by James Wyatt
His stomach had stopped complaining, but his throat screamed for water. All he knew was his most primitive need. He fell, gravel pressing into his cheek. He didn’t think he could stand up again. Abandon all hope.
He heard the gravel crunch, and again. Twice more, a pair of boots appeared before his eyes, and he realized the sound had been footfalls.
“Who are you?” he murmured, anticipating the Traveler’s inevitable question.
A booted foot rolled him over, and his vision became a field of reddish sky, framed on two sides by canyon walls. A shadow appeared and blocked the sky-a pair of eyes, a face looking into his. This time, the Traveler had adopted the face of a different fallen paladin, Vor. Light shot out in rays from behind his head, a nimbus of silver.
“He’s alive,” the Traveler said.
“Kill him.” The other voice had no body, and it was almost too far away to hear.
“Not until he’s heard the challenge.” The Traveler’s orc-face bent nearer to his. “You lie on cursed ground. You may proceed no farther into this place of evil, and you may not leave to spread its taint. I offer you a choice: Commit your life to the service of Kalok Shash and the holy calling of the Ghaash’kala, or die where you stand-where you lie.”
A word died on his lips, an echo of the Traveler’s words-“Shash.”
Darkness swallowed the Traveler’s face and the ruddy sky, and lastly the silver halo.
There was no pain. His first experience was absence-no pain. No light. No ground beneath him, no red sky above him. He floated in a void.
He couldn’t move, and panic seized him. He tried to shout, but no sound would come from his mouth. He couldn’t draw breath.
The first sense to return was touch-there was something beneath him after all, a hard bed supporting him in the void. And something heavy weighed on his chest, squeezing the breath out of him and keeping him immobile.
Suddenly air poured into his lungs in a shuddering gasp, and dim light nudged at his vision. His eyes shot open, and all his senses came back to him in a flood. He lay in a windowless room lit by a guttering oil lamp. Except for the lamp, it was bare as a prison cell. The thin door was slightly ajar.
One hand flew to his face to feel his features. Who was he supposed to be?
Scarred cheeks, a thin nose, wide jaw-Aric’s face, he remembered. It seemed he had kept the proper face while he was unconscious. He wondered how long he had been there.
He remembered becoming Aric, taking the face of a barbarian foe. He remembered running with the horde, and shuddered as he remembered Kathrik Mel. Then grief clutched at his heart as he saw the agony of Zandar and Sevren-the torture he’d brought on them. He had stumbled into the Labyrinth, but the rest was a blur. He had no memory of where he was or how he got there, but unless he had somehow escaped the Labyrinth, he reasoned, he must be in one of the cities of the Ghaash’kala.
Which means I’m safe, he thought. For now.
He drifted back into a less troubled sleep.
The door swung open with a creak, jolting Aric awake. An orc leaned through the doorway, and seeing he was awake, came to stand at the foot of his bed. He looked a little like Vor, with an almost triangular face, wider at the jaw than at the brow. Two prominent teeth jutted up over his upper lip, suggesting a young boar’s tusks.
“You are in Maruk Dar,” the orc said, “refuge and capital of the Maruk Ghaash’kala. You are here, rather than being dead where we found you, because I thought you might have uttered the holy name of Kalok Shash before you completely lost consciousness. Tell me clearly now. Will you commit your life to the service of Kalok Shash and the holy calling of the Ghaash’kala?”
The alternative, Aric knew, was death. The Maruk Ghaash’kala would not hesitate to kill him, even after making the effort to nurse him back to health.
“I will,” he said. What was another broken oath? He felt sick.
The orc smiled, revealing the full row of crooked teeth between the tusks. “Then you have heard the call of Kalok Shash, the beacon of hope in the Demon Wastes?”
Aric nodded.
“You are most welcome in Maruk Dar. I am Farren Dorashka. What is your name?”
“Aric.”
“From what tribe do you come?”
Aric cast his mind back over his brief time among the barbarians. Had he heard a tribal name mentioned? He couldn’t remember one-but then he recalled what Kelas had told him.
