CHAPTER

19

Kalok Shash!” Vor’s roar resounded in the canyon, and it seemed to Kauth that the earth beneath him shook with it. Clutching his belly as he fell to the ground, Kauth turned to look at the orc.

The giant’s sword was buried in the orc’s shoulder, and Vor was drenched in blood. His left arm hung lifeless at his side, but the sword in his right hand was in the midst of a mighty swing aimed at the stooping giant’s neck. Silver light traced the arc of the blade, and it flared into a brilliant explosion as it struck true. The giant toppled, but Vor followed it down to the ground.

“No no no,” Kauth groaned. He tried to crawl to Vor, but his arms wouldn’t support his weight.

Sevren’s foot slammed into his ribs, knocking him over onto his back. The shifter held his knife poised for a killing blow, but his face showed signs of his internal struggle. He was trying to resist whatever compulsion held him in its grip—but he couldn’t.

Just as the knife began its downward plunge, Zandar leaped over Kauth and into Sevren, knocking him down. Kauth loosed the wand’s healing magic into his body, stopping the blood flowing from his gut, at any rate, though it still left him feeling weak from the blood he’d already lost.

Sevren had the upper hand in grappling the warlock. Though his knife had fallen away somewhere, his claws tore at Zandar. Worse, beetles now swarmed over Zandar as well, burrowing beneath his skin. On the other hand, Zandar completely occupied the shifter’s attention, leaving his back open to Kauth’s wand.

Kauth struggled to his feet and bent over the shifter. As the wand’s magic coursed into Sevren’s body, beetles erupted through his skin and fell dead to the ground, leaving bloody ulcers behind. Sevren stopped struggling against Zandar, and the warlock pushed him off. Kauth bent over Zandar next.

“I’m fine,” the warlock said, pushing him away. “Check on Vor!”

A surge of grief clenched in Kauth’s chest and pressed at his eyes. “It’s too late for Vor,” he said.

“It can’t be! Go heal him!” Zandar’s face was twisted in pain that reflected Kauth’s own and magnified it.

The beetles that still crawled over the earth came together and started building their slender pillar again. Kauth pulled out the fiery wand again, but Zandar snatched it from his hand.

“I’ll kill it,” Zandar said. “See to Vor!”

Kauth couldn’t argue. Dreading what he would see, he picked his way among the swarming beetles to the fallen orc’s side. Fire burst behind him, and he heard the drone of the beetles.

He’d been right—there was no pulse of life in Vor’s neck, no breath in his mouth. His eyes stared blankly at the sky. But in this one place, the sky did not seem so dark. Kauth felt a sudden surge of hope—hope, perhaps, for Vor above all. At the last, he had struck the giant with the power of Kalok Shash. The Binding Flame had not abandoned him.

Another burst of fire made Kauth’s shadow fall across Vor’s face. Then silence. He heard quiet footfalls approach, then Zandar fell to his knees at Kauth’s side. Sevren stood behind them. There was nothing to do but mourn.

Vor’s lifeless eyes stared at the burning sky. Kauth followed them up as if there were something to see, and lost himself in the churning of the clouds, the strange red light, and in memories of Vor.

Zandar was weeping unabashedly beside him, displaying far more affection for the dead orc than he ever had while Vor was alive. The sounds of his cries seemed a fitting background to Kauth’s thoughts.

Vor had died for him. The giant-demon would have killed him if Vor had not charged in when he did. Kauth had put his own life in danger to reclose the Gatekeeper seal in the serpent’s lair and saved his companions, but Vor had been the one standing beside him, hacking off the alien tentacles that wrapped around his neck while he worked.

Why should Vor’s death bother me? Kauth thought. I brought him here to die. The whole plan rests on him dying, along with the others. Along with me. Their lives are playing pieces in a much larger game.

He shook his head, still staring up at the clouds.

“Do it now!” Kelas stood behind her, yelling in her ear. “No one lives forever.”

Laurann stared into her friend’s eyes. She had trained with Kyra for a month. They had been girls together, laughing and laughing over the most foolish things. She had told Kyra things she had never told anyone. Now Kelas was making her kill her friend.

