by Troy Denning
It took Theseus a moment to realize he had no idea where he was going. His own screams were drowning out any cries he might have heard from Karfhud or the monster, and his nose was too full of his own blood to find them by scent. Slowly, he managed to thread the thought through his tormented mind that he needed to be silent, that if he kept screaming he would summon his enemies to him like scavengers to the battle dead. The Thrasson closed his mouth, and that was when he heard the awful stillness.
The chamber was quiet, but not quite silent. Somewhere ahead, there was Karfhud's groaning, low and steady. All around the fiend, there seemed to be a soft scrabble, as though the rats had already come out to gnaw at his fingers. There was a terrible, howling wheeze-it took Theseus a moment to identify it as his own labored breath.
"Star… light…" It seemed difficult to believe the frail voice struggling to issue the command belonged to Karfhud. "Cleave the… night."
The sapphire light glimmered to life on the tip of Theseus's sword, revealing a sight only slightly more gruesome than before the battle had begun. One of Sheba's black-veined legs lay at his feet, the toes still twitching, the ankle and the knees still working – the thing slowly inched its way toward the den. Scattered around the chamber, wherever they happened to have landed after the Thrasson's sword hacked them away, were other pieces of the monster: an ear, a wedge of torso, the matted hand from the arm that had been cleaved back in the swamp maze. Like the teg, they were all writhing back toward the central pillar.
A few paces away, Karfhud lay in a hollow of smashed bones, soaking in a pool of his own bubbling blood, his blighted face torn half off, and his black ribs shoving up through his chest in a dozen places. Though his maroon eyes had faded to mere orange embers, they looked no less hateful than ever, and they were fixed on Theseus's face.
"Coward."
Theseus shook his head. "Treacherous, perhaps."
The tanar'ri shook his head. "Can't… fool… me." The fiend raised a broken talon, beckoning the Thrasson closer. "Give me… a little blood."
Theseus stayed where he was.
"Last.;. request," Karfhud said. "I'll… tell…"
Theseus shook his head. Even in death, the tanar'ri was not likely to reveal the secret of his maps.
"Not… maps. You… will… never know… that-but what… of… friend? There is… secret…"
The Thrasson cursed. Tessali was probably dead by now, but Theseus could not leave here until he learned the truth.
"Of course… you can," Karfhud gasped. "Who is… to know? Your… fame… will not suffer…"
Theseus started toward the fiend. "My fame isn't what matters-Tessali is."
Had Karfhud not looked away and uttered a curse, Theseus might never have stopped to consider his own words. He had been a man of renown for so long that he had grown accustomed to considering his feats not in light of how they helped others, but merely in the glory they won him. He had lost sight of the quality that had made him a hero in the first place – his true concern for others – and focused his attention instead on the trappings of being a famous champion. Perhaps that was why he had lost his memories in the first place: he had lost himself.
"Don't… have much… time to waste… congratulating…" Karfhud gasped. "I… may not… last."
Theseus kneeled beside Karfhud's head, then he ran his own palm down the cutting edge of his sword. The blade opened a clean red gash. The Thrasson made a fist, but did not allow any of his blood to dribble on the tanar'ri's lips.
"Tell me."
Karfhud's only reply was a long, gurgling wheeze. The fiend licked his lips, but shook his head. "You… already peeled me… once."
Theseus swung his hand over the tanar'ri's lips and tightened his fist, squeezing a long red stream into Karfhud's mouth. He allowed the fiend to drink for several seconds, then pulled his hand away again.
"Now, tell me how to find Tessali."
Karfhud licked the blood off his cracked lips, then a raspy laugh rumbled up from deep in his chest, and the embers in his eyes went cold.
Theseus wasted no time trying to revive the fiend, for he knew well enough when he had been swindled. Instead, the Thrasson rolled the tanar'ri's heavy body onto its side and cut the fiend's battered back-satchel free. If there was a secret to entering the lair, Karfhud would certainly have marked it on his beloved maps. Theseus rifled through the parchments until he found the freshest one, then pulled it out and, as he unfurled the chart, found a clump of nappy white bariaur fur still clinging to one pink-tinged edge.
It is true, despite all I promised, that someone else is dead. It happened this way: while we were looking elsewhere, Karfhud jumped the bariaur from behind. Before Silverwind realized what was happening, all his legs and both his arms were broken, his skin was being peeled from his back, and he was already making plans for what he will imagine better the next time around.
I wish I could say the bariaur's multiverse ended quickly, but that is not how tanar'ri do things. They are masters of the slow death, with a thousand ways to prolong the torment, and each more agonizing than the last. Sometimes, the torture lasts even beyond death; the bariaur was spared that, at least, for the price of becoming a map.
