Kyra set her mouth in a thin line, but her eyes betrayed her. The eyes always do.
“You have no friends,” Kelas said. “If you cannot kill her, I will make her kill you before I kill her myself. Kill or be killed. If you love you will fail!”
“I’m sorry,” Laurann whispered. She drove the knife into Kyra’s heart as fast and hard as she could, hoping her friend would die quickly.
Kelas spun her around and punched her face. “You are not sorry!” he yelled. She fell to the floor and Kelas kicked her in the gut. She curled around the blow, gasping for breath, and he kicked her again. “You do not care for this girl! She failed, so she died!”
He kicked her once more, and Laurann rolled over into the spreading pool of Kyra’s blood.
How many people had he killed at Kelas’s command? He couldn’t begin to count. It started when he was barely old enough to wrap his hand around the hilt of a sword. How many times had Kelas beat him for displaying a shred of hesitation or compassion, for caring a whit about anyone? Kelas had worked hard to ensure that Kauth-that Aunn in all his faces hated him. Hated him and obeyed him without question.
Always the message was the same: Aundair was everything and the lives of individuals meant nothing. A Royal Eye was willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for the good of the nation, even himself. The needs of the nation and its hundreds of thousands far outweighed the life of any one person.
I don’t believe it anymore, he realized. He looked down from the sky to Vor’s corpse on the ground, to Zandar weeping over his friend. This, he thought, is what life is about.
I won’t do it. For the first time in my life, I’m going to fail. And Kelas can burn in the Lake of Fire for all I care.
He unslung his pack from his shoulders, opened the front pouch, and drew out an ivory cylinder. He unscrewed the lid and shook out a roll of papers, then began to shuffle through them, looking for the one he needed.
“What are you doing?” Sevren asked. The shifter had been standing silently behind him, mourning in his own quiet way.
“I’m going to bring him back.”
Zandar looked up at that. His face was a mask of anguish, streaked with tears. His violent display of emotion no longer seemed out of place to Kauth. It was right and good that he should care so much about his friend.
“You can do that?” the warlock asked. The note of hope in his voice convinced Kauth that he had made the right decision.
“I can damn well try.” He’d carried the scroll with him for years, hoping he would never have to use it, and never quite sure that it would work if he did. He found the right one, withdrew it from the sheaf, and returned the others to their case.
“How can I help?” Zandar asked.
“Pray for me.”
Kauth let his eyes roam over the scroll, blocking out the rest of the world from his mind. A devotee of the war god, Dol Dorn, had scribed it, ornamenting it with images of weapons and marching armies. The priest had probably intended it to be used in the event of a great general’s death on the field of battle. Presumably whoever carried it into battle had died before the general in question. Kauth had purchased it some years ago with money he’d secreted away without Kelas’s knowledge.
Kauth had heard other changelings in the Royal Eyes speak of the Traveler over the course of his training, always out of earshot of Kelas and other handlers. The ever-changing trickster of the gods, the Traveler did not answer prayers or accept sacrifice-the Traveler smiled on the self-reliant. The Traveler’s ten thousand names were said to hide the secrets of the universe for those who could puzzle them out. The idea of those ten thousand names had always captured Kauth’s imagination, and he figured that the best way to glean their secrets was to adopt ten thousand names himself. In thirty years, he had yet to take on a hundred names, and he felt more than nine thousand names distant from the mysteries of the universe.
He wasn’t sure whether the Traveler had really appeared to him in a dream. He had been inclined to dismiss that apparition as the product of a fever. But her persisent question-he had always thought of the Traveler as her, though others described him as male in sometimes vulgar myths-that question had lingered with him: “Who are you?” It galled him that he hadn’t yet come up with a satisfying answer.
So it was her image that Kauth fixed in his mind as he began to read the scroll, as she had appeared to him in that dream, wearing the face of the martyred paladin Dania ir’Vran and bathed in argent light. Perhaps Kalok Shash would smile on that mental image of silver fire and favor Vor because of it.
He reached into the scroll with his mind, gingerly touching the magic bound in each letter, amplified in each syllable, straining against the bonds of each word. One by one, he wrapped his mind around the knot of magic in each word and felt the knot loosen as he spoke. Magic streamed from the letters on the page, dissolving the ink it left behind, and poured from his mouth like sound. A cloud of divine power swirled around him like a brewing storm.
In that shadow of that storm, he felt infinitesimal, and he felt infinite. He felt himself dissolved in divinity, stretched across the universe and beyond, as though if he looked he could see everything and if he thought he could know anything. But he was far past sight and thinking. He was a tiny mind and a feeble hand reaching to touch a far greater power, speaking words that hallowed his tongue, daring to command the power of the gods.
It seemed to him, for a fleeting instant, that the gods deigned to be commanded, as he felt the power of the divine storm break and pour into Vor’s body. He was empty, every mote of energy scoured from his body and mind. A shimmer of silver ran over the fallen orc, and some part of his mind heard Zandar next to him gasp, then hold his breath.
There was a moment of perfect silence. No one breathed, no waft of wind stirred the dusty ground, nothing moved. They hung suspended in time.
And then the sky rumbled with thunder somewhere in the distance, the gravel shifted and crunched under Sevren’s foot, and the last flicker of silver faded from Vor’s blood-soaked armor.
Nothing. There was nothing. His failure was complete.
Zandar couldn’t bear the thought of Vor’s body becoming a feast for whatever carrion feeders might crawl through the Demon Wastes, but there was no wood to build a funeral pyre. So he and Sevren collected rocks and piled them in a cairn over Vor, hoping that would do the job but not really believing it. Kauth sat alone as they worked, trying to recapture some of what he’d felt as he read the scroll and agonizing over his failure. Against the magnitude of that failure, turning his back on his mission and the Royal Eyes seemed paltry.
One other problem nagged at Kauth’s mind-how to tell the others they were turning back. He had told them their mission was to scout the Demon Wastes for sign of an imminent invasion of the Eldeen Reaches. Something told him that Sevren and Zandar would want to complete that mission to honor Vor’s sacrifice. He considered telling them the truth-that their true mission was to stir up an invasion and lose their lives in the process. He wasn’t confident they’d be understanding. Somehow, he had to figure out how to prevent the rest of them from meeting the same fate as Vor.
Zandar and Sevren finished their work before he came near a solution to that problem. With some hesitation, Sevren took up the sword Vor had carried, the one they’d found in the serpent’s lair, surrounded by the words of Prophecy. It was more fitting, Zandar had argued, to lay Vor’s greataxe over his chest, the weapon he’d wielded in battle for years. Sevren initially handled the sword as though it were tainted by Vor’s death, but after giving it a few trial swings he clenched it more tightly, evidently pleased with its heft. Then he looked between Kauth and Zandar.
“Onward?” the shifter said. “Vor said we should clear the Labyrinth today.”