“Kathrik Mel bound my tribe into his horde. My tribe no longer exists.”
Kathrik Mel-speaking the name brought his face clearly to Aric’s mind, and he shuddered. The brick red skin and lashing tail, the clawed hand tracing a line of blood across Zandar’s neck.
“The tiefling,” the orc said, as though uttering a curse. “What information can you give us about him?”
“Many tribes now march under his banners. He plans to strike east. He swore to level the Towering Wood on his way to the cities beyond.”
“As we feared. But he will have to get past us first. Are you ready to stand against him?”
“I am,” Aric said-and he found, to his surprise, that he was.
The next morning, Aric put on a new leather cuirass, hefted the club he’d taken from a fallen barbarian, and stood with ten other warriors of the Ghaash’kala in the front courtyard of the fortress-city of Maruk Dar. Stone walls and bridges towered around and above him, carved into and built out from the walls of the Labyrinth. A great curtain wall shielded the city from the horrors beyond, with a dozen soldiers patrolling its battlements. Inside, homes were cut into the walls from the ground almost to the uppermost heights, stacked atop one another, stairs and ladders leading to the higher levels.
He’d learned earlier in the morning that the citizens ate in great mess halls, rather than buying or selling food in a market, and his new armor was further evidence that living in Maruk Dar was much like serving in the military. All of its residents were soldiers, except those too young to fight. None of its citizens was too old.
Farren Dorashka paced in front of the assembled warriors as he addressed them. He spoke in Orc, and Aric wondered whether to reveal that he understood the language-would a barbarian of the Carrion Tribes know the language of his orc neighbors? Farren had addressed him in Common, assuming he didn’t speak Orc, so he decided to feign ignorance, to keep his face impassive and his expression blank as the orc leader spoke.
It wasn’t easy. Farren’s passionate oration about the task before them reminded Aric of Haldren ir’Brassek-a memory from three lifetimes ago, it seemed. Farren was inspiring. Aric felt courage steel his nerves, pride well up in his chest, and reverence for the warriors of the past humble him. Kalok Shash-the collective spirit of those great warriors-seemed to form a nimbus of light around Farren as he spoke, a light that danced among the warriors like tongues of fire.
Like the Silver Flame, Aric thought. He increasingly understood why people tended to think of the Binding Flame and the Silver Flame as the same purifying fire. Was it wrong to equate them? Did that somehow dishonor the noble Ghaash’kala warriors whose spirits made up Kalok Shash, or the knights and paladins who had given their lives in service to the Church of the Silver Flame? He couldn’t see how. He imagined the souls of all those warriors would be proud to say they had fought and died in pursuit of the same noble calling.
When did I start thinking like this? he wondered. Have Vor and Dania poisoned my mind? Or perhaps pretending to be a barbarian who’s heard the call of Kalok Shash is rubbing off on me.
Farren finished his rousing speech and led the warriors through the mighty gates of the city that swung open before them. The city was situated at a bend in a wide canyon, so a plain spread out before the city walls and split into broad paths leading off to either side. They took the one on the right, and within the space of an hour Aric was again completely lost in the Labyrinth.
Days wore on, until Aric began to wonder whether Farren himself was lost. It seemed clear that the monsters
and barbarians of the Labyrinth avoided the large band of warriors-Aric’s small party hadn’t traveled more than a day or two without meeting something that tried to kill them. It made him wonder whether they were actually doing anything to keep the Labyrinth safer, or just herding its inhabitants through the canyons.
Then he realized that was exactly what they were doing. Farren gave a signal, and the warriors fell silent. He led them slowly and quietly to a bend in the canyon, and told them to ready their weapons. He repeated the command in Common for Aric’s benefit, then led the charge around the bend, into a dead-end canyon.
A small band of Carrion Tribe barbarians met their charge, trapped in the canyon. Aric had to admire Farren’s skill-he had pressed the barbarians along exactly the paths he wanted them to go until he boxed them in. Now he closed in for the kill.
“They’re Plaguebearers!” Farren shouted in Orc.