Kyra set her mouth in a thin line, but her eyes betrayed her. The eyes always do.

“You have no friends,” Kelas said. “If you cannot kill her, I will make her kill you before I kill her myself. Kill or be killed. If you love you will fail!”

“I’m sorry,” Laurann whispered. She drove the knife into Kyra’s heart as fast and hard as she could, hoping her friend would die quickly.

Kelas spun her around and punched her face. “You are not sorry!” he yelled. She fell to the floor and Kelas kicked her in the gut. She curled around the blow, gasping for breath, and he kicked her again. “You do not care for this girl! She failed, so she died!”

He kicked her once more, and Laurann rolled over into the spreading pool of Kyra’s blood.

How many people had he killed at Kelas’s command? He couldn’t begin to count. It started when he was barely old enough to wrap his hand around the hilt of a sword. How many times had Kelas beat him for displaying a shred of hesitation or compassion, for caring a whit about anyone? Kelas had worked hard to ensure that Kauth—that Aunn in all his faces hated him. Hated him and obeyed him without question.

Always the message was the same: Aundair was everything and the lives of individuals meant nothing. A Royal Eye was willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for the good of the nation, even himself. The needs of the nation and its hundreds of thousands far outweighed the life of any one person.

I don’t believe it anymore, he realized. He looked down from the sky to Vor’s corpse on the ground, to Zandar weeping over his friend. This, he thought, is what life is about.

I won’t do it. For the first time in my life, I’m going to fail. And Kelas can burn in the Lake of Fire for all I care.

He unslung his pack from his shoulders, opened the front pouch, and drew out an ivory cylinder. He unscrewed the lid and shook out a roll of papers, then began to shuffle through them, looking for the one he needed.

“What are you doing?” Sevren asked. The shifter had been standing silently behind him, mourning in his own quiet way.

“I’m going to bring him back.”

Zandar looked up at that. His face was a mask of anguish, streaked with tears. His violent display of emotion no longer seemed out of place to Kauth. It was right and good that he should care so much about his friend.

“You can do that?” the warlock asked. The note of hope in his voice convinced Kauth that he had made the right decision.

“I can damn well try.” He’d carried the scroll with him for years, hoping he would never have to use it, and never quite sure that it would work if he did. He found the right one, withdrew it from the sheaf, and returned the others to their case.

“How can I help?” Zandar asked.

“Pray for me.”

Kauth let his eyes roam over the scroll, blocking out the rest of the world from his mind. A devotee of the war god, Dol Dorn, had scribed it, ornamenting it with images of weapons and marching armies. The priest had probably intended it to be used in the event of a great general’s death on the field of battle. Presumably whoever carried it into battle had died before the general in question. Kauth had purchased it some years ago with money he’d secreted away without Kelas’s knowledge.

Kauth had heard other changelings in the Royal Eyes speak of the Traveler over the course of his training, always out of earshot of Kelas and other handlers. The ever-changing trickster of the gods, the Traveler did not answer prayers or accept sacrifice—the Traveler smiled on the self-reliant. The Traveler’s ten thousand names were said to hide the secrets of the universe for those who could puzzle them out. The idea of those ten thousand names had always captured Kauth’s imagination, and he figured that the best way to glean their secrets was to adopt ten thousand names himself. In thirty years, he had yet to take on a hundred names, and he felt more than nine thousand names distant from the mysteries of the universe.

He wasn’t sure whether the Traveler had really appeared to him in a dream. He had been inclined to dismiss that apparition as the product of a fever. But her persisent question—he had always thought of the Traveler as her, though others described him as male in sometimes vulgar myths—that question had lingered with him: “Who are you?” It galled him that he hadn’t yet come up with a satisfying answer.

So it was her image that Kauth fixed in his mind as he began to read the scroll, as she had appeared to him in that dream, wearing the face of the martyred paladin Dania ir’Vran and bathed in argent light. Perhaps Kalok Shash would smile on that mental image of silver fire and favor Vor because of it.

