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.Few people were out in such weather, though, and the afternoon was rapidly turning into evening.Twilight.Perfect time for hunting.Something glinted in her eyes.Her pupils seemed to flare green.Levoreth strode off down the street, heading deeper into the city.The street grew narrower and the buildings began to look shabbier.Windows were shuttered against the approaching night.There.The sensation was coming from the southwest.She turned a corner.Her nostrils flared as she sniffed the air.The sensation was getting stronger.It wasn’t like a worm anymore.It was more like the finger of a dead man trailing against her skin.Gentle, but hard, with bone under the cold flesh.It stank of death.She shoved back against it with her mind.And the finger recoiled.It vanished.Instantly, she flung her thoughts wide, hunting through the silence and the darkness that exists on the edge of the mind.She was dimly aware of countless lives flickering in the darkness.Tiny stars gleaming in the night.Thoughts floated by, blind to her, but they were only the lives of Hearne’s people, heedless of the danger that lurked within their city.How long had the spell been in existence?Her thoughts raced through the darkness.Nothing.Another thousand lives flashed by.Candle flames.But their lives would be counted as nothing if such a spell were allowed to continue.How many generations had already spent their lives in sleep under the spell?Sleep possesses three doors.The first door opens from the day.We walk through into sleep.The second door opens on the other side of sleep into the morning.We walk through into the morning.And the third door?The third door opens into darkness.And if a sleeper stayed lost in sleep for too long, then the door would open and the Dark would come in.Then, just when Levoreth was about to give up, she stiffened.A scent lingered in the darkness, far out on the edge of her thoughts.Almost due south now.The scent was faint but unmistakable.The stench of the Dark.Her eyes flared green.She ran.Her skirts whipped around her legs, sodden with water.She splashed across a street and darted down an alley.The cobblestones were slick, but she ran sure-footedly, vaulting over garbage piles and dodging around corners.The twilight had deepened into night.The clouds were thickening and the sky was gone.A wind arose, slashing the rain down sideways.The touch of the spell wriggled frantically in her thoughts, desperate to escape her, but it could not.She held to the scent as surely as a bloodhound, as surely as a wolf tracking its kill across the snow.She furled the umbrella without slowing and tucked it under one arm.Her hair whipped free from its pins, heavy with water.A couple of men—fishermen, by the smell of them—hurried up the street toward her, their heads bent down under the rain.She ran by, and they did not see her.It seemed she ran in a world of silence, a world of darkness and blurred stone and light hiding secure behind shutters.The rain lashed against her face and she smelt woodsmoke cooling in the air.Somewhere in front of her, somewhere in the city and not far away now, was the spell.Abruptly, she stopped running.Before her, a street made its crooked way into the evening.Several doors down was an inn.Light streamed from its windows.She could hear laughter and the sound of voices coming from the inn.The street seemed all the colder and darker because of the cheeriness of the sound and the light.Past the inn, however, and on the other side of the street, was a house.The house was wedged between what looked like a warehouse on one side and a second house on the other.It was shabby and tall, three stories in total, with a sharply pitched roof underneath the chimneys teetering up into the sky.Every window was shuttered and dark.It looked like an empty house, a house that had not been lived in for many years.A dead house.But the house was not dead.It was alive.A ward buzzed on the edges of her mind.It was woven about the house.Her thoughts feathered around it, touching and tasting and smelling.The ward was old.Hundreds of years old.It listened to her, coiled as tight as a snake ready to strike.Behind the ward crouched the house.Within the house was the spell.It stank of malice and ancient intent and death.How long have you been here, you abomination? She whispered the words in her mind.Long enough, Mistress.Long enough.The voice of the spell was dry and dusty, creaking as if it were made up of the sounds of footsteps on stairs, of echoes in empty hallways and the drip of water in a dark basement.Your time here is at an end.This is my land.These are my people.You did your people well, you foolish old woman.I have lulled your people to sleep for these hundreds of years.Them and you.It is what I was woven for and I have done my job well.You shall die this night and I shall remain until my master returns once again.My lullaby continues, Mistress, and Tormay sleeps
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