Hound paced quietly through Haden’s empty streets, pausing periodically to smell the air. This was no idle sniffing, either. It was an entire lungful of winter night through his nose, and he relished the frigid, bitter sting even as he methodically pulled apart the blurred stream of scents it carried.

He reached into the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, withdrawing a specimen bag with a single hair in it. More than a foot long and orange like flame, the hair was his only lead on what was proving to be one of the most elusive quarries he’d hunted in a long career as a tracker.

Another sharp inhalation drew the girl’s scent to the front of his mind. A faint perfume, lavender and raspberry and something softer like vanilla, still clung to the hair, along with traces of the potent magic she wielded. Magic had its own strange quality when he processed it. Each had a kind of scent to it, but it was almost halfway between smell and touch in terms of how his senses differentiated them. Some magic was like a burning in his nostrils. Others were so thick it was like he was trying to breathe underwater. Getting a feel for the different scents of magic was one of the first hurdles he had to overcome in learning to use his power.

The other, the one that he found himself dealing with nearly every moment he stood on Mundane soil, was that the foul smells were amplified a hundredfold. It could be overpowering; a system shock of sorts, and that was when it wasn’t all he could smell.

Soot and ash were heavy on the air, as it was in most of the Mundane world, though Haden still had a touch of nature left to it. He had been deployed to New York City in the weeks following Emergence Day, acting as a bodyguard to a cluster of stuffed-shirt diplomats. The air there had been rancid. His magic gave him an edge in detecting those sorts of airborne toxins, but he knew the others could smell it. How could they not? And yet they continued about their business, day in and day out, breathing their poison and pretending not to notice.

But that was the way of it. The Mundanes were hard to separate from their comfort zones. Even now, eight months after the Rainbow Nations had lifted the great curtain that concealed magic from the rest of the world, hardly a day went by without the Cabal of Dreams reporting an incident. Some joy-riding mesmer or shadow trying a toe across the line, only to find out just how seriously the Council was taking the integration. A tourist from Avalon getting jumped by a mob of fearful citizens and pummeled mercilessly, or worse, retaliating. Service refusals, no-wizards-allowed signs.

It would pass, though. He was sure of it. The Rainbow Nations had gone through greater upheavals, and there were truly few things that couldn’t be resolved with the proper application of magic. Even now, Lady Violet was pushing some new exchange program. Looking to introduce wizard children into local schools to see if the separation would be easier to bridge if they started with the nation’s youths. 

The man snorted in derision, the action further muddling the scents he was attempting to parse. The gap in competence between Mundane children and wizard children was, he’d been told, pretty similar to the gap between Mundane children and Mundane adults. With the addition of the fact that only the most well-trained, heavily vetted youths from the Rainbow Nations were being cleared for the program, he found himself feeling pretty sorry for the host schools. They truly didn’t know what they were in for.

There was something sweeter on the night air, ghostly faint, barely pushing through the smell of smoke and gasoline. The bakery he was walking past, its storefront as dark as the rest of the street, had the last vestiges of its daily aromas still permeating the air around it. It was unlikely that any person walking past would be able to pick out the scent, especially with the air so cold. His magic told him it was around seven hours old, barely clinging to the patio tables that were scattered around the wide sidewalk. The smell of fresh-baked bread and confectionaries led off in several directions, down the sidewalk both ways and across the street. He could have followed them if he wanted to, until he came to the silent home of the bread’s purchaser or until the trail crossed through an area that masked it. But he wasn’t here to track down bread.

Static crackled in his earpiece. The ancient communicators were barely more than Mundane junk this far from Avalon. He tapped on the smooth, round pod, wincing as the static momentarily intensified. Eventually the crackling solidified into a voice, still kind of quiet and tinny, but audible at least.

“Hound, check in.”

He rolled his eyes. He’d been expecting Vence’s reedy tenor, but the voice that came through his earpiece didn’t belong to the lieutenant. It was deep and commanding, though laced with a tinge of stress that undercut its calm affectation.

“Hound, checking in,” he answered, re-sealing the bag and returning it to his pocket. The hair would lose its scent eventually, and he needed to keep it potent for as long as possible if he had any hope of catching the elusive girl. He cast his gaze around the street to make sure no one would be alerted by his quiet speech, then ducked into an alley behind the bakery, just in case.

“Status report?”

It spoke to how badly Lord Red wanted the girl apprehended and returned, that he’d man the console himself. He was famous for hating to micro-manage. Hound knelt, sniffing the ground. He peeled away a dozen different scents, rank garbage and stagnant water, mildew and moldy bread. Still no sign of the girl.

