“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.