The Warlord's legacy

Chapter Eighteen

GRUNTING WITH THE EFFORT, Corvis yanked Sunder from both the Cephiran body and the rock face beyond in which the demon-forged blade had embedded itself, and made himself ignore the sensation as the weapon gave an almost erotic shudder. Powdered stone and the metallic tang of blood tickled his nostrils, but he lacked even the energy for a proper sneeze. Just moving his head was a struggle as he surveyed the latest in countless scenes of carnage.

Half a dozen bodies, made crimson by both wounds and tabards, sprawled in the dust. A few warhorses stepped carefully between them, awaiting new orders that would never come. Some way back, at the edge of the tree line, the more skittish, less well-trained mounts pranced nervously, disturbed by the scents of death.

For two days now, Corvis and Irrial had sought some compromise between stealth and speed. They chose back roads and even the occasional cross-country gallop rather than the main highways, rode well into the night, and holed up in overgrown copses to placate their fatigue with a few hours' slumber. And still the Cephirans were everywhere, ubiquitous as ants. Every night, they spotted the gleam of campfires in the distance. Every day, they picked their way through fields of dead horses and dead men, littered with broken armor and shattered blades, redolent of old blood and new rot. Irrial's predictions, however cynical, had been spot-on: Torn banners suggested that these were all that remained of the brave forces fielded by those Imphallian nobles desperate enough to take a stand. And to their credit, they'd taken a great many Cephiran soldiers with them, but not nearly enough. A patriotic gesture, the fielding of these tiny armies, but a futile one. There seemed no end to the crimson tabards.

This patrol was the fourth-fifth? Corvis had lost count-that they'd already been forced to battle, and they'd outrun or hidden from half again as many.

Damn it! Scattered as the Cephirans must be, to cover so much terrain and still maintain their hold on the cities, they had to be spread thin. If the Guilds had just gotten off their asses and contributed, the Imphallian soldiers might've actually accomplished something, instead of just smashing themselves to pulp against the Cephirans like birdshit on cobblestones!

'My, how poetic. "Birdshit" are they, Corvis? And you always used to think so highly of people…'

He strove, as always, to ignore that voice. Instead he watched Irrial sink exhaustedly to the earth, back pressed to the slope of one of the region's scattered foothills and rock formations, weeds of stone sprouting from Daltheos's garden. Her eyes were dark and sunken, her hair hanging limp, and though she tried to hide it, Corvis could see she favored her left arm where, just yesterday, a Cephiran broadsword had split muscle from bone. Seilloah had done her best to heal the injury, but in her current state, her magics weren't quite up to completing the task.

The witch herself lay slumped over a rock, paws dangling, tongue lolling in an uneven pant. A smattering of open sores beneath mats of fur oozed a constant trickle of yellowed pus and the sickly sweet scent of disease.

And Corvis knew damn well that he was no better off. The face he'd seen that morning, reflected in a small pond at which they'd halted to rest, was hollow, skin grey with fatigue. His neck and back ached as though the horse had been riding him, rather than vice versa, and it took him longer and longer to catch his breath after each engagement.

'Crybaby. I'm feeling just fine.'

Axe trailing in the dirt like a child's toy, he staggered over to the others and collapsed, badly scraping his left palm. The pain scarcely registered; just another complaint among many.

"We can't keep this up," he wheezed, gulping for air.

Irrial managed what was probably meant as a shrug. "What choice have we?"

Corvis nodded, frowning. They had no idea what territory was whose around here, how far the invaders had moved beyond Emdimir. Worse, some of the patrols seemed to be hunting them specifically; they might even pursue beyond Cephiran lines. Clearly, whoever in the ranks of the Black Gryphon had been studying Corvis Rebaine-General Rhykus, Ellowaine had said-didn't want them escaping with what they'd learned.

On the back roads, it would still be days before they reached any major Imphallian cities, before they could be certain they'd moved beyond the reach of the Black Gryphon's claws. On the main highways, it would take less than one-assuming half the invading army wasn't spread out along the way.

Either way, they'd have to fight both enemy forces and their own fatigue for every yard they covered. For long moments, Corvis stared at the rock above Irrial's head, ignoring the squawking crows and buzzing flies bickering over the bodies, ignoring the instincts that ordered him to get up and keep moving before another patrol happened by-ignoring everything but a weariness so heavy it threatened to crush him against the unyielding earth.