A pity for Silverwind, of course, that he never found his way out of the mazes, but he was hardly a great loss to us: a boring, self-centered old fool, the likes of which you can find sleeping in any gutter in Sigil. And, really, what did you expect from a tanar'ri? Wisdom and goodwill? Consider yourself lucky the fiend settled for a bariaur's hide when he could have had prime, olive-skinned human.
The Thrasson, of course, was right about the map. It took him only a moment to find the pillar, a moment longer to see the three circles, no time at all to realize what he had to do. Already, he has hurled Sheba's writhing parts back into die adjoining passages; already, he has rounded the column twice; already, he has tossed aside the unfurled map and set himself to the task.
Staved ribs aching and bloody slashes throbbing, Theseus staggered the third time around the pillar and did not notice the peace gift in his path. He only saw the dark door opening before him, then heard his foot shattering the pottery, felt the broken shards crumbling beneath the palm of his borrowed foot, and looked down to see the black ribbons swirling round and round, rising up one after the other, circling his body once, twice, three times. He remembered, once before, standing in the mouth of a dark, fetor-filled cavern. His young wine woman had been there with him, pressing a ball of golden thread into his hands.
"I will hold the end, brave Theseus. After you have slain the minotaur, follow the string back to me."
"You may be certain I will, Princess." Theseus had kissed her long upon the lips. "And then will I carry you away from cruel Minos, across the sapphire sea to make you Ariadne, Queen of Athens."
Ariadne.
No sooner had the name come than the Thrasson felt the bursting of a husk; he looked down and saw black ichor oozing down his breast. His chest went hollow, and inside he felt a cold, bitter wind scraping across his raw ribs.
"No morel" he cried. "I have remembered too much already!"
But the memories continued to come; with each, another black pod ruptured and spilled its dark purulence over his body. He saw dearly what he had only glimpsed before: his callous betrayal of Ariadne, how his neglect caused his own father's death, how his own prideful blindness cost the lives of two wives, how his fury destroyed his innocent son. From the moment of his first victory, he had lost the very thing that had made him a hero.
And now, here the monster was, offering the same terrible bargain that had brought him so much misery before: a life, a single life, in exchange for eternal fame and renown; Tessali for all his memories of glory and fame. This time, Theseus knew better than to accept. With the black ribbons still whirling about him and the black pods still spilling ichor down his chest, the Thrasson raised his sword and rushed through the black door.
He found himself in a dark, vaulted chamber
thick with the smell of sweat and fear, where gloom clung like smoke to the ceiling and the rasp of anguished lungs echoed from every wall. The room was cluttered with iron cages of every size and shape, some square, some round, some shaped like pears, some big enough to hold Sheba herself and others barely large enough for a gnome. Dozens of manacles and shackles dangled from the support pillars; many of them still held the rotted remains of their latest prisoners.
In the center of the room, Tessali hung by the neck on a long rope, kicking his legs and rasping for breath. His arms were not bound, and he was rubbing his raw wrist stumps across the noose in a vain attempt to keep himself from strangling. The monster was nowhere in sight, though the Thrasson knew she would be lurking somewhere within easy reach of the elf.
Theseus took off at a sprint, taking no precaution other than to curve around so he could approach from the side. Though he was rushing into a certain ambush, he had no time to be prudent-not if he wanted to save Tessali.
As the Thrasson neared the rasping elf, he was nearly overcome by the mordant smell of ash. He dodged behind a pillar, narrowly avoiding a swiping claw, then pivoted around behind the column to sprint past Sheba's back. Tessali's eyes were already bugging out and his face was contorted with suffocation, so Theseus could not say how surprised the elf was to see him charging to the rescue. The Thrasson crossed the fast few paces of floor in a flying leap, his blue-glowing sword flashing like lightning as he slashed through the rope.
Theseus's blade had barely cut the line before a deafening roar exploded in his ear. He felt himself flying sideways through the air, then landed in a crumpled, aching heap beneath the beast Pods of pain burst by the handful. He opened his mouth to scream and found his cry smothered by the monster's slimy red hide. She began to burrow her maw down toward his throat. The Thrasson tried to bring his shoulder up to protect himself, but she was too powerful to resist.
Then, suddenly, there was an opening between their bodies. Theseus rolled onto his back and saw a length of rope looped about Sheba's throat, pulling her head up and away. Behind the monster, with one end of the line clamped between his teeth and the other threaded around his elbow, stood Tessali.