He reached into the scroll with his mind, gingerly touching the magic bound in each letter, amplified in each syllable, straining against the bonds of each word. One by one, he wrapped his mind around the knot of magic in each word and felt the knot loosen as he spoke. Magic streamed from the letters on the page, dissolving the ink it left behind, and poured from his mouth like sound. A cloud of divine power swirled around him like a brewing storm.

In that shadow of that storm, he felt infinitesimal, and he felt infinite. He felt himself dissolved in divinity, stretched across the universe and beyond, as though if he looked he could see everything and if he thought he could know anything. But he was far past sight and thinking. He was a tiny mind and a feeble hand reaching to touch a far greater power, speaking words that hallowed his tongue, daring to command the power of the gods.

It seemed to him, for a fleeting instant, that the gods deigned to be commanded, as he felt the power of the divine storm break and pour into Vor’s body. He was empty, every mote of energy scoured from his body and mind. A shimmer of silver ran over the fallen orc, and some part of his mind heard Zandar next to him gasp, then hold his breath.

There was a moment of perfect silence. No one breathed, no waft of wind stirred the dusty ground, nothing moved. They hung suspended in time.

And then the sky rumbled with thunder somewhere in the distance, the gravel shifted and crunched under Sevren’s foot, and the last flicker of silver faded from Vor’s blood-soaked armor.

Nothing. There was nothing. His failure was complete.

Zandar couldn’t bear the thought of Vor’s body becoming a feast for whatever carrion feeders might crawl through the Demon Wastes, but there was no wood to build a funeral pyre. So he and Sevren collected rocks and piled them in a cairn over Vor, hoping that would do the job but not really believing it. Kauth sat alone as they worked, trying to recapture some of what he’d felt as he read the scroll and agonizing over his failure. Against the magnitude of that failure, turning his back on his mission and the Royal Eyes seemed paltry.

One other problem nagged at Kauth’s mind—how to tell the others they were turning back. He had told them their mission was to scout the Demon Wastes for sign of an imminent invasion of the Eldeen Reaches. Something told him that Sevren and Zandar would want to complete that mission to honor Vor’s sacrifice. He considered telling them the truth—that their true mission was to stir up an invasion and lose their lives in the process. He wasn’t confident they’d be understanding. Somehow, he had to figure out how to prevent the rest of them from meeting the same fate as Vor.

Zandar and Sevren finished their work before he came near a solution to that problem. With some hesitation, Sevren took up the sword Vor had carried, the one they’d found in the serpent’s lair, surrounded by the words of Prophecy. It was more fitting, Zandar had argued, to lay Vor’s greataxe over his chest, the weapon he’d wielded in battle for years. Sevren initially handled the sword as though it were tainted by Vor’s death, but after giving it a few trial swings he clenched it more tightly, evidently pleased with its heft. Then he looked between Kauth and Zandar.

“Onward?” the shifter said. “Vor said we should clear the Labyrinth today.”

Kauth looked at Zandar, hoping he would be the first to suggest they turn back. The warlock was staring at the ground. No help from that quarter.

“Do you think you can get us the rest of the way through the Labyrinth?” Kauth asked Sevren.

“I have about as much chance to get us out on the far side as to take us back the way we came.”

“Couldn’t you follow our tracks back to the mountains?” Zandar asked. Good—the warlock was considering turning back.

“It’s possible. This gravel doesn’t show much sign of our passing, though. And the ground here has a tendency to change. Kauth, what do you think? This is your job, after all.”

“My job got Vor killed. I’m about ready to damn it.” And Kelas, he thought.

“I can see that,” the shifter said, scratching his head. “On the other hand, if we turn back now we don’t even get paid for our trouble.”

“Five thousand galifars split three ways,” Zandar said. “That’s what? Sixteen sixty-something? I suppose that’s the upside of Vor’s death—an extra four hundred gold.”

Kauth stared at the ground. Zandar was making a valiant effort at regaining his cynical mask, but no one believed it.

“If we survive,” Zandar added.

“I think we need to find our way out of here,” Kauth said at last.

“Zandar?” Sevren asked.

The warlock nodded, staring at Vor’s cairn.

“I don’t know how well I can follow our tracks,” Sevren said, “but at least I know we start going that way.” The shifter pointed a sharp claw in the direction they’d come.

