“I am all right now. And I have you to thank for it.”
I shrugged.
“No, Amra. I was in Gholdoryth, the Cold Hell. Now I’m not. You saved me.”
I’ve never been comfortable with gratitude directed toward me, not having much experience with it. Plus, it tended to diffuse all the railing at him I’d planned to do for getting me stuck and starving in Thagoth for half a year. I changed the subject.
“What was it like, hell?”
“Cold,” he said. “Empty. Vast. I…I don't remember much. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Of course, Holgren. I understand.”
“No, you don’t.”
I had nothing to say to that. We passed another hour in companionable quiet. By the time the fire had died down to embers, Holgren was fast asleep. I settled his blankets more snugly about him, checked the mules, and went to my own hard bed.
I lay there, running my thumb across the necklace I’d taken from the Duke, the talisman that had allowed him, and later me, to cross the death lands unimpeded. It was a simple rope chain about eighteen inches long with a cunning lobster claw clasp. It was made of some bluish metal I didn’t recognize, and while it was magical, as far as I could tell, the magic was of such a specific nature that it was basically worthless. I kept it as a memento, a souvenir—and as a reminder to listen to my gut.
Right then, my gut was telling me I had missed Holgren just a bit more than a business partner should. I told my gut to shut up and go to sleep, and I followed suit.
#
Holgren was up before me and had built the fire back up a bit. He’d found his pack among the mules and dressed in his own clothes. What he’d done with the rags I’d put on him I didn’t know or think to ask. Not then.
He was standing on a little knoll a few yards away from camp. It was hardly more than a swell of ground on that wide plain of grass. His eyes were closed, his hands stretched up toward the sky. He was taking slow, deep breaths of crisp morning air. A lazy smile played across his face.
“The world is a fine and beautiful place, Amra. It’s good to be alive. Tea there near the fire and jerked meat.”
I grunted at him and walked a ways off to relieve myself. When I returned, he’d unrolled the map he’d sketched and inked months before.
“You haven’t charted out the return trip?” he asked.
“I’m no cartographer. I’ve just been following the rising sun.”
“Well then, we’ll just have to estimate.” And I spent the next hour describing the terrain I’d traversed over the last month between bites and sips, giving him my best guesses as to distances traveled.
“I wish I’d thought to bring a compass. Still, you’ve been traveling latitudinally for the most part, so no harm done there.” He fiddled with the map a while then set it aside.
“We don’t have to spend months traversing uncharted terrain, you know. I can open another gate—”
“No.”
“It’s only a month’s journey back to Thagoth, and you’ve got the talisman this time.”
“No. Absolutely not. I’m not going to let Tha-Agoth have another crack at my mind or yours.”
“He didn’t force you to free him before.”
“A mistake he will most likely remedy if we return. I won’t do it.”
He sighed.
“Let’s get moving,” I said. “I’d like to get to that river. The mules need watering, and I’d like to take a bath. I’d think you would too.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Sorry.”
We got our mules going again and reached the river in less than two hours. It was broad and shallow, and the mules drank greedily. The gelding, who I’d taken to calling Dandy, drank almost daintily, as if to distance himself from the disgraceful manners of the mules.
Holgren had pulled out his map again and was sketching in the last bit we’d traveled.
“Can you start filling the water skins?” I asked him. “I’m going to clean up.”
He raised a hand in distracted assent.
I pulled a lump of the late Duke’s soap out of a pack and walked a little distance downstream. The Duke had been a fastidious man and his taste in soap expensive if a bit perfumed for me. I stripped and jumped in.
The water was frigid. I gasped and proceeded to scrub myself up vigorously and quickly.
It was on the third or fourth dunk, as I was trying to get all the soap out of my hair, that I noticed something across the river on the thin ribbon of bank between river and tree line.
It was one of my mules. What was left of it. It had been hacked to pieces, its guts strung up in the trees. The mule’s severed head was staring sightlessly at me. It had been stuck on a branch that jutted out of a log half submerged at the river’s edge. The neck had been hacked at raggedly, and red gobbets of flesh hung down from it almost to the river, blood pinking the water near it before being carried off by the flow. Flies crawled all over its open eyes, its froth-flecked nostrils—
I sprinted up the bank to my clothes, yelling for Holgren all the way.
As I made it to my pile of clothes, I felt the familiar chill along the nape of my neck and knew Holgren was performing magic. He ran up to me, holding a glowing sphere in one hand. I pointed to the mule’s head as I quickly dressed.
#
We decided to take a detour.
“No animal would do that,” Holgren said. “Kill, yes, but play with the remains? I don’t think so.”
“I’m just wondering how the mule got across the river in the first place.”
“No telling. Mules are intelligent beasts. Perhaps it broke its hobble in the night and just wandered off for a drink.”
We were backtracking a mile or so then planned to parallel the river for a few more miles before we started looking for another ford. Holgren looked a little ridiculous riding a mule. His long legs didn’t quite hang naturally. But Dandy wanted nothing to do with him.