“Trail went cold about a mile outside of town,” he mused. “She’s smart. Covering her tracks, muting her magic.”

There was another loud burst of static. Hound could easily picture Lord Red sweeping everything off of the console, striking the reinforced oak table with enough force to splinter it. When the man’s voice sounded in Hound’s ear again, his tone was less commanding. His words came on the end of a heavy sigh, exhaustion and suppressed anger adding weight to his speech.

“Keep me posted, Hound. Console out.”

He echoed Lord Red’s sigh the moment the connection was dropped. Contracts like these wore on him. It wasn’t hard for him to chase down his usual targets, the murderers and the molesters and the traitors. The ones who deserved the chase. He usually felt a savage joy in the pressure that mounted against his quarries. Knowing that they knew they were being hunted, knowing that he could press the pursuit to force them to panic, or let off and follow the trail slowly to give them a moment’s respite, only to catch them off guard. Watching their resolve to continue fleeing fray with each narrow escape. He lived for that feeling. 

It was when his targets didn’t deserve to be hunted that he struggled. When he tracked down rebels and dissenters for the Rainbow Mage, they didn’t run to back-alley hovels or gang dens. They ran to homes, full of life and love and families that wept and screamed as he dragged them back to face their sentences.

Now, the Rainbow Mage was dead, and the first command Hound received from the ruler who rose in the old tyrant’s place was to chase down a teenage girl, guilty of no crimes but the desire to flee those who would see her imprisoned.

He thought he was done with all this.

Hound took a deep breath, holding onto the lavender and raspberry scents while discarding the unpleasant smells he’d come to associate with Mundane cities. He took a step towards the empty street, eager to leave the trash-filled alley, and froze. One hand went to his sweatshirt pocket, withdrawing the bag with the hair in it.

It was still sealed. The whiff of the girl’s scent had been in the air.

He focused his senses, tightening his will in an attempt to convince his magic to give him just a little more. Hound shut his eyes, closed out the quiet of the night, and receded deeply into a world where scent was his only guide. The air stirred once more, bringing with it a plethora of new information. Smoke from a long extinguished hearthfire, musty earth from the forests that wrapped the swelling mountain town in life, the rank scent of a thousand different trash cans...there.

Due east, layered behind the heady smell of pine needles, he caught another hint of the girl’s sweet, kind magic. He inhaled deeply again, discarding all of the irrelevant scents. He had her.

Hound opened his eyes and took a heavy step forward, shaking off the slightly disorienting feeling of returning to his less reliable senses. It had taken him all of four years to break down the habits of sight and sound, but freeing himself of the sensory shackles had allowed him to rise through the ranks of the Cabal of Vengeance in no time at all. He could sniff out trance-dust in the pockets of people hundreds of feet away in a crowd. He could smell a liar’s sweat before it had even visibly left the pores. He could catch the sharp sting of silent steel on the air, no matter how quiet the assassin, or how deep the shadows in which they hid.

Even now, in an alleyway lined with stagnant water and garbage, Hound smelled the sour perspiration and blood-caked weapon long before he heard the scuff of foot on stone. He called his longblade from its containment rune with a light tap on the inside of his left wrist before whirling to meet the assailant. Sparks flew as his enchanted weapon struck his enemy’s, and the sound of metal crashing against metal rang off the alley’s walls.

The force of the intercepted blow pushed Hound off balance, but his training took over. He took a few retreating steps before leaping backwards a short distance, sliding on the alley’s smooth stone brick as he brought his sword back up into a ready stance.

His attacker hadn’t moved from the initial point of contact, a long machete tapping idly against one shoulder. He wore a black robe that covered his body from shoulder to toe, and his face was hidden within a voluminous hood. The man seemed fit, to be sure, but the force carried by the single blow spoke to fortification magic of some kind.

Hound switched his sword to his left hand, clenching and unclenching his right hand behind his back. The shock of the clashing blades had his right arm shaking and numb nearly up to the elbow. He’d have to be careful to avoid any more direct blows.

“What’s the deal here?” he called out, giving his blade a few idle swings. It had been a while since he’d fought left-handed, but Lord Red required all of his Vengeants to be combat-capable with their off hands. I’m not paying for half a soldier, he was fond of saying.

