Sung in Blood by Glen Cook Page A

himself more comfortable.
    A gong hammered in the rear of the house.
    Rider hurtled out of the room, into intense light. Chaz stood upon the trap step, a dumb look on his face.
    Two men charged out of rear rooms, weapons in hand. Su-Cha materialized between one's legs. He pitched off the balcony with a shriek. The other saw Rider, whirled, charged into the room where Rider knew Caracene and another man to be.
    Rider followed, pop seeds exploding beneath his feet. He hurled a shoulder at the door. It burst inward. Chaz breathed down his neck as he entered a room outshining Odehnal’s. A thrown knife ripped between them.
    In the rear of the room, in shadow, Caracene stood with hands at mouth, looking down. The man who had preceded Rider slammed her out of the way, dropped like a badger plopping into its hole.
    Caracene scrambled ...
    Then Chaz had hold of her and Rider was staring down at a man thrashing through brown water, chasing a boat which meant to waste no time on him.
    Rider's gaze fixed on the man in the boat, a lean, powerful oriental with astonishing green eyes. "Shy key, Vlazos said," he murmured. "Shai Khe." One hand came from a pocket clutching a phial. He hurled it.
    The man in the boat dropped his oars, raised hands, loosed a warding spell. The phial plopped into the river.
    The man saved himself from the misery in that fluid, but lost his oars. He drifted at the mercy of the current.
    Rider heard shouts. Soup and Greystone. They had spotted the fugitive. Someone threw a line to the man abandoned.
    The oriental's long fingers began weaving sparks. Rider snapped, "Out of here, Chaz. Take the woman. Su-Cha. Get Odehnal." His tone brooked neither questions nor argument.
    He drew on the web, began binding it around the sorcerer. Chaz and Su-Cha pounded away.
    Too late Rider realized what the oriental was doing. Not attacking him directly at all.
    A piling snapped like a twig. The house lurched. Another piling went. The house began to shift, to groan, to tilt toward the river.
    Rider did not hesitate. He dropped through the hole, hit the water feet first. He drove himself deep with one powerful stroke, then swam with the current. His strokes were strong and practiced.
    The water screamed with the sound of the building collapsing. The scream grew to a roar. But no building comes down in seconds.
    When Rider surfaced he was beyond danger of the collapse. Indeed, the structure's main mass smashed into the river as he came up. It raised a wave that lifted him five feet. From the wave's crest he looked at the man in the boat.
    The sorcerer's face betrayed frustration. His fingers began weaving again. But the wave caught the boat and toppled him into its bottom. When he recovered Rider had made the riverbank. The oriental wasted no time on an enemy in a position to best him. His boat flew away as though upon a lightning current.
    Rider clambered between houses, to the street, where he settled on a stoop to dram his boots.
    Chaz settled down beside him, Caracene held almost negligently in one arm. "Who was that guy?"
    "Shai Khe," Rider replied. "I should have thought of him when Vlazos tried to tell me. He said Shai Khe and I heard shy key."
    "That's his name," Chaz said. "But it don't tell me nothing about him." They watched Su-Cha drag Odehnal their way. The dwarf remained imprisoned in his opium dream.
    "I know only one thing more," Rider said.
    "Uhm?"
    "My father was afraid of him."
    Chaz looked startled.
    "Yes. He wouldn't talk about it. Shai Khe is some great terror in the east. He commands an empire more vast than Shasesserre's. But that does not satisfy him. He wants it all."
    Wreckage from the collapsed building drifted away. Rider's men assembled. Neighbors came to watch from a distance safe from shantors.
    "More prisoners," Greystone said. The man who had jumped into the river was trying to talk Soup and Spud into turning him loose.
    Rider caught his eye. "You're luckier than your friends." He indicated the