For a moment, no one seemed willing to move. Zandar’s eyes were wet, and Sevren watched him. Finally Kauth took the first step, and the others trailed behind. Zandar kept looking back at the cairn until the canyon turned and shut it off from his view.

Each time they reached a branch in the canyon, Sevren examined the ground, sometimes ranging a hundred yards in both directions in search of any sign of their prior passing. More and more each time, it seemed to Kauth that his final decision was little more than his best guess. Kauth kept turning around, hoping the canyon would look familiar from the other direction, but there were no clear landmarks, the canyon all looked more or less the same, and he hadn’t really been paying close attention the first time around. He began to wonder if they might not end up on the far side of the Labyrinth after all, in a cruelly ironic trick of the Traveler.

They made camp early, to ensure that Sevren had enough light to look for their tracks. His hope was that sometime the next morning he’d find some sign of the camp they’d made the previous night, indicating they were still on the right track. But Kauth couldn’t help noticing the uncertain tone in his voice.

The night passed in deathly silence, their third night in the Labyrinth. Kauth wondered how many travelers had survived three nights in the Labyrinth before. Perhaps it was many—travelers who managed to avoid the Ghaash’kala and any monsters that haunted the Labyrinth, only to die of starvation, hopelessly lost in the maze.

The next morning was slow going. Sevren stopped more than usual, looking for signs of their previous camp, and spent longer at each branch. As the day wore on, the shifter grew increasingly tense, snarling at any interruption of his concentration. He was beginning to believe he’d led them astray. Shortly after the sun passed its zenith, he threw himself on the ground.

“What was it Vor said?” Sevren said. “Something about abandoning hope?”

“Abandon all hope for your body or your soul,” Zandar said, crouching near the shifter.

“We should have done that days ago.”

Kauth sat to rest his legs, a little away from the others, and stared at the ground. Days ago, he thought, I should have realized that I couldn’t lead these men to their deaths. Now it’s too late.

Wrapped in his thoughts, it took a moment for his mind to register what his eyes had seen. In a tiny spot beside him, there was a disturbance in the sea of gravelly ground. Larger pebbles cleared away to the sandy soil below. And in the soil, the faint memory of a pattern—a pattern traced by Vor’s finger!

“We’re here!” he shouted, startling Sevren to his feet.

“We’re where?” Zandar said, looking around the canyon walls.

“This is where we camped the night before last. Look—Vor was tracing his finger on the ground while we talked that night.”

Sevren crouched beside him and examined the ground. He threw his head back and laughed. “Well,” he said, “it’s taken the better part of a day’s travel, but I’ve finally managed to retrace a half-day of our journey. Only a day and a half to go!”

“Excellent,” Zandar said, his old grin returning to his face. “We should be out of here by the middle of next month.”

Despite Zandar’s affected gloom, their mood was high as they continued their journey. Sevren chose their path with more confidence, and from time to time pointed out other signs he remembered from their earlier course—a place where Zandar’s foot had slid in the gravel, a particularly large boulder Sevren had scrambled on top of to get a sense of the land. Kauth almost dared to believe they might all get out of the Demon Wastes alive—and he could carry the guilt of only this one last death, Vor’s death, back into the Eldeen Reaches.

As Sevren pointed out what might have been one of Vor’s heavy footprints, though, a terrible ululating cry arose from the cliffs around and above them, gripping Kauth’s heart with icy fear. By the time he could pull his mace from his belt, warriors were running down the steep canyon walls like a swarm of insects, continuing their eerie wailing.

“The Carrion Tribes,” Sevren said.

They were filthy and wild, matted hair jutting from beneath their battered helms and old blood staining their leather armor. They swung their weapons—clubs and spiked chains—in whirling arcs as they charged. Their rush was so chaotic that many tumbled down the steep canyon walls, only to be trampled under the feet of the barbarians behind them. They numbered in the dozens.

“Back to back,” Sevren said.

Zandar took his position close to the shifter, each of them facing out to the onrushing horde. Kauth completed the triangle, glad to feel his companions so close, but acutely aware of Vor’s absence.