It was the perfect set. Theseus gave a great war cry and brought his sword arcing up toward Sheba's throat – but the monster of the labyrinth lives inside us all. She is the dark, devouring hunger that is never sated, the creeping shadow that ever plays the fiend to our seraphim, the secret rage hidden in our hearts; deny her, and we become her slaves; fight her, and we make her invincible. By now, you must know that no monster can ever be killed, not really – and so the Thrasson's star-forged steel slashes through the air in a perfect sapphire arc that nearly cleaves a githyanki in two.
"Watch it, berk!"
The fellow dances aside, delivering a swift kick to Theseus's head.
When the githyanki's foot comes away, he does not see the throbbing yellow pod clinging to his ankle. He only sees a battered, foul-smelling Thrasson seated on the bed of hard cobblestones, gaping at the cursing, bustling crowd, at the squalid, unmortared stone huts that flank the street, and, most of all, at the ragged, wild-eyed elf standing before him. The Pains Unending
He thinks he has given me the slip, that sun-bronzed man of renown, but no one leaves the mazes, not really; they only turn a corner, cross a threshold, open a door, and forget they have walked the same path before. I see him there upon Lethe's black, barren shore: a quivering mass of husks, bloated and throbbing with ichor, bowing over the cold waters to look upon his own dark reflection. His eyes, sunken and rimmed with red, stare back from some murk-Filled place as deep and brutal as the Abyss; his cheeks have gone gaunt and hollow with dusky hunger; his swollen and cracked lips bleed with that vile thirst he can never quite escape. Nothing has passed his lips since quitting the monster's den: not bread, not fruit, not sweet, cool wine; he squandered not a moment upon Sigil's wonders, nor took an hour's ease, nor even provisioned for his journey. He only rushed down Scab Way to burst through Rivergate's grim door and hurl himself through that purling portal in back.
The Thrasson kneels upon the cragged bank and cups a precious mouthful of the river's dark, soothing water in his hands. How many times before, he wonders, has he done this? How many times before has he been the Amnesian Hero, the man of renown searching out his legacy, only to discover it not worth the having? How many times has he knelt upon these same barren shores, taken these cold waters in his palms to drink the numbing bounty of the Lethe? Lethe?
Those who have drunk of Lethe's waters cannot remember its name, yet that is the name I recall. If he has drunk, then have I also? What matter then that the monster has collected all Poseidon's lies, that she has strung them like golden tinsel safely inside her den? If the Thrasson has drunk, then so have I. The lies become truths forgotten. I become prodigal daughter to the King of Seas and bride of Set, obliged by blood and rite to honor them both.
Yet, it may be the Thrasson never drank, that he lost his memory through accident or god-curse, that even now the game has not run its course and cunning Poseidon plays at making a daughter of one to whom he is no father. Then would I know his golden gifts for lies; then would the cracked gate mend; then would this Theseus, this sunken-eyed drudge, return to Arborea just one more Hunter bearing gifts for his master.
Has he drunk before? You have the answer within, I am sure; is the river's true name Lethe or… some other?
I will know soon enough. The Thrasson is lifting his hands toward his face; the Pains have become too much. Already- as he battled the monster, as he pushed his way down Scab Way, even as he has been kneeling there on Lethe's cragged bank – a hundred husks have burst; but what is a hundred to a thousand? He cannot bear that broken emptiness inside, that cold, sick guilt gnawing at his belly, that eternal ache in his breat. He has only to drink and they will be gone; the soines will straighten, the husks will slip from his body and splash into the cold, swirling waters.
The Thrasson lowers his face to meet his rising palms, purses his lips to draw the soothing waters into his mouth… but if he drinks, he will forget Ariadne. Will she not return to torment him? Will he not start chasing her through the mazes, begging her to tell him his name? Will he not keep making the same mistakes, keep adding more Antiopes and Hippolytuses and Jayks to his long ledger of betrayals, keep adding to the terrible burden he must shoulder each time he seeks out his legacy?
The Thrasson looks deep into his cupped hands, studies those hollow cheeks and thirst-cracked lips on his glimmering likeness, stares many long moments into those red and sunken eyes, and he sees something of the fiend in them: a tinge of maroon around the irises, two tongues of orange flame flickering in the Abyssal darkness of his pupils. He does not look away; he opens his hands and lets the dark reflection drain away. Terrible as the Pains are, better to bear them forever than to turn his back on a tanar'ri.
O mistress and mother of pleasure,
The one thing as certain as death,
We shall change as the things that we charish,
Shall fade as they faded before,
As foam upon water shall perish,
As sand upon the shore.
We shall know what the darkness discovers,
If the grave-pit be shallow or deep;
And our fathers of old, and our lovers,
We shall know if they sleep or not sleep.
We shall see whether hell be not heaven,
Find out whether tares be not grain,
And the joys of thee seventy times seven,
Our Lady of Pain.
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