They'd still not decided if making for Mecepheum again was truly their best option, and right now the question brought nothing but the sting of bitter laughter to Corvis's throat. The idea that they'd survive to get anywhere near Mecepheum seemed about as likely as climbing to safety on beams of moonlight.

Climbing…?

Corvis peered more intently at the rock face, then around at the hill-really just a spur of stone-against which they'd slumped.

"Most people fail to realize," he said didactically, "because they're so far apart from one another, that most of Imphallion's southern mountain ranges are actually all part of the same range. They're sort of a smaller mirror to the Terrakas Mountains."

The cat and the baroness looked at each other, then at Corvis. "Yes, that's true," Seilloah told him, using very much the same tone in which one might address a small boy who was proving just a bit slower than the other children. "I've seen the southern mountains, remember? I was with you when…" She blinked, her back arching and tail growing bushy. "Corvis, what are you thinking?"

He gestured awkwardly with Sunder, first at the stony protrusions around them, then toward the southwest where, after some distance, the rocky hills grew substantially more common. "I was just wondering," he said, "if there's any possibility that these hills here are in any way connected."

"You're not serious!"

'Oh, he's serious. He's just mad as an inbred hatter.'

"If you've got another idea, Seilloah, now would be a great time. Actually, yesterday would be even better."

"Give me a few minutes," the cat growled. "I'll come up with something. What in Arhylla's name are you planning to offer them, anyway?"

"Whatever I have to," he told her, rising to his feet with a low groan.

"I'm so sorry to interrupt," Irrial said peevishly, "but would it be too much to ask that one of you tell me what the hell we're talking about?"

"We're talking," Corvis said, limping over to gather two of the horses, "about finding allies."

"Who very well might save us the trouble of fleeing the Cephirans by killing us themselves," Seilloah added darkly. EIGHT HOOVES pounded over what had petered out into little more than a game trail, sending twin plumes of dust into the air behind them. They moved with the rumble, not of thunder, but of an earthquake, a constant and unbroken roar-for they ran with a speed unseen in nature, spurred not by their riders' boot heels but by the prod of Corvis's enchantment. Corvis and Irrial hunkered down, squinting against the wind and the sting of the horses' manes in their faces, devoting their attentions entirely to holding on. On occasion, amid the deafening cacophony, Corvis thought he heard a plaintive, feline yowl from the depths of his leftmost saddlebag.

The scrub and dried grass along the road blurred into a thick carpet. The trees were a solid wall, until the riders moved far enough into the rocky terrain that there were none. The occasional battlefields of dead knights and infantry become tiny pools of metal hue, gone almost before they could reflect a single gleam at the passing travelers. More than once they shot past a Cephiran outrider who could only lift his horn and hope to warn his companions up ahead; the soldiers might as well have tried to slap a ballista bolt from the air as to impede the riders' headlong plunge.

From the horizon's edge, the first of Imphallion's southern hills-true hills, these, not the rocky lumps through which they'd been riding-drew ever nearer, ships of stone on a sea of cracked earth. From within those hills, barely visible, crimson-clad soldiers rose and lifted longbows toward the sky. Unprepared as they were for the unnatural speeds at which their enemies pounded toward them, the distant horns of their scouts had warned them to stand ready.

Arrows arced up and out, graceful as a flock of raptors, and plunged earthward in a rain of wood and steel.

And Corvis, his body a tangled knot of agonized strands, his head heavy with exhaustion, lifted Sunder from his side and drank from the power of the Kholben Shiar.

Still he did not unleash the full might of the demon-forged blade; he never had, and he hoped, swore, even prayed he never would. But he delved now as deep as he ever had, and his mind cringed from the weapon's lustful, sadistic howl. He felt the surging of infernal magics flow through him, until he thought he must scream as the blood threatened to boil within him. A veil of fire shrouded his senses, so that he could see only a handful of yards-but within that distance, his sight was that of the gods. To him, every pebble that lay upon the earth, every blade of grass, even the currents of the wind, were painfully clear. In his ears, he heard the hoofbeats of the horses, not as a constant rumble but as separate and distinct sounds, the steady beat of a slow drum.

When the arrows fell around him, they fell not as a rapid rain but as the light drifting of snow. He rose in his stirrups and it was nothing to him, nothing at all, to reach out with Sunder and sever them from the sky before they could draw so much as a drop of blood.

Without pause they were gone, past the slack-jawed archers and deep into the shallow, winding gorges of the stone-faced hills.

