him through the open window, into the alley beyond. She took a final glance inside the office and suddenly knew why the knives had seemed so disturbingly familiar: She had seen them in a dream.
    No, she corrected herself, not a dream. A nightmare.
     

Four
     
    Lucius Cardoc escorted Myrmeen back to the inn, then told her that he would spend the night trying to discover the location of the two men Kracauer had mentioned.
    “You need sleep, too,” she had protested. “And it may not be safe for you on your own.”
    “I do my best work when I am alone,” he said, giving her no choice in the matter as he became invisible. She reached out to where he had been standing, but he already had moved away. With a sigh of defeat, she turned and went upstairs to join the others.
    Ord had fallen into a deep sleep with Burke silently watching over the boy. Myrmeen told the group all that had occurred and relayed Lucius’s promise to return with information by morningsun.
    “The best thing for us to do is wait,” Varina said. Myrmeen agreed. Reisz went back to the room he had planned to share with Ord. Myrmeen retired to her private chamber. She slept fitfully, waking every thirty minutes to an hour. The last time she wrested herself from her sleep, she awoke frightened and felt as if she were being pulled away on a tide that had overpowered her senses.
    Slivers of her last nightmare remained as she got up and paced. She did not feel like going back to sleep and so she performed an exhausting series of exercises and practiced with her heavy sword, hoping to tire herself. Finally, when she had given up on a decent night’s sleep, Myrmeen sat before the small window, looking out at the city of her birth. A single image from her dream refused to fade:
    She had seen a man standing on the muddy earth in the middle of a terrible storm, a dark man who raised his arms to the sky. Two ragged bolts of lightning shattered the night with their blinding intensity, their jagged paths cutting across the horizon from opposite directions. Suddenly they met where the man stood, each of his out-thrust hands receiving a single blast of lightning. He became transparent for a moment as the searing white light coursed through him, and Myrmeen could see that his anatomy was not that of a man, but of something considerably older and more threatening.
    Was this Talos, god of the storms? She was not a worshiper of any particular god, but if she had been, Talos would have been her last choice. Storms terrified her.
    Myrmeen felt an odd scratching sensation on her left arm and held the arm out to the soft blue-white illumination from the window. She was shocked to see three sets of black eyes open on her forearm.
    Suddenly she was aware of a knocking at her door. Myrmeen yawned and felt a strange warmth on her arms. She looked up and saw sunlight pouring through the open window. The raw heat of the day caressed her. Examining her left arm several times, she found no trace of the curious eyes that had materialized within her flesh. She did not remember falling asleep after she shook herself from her nightmares and sat before the window, but the eyes must have been part of them. Worried that the line between her dreams and her waking reality was beginning to blur, Myrmeen became anxious to fill her mind with other thoughts. She checked her dress to ensure that her gown would not offend her visitor’s sensibilities and said, “Come!”
    The door opened and Lucius Cardoc stepped inside. She was not surprised. From the tentative nature of the knock, she had guessed that it would be him.
    “Myrmeen,” he said as he entered and lowered his gaze in a form of respectful greeting. The mage looked exactly as he had the night before. If he had missed out on a night’s sleep, the effects had not manifested.
    She stepped away from the chair that she had been straddling and turned to face him. Her neck and back ached.