Vor didn’t move or speak.
“Vor?”
“I heard you.” He didn’t turn his head. “I didn’t know you understood the language of the Ghaash’kala.”
Kauth felt his cheeks flush. He had overheard a conversation meant to be private-Vor revealing his deepest and most painful secrets.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “perhaps I should-”
Vor cut him off. “Never mind. It’s not an easy question to answer.”
“I’m just trying to understand…” Understand what? What it meant to have principles?
“She begged me,” Vor said. “She begged you? That’s it?”
“I offered her the choice, the same one Durrnak offered us today. If she had stayed with us, we might have been able to deal with her child when it came, either purify it or destroy it before it grew too powerful. But she refused. She said that she had friends who could exorcise the evil from the child before it was born and let her give birth to a normal child free of evil’s taint.”
“And you believed her.”
Vor hesitated, tracing some pattern in the gravel. “I’m not sure I did, actually. But I wanted to.”
“You wanted to?”
“You don’t understand what it’s like to live here, Kauth. Wandering the Labyrinth you can go days without seeing another living thing. Anything you do see you usually have to kill. It’s a war of relentless extermination. To believe that she could bear a normal, healthy child-it was like believing that something could grow and flower in the Demon Wastes.” Vor slowly shook his head. “A damn fool dream.”
“As though life could somehow grow out of death,” Kauth said. He looked down at last at the masonry in his hand… recapitulates the serpents’ sacrifice, binding the servant anew so the master shall not break free.
The first time he’d seen it, it had made him think of Dania, made him wonder if Gaven had dreamed of her one tortured night in Dreadhold. Had Gaven seen Dania exorcise the spirit from Maija’s body, trapping it in her own? She had bound the servant, the lesser evil, before it could carry out its plan to free its master, a still greater evil bound in the depths of the earth.
Could Dania’s death have fulfilled some part of the Prophecy? Did it have some greater purpose, something that would give meaning to her sacrifice?
Could life grow from her death?
The night passed without another attack, and by dawn’s light Vor announced that they should clear the Labyrinth by the end of the day. That lifted Sevren and Zandar’s spirits even higher, but Kauth could think only of the far greater danger that lay on the other side.
Sunlight barely penetrated the clouds that day, and they walked in a strange twilight world of dim red light and greenish shadows. When the day had worn on to what Kauth guessed was its middle, the earth suddenly erupted a few yards ahead of them, cutting off Zandar’s laughter. Kauth thought at first that a flow of mud had burbled up from the depths, accompanied by a sound that was not so much liquid as metallic, almost like coins in a pile shifting around each other. The oozing stuff began to pile on itself in a mound, then a slender pillar, and he realized that the flow was composed of brownish black beetles, each one about the size of a gold galifar, massing together into a figure the size of a human.
When only a few beetles still skittered over the ground, the sound grew to a shrill droning as all the ones in the pile lifted their wing casings, becoming a shimmering blur of color. Then silence, and what stood before them was no longer a swarm of insects, but a beautiful woman with the slender grace and elegance of a fey queen or a noble elf of Aerenal. Her eyes were pearly orbs of silver staring wide, her hair was a wild tangle, and she wore a crooked smile that reminded Kauth of Zandar’s. The long hem of her tattered velvet gown dissolved into beetles as it swept the ground. She spread her arms wide as though beckoning Vor into her embrace. “You,” the orc murmured.
Sevren threw a sharp glance at Vor. “What’s going on?” he said.
A blast of Zandar’s dark fire shot over Kauth’s shoulder, between Sevren and Vor, and splashed against the smiling woman. Kauth saw beetles fall from her gown and lie still on the ground, but the woman’s smile didn’t falter.
“It’s charmed him,” Zandar said. “Take it down.”
“You didn’t escape,” Vor said, his voice choked with grief. He dropped his sword on the ground, pulled himself free as Sevren tried to grab at him, and stumbled toward the beetle-woman.
Zandar blasted her again, and Kauth felt in his pouch for the cherry wand, the one tipped with a fire opal. He drew it out and pointed it at a spot a few yards past where the woman stood. When he loosed the knot of magic in the wand, fire blossomed out from his target point and swallowed the strange figure. More beetles dropped off her and, for an instant, her fair face vanished and she was just a column of beetles again. Then the beetles shimmered and droned, and her lovely face returned. Her smile was gone, but she didn’t take her gaze from Vor.
“Your child,” the orc murmured. “What happened to your child?” He was just a few steps from her now, and she stepped forward to meet him, to take him in her arms.
Sevren sprang forward to intercept her, slashing his knives through her belly. A few beetles fell from her body, this time with a splash of green-black blood and an angry chittering sound, and she turned her eyes on him with fury. She swung her arm in what would have been a backhanded slap-unhindered by another slash from Sevren’s knife, which seemed to pass right through her arm-but her hand dissolved into crawling vermin as it connected with his face. Sevren cried out in pain and shock and he clawed at his face.
Kauth’s stomach turned as he saw the beetles burrowing into the skin of the shifter’s face and neck. At the same moment, Zandar shouted and Kauth wheeled to see the warlock stumbling away from a new threat-a towering hulk of a monster, clutching a curved sword in both hands. But for its purple skin, it might have been an ogre or a degenerate giant, something twisted by the evil of the Demon Wastes. A pair of gleaming white horns emerged above its hideous face, which was twisted in a mocking grin as it advanced upon Zandar.
Indecision paralyzed Kauth. The battle seemed to be playing out beyond the grasp of his understanding, and it overwhelmed him as he glanced between the giant demon on one hand and the beetle-woman on the other. Shaking himself, he returned the wand to his pouch, drew out his mace, and ran to help Zandar, entrusting Vor to Sevren’s able care.
The giant’s smile broadened as Kauth approached. It stepped to one side, putting Zandar between itself and Kauth’s approach, then pointed a claw-tipped finger at them. Lightning sprang from its hand and flew in a mighty bolt through the warlock’s body and just past Kauth. Zandar dropped to the ground, stirring a grumbling laugh from the giant. Kauth continued his headlong charge, but just as he reached the spot where Zandar lay, his foe vanished.
Cursing, Kauth drew up short and closed his eyes, straining to hear the monster’s footfalls. Zandar scrambled to his feet beside him, crunching the gravelly earth but holding in his breath. A few yards away, Sevren was growling his pain, and Kauth could hear the whistle of his blades slicing the air, and the quiet chittering of the beetles. But no sound from the demon-thing.
“Eleni, what happened to the child?” Vor’s voice was pleading, pained. “Where is my child?”
Kauth’s eyes shot open and he whirled around to look at the orc. The child had been his-he let the woman go because she bore his child! And now he thought this apparition of beetles was her, and he walked willingly into her embrace.
“No!” Sevren and Kauth screamed together. Sevren, closer to Vor, sprang at the orc and knocked him to the ground. Too late-beetles swarmed to cover them both, wriggling between the plates of Vor’s armor and beneath Sevren’s chain mail shirt, burrowing into the flesh of both men.
Kauth fumbled in his pouch for a wand that would help, unsure how to attack a foe that was burrowing inside his friends. Zandar ran past him and started blasting the ground with black fire, incinerating the beetles that still crawled free. Kauth shuffled forward, painfully aware of the beetles all too near his feet but deciding that the best way he could combat this creature was to make sure Sevren and Vor stayed alive.