Corvis dropped from his horse and advanced along a narrow pathway, casting about for any sort of hollow, cave, overhang, any entrance into the rocky depths. Internally he wrestled with the power flowing through him, struggling to shove it back into the weapon in his fist. Like a slow tide it receded, leaving burns across his soul.

He had just enough time, as his body yielded to the searing pain and he felt himself crumple limply to the earth, to hope that the others would have better luck finding shelter than he had. CONSCIOUSNESS AND VISION RETURNED as one, and Corvis discovered a cat in his face.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Sweet merciful gods aplenty, Seilloah, what the hell have you been eating?"

The cat nodded and turned away, leaving Corvis to his gagging. "He's all right!" she called out.

A set of footsteps-Irrial's, of course-drew near, and Corvis took a moment to orient himself. He was lying atop his blanket at the rear of what, so far as he could see in the dim light, was a remarkably shallow cave, little more than an impression in the stone sort of like a sideways bowl. He was naked from the waist up, unless one counted Seilloah sitting on his chest. He shifted his weight, and discovered that the blanket beneath him was soaked with sweat.

That realization brought a sudden awareness of a bone-deep ache that covered his body like a shroud, and he couldn't quite repress a groan. "Maybe not entirely all right," he admitted to Seilloah through pale, chapped lips.

"You were clinging to life by a single fingertip, Corvis. That damn thing burned you out from the inside. You're lucky I managed to heal you even this much."

"I've been lucky to have you do a lot of things for me, Seilloah. Thank you."

The cat smiled-rather a disturbing image in its own right-and then Irrial was kneeling beside them. He craned his head and discovered that the faint light he'd noted earlier was the result of a tiny campfire, barely more than two crossed torches, in the midst of the cave.

"I've never seen anyone move like that," she said, pressing a wet rag to his forehead. "Was that the same spell you used on the horses?"

"No." He waved a finger at Sunder, lying some few feet beside him. "That." Then, blinking, "Where are the horses?"

"Gone," Seilloah told him. "They were dying. We pushed them too far under your spell. I thought it best to walk them some ways before they keeled over, lay down some false trail."

"Damn."

"Yeah. Your plan better work."

'We're reliant on your plan? Well, shit. I'm not even real, and even I'm buggered.'

Corvis struggled to sit up. "We don't have much time before they find us. This cave's not that deep, and…" His eyes widened as he realized the implications of the fire.

"Relax, Corvis. From the outside, the cave looks just like any other span of rock." She lifted a paw, licked it and ran it over her head. "I taught you some of your best illusion spells, remember?"

He smiled and allowed himself to lie back once more. "How long do we…?"

"Long enough. You need to be rested for what's to come. I'll wake you if I think time's getting short."

Corvis's smile widened further, but he was asleep before he could sculpt his gratitude into words. FEELING A LOT MORE RESTED, but only a bit better overall, Corvis moved about the cavern on hands and knees, alternating between scrawling strange sigils on the rock with a lump of charcoal and complaining about what the stooped posture was doing to his back. He was once again fully dressed, and everything the travelers owned was packed and ready to go. "When we move," he'd warned, "we may have to move quickly."

Every now and again Seilloah would rise up from a puddle of fur, totter awkwardly and in obvious pain across the floor, and point out a spot where Corvis had misaligned a design or muddled a rune. (At which point, of course, the echo of Khanda in his mind would mock him unmercifully.) Irrial, still not entirely certain what was going on and a bit put out that they'd not deigned to explain, hovered to one side and occasionally fed another stick into the meager fire.

And then she jumped so violently she nearly swallowed her own eyes as Corvis, in a single swift motion, rose to his feet and drove Sunder into the nearest wall. The crunch reverberated vacantly throughout the cave, but it was the subsequent screech as he worked the enchanted blade from the stone that really set hair and teeth on edge, gnawing on the fringes of mind and soul like a maddened beaver.

"Buggering hell, Rebaine! What in the gods' names are you doing?"

Corvis froze in mid-swing. "Why, Lady Irrial, wherever did you learn such language?"

"Probably from spending-" She paused, wincing, at the second crash, and then the third. "-spending too much godsdamn time with you!" Another crash, a second wince. "Would you stop that!"

He glanced at the small chunk he'd carved from the stone, then down at the powdered rock at his feet. "Sure, that's probably enough. I-ow!"

