Sweep of the Heart (Innkeeper Chronicles #5)(7)

Gorvar had lost a lot of blood. Our old medunit wouldn’t have known what to do with him, but the new one analyzed his injuries in seconds. It had pumped him full of antibiotics and fluids, and its robotic surgery arms repaired the cut in his liver, cleaned his wounds, cut off a very thin sliver of the injured tissue to combat the worst of the necrosis, and sealed the lacerations. His pulse was weak but steady, and the medical unit’s read outs assured me that in its opinion, he was stable.

Now I just had to wait for Sean to come back.

He had smelled corruption by Wilmos’ store. Wilmos wasn’t at the store, so Sean would follow that corrupted trail. He told me before that the stench of corruption lingered much longer than normal scents. It stained everything it touched.

Corrupted Michael had thick yellowed claws. Sometimes I had nightmares of him chasing me through Red Deer dripping decay and reaching for me with those claws while I desperately tried to find my way back to the inn. My distorted memory made them much bigger in my mind, but objectively speaking, the wounds on Gorvar could have been made by claws just like those.

After I brought Michael’s corpse to the inn to analyze it, the corruption that inhabited his body acted almost like a living thing, a pathogen that actively tried to contaminate the inn. I had purged that infection from Gertrude Hunt, but I had done it in my inn, where I was strongest. When Sean and I fought Michael on the streets of Baha-char, we almost lost. We might have died, if Wilmos hadn’t jumped in with a high-impact version of an alien Gatling gun.

Was the damage at Wilmos’ shop a retaliation for that fight? If so, why now? That happened months ago. Or was it something else? It couldn’t be a coincidence.

I had hoped Michael was the only one. I had alerted the Innkeeper Assembly to what happened, but they hadn’t said anything about it.

Sean would be fine. He was strong and fast, and this wouldn’t be his first encounter with a corrupted creature.

Of course, he would be fine.

There was no reason to worry.

There was definitely no reason to rush to Baha-char. If another corrupted ad-hal like Michael attacked him, Sean would draw him here, to the inn, and I needed to be ready for it.

Gertrude Hunt groaned. It was an odd sound of wood stretching.

The inn was branching. Shortly after Maud and Helen left the inn, Gertrude Hunt began to grow. Right now, in the far corner of Gertrude Hunt, a simple hallway led to a barrier glowing with pale silver. Eventually that barrier would vanish, and a door would form, opening to another world or possibly a different dimension. That’s why the inn had been gobbling up firewood by the cord. When that door opened, which could be any minute, one of us needed to be there because we had no idea what lay on the other side. Another reason to sit tight.

How long did it take to inspect the store anyway? He should have been back by now.

Magic chimed in my mind. The Baha-char door opened, and Sean entered the inn. Finally.

I jumped up. The inn dropped a staircase in front of me and I climbed it into the kitchen.

By the island, Orro drew himself up to his full seven feet. His dark quills rose slightly.

“You have made a cake,” he started.

“Not now,” I told him and hurried into the hallway.

Sean was waiting by the Baha-char door. It was still open. His eyes had that focused, clear look they got just before he expected to jump into a fight. My pulse sped up.

“I need your help.”

My robe was still on. The inn dropped my broom into my hand. I jogged out the door back into the Baha-char sunshine, and we rushed through the streets, dodging passersby.

“Gorvar?” he asked.

“Stable. Where are we going?”

“One of those corrupted assholes took Wilmos out of his store and went through a temporary portal gate. There was a witness. He says he knows where the portal leads, but he refuses to tell me.”





The gate lay far from the center of the bazaar. We’d been walking and jogging for over twenty minutes, and we had left the brightly decorated streets behind a while ago. Here the air was ominous, the canvas roofs of the stalls faded and tattered, and trash littered the cobblestones. This wasn’t the fun-shopping part of Baha-char. You didn’t come to this place unless you wanted something specific you could only get here, and the grim-faced vendors gave us dark looks as we passed.

A merchant on our left, a strange creature with the shaggy body of a sloth, a massive beak, and furry tentacles instead of limbs, screeched at our approach. It was hanging upside down from the top frame of its shop, anchored by its hind tentacles, and I had no idea what species it was, which almost never happened. When we got home, I would have to look it up.

A large stone arch loomed ahead, its brown stone worn and scarred. Remnants of red banners hung from it, bleached by the sun to a dirty pink and torn to shreds by the desert wind. Tall buildings with barred windows crowded the arch on both sides, creating a long gloomy tunnel.

We strode through it. A draft fanned us, bringing a thick, potent scent, an off-putting musk. Some large animal had marked its territory here.

The musk grew stronger. I fought the urge to clear my throat. I could taste it on the back of my tongue. Next to me, Sean grimaced and kept going.

The tunnel ended, and we emerged into a round plaza formed by a single circular building. Three oversized stories high, the building stretched to the sky, offering rows and rows of balconies and stone benches. Strange creatures and elaborate glyphs had been carved into its sandy stone fa?ade, once sharp, but now smoothed and blurred by elements and time.