Now she was alone in pitchy darkness, with only
the rough brick wall of the corridor as a guide, and
the faint sound of her footsteps bouncing off the
walls to tell her that it was a corridor. She held
back impatience and continued to feel her way with
extreme caution—until once again her hand en-
countered open air.
She was suddenly awash with light, frozen by it,
surrounded by it on all sides. She would have been
prepared for any attack but this, which left her
blind and helpless, with tears of pain blurring what
little vision she had. She went automatically into a
defensive crouch, pulling her blade over her head
with both hands from the sheath on her back; only
to hear a laugh like a dozen brass bells from some
point above her head.
"Little warrior," the voice said caressingly. "I
have so longed for the day when we might meet
again."
"I can't say I feel the same about you," Tarma
replied after a bit, trying to locate the demon by
sound alone. "I suppose it's too much to expect you
to stand and fight me honorably?" She could see
nothing but angry red light, like flame, but without
the heat; perhaps the light was a little brighter
above and just in front of her. She tried to will her
eyes to work, but they remained dazzled, with lances
of pain shooting into her skull every time she
blinked. There was a smell of blood and sex and
something more that she couldn't quite identify.
Her heart was racing wildly with fear, but she was
determined not to let him see how helpless she felt.
"Honor is for fools—and I may have been a fool
in the past, but I am no longer quite so gullible. No,
little warrior, I shall not stand and fight you. I shall
not fight you at all. I shall simply—put you to
sleep."
A sickly sweet aroma began to weave around her,
and Tarma recognized it after a moment as black
tran-dust; the most powerful narcotic she knew of.
She had only that moment of recognition before she
felt her control over herself suddenly melt away;
her entire body went numb in a single breath, and
she fell face down on the floor, mind and body alike
paralyzed, sword falling from a hand that could no
longer hold it.
And now that you cannot fight me, said a silky
voice in her mind, I shall make of you what I will...
and somewhat more to my taste than the ice-creature
you are now. And this time your Goddess shall not be
able to help you. I am nearly a god now myself, and the
gods are forbidden to war upon other gods.
The last thing she heard was his laughter, like
bronze bells slightly out of tune with one another.
Kethry fretted inwardly, counting down the mo-
ments until she was supposed to try the gate. This
was the hardest part, for certain; the waiting. Any-
thing else she could manage with equanimity. Wait-
ing brought out the worst fears, roused her imagi-
nation to a fever pitch. The plan was for Tarma
and Warrl to check the courtyard, then unlock the
gates for her. They would precede her into the
temple as well. They were to meet in the sanctu-
ary, after Tarma had declared it free of physical
hazards.
It was a plan Kethry found herself misliking more
with every passing moment. They were a team; it
went against the grain to work separately. Granted,
Warrl was with Tarma; granted that she was some-
thing of a handicap in a skulk-and-hide situation
like this—still, Kethry couldn't help thinking that
she'd be able to detect dangers neither of the other
two would notice. More than that—her place was
with Tarma, not waiting in the wings. Now she
began to wish she hadn't told the Shin'a'in that she
intended to investigate this place. If she'd kept her
mouth shut, she could have done this properly, by
daylight, perhaps. Finally her impatience became
too much; she felt her way along the wall to the
wooden gates, and pushed very slightly on one of
them.
It moved.
Tarma had succeeded in this much, anyway; the
gates were now unbarred.
She pushed a little harder, slowly, carefully. The
gate swung open just enough for her to squeeze
herself through, scraping herself on the wooden
bulwarks both fore and aft as she did so.
Before her lay the courtyard, mostly open ground.
Remembering all Tarma had taught her, she
crouched as low as she could, waited until the
moon passed behind a cloud, and sprinted for the
shelter of the dried-up fountain.
Under the rim, in shadows, she looked around;
watching not for objects, but for movement, any
movement. But there was no movement, anomalous
or otherwise. She crawled under the rim until she
lay hidden on the side facing the temple doors.
She watched, but saw nothing; she listened, but
heard only crickets and toads. She waited, aching
from the strain of holding herself still in such an
awkward position, until the moon again went be-
hind a cloud.