For several moments he hopped on one foot, waiting for the pain to ebb from the other. "What was that for?"

Seilloah spat out a few strips of leather. "For not warning me. These ears are sensitive."

"Fine! Fine, I'm sorry. I should've told you it was coming."

"I believe I just said that." And, simultaneously, 'I believe she just said that.'

This was not, Corvis knew without even taking the time to ponder it, an argument he was likely to win. "Irrial," he said instead, "I need a gem."

"What?"

"A gem. Diamond, emerald, doesn't matter, though more valuable is better."

"I don't-"

"I know you took a few bits of jewelry from Rahariem."

The baroness frowned. "And you think you're just entitled to them?"

"Consider it fair price for escaping here alive. Unless you don't think it's worth the cost? You're welcome to take your business elsewhere…"

Muttering a few more of those words that she must have learned from Corvis, Irrial slipped a glinting blue ring from her finger and handed it over. He took it, flipped it over a time or two, and then snapped the sapphire from its setting and handed the silver band back to her.

"Your change, m'lady."

"Thanks ever so," she grumbled.

He took a few more moments, gathering rocks from around the cave into a circle, for reasons that neither Irrial nor even Seilloah initially understood. Only when he placed the tiny sapphire in the midst of it and raised his axe high overhead did they comprehend: He wanted to ensure the shards and powdered gem didn't get lost throughout the cave.

And it was a good thing he did, too, as he first struck the tiny target only obliquely, sending it skittering across the floor, bouncing and rolling until it fetched up against the edge of his work space. His entire posture daring either of the women to comment, he stomped over to it, put it back in place, and tried once more.

This time it shattered cleanly beneath the Kholben Shiar. Again bending over, and again struggling with the pain in his back, Corvis scooped up the dust and splinters into one palm and sprinkled them into the pile of rock dust he'd already gathered. Then, using an eating knife rather than Sunder, he drew a thin line down the palm of his left hand and squeezed exactly nine drops of blood into the mixture, adding water from a leather skin until the whole thing was a gritty paste.

"What-?" Irrial began, only to have Seilloah look up and shush her.

Corvis moved about the symbols he'd sketched, chanting an atonal, discordant litany as he went, daubing the gunk at various points across the runes. When he was done, he sat cross-legged in the center of it all and, pausing just long enough to draw breath, raised his voice to a shout. Sounds and syllables that were not words echoed across the cave-and then, though Corvis never wavered and his chant continued, those echoes stopped, sucked away by the stone.

A minute passed, then two. And then they were there, appearing through the shadows and even the rock wall as though stepping between the curtains on a stage.

There were five, or rather there seemed to be five; it was impossible to say for certain. They were half Rebaine's height, but there was nothing remotely child-like about them. Filthy, maggot-pale skin covered long and gangly limbs that hung at improper angles and bent in unnatural directions. They did not walk so much as convulse, each twitch carrying them the distance of a single pace. Pink, irritated eyes sat, uneven and far too close together, above a jagged, tooth-rimmed slash.

Corvis thought no less of Irrial when she whimpered and retreated as far as the cave's walls would allow; he'd dealt with the foul things before, but it was all he could do to hold his ground.

He spoke as firmly as a voice made hoarse by his prior incantations would allow. "I offer greetings to the gnomes, true and rightful lords of the earth's inner flesh. I am-"

"He knows." It was the foremost gnome, indistinguishable from any of the others, who interrupted in a voice of grinding stone. They came to a halt, all as one, and the speaker tilted its head to a perfect right angle. "He knows who has come, yes, has climbed into, under, the skin of the earth." He reached an impossibly long arm, sensuously caressed the cave wall with a cluster of irregular fingers. "Who dares again to call, yes, to spit the mountain's voice through flopping human lips. He knows the Rebaine, yes. He never forgets, none of him forgets the Rebaine."

"Nor has the Rebaine forgotten him," Corvis replied gravely.

"What…?" Irrial whispered.

"They call themselves 'he,' " Seilloah explained quietly. "I don't know if it's their language, or something about how they think, but they all do it."

"So how do they know which one of them's being addressed?"

"No idea, but they always do."

"… call to him now?" the gnome was saying. "He has nothing left to say, no, to tell the Rebaine. It risks its life, yes, its flesh, to come here, to his home beneath, below."

"I've come to bargain, as we have in the past."

"So, bargain, yes, deal." The vile creature licked its lips with something that more closely resembled a limp worm than a tongue. "Does it wish the same as before?"