His assailant gave no answer, no sign he’d even heard Hound speak. That was fine. Judging from the force of the blow and the nature of the weapon he’d swung, the man hadn’t been aiming to keep him alive. Even with the lightweight combat armor Hound wore beneath his Mundane civilian clothing, the attack would probably have cut him in half. This wasn’t a back-alley scrap, or some Old World baron trying to send a message.

This was an assassination.

Hound raised a hand to his communicator, tapping the pod in his ear to open the connection back to Avalon. “Console, I-”

The man was on him in an instant. Hound swore, barely sidestepping the vertical swing. He tried to step back, desperately seeking to create space, but his assailant had seized him by the front of the shirt with his free hand. Hound struggled with the man’s iron grip as he watched the machete rise for a blow he wouldn’t be dodging.

He knew he didn’t have the strength required to cut through a fortified opponent, so Hound went with the only option left to him. As the machete fell, his own blade flashed through the air, cutting the front from his shirt. Freed from his opponent’s grip, Hound twisted desperately away from the incoming blow, but still felt a blinding pain in the side of his face as he stumbled deeper into the alley. The man surged forward, but swayed back from a blind retaliatory swing as Hound pressed a hand to the side of his face, blood already obscuring his left eye’s vision.

The cloying, salty smell of blood filled his nostrils, and his stomach swam as he saw the small sliver of flesh on the floor of the alley. The weapon his enemy was swinging must be horrifyingly sharp to pare the skin away from the side of his head the way it had, and the man held the instrument up to the sparse moonlight, the ghostly silver reflecting off the blood-slick blade. 

Hound shuddered in revulsion as the man opened his mouth and licked the crimson stain from his weapon, swallowing with a look on his face like he was relishing the taste.

Then, he began to change.

The man’s figure twisted and warped, widening in the chest even as he doubled over, pained grunts shaking his body. What little Hound could see at the end of the man’s black sleeves thickened, shifting from lean, muscular hands to larger meaty fists. He felt a shiver run up his spine.

Hound was transfixed by the unnatural ghastliness of the transformation, the way it seemed to hurt the man as much as he’d been relishing its beginning, the grotesque snapping and twisting of his form. He realized belatedly that he should have been attacking, or at least putting more space between himself and his opponent, but the man’s seizures ceased as soon as Hound took an uncertain step back, and both men froze.

The man looked up, straightening slowly from where he’d been bent over. His hood slid down, either intentionally or dislodged by his convulsions, and Hound resisted the urge to flee only by the grace of his years of training.

A protruding brow was set above two sharp blue eyes, with a bulbous nose that looked like it had been broken a few too many times. The man’s mouth and square jaw was almost fully obscured by a wild beard, several times longer than Cabal of Vengeance regulations. Hound’s hand went up to his own beard, which he’d avoided having to trim because Lord Red valued his service in the rebellion enough to let little things like this slide. He took another step backward, and his opponent followed him, a crazed grin stretching the assassin’s face.

Hound’s face.

The man started to laugh, a low, rough noise, described by his team as more of a bellow than the standardly jovial sound, and Hound felt his discipline begin to waver. 

He could put all the pieces together, now. A body strong enough, fast enough to stand head and shoulders over an unfortified person, with revolting magic that used the source of life as its fuel. The black robe, the sneak attack in the dead of night, long after wizardkind had finished its civil war.

Bloodmage.

He heard a sound, and his doppelganger stopped laughing, cocking his head to one side. They both went quiet, and Hound heard it coming from the ground between the two of them.

“-ound, this is Console. What’s the situation?”

Hound’s stomach dropped as his eyes found the piece of flesh the man had cut from his head with his previous attack. His ear, fully intact on the crimson flap of skin, lay on the stone bricks, the communicator in it buzzing with Lord Red’s attempts to contact him.

He started forward, but froze as his opponent leveled the machete at him. The impostor sauntered towards the puddle of gore at an unconcerned pace. He leaned down and plucked the communicator from the disembodied ear with an unconcerned expression, before wiping it down and placing it gently in his own.

“Hound, checking in,” he said gruffly, his voice a perfect match to Hound’s own gravelly tone. He wanted to scream out, to let Lord Red know he was speaking to an impostor, but the communicators were designed to filter out background noise, only accepting vocal inputs from the people they were currently attached to. The man smiled coldly at him, listening to a conversation that he was no longer privy to.

“No, sir,” the man continued. “A stray dog. Yes. Non-lethal, yes. I’ll be more careful, sir. Hound out.”

