“W-what?” He looked at me out of startled brown eyes.
“Training bay one! Where is it?”
“Er, down that way.” He pointed to the left, and I took off, only to turn back around almost at once. Because a fey was a hell of a lot faster than I was. And I couldn’t do a spatial shift somewhere I’d never been! “Phone?”
“What?”
“Phone! Phone! Do you have a—”
A phone was thrust in my face. I started down the corridor with it, frantically punching in Pritkin’s number. Only to find out that it didn’t work!
“It doesn’t work,” the small man said, keeping pace with me, probably because I was stealing his phone. “The main wards are online.”
Crap! I’d forgotten: wards, at least the big boys, didn’t play well with electronics, not to mention that we were underground. “I need to get in touch with Mage Pritkin,” I told the man. “There’s an assassin in here!”
“Oh, that’s impossible,” he assured me. “Our wards ar
e the best that—”
I slammed him up against the wall. “There’s an assassin! He’s after Mage Pritkin! Tell me how to stop him, or I swear to God—”
I stopped, but not because the startled-looking man had said anything useful—or anything at all. But because an alarm had begun blaring nearby, loud enough to hurt. And to clench my heart, because my God, he couldn’t have reached Pritkin that fast—could he?
“What is that?” I demanded, as another bright blue light started splashing the rough walls of the corridor like a police flasher.
“T-the wards, like I said,” the little man stuttered. “They’re quite sensitive and react p-poorly to violence.”
“News to me! Something almost gutted me in Mage Pritkin’s rooms!”
“Well, it doesn’t work in quarters,” he said, looking shocked. “That would be an invasion of privacy.”
I took a breath, and thought about sending him, summer clothes and all, to the Artic. I thought hard. “What do they do outside of quarters?” I gritted out.
“Er, that,” he said, pointing vaguely at the light. “If the disturbance is bad enough, they seal off access.”
“Access to what?”
“Everything. They shut the place down.”
I stared at him for a second. And then I threw him at the other wall. “Fight me!”
“What?”
“Stop talking and fight me!” I screamed, but he wouldn’t. He just stood there, staring, until I ran back into Pritkin’s room and grabbed an armful of weapons off the bench. And then came back out to find him in the same place, as if he’d been frozen there, only I hadn’t.
“Fight me!” I yelled, and threw a potion bomb.
I didn’t hit him; I wasn’t even aiming at him. But as soon as the bomb exploded against the ground, sending a tongue of green flame licking the ceiling, he screamed bloody murder and took off like a scared rabbit. And was almost as fast as one.
I ran after him, throwing things at the walls and ceiling and floor. Sometimes they hit across the corridor from him, sometimes just ahead, sending the panicked man ping ponging between them, screeching all the while. And, just as he’d said, the wards didn’t like that.
They didn’t like it at all.
The colors strobing the tunnel changed from blue to yellow to orange, and finally, to red. And, as soon as the red light hit, the little man stopped, having run straight into something by the look of him. There was nothing to see there, either, but when I caught up with him and put out a hand, a powerful ward zapped the shit out of me.
“Is this what you meant by shutting things down?” I demanded.
“Augghhh!” he said. “Augghhh!”