"No, nothing so long term. We require you to guide us through your tunnels, far to the west." Then, at the creature's puzzled blinking, "Ah, in the direction of the sunset. For at least…" Damn it, how do the little creeps measure distance? "… at least, um, thirty-thousand paces. My paces, not yours."

"It wishes to walk, yes, to travel below? Through his paths and corridors? This, he does not like, no, has never allowed. What does it offer?"

Corvis pretended not to hear Irrial's whispered "I don't have a lot more where that first one came from." He gestured vaguely toward the cave mouth, still hidden from outside by Seilloah's phantasm.

"Many men hunt us. I offer you the chance to spill their blood, to avenge the theft of your ancestors and the rape of earthen wombs, as I did before."

The gnomes cocked their heads toward one another, puppets with loosened strings, and whispered in tones that Corvis felt vibrating in his gut and through the floor.

"No," the speaker grumbled finally, "he does not think so, no, does not agree. Before, the Rebaine offered him crowds, yes, homes and cities high above, far above, where normally he cannot go, no, cannot reach. And now it thinks these men here, yes, in the hills above are payment? They are not payment, no. He can take them whenever he wants, anytime, yes.

"And he can take the Rebaine, yes, and its companions."

"That would not be wise of him," Corvis warned, rising to his feet with Sunder in hand. "It would also be inappropriate."

The gnome, which had just begun to step forward, paused. "It thinks so? He wonders why…"

"Because I never actually did release you from my service," he said with a smile. "You agreed to serve. It's been some time, but I never ended our agreement."

It was a feeble argument, and he damn well knew it. But he knew, too, that the gnomes did not share humanity's sense of time, and given their peculiar, even alien thought patterns, it just might…

No.

The laughter of the gnomes sounded like a man choking on gravel. "It is foolish, yes, pathetic and stupid! He will eat of its flesh, suck the juice of its inner white stones!"

"Don't do this." Corvis wasn't sure if he was still warning, or if he'd crossed the line into pleading. He felt Irrial moving behind him, heard the rasp of steel on leather as she drew. "We've worked well together before. We might again. Don't ruin it now."

"He-"

Every face in the chamber turned as the cat yowled, a wretched, high-pitched squall of pain and terror. Belly pressed to the floor, it fled from beside Irrial's feet and out into the uneven hills. For long seconds, humans and gnomes peered at the illusory wall, as though they could follow the animal's flight.

Even as Corvis directed his bemused attention back to the gnomes, the foremost creature, the one who'd spoken, abruptly twitched. It was faint, scarcely a shiver, and the former warlord wouldn't even have been certain he'd seen it were it not for what came next.

"It is correct," the creature said thoughtfully. Was there, perhaps, just a slight change in its timbre? "He has worked well with the Rebaine in the past, yes, before." The creature twisted its head completely around to address the others behind. "He will guide it, yes, as it has asked."

Every other gnomish jaw dropped in a surprisingly human expression-assuming one allowed for the odd angles and excessive length of those gaping maws. "He is confused," one of them-presumably the one who'd been addressed-began. "Why does he-"

The speaker raised a crooked arm overhead, a motion more comical than threatening. "He is not asking, no! He is telling! He will guide it, yes, will do what he says!"

The pronouns were, at this point, impossible for the bewildered humans to follow, but the gnomes obviously got the message. The one who'd been yelled at actually managed to look a bit hurt. "He will obey," it murmured petulantly.

The speaker nodded, a hideous gesture that took its head so far back it actually touched between its misshapen shoulder blades, and then stepped through a seamless stone wall without another word. Most of the others went their own way as well, leaving the sulking guide along with a very confused Irrial and Corvis. For several long moments, they stood motionless, unsure of what to say.

"It comes," the creature finally snapped at them, "yes, follows swiftly. He will not wait for it, no." With that it stuck its arm elbow-deep in the wall. "Go, pass through, yes."

"What about-?" Irrial began.

"I'm here." From a narrow crevice a strange shape emerged, soft and malleable as though extruded from some digestive orifice within the rock. Only as it hit the ground and scuttled toward them did Corvis recognize the two-foot salamander for what it was.

And it was then, finally, that he realized just what she had done.

Face pale, he knelt down-ignoring the impatient muttering of their reluctant guide-and lifted the creature to perch upon his shoulder. "We're dead if they figure out what you did before we're gone," he whispered.