The bloodmage tapped the communicator as Hound had only moments before, closing the connection to Avalon and his only hope for rescue. The weapon came up to idly tap against the man’s shoulder once again. His head tilted to the side and his nostrils flared, confusion and then wonder crossing the bloodmage’s face. Hound wondered at the behavior for a moment before his heart sank.

My magic, he thought. The bastard’s got my magic.

“This will be useful,” the bloodmage mused. “The girl has proven quite elusive.”

Had the statement not jerked Hound into full wakefulness, he wouldn’t even have realized how close to passing out he had been. He was losing huge amounts of blood, but the last sentence he’d heard drew a low growl from his throat, reigniting the resolve that had been slipping away in the dire situation.

They were after the girl. Of course they were. They had his magic, his communicator, his face, and they would have her trail soon enough. He couldn’t let that happen.

Hound flexed his right hand. It had recovered enough of its feeling to be used, and so he switched to a two-handed grip on his longblade. The bloodmage grinned, stepping forward as he cut the air in front of him, back and forth, as though impatient to have the sharp blade cleave through something.

By the seven graves of the Rainbow Mage, he thought. By Arthur, by the old gods of Olympus, by the fucking Prism Council, for all I care. If there’s ever been a higher power in the world, guide my blade. Not for my life, but for hers.

Hound stepped forward to meet his opponent, blade held low. A moment before the man started his swing, Hound plunged the tip of his sword into a bag of trash by the side of the alley, flicking out the first of its unseen contents.

A smaller, brightly-colored bag sailed through the air, and Hound felt his heart sink. He had been hoping to overload the man’s imitation of his own magic with some foul-smelling garbage, something he had a great deal of trouble with in the days after his manifestation. The bloodmage cackled, a sneer curling his lips as he cleaved the bag in two, the machete continuing downward in a vicious, gleaming arc.

And clattered to the ground.

A horrified choking sound escaped the bloodmage’s throat. Hound could hardly believe his eyes, but what looked like actual shit was plastered around the man’s mouth and nose. He could have laughed. He knew the Mundanes were fond of their toxins, but the idea that they would actually leave feces sitting in the nooks around their homes and businesses had never occurred to him. No wonder the whole town smelled rancid.

The bloodmage clawed at his face before falling to his knees and retching on the stone beneath him. Hound grimly advanced, stepping over the man’s fallen weapon as his opponent scrambled away from him, desperately trying to clear the foul matter from around his nose. He tapped his longblade in a complex pattern. The next blow would burn up all of the enchantments layered on the weapon, but would strike with nearly ten times the force. Hound wasn’t about to take any chances.

The blade rose high above his head.

“Sorry,” he said wearily. “My magic’s not for everybody.”

Hound went to swing the final blow, but for some reason his arms weren’t listening to him. He felt the strength drain from him like water, and his sword fell to the stone beside him.

He looked down, where a sharp pain in his chest was accompanied by the crimson tip of a machete, the blade gleaming like a ruby in the moonlight. Hound fell to his knees before slumping over on the stones. He felt like a fool. Even the Rainbow Nations sent assassins in pairs. This second killer had waited, quiet and unseen, even as their partner was pushed into a corner, all to seize their best opportunity. One thing still nagged at Hound, in the strange calm that accompanied mortal wounds.

Why couldn’t I smell you?

His unseen attacker stepped over him, stooping to pick up his empowered longblade. Hound couldn’t even find the strength to look up, couldn’t steal even a single glimpse of his attacker as they undoubtedly raised the blade over their head, as he had done only moments before.

He struggled to find the air for words, but couldn’t make a sound. The empowered strike was designed to tear down stone walls and annihilate fortified doors. He doubted he would even leave a corpse. Behind the new assailant, his doppelganger had cleared the worst of the excrement from his face and had retaken his feet.

“Give him to me, Fantasma,” the man spat, and Hound could hear the fury in the man’s voice, even if he couldn’t see his face. “This is my kill.”

“It is your shame, Cambiador. Can you imagine the harm you could have done to the operation, had you fallen? This is my kill. Find the girl’s trail. Redeem yourself.”

The newcomer, Fantasma, was female, and her tone was laden with scorn.

Ah, the girl, Hound thought, idly watching Fantasma’s feet shift as she prepared to strike. I hope she finds somewhere safe to hide. And allies, too.

He felt regretful then. Not only knowing that he’d failed, and that his failure wouldn’t even be appropriately noted by the Rainbow Nations with this Cambiador wearing his face. He regretted the hopeless situation his incompetence had placed the girl in.

For where in this awful city could she find someone who would protect a wizard?