“Bloody as it was, what was done to the mule shows at least some level of intelligence,” he continued. “I’m curious as to who or what makes those woods home.”
I was going to tell him I’d used up all my curiosity in Thagoth, but then I was being strangled.
It was the necklace I’d yanked off the duke’s doomed neck. It had tightened suddenly. I couldn’t breathe. I gagged and hacked and clawed at it and fell to the ground.
Holgren was right there beside me, alarm in his eyes.
“Move your hands, woman! Move them!”
I stuffed down the panic enough to drop my hands from my neck. He put his own on the necklace and muttered a few liquid syllables, eyes closed. There was a thunderclap and a brilliant flash of light, and Holgren flew back half a dozen feet. Mercifully, I could breathe again.
Holgren got up and came back over to me. I panted raggedly.
“Thank you,” I rasped.
“Don’t thank me. My spell failed—rather spectacularly at that. The necklace…decided to let you go.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. Let me see it again. This thing has to come off.”
“Kerf, yes. Get it off me.”
He tried for nearly an hour to no avail. Finally, he sat back on his haunches and huffed.
“It’s powerful, and it’s complex. I don’t know if I could remove it in the best of conditions.” He looked around, plainly missing his sanctum. “These are not the best conditions.”
“You’ve got to get this thing off me. I mean it.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry. I have been able to decipher something of its nature, however. As far as I can tell, its purpose is to make the wearer go…somewhere.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Put simply, the necklace didn’t like you traveling back the way we came.”
“But the Duke must have come this way. He definitely traveled west to get to Thagoth in the first place.”
“As I said, its nature is complex. I’m seeing only part of the weave of commands embedded in it. Very fine work, actually.”
I swore again.
Holgren went on and checked the campsite. I stayed with the mules. I whiled away the time trying to get the necklace off, and succeeded in making my neck even more raw. The clasp had frozen shut, and it refused to break.
Funny how it had slipped right off the Duke’s neck just before Athagos had sucked him dry. The clasp had just opened when I snatched it from him.
My neck was hot and stinging when Holgren returned.
I sighed and scratched my head. It required an act of will to keep my hands from straying up to the necklace and trying to rip it off.
“Well, do we go forward or try to go around?” he asked. “It’s your neck, so to speak, so perhaps you should decide.”
I gave the chain another tug and stood up. “Let’s try to avoid the mule butcher’s territory if we can. Let’s see how far this thing will let me get.”
#
It let me get about six miles downriver before it started choking the life out of me again. I whipped Dandy back the way we’d just come and set him to a canter. The necklace eased almost immediately.
“You handled that adroitly,” said Holgren from mule-back.
“This is not something I want to get used to,” I rasped. “You’re the mage. Figure something out, for Kerf’s sake.”
“For what good it will do, I’ll try again when we make camp. Speaking of which, I would only loosely term this daylight.” He gestured at the sky. There was still a decent amount of light in the west, but night was falling rapidly.
“Fine. You make camp while I hobble the mules.”
He nodded, dismounted, and started pulling open packs.
Once camp was set up and we’d eaten, he sat down in front of me and peered at the necklace again.
“They used similar items in Elam before slavery was outlawed. Kept the slaves from running off. What you’re wearing is much more complex, however.”
“I’m not interested in a history lesson, oddly enough. I want it off.”
“I’ll try. Of course I’ll try. I just don’t hold much hope.” And he bent back to the task at hand.
I ignored his breath on my cheek and the inadvertent touch of his fingers on my bare skin as best I could. This was neither the time nor the place, I told myself forcefully.
An hour passed. He dropped his hands and leaned back.
“It’s no use. I’m sorry. The spells laid on it are seamless, and I still can’t see what all went into the making of it. There’s nothing for me to get hold of to try and unravel. I’m afraid if I try anything truly invasive, you’ll get hurt.”
“So be it,” I said with more conviction than I actually felt. I was tired of thinking about the damned thing.
The next morning, we forded the river and went into the woods. I was jumping out of my skin at the slightest sound, and Holgren held his power ready for an instant casting. I could feel it, that crawling sensation in the back of my neck. It gave me some comfort.
The woods were sparse enough that we had a decent view of our surroundings and no real trouble leading the mules. There were birds and squirrels and rabbits, but we saw no sign of larger game.
Holgren called a halt at midday, and we ate a sparse meal. Then, we continued on much as before.
It wasn’t until late afternoon that we saw anything out of the ordinary. A wall.
The wall was ancient, vine-choked, and tumbledown. In its day it must have been massive, but we had no trouble leading the horses through one of the many great rents in it. Beyond, a small city in even worse shape than Thagoth had been. Tumbled granite blocks and raw winter grass was all that remained. If the stones had not been obviously carved, I might have been tempted to believe it was some natural, if odd, meadow.
No stone stood atop another in all that great space save for an odd, low, stepped pyramid in the center.
“Night is coming,” Holgren said. “Might as well camp here.”
“All right. I’ll look around and gather firewood.”