"They won't," she assured him quietly. "My previous host is, ah, somewhat indisposed. I walked him off a deep ravine down in the caves. It probably didn't kill him, but he won't be talking to anyone else for a good long-"

"Come!" the gnome shrieked at them. "Or he goes alone, yes!"

Steeling himself, Corvis stepped toward the wall. Every sense, every instinct, screamed at him to stop, that he was about to walk face-first into a solid barrier. Though he'd intended to stride casually through, he couldn't keep himself from raising his hands before him, just to be sure.

It was, he decided later when he'd calmed his mind enough for rational thought, rather like pushing through a curtain of beef fat. It failed, for half a heartbeat, to give at all, and then it oozed around his fingers, his arms, his face and chest. It crept over every inch of his body, pressing deep into his nostrils, the hollows of his mouth and ears. No, not over-through; he felt it sliding inside him, in his throat, his lungs, his gut. He struggled with a panic more primal than any fear he'd ever known, forced his gibbering brain to ignore the sensation of crushing suffocation that threatened to overwhelm him. Despite his efforts to blank his mind, he wondered what would happen if the impatient, spiteful little creature pulled its arm from the rock, allowing the wall to return to its normal state, and he found himself on the edge of hyperventilating despite his seeming inability to breathe.

And then he was through, standing in darkness as unrelenting as a demon's heart. Though the viscous stone had felt wet and pasty as it passed over him-through him, and he shuddered at the thought-it hadn't clung at all. He was no dirtier than when he'd begun, not the slightest bit damp save for his frightened sweat. For a time he simply stood, breathing deep of the stale but welcome cavern air, listening as the salamander on his shoulder did the same. He heard a horrified gasp beside him and knew that Irrial was through as well.

The air around them was dry, dusty, and very, very still. Wherever they were, it was a long way from any proper passage back to the world of light and wind.

"It follows." Corvis jumped at the voice; he'd heard no hint of the gnome's passage. He took a moment to mutter a spell, sending a gentle light emanating from his left hand. The gnome, presumably quite capable of seeing in the dark, glanced back with some irritation, but he felt his own tension ebb somewhat, and sensed some of the stiffness pass from Irrial's shoulders as well.

Though there was, for the moment, nothing to see, nothing around them but an uneven passage of featureless stone. Corvis waved for the gnome to proceed, and the humans fell into step behind.

"I don't understand," Irrial whispered, trusting the echo of their footsteps to keep her voice from their guide's ears. "I thought you couldn't inhabit anything with a soul." She, too, had clearly pieced together what Seilloah had done to ensure the gnomes' cooperation.

"That's correct," the salamander told her. "I can't."

"But-"

"If you ever hear someone refer to gnomes as 'soulless,' " Corvis said, "they're not just saying the bastards are vicious. It's the gods' honest truth. I have no idea what the little shits really are or where they came from-nobody does, as far as I know-but they're even less human than they look."

Irrial shivered. Then, "So why-?"

It was the witch, this time, who anticipated her question. "Because they have a sense of self, and a will of their own. I can inhabit them, but control is another matter entirely. It's very difficult. I doubt I could have kept it up for more than a few minutes-not much longer than it took to get them to help us, really."

'And to deal with the only one who knew what she'd done. The witch's teeth are showing.'

It took, at best guess, mere minutes to lose all sense of direction, all track of time. There was nothing but blank stone that had never before been seen by human eyes; narrow, jagged passages that tore at clothes and skin; overhangs that lurked in wait to crack careless skulls. They heard only their own breathing and their own footsteps. Even the echoes were oddly muted, repressed by the weight of the earth overhead.

At times they climbed, hauling themselves hand over fist up steep inclines that threatened to crumble beneath their weight, dropping them back into the shadowed emptiness; or scrambling down slopes on which standing was impossible, tearing hands and knees when they crawled, thighs and buttocks when they slid. And at other times they passed through solid walls, seeping through as the gnome held the way open, praying that the stone would never prove thicker than their lungs could handle. Corvis didn't know for certain what would happen if he took a breath while he and the rock slid obscenely through each other, but he did know that he'd rather never find out.

The air grew stale as they traveled ever deeper, and the barriers between them and the outside world thicker. He struggled not to wheeze with every step, heard Irrial gasping at the slightest exertion. And never once did the gnome show any inclination to rest, or even to slow its headlong pace, either unaware of, or unconcerned with, their discomfort. Corvis started to wonder if battling through the Cephiran patrols might not have been the better option after all.