She sprinted for the temple doors, flinging her-
self against the wall of the temple behind a pillar
as soon as she reached them. It was then that she
realized that there had been something very anom-
alous at the gate.
The aged gates, allegedly locked for fifteen years,
had opened smoothly and without a sound—as if
they had been oiled and put into working order
within the past several days.
Something was very wrong.
A shadow bulked in front of her, and she started
with alarm; she pulled the sword in a defensive
move before she realized that her "enemy" was
Warrl.
He reached for her arm and his teeth closed gently
on her tunic; he tugged at her sleeve. That meant
Tarma wanted her.
"You didn't meet with anything?" Kethry whisp-
ered.
Warrl snorted. I think that they are all asleep or
blind. A cub could have penetrated this place.
This was too easy; all her instincts were in an
uproar. Too easy by far. She suddenly realized what
their easy access to this place meant. This was a
trap!
And now Kethry felt a shrill alarm course through
her every nerve—a double alarm. Need was alerting
her to a woman in the deadliest danger, and very
nearby—
—and the bond of she'enedran was resonating with
soul-deep threat to her blood-sister. Tarma was in
trouble.
As if to confirm her fears, Warrl threw up his
head and voiced his battle-cry, and charged within,
leaving Kethry behind.
And given the urgency of Need's pull, that could
only mean one thing.
Thalhkarsh was here—and he had the Sworn One
at his nonexistent mercy.
The tim
e for subterfuge was over.
Kethry pulled her ensorcelled blade with her left
hand, and caused a blue-green witchlight to dance
before her with a gesture from her right; then kicked
open the doors of the temple and flung herself
frantically through them. She landed hard against
the dingy white-plastered wall of a tiny, cobwebbed
anteroom, bruising her shoulder; and found herself
staring foolishly at an empty chamber.
Another door stood in the opposite wall, slightly
ajar. She inched along the wall and eased it open
with the tip of her blade. The witchlight showed
nothing beyond it but a brick-walled tunnel that
led deeper into the temple proper. Warrl must al-
ready have run down this way.
She moved stealthily through the door, and into
the corridor, praying to find Tarma, and soon. The
internal alerts of both her blade and her blood-bond
were nigh-unbearable, and she hardly dared con-
template what that meant to Tarma's well-being.
But the corridor twisted and turned like a kadessa-
run, seemingly without end. With every new cor-
ner she expected to find something—but every time
she rounded a corner she saw only another long,
dust-choked extension of the corridor behind her.
The dust showed no tracks at all, not even Warrl's.
Could she have somehow come the wrong way? But
there were only two directions to choose—forward,
or back the way she had come. Back she would
never go; that left only forward. And forward was
yard after yard of blank-walled corridor, with never
a door or a break of any kind. She slunk on and on
in a kind of nightmarish entrancement in which
she lost all track of time; there was only the end-
lessly turning corridor before her and the cry for
help within her. Nothing else seemed of any import
at all. As the urgings of her geas-blade Need and
the bond that tied her to Tarma grew more and
more frantic, she was close to being driven nearly
mad with fear and frustration. She was being dis-
tracted; so successfully in fact, that it wasn't until
she'd wasted far too much precious time trying to
thread the maze that she realized what it must
be—
—a magical construct, meant to delay her, aug-
mented by spells of befuddlement.
"You bastard!" she screamed at the invisible
Thalhkarsh, enraged by his duplicity. He had made
a serious mistake in doing something that caused
her to become angry; that rage was useful, it fueled
her power. She gathered it to her, made a force of it
instead of allowing it to fade uselessly; sought and
found the weak point of the spell. She sheathed
Need, and spreading her arms wide over her head,
palms facing each other, blasted with the white-
heat of her anger.
Mage-energies formed a glowing blue-white arc
between her upraised hands; a sorcerer's wind be-
gan to stir around her, forming a miniature whirl-
wind with herself as the eye. With a flick of her
wrists she reversed her hands to hold them palm-
outward and brought her arms down fully extended
to shoulder height; the mage-light poured from them
to form a wall around her, then the wall expanded
outward. The brick corridor walls about her flared
with scarlet as the glowing wall of energy touched
them; they shivered beneath the wrath-fired mage-
blast, wavered and warped like the mirages they
were. There was a moment of resistance; then,
soundlessly, they vanished.