“Be careful. I sense the residue of old magics. Very faint, but best be cautious.”
“Any idea what this place was?”
He shook his head. “No telling. So much was lost in the Diaspora. It might be Trevell, Hluria, or one of a dozen other shattered cities.”
As I wandered closer to the pyramid, I realized there was a large, stone bowl at the top and, almost invisible in the daylight, a fire was lit in that bowl. I climbed the steps of the pyramid to get a closer look, already thinking that this place was inhabited, probably by the mule killers, and that we needed to get moving before they came back. But something was compelling me, more than my natural curiosity, and even as I was thinking how stupid it was, I was moving closer to that fire.
A pale blue flame burnt in the bowl, feeding on nothing. Stone and flame was all. With a sense of disbelief that quickly transmuted to panic, I saw myself sticking my hand into the flame.
The meadow and everything in it melted away.
Chapter Five
I stood in the center of a great, gray, stone hall whose walls rose up into darkness. Dozens of staircases and hundreds of hallways stretched away in every direction and at impossible angles. I could not imagine what it would have taken to build such an edifice, beyond sheer insanity. Torches flickered wanly, imparting a dull, will-sapping gloom rather than honest illumination.
The whole fantastic place reeked of age and abandonment—no, not abandonment exactly. Buildings get abandoned by the living. This place wasn’t for flesh-and-blood mortals. I couldn’t imagine people actually inhabiting that space.
There was nothing about the place that I even remotely liked.
“A thief,” said a voice high above. “Nothing to steal here, I’m afraid. Any treasure you take from my halls must be earned, oh yes.”
“Who’s there?”
“I ask the questions here, and you answer them as you can. I am the judge, and you are the judged.”
“I’m here to be judged?”
“You placed your hand in the flame. Therefore, some part of you wishes to be judged. Some shame compelled you to do so.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.”
“Well, if you have had a change of heart, just walk out through those doors behind you. You might survive.”
I glanced back. Massive, black double doors beckoned, easily twenty feet tall. I turned back around.
“What happens if I just leave without being judged?”
“That depends on your undischarged guilt. In Hluria, the law has always been an eye for an eye.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “So you’re saying—”
“No more questions. It is time for judgment.”
A light appeared on a staircase high above me, one that could only have been used by spiders and flies since most of it was upside down. Swiftly, it began to descend, and all the while, the voice spoke on, sibilant, insinuating.
“So many crimes,” it said, “so many to choose from. But you don’t consider theft a crime, do you? Not a moral one. ‘Take what you can from those who don’t need it, and take punishment, if it comes, as punishment for stupidity, not wrongdoing.’ Isn’t that what your crippled teacher told you? Ah, but you’d rather forget old Arno, wouldn’t you? All he did for you, all he taught you, and you left him to die in that shack in Bellarius.”
“What? It wasn’t like that—” I hadn’t thought of Arno in years. He’d been my mentor, more of a father than my father had ever been. He’d taken me in, showed me how to steal bread without getting caught. How to pick a lock. How to pick pockets. How to scam unwary merchants out of pocket change. He’d been a fine thief before he got caught, and the magistrate broke all the bones in his hands. Then, he’d been a fine teacher before the lung fever took him the winter after he took me
in. When he started coughing up blood, we both knew what it meant, and he drove me out of his shanty lest I catch it as well.
He’d died within a week.
“All that he did for you, and you let him die alone. If it weren’t for him, you’d never have seen your eleventh birthday.”
“Arno chose to die alone. If I had stayed with him, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d be dead along with him. I know the debt I owe him, you bastard.”
“Do you? Perhaps you do. That was hardly the worst thing you’ve ever done, though.”
I didn’t like where this was going, not at all. I’d let a lot of things stay buried in the past for good reason. The light had gotten much closer, but it was still high above. It seemed to be carried by a robed figure, though I couldn’t make out much detail.
“What’s the point of this?”
“For the third time, I ask the questions here. Do not make me tell you again.”
“Or else what?” I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.
It was silent for what seemed a long time but was likely only seconds. The figure was almost at the bottom of the stairs, hidden by a corkscrew turn.
“Else I will show you what you least desire to see.” With those words, I felt a sick dread begin to worm its way through my guts.
The figure descended to the floor, suddenly somehow right side up. It held a lamp high, illuminating its face, and laughed. I screamed.
Its face was the face of my dead father. Guilt and terror crashed down on me.
I couldn’t face it wearing my father’s face. I couldn’t. I fled into the labyrinth of passageways, past staircases and intersections and dust-choked, empty rooms in that hellish, twilight world. I scurried away like a rat, a cockroach. Like the nothing that I was. I fled. The voice followed wherever I went, just a step behind.
“What was it like, plunging the knife into your own father’s back? Could you feel the blade strike bone, the shock of it run up your arms? Could you hear the steel grate along his rib? A clumsy kill, but you got better at it, didn’t you? You learned to keep your blade parallel to the ground. You learned where to thrust and why. You learned to kill quickly and quietly.”
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