But slowly, so gradually he initially failed to notice, the walls spread outward, the echoes of their footsteps grew louder. Forcing his attention from his exhausted feet, Corvis examined his new surroundings and discovered a far wider passage, replete with forks and little side corridors. From within he heard the occasional scuff of movement, the hiss of a whispered word.

Two humans walked, with faltering steps, through the abode of gnomes.

Bulges protruded into the ever-expanding corridor, and from those solid rocks myriad faces appeared, staring in fascinated hatred at the intruders from above. On two feet and on all fours, across floor and walls and ceiling, the creatures skittered, misshapen limbs pumping and twisting at impossible angles. Air and rock, light and dark, all the same; Corvis, watching as a face slid from a stone to glower at him, realized that these were their actual homes, that the gnomes lived not in the empty spaces beneath the earth, but inside the rocks themselves. It was, somehow, even more than their grotesque ability to move through those rocks, a disturbing reminder of their alien nature.

They oozed through yet another solid wall, thicker than any they'd so far passed, and Corvis and Irrial froze, deaf to the impatient cajoling of their guide.

They stood upon a ledge, frighteningly narrow, at the lip of what could only be described as a gulf of darkness. It had, so far as Corvis's light could reach, no floor and no sides save for the one beside them. He had little doubt that were Mecepheum itself somehow transported here, it would have room to grow.

Only the ceiling was visible, casting back reflections of that feeble illumination. Gems, or what Corvis assumed to be gems, gleamed back in every imaginable hue. Most were white or a pale yellow, but there were sporadic glints of rich red and deep green as well. Despite the steady glow of Corvis's spell, the gems glittered, twinkling like the stars of night above.

Gnomes crawled betwixt and between them in defiance of gravity, stopping here and there to perform what Corvis, from his limited vantage, could only describe as a twisted genuflection. In the cavern air, what he'd first taken to be the rush of a distant waterfall resolved itself into a grinding paean, a song produced by inhuman throats. A hundred identical voices wove it together, one picking up where another left off so not even the need for breath ever interrupted the unending, monotonous tone.

Only when the gnome had actually backtracked and reached out to physically drag Irrial along did they begin walking once more, making their way around the impossible, wondrous abyss. Corvis and Irrial kept their right hands on the wall, hoping to ensure that they would not step out over the edge, for they could not tear their attentions from the false firmament above.

At least, not at first. As they progressed, Corvis began to realize that the gems actually did match the stars of the night sky. He recognized constellations: here the Scales of Ulan; there Kirrestes the Archer, drawing back his great bow for the shot that, according to myth, passed through all seventeen heads to slay the Ryvrik hydra; farther along the winding coils of the wyrm Anolrach, whose spilled lifeblood made the oceans salty.

Corvis wasn't certain which was worse: the thought that the gnomes had deliberately created this mirror of night, or the possibility that the stones had naturally taken such shapes and forms. His mind shied away from the deeper implications of either option.

Nor was this the worst of it. As his vision adjusted even more, Corvis saw other shapes, monstrous, writhing things at the edges of his light, moving unlike any natural beast of earth or air or even sea. They strode the empty reaches, the stagnant darkness, at the center of that black gulf, whispering sounds that reached the ear but which the mind fearfully refused to acknowledge. And when they moved, the nearest gnomes genuflected to them.

Corvis turned his eyes to the path and refused to look any longer into that abyss. THEIR SLOG AROUND ONE MINUSCULE FRACTION of that seemingly infinite cavern could have taken hours or even days; their progress through another array of twisting, monotonous corridors, even longer. Corvis's world had become nothing but the beating of an exhausted heart, the slow plod of aching, blistering feet. During those few moments when he could think at all, he began to contemplate the notion that he had died, that this was some horrible torment imposed in one of the darker corners of Vantares's dominion. He even began to welcome the occasional passage through solid walls, for the burning in his chest as he struggled not to breathe was indication that he yet lived.

He only just noticed when the corridors began, ever more frequently, to slope upward, and in his present state he never quite grasped the connotations.

Not, that is, until the gnome informed him "He goes no farther, no," at the same time Corvis felt the faintest brush of a breeze against his face, tentative and soft as a girl's first kiss. It smelled of grass and soil. It was all he could do not to fall to his knees, whether in gratitude or simple exhaustion he could never say.