Then Aric was in their midst, and he understood the warning. Bleeding sores ringed by dead black flesh covered the barbarians, and gangrenous rot disfigured their faces. They reeked of death. Their disease didn’t seem to weaken them, however-a club caught Aric in the ribs and knocked him back. He swung his own club wildly to stave off his attacker while he caught his breath, cursing the clumsy weapon.
“Die, traitor!” the barbarian growled, stepping past Aric’s guard and swinging for his head.
As he ducked, Aric cursed again-the disguise he had adopted for the sake of survival had become a liability. He realized that every barbarian he could see was trying to fight past the orcs to reach him. They loathed a Carrion Tribe traitor more than their Ghaash’kala enemies.
Time to start killing. He swung his club to take the barbarian’s legs out from under him, then brought it down on the man’s head. In that moment’s respite, he wove threads of magic into his borrowed club and tripped it, ensuring that it would swing faster and harder. He was fairly sure his allies were too busy to notice anything strange about his actions.
An orc to his right shouted, “Aric, watch out!” and tried to block an onrushing barbarian with a cut to his belly. It was a killing blow, but the barbarian’s momentum carried him on to crash against Aric, knocking him to the ground. The dying man bared his rotting teeth in Aric’s face, a leering grin of triumph even as his lifeblood spilled out over his prone foe.
Disgusted, Aric shoved the barbarian off and scrambled to his feet. Gore covered his armor, and his enchanted club was lost on the ground somewhere. The nearest weapon he saw was a two-handed hammer with a large, jagged stone for a head, so he lunged for it.
“Don’t!” someone yelled.
Aric swung the hammer at a barbarian charging him and smashed the man’s face. He appraised the hammer in his grip. Crude, he thought, but quite effective. He drew it back for another blow, then something knocked it from his hands.
He whirled on this new attacker and saw Farren instead.
“Plaguebearers!” the orc leader said. He pulled a battle-axe from a sling on his back and tossed it to Aric. “Use this.”
Plaguebearers. The word finally registered in Aric’s mind, and bile rose to his throat. The rot-infected man who had fallen on him-of course, he’d been trying to ensure that Aric contracted the same plague that had ravaged his own flesh.
He made a clumsy swing with Farren’s axe at the nearest foe. He hated axes-it was too hard to make sure they hit edge-first. Too many glancing blows.
Orcs fought close around Aric, beating back foes that tried to reach him, parrying blows that might have hit him. He felt awkward and ineffective, and the thought of his flesh rotting away preoccupied him. He only realized the battle was over when the nearest orcs lowered their weapons and drooped with fatigue.
“We’re not done yet,” Farren shouted. “Burn the Plaguebearers.”
Careful to avoid touching any of the bodies, the Ghaash’kala poured a viscous liquid over every corpse-human and orc alike-and set them alight. Aric watched black smoke rise into the air, a dark smear across the red sky.
CHAPTER 26
Cart spent the next few weeks supervising the soldiers’ work in the canyon. They fought off a few half-hearted worg attacks, but the worgs’ strength was broken. They cleared away the bones that formed the worgs’ labyrinthine temple and built a palisade using lumber from the surrounding hills. And they built scaffolds up the wall at the canyon’s head and began chipping away at the stone toward the buried crystal within. First they cut down from the top of the canyon wall until they reached the azure pool, then they began chipping the rock away from it.
Ashara supervised the excavation, which meant that she spent most of her time on the scaffolding, watching soldiers swing their picks to make sure that they didn’t strike the crystal. Once in a while, she called a halt and put her hands against the stone. Then she either told them to continue or ordered a switch from picks to chisels. The rhythm of the swinging picks changed to a rattle of tapping hammers as the last thin layer of stone fell away to reveal the gleaming blue stone beneath. Then the soldiers lowered the scaffold and swung their picks again. Every few days, they raised the scaffolds again and cleared more stone away from above the jutting crystal.