She saw she was standing in what had been the
outer, common sanctuary; an enormous room, sup-
ported by two rows of pillars whose tops were lost
in the shadows of the ceiling. Tracks in the dust
showed she had been tracing the same circling path
all the time she had thought she was traversing the
corridor. Her anger brightened the witchlight; the
green-blue glow revealed the far end of the sanctuary
—the forgotten god stood there, behind his altar.
The statue of the gentle god of rains had a forlorn
look; he and his altar were covered with a blanket
of dust and cobwebs. Dust lay undisturbed nearly
everywhere.
Nearly everywhere—she was not the expert tracker
Tarma was, but it did not take an expert to read
the trail that passed from the front doors to some-
where behind the god's statue. And in those dust
tracks were paw prints.
Desperate to waste no more time, she pulled her
blade again and broke into a run, her blue-green
witchlight bobbing before her, intent on following
that trail to wherever it led. She passed by the
neglected altar with never a second glance, and
found the priests' door at the end of the trace in
the dust; it lay just behind and beneath the statue.
It had never been intended to be concealed, and
besides stood wide open. She sent the witchlight
shooting ahead of her and sprinted inside, panting
a little.
But the echoes of running feet ahead of her as
she passed into another brick-walled corridor told
her that her spell-breaking had not gone unnoticed.
Common sense and logic said she should find a
corner to put her back against and make a stand.
Therefore she did nothing of the kind.
As the first of four armed mercenaries came
pounding into view around a corner ahead, she took
Need in both hands and charged him, shrieking at
the top of her lungs. Her berserk attack took the
demon-hireling by surprise; he stopped dead in his
tracks, staring, and belatedly raised his own weapon.
His hesitation sealed his doom. Kethry let the el-
dritch power of Need control her body, and the
bespelled blade responded to the freedom by mov-
ing her in a lightning blow at his unprotected side.
Screaming in pain, the fighter fell, arm sheared off
at the shoulder.
The second hired thug was a little quicker to
defend himself, but he, too, was no match for Need's
spell-imparted skill. Kethry cracked his wooden
shield in half with a strength far exceeding what
she alone possessed, and swatted his blade out of
his hands after only two exchanges, sending it clat-
tering against the wall. She ran him through before
he could flee her.
The third and fourth sought to take her while—
they presumed—Kethry's blade was still held fast
in the collapsing body. They presumed too much;
Need freed itself and spun Kethry around to meet
and counter both their strokes in a display of swords-
manship a master would envy. They saw death
staring at them from the witchlight reflected on
the blood-dripping blade, from the hate-filled green
eyes.
It was more than they had the stomach to face—
and their lives were worth far more to them than
their pay. The
y turned and fled back down the way
they had come, with Kethry in hot pursuit, too
filled with berserk anger now to think that a charge
into unknown danger might not be a wise notion.
There was light ahead, Kethry noticed absently,
allowing her rage to speed her feet. That might
mean there were others there—and perhaps the
demon.
The hirelings ran to the light as to sanctuary;
Kethry followed—
She stumbled to a halt, at first half-blinded by
the light; then when her eyes adjusted, tripped on
nothing and nearly fell to her knees, her mind and
heart going numb at what she saw.
This had once been the inner temple; Thalh-
karsh had transformed it into his own perverted
place of unholiness. It had the red-lit look of a
seraglio in hell. It had been decorated with the
same sort of carvings that had ornamented the de-
mon's temple back in Delton. The subject was sex-
ual; every perversion possible was depicted, provided
that it included pain and suffering.
The far end of the room had been made into a
kind of platform, covered in silk and velvet cush-
ions, plushly upholstered. It was a cliched setting;
an overdone backdrop for an orgy. The demon cer-
tainly enjoyed invoking pain, but it appeared that
he himself preferred not to suffer the slightest dis-
comfort while he was amusing himself. The plat-
form was occupied by a clutch of writhing nude
and partially clothed bodies. Only now were some
of those on the platform beginning to disengage and
take notice of the hirelings fleeing for the door on
the opposite side. Evidently not even the demon
foresaw that Kethry would be able to get this far on
her own.
Vows And Honor Book 1: The Oathbound Page 33