"Thank you," he rasped, startled at how dry and gritty his voice sounded. How long have we been down here? It was only then he realized that not only had they never rested, they'd never stopped to eat or take even a mouthful of water. He looked briefly back the way they'd come, a shiver running down his spine, and wondered how much of it had been real.

"He does not want its thanks, no, its pitiful words of useless gratitude. He does not know what it said to him, why he guided it, took it below, between, the organs of the earth. But he knows that he will not do so again, never again, no. It leaves, yes, swiftly, before he changes his mind."

Corvis nodded. Staggering, holding each other upright, he and Irrial shambled forward, following the siren song of the breeze. They climbed shallow slopes, hands outstretched as though to clutch the diaphanous scents of the world above. The sun, when they found it, was overwhelming, knives of light stabbing at their eyes, but it was the most joyful pain Corvis had ever known.

He pretended, as he wept, that the blinding glare was the sole cause of his tears. CORVIS LEANED OUT between two uneven shutters, the knuckles of one hand pressed to the windowsill, and gazed morosely over the collection of wooden shacks and winding roads that pretended to form a town. He'd no idea what the place might be called, and couldn't be bothered to care overmuch. It'd been the first dollop of civilization they'd stumbled across after crawling back into the light from the earth's stone womb, and it had boasted rooms for let above the combination tavern/restaurant/general store. That was enough to make it home, at least for tonight.

He felt his head sag, and pressed the thumb and forefinger of his free hand to the bridge of his nose. Much as he might have liked someone to talk to, a part of him was glad that he was alone for the moment-that there was nobody present to witness his weakness. Or at least, a faint chuckle in the back of his thoughts reminded him, nobody real. Moving from the window, he slumped hard in the nearby chair, unwilling even to expend the effort to reach the thin and lumpy mattress.

Corvis couldn't remember the last time he'd been so weary, so weighted down and oppressed by his own body-although, he admitted with a rueful grin, that might just be due to failing memory. No physical exhaustion, this, easily solved by a day or two of relaxation, a few nights' rejuvenating slumber. Rather, he felt himself sinking, suffocating, in the mire of a mental and emotional fatigue so thick that it bordered on despair. Not since the darkest days of the Serpent's War had he so desperately wanted the world to just go away for a while, to cease its incessant demands. He dreaded the thought of returning to Mecepheum's morass of Guilds and Houses and politics and corruption, and in the deepest recesses of his soul, a voice-his own voice-beseeched him to give it all up. Forget the mystery, forget the conspiracy, forget Imphallion. It's not your responsibility; it never was. So what if someone has murdered in your name? It's a name that cannot possibly be hated any more than it is already. Why continue? Why not find a home somewhere, far from the Cephiran border, and make a life from what years remain?

He knew his answers, of course: His sense of the greater good, tarnished and frayed though it may have been, so rigid and uncompromising that it had allowed him to murder thousands that he might save millions. His loyalty to companions who had fought and bled at his side. His concern for a family he had lost yet still loved. And, he conceded, his own pride, a towering pillar of fire that refused to be doused.

But for a brief time that evening, had anyone asked Corvis Rebaine if those reasons were sufficient, if they made the struggle worth continuing, he could not truthfully have answered yes.

And it was there, at the nadir of his inner pit of exhaustion and desolation, that the gods elected, in their own peculiar way, to yank him out of it.

Corvis was standing up from his chair, mind and muscle groaning with the effort, before it occurred to him that the heavy knock reverberating through the door didn't sound like it came from Irrial's modest fist. He straightened, frowning thoughtfully at the door. No safety there. He hadn't thought to twist the lock as he'd staggered in-not that it really mattered, since both latch and door itself were flimsy enough for an angry rabbit to take down, given a sufficient running start. He thought about keeping silent, but that probably wouldn't put anyone off more than a few moments.

So he stepped, not to the door, but back to the window. You're being paranoid, Corvis. It's probably just the proprietor. Still, only once he'd hefted Sunder from where it leaned against the wall below the sill did he call out, inviting whoever it was to enter.

The door drifted open with a melodramatic creak, revealing a looming shape in the flickering lanternlight of the hall beyond. And Corvis, blood pounding in his ears, old agonies coursing through his limbs, could only think to say, "I'm rather stunned that you were able to keep calm enough to refrain from kicking the damn thing in."

"I figured there was no need to rush," said the Baron of Braetlyn. "I've been looking forward to this for such a very long time."