Haldren paced like a caged tiger, yelling at soldiers who flagged in their work or made any errors. He had earned some good will from the soldiers in the battles against the worgs, but he squandered it away until the soldiers burned with resentment toward him. Either he was oblivious to it or he thrived on it-with every passing day his vitriol grew more caustic. Cart was sure that if he had not been there, the soldiers would have killed Haldren in his sleep, and he wasn’t sure how long his influence could stay their hands.
Three weeks after the excavation began, Kelas arrived at the head of a caravan. A platoon of soldiers escorted a train of carts laden with food, lumber, and a jumble of metallic objects Cart couldn’t begin to identify-tubes and cylinders of all sizes, gears and wheels, and a staggering variety of other shapes. A team of artificers and magewrights from House Cannith walked in the middle of the caravan, and miners and smiths rounded out the convoy. Haldren’s soldiers cheered when the caravan first came into view, and laughed and clapped the newcomers on the back as they passed through the palisade.
Kelas and Haldren disappeared into the Lord General’s tent, leaving Cart to supervise the expansion of the camp and the placement of supplies. Though it was hectic, everything went smoothly. The sheer number of new arrivals made the work go quickly-until a problem arose with the Cannith contingent. They wanted to place their tents and supplies near the scaffolding and commanded the soldiers and miners who were already established there to move. When Cart came to sort the problem out, they ignored him, continuing to yell at the other soldiers as though he weren’t there.
It had been years since Cart had encountered that kind of treatment. As the only warforged in a squad of human soldiers during the Last War, he’d had to earn their respect-but he’d done that in their first battle. As he worked his way up the chain of command, he occasionally met resistance from his subordinates, but the army did not tolerate insubordination. On the Lord General’s staff, he commanded absolute obedience. But many of House Cannith-because they had made the warforged during the war-refused to acknowledge the warforged as equals, let alone superiors.
Cart turned to a soldier beside him. “Get Ashara,” he said. He hated to resort to that-bringing in someone else to bolster his authority-but he couldn’t see any other option. He stood, arms crossed and impassive as he listened to the argument continue, until Ashara arrived.
Ashara approached quietly, unnoticed by either of the bickering factions. She stood behind his shoulder and spoke quietly. “What is it?”
The Cannith representatives were junior members of the House, technically subject to Ashara’s command, and when they noticed her presence they slowly fell silent. She said nothing, but put a hand on Cart’s back.
“House Cannith, your place in the camp is to the south,” Cart said.
&nb
sp; An artificer, a young man with pale hair and a constant sneer, stepped forward and looked up at Cart. The Mark of Making covered one of his arms, left bare by the sleeveless silk shirt he wore.
“We do not take orders from you,” he said. His arrogant condescension was what he had first expected from Ashara.
Ashara remained just behind Cart, her position reinforcing his authority. “There are two people in this camp who outrank Cart,” she said quietly. “Lord General Haldren ir’Brassek is one, and Kelas ir’Darran is the other.”
The blond man stepped sideways to face Ashara. “You expect us to obey a cart? A tool?”
Ashara’s hand flew like lightning to slap him across the face. A gasp went through the entire Cannith contingent.
“I told you his rank,” she said coldly. “You will behave accordingly, or the Baron will hear of it.” She turned and strode away, confident that her command would be obeyed.
His hand on his burning cheek, the blond man looked up at Cart again.
“House Cannith,” Cart repeated, “your place in the camp is to the south.”
The artificer spat on the ground at Cart’s feet and rejoined his contingent. Cart watched, seething with anger and grateful for his immovable face, until they had gathered their belongings and moved to the south of the camp.
Cart didn’t have a chance to seek Ashara until evening, with the new arrivals settled and the next day’s plans set in place with Haldren and Kelas. He found her walking alone near the palisade.
“Lady Cannith,” he said.
“Cart, how many times do I have to-”
“Ashara. I owe you an apology.”
“Oh, no-I should be apologizing to you. Their behavior was outrageous. I’m ashamed for my House.”
“It’s nothing. And certainly not your fault. But I’m sorry for the way I’ve been treating you. You’ve shown me nothing but kindness since we met, and I… I questioned your motives.”