What base animal instinct in us drives us? Alfred wondered to himself bitterly. Forces us to continue living, when it would be far easier to sit down and die.
The carriage rolled around a corner on two wheels. The Sartan was thrown violently against the chill form of the cadaver. The carriage righted itself. Alfred righted himself, Prince Edmund’s corpse assisting him with its accustomed dignity.
Why do I cling to life? What is there left for me, after all? Even if I escape this world, I can never escape the knowledge of what I’ve seen, the knowledge of what my people have become. Why should I race to warn Baltazar? If he survives, he’ll continue to look for Death’s Gate. He’ll figure out how to enter and carry the contagion of necromancy into the realms beyond. Haplo himself has threatened to bring the art to the knowledge of his lord.
Yet, Alfred pondered, the Patryn spoke of that when we first came. He hasn’t mentioned it since. I wonder how he feels about it now. Sometimes I imagine I’ve seen the same horror that I’ve felt in my soul reflected in his eyes. And in the Chamber of the Damned, he was the young man seated next to me! He saw what I saw—
“He fights against it, as do you,” said the prince, breaking in on Alfred’s thoughts.
Startled, Alfred tried to speak, to protest, but the words were jounced out of his mouth. He nearly bit off his tongue. Prince Edmund understood, however.
“Only one out of the three of you opened his heart to the truth. Jonathan doesn’t understand completely, yet, but he is near, much closer than you.”
“I want... to know ... the truth!” Alfred managed to get out, shooting the words from between clenched teeth to keep from biting his tongue again.
“Do you?” asked the phantasm, and it seemed to Alfred that he saw it coolly smile. “Haven’t you spent your life denying it?”
His fainting spells: used consciously at first to keep from revealing his magical powers, had now become uncontrollable. His clumsiness: a body at odds with its spirit. His inability—or was it refusal—to call to mind a spell that would give him too much power, unwanted power, power that others might try to usurp. Constantly putting himself in the role of observer, refusing to act for good or for evil.
“But what else could I have done?” Alfred asked defensively. “If the mensch once found out I had the power of a god, they would force me to use that power to intervene in their lives.”
“Force you? Or tempt you?”
“You’re right,” Alfred admitted. “I know I’m weak. The temptation would have been too strong, was too strong. I gave in to it—saving the child Bane’s life when his death would have averted the tragedies that followed.”
“Why did you save the child? Why”—the prince’s ghostly gaze shifted to Haplo—“did you save the man? Your enemy? An enemy who has vowed to kill you? Search your heart for the answer, the true answer.”
Alfred sighed. “You’ll be disappointed. I wish I could say I acted because of some noble ideal—chivalrous honor, self-sacrificing courage. But I didn’t. In Bane’s case, it was pity. Pity for an unloved child who would die without ever knowing a moments happiness. And Haplo? I walked in his skin, for a few brief moments. I understand him.” Alfred’s gaze went to the dog. “I think I understand him better than he understands himself.”
“Pity, mercy, compassion.”
“That’s all, I’m afraid,” said Alfred.
“That is everything,” said the phantasm.
The road on which they traveled was empty, deserted. It had been trampled by many feet, part of the army of the dead had passed this way, flowing out of the city onto the many highways leading to the Fire Sea. Helmets, shields, bits and pieces of armor, bones and, here and there, a fallen, shattered skeleton lay scattered in the army’s wake. Farm carts or carriages were discovered abandoned, their passengers either murdered or they had fled the rumor of the dead army’s coming.
Alfred had first believed Tomas to have been correct. They had not seen one living being since they emerged from the catacombs. He feared that everyone in or around Necropolis must have fallen victim to the dead’s fury. But on their journey, he thought more than once that he caught a glimpse of furtive movement in the tall kairn grass, thought he saw a head lift, eyes—living eyes—peer fearfully out at them. But the carriage whirled past too swiftly for him to confirm what he’d seen or mention it to the others.
But it was a tiny crack of hope, splitting the darkness like light shining from beneath a closed door. His spirits raised, whether because of the newfound hope or the phantasm’s comforting words, he couldn’t tell. His brain was too jounced and jostled for coherent thought. He clung to the side of the carriage, hanging on to it in grim resolve. Life did have meaning and purpose. He wasn’t certain what that was, yet. But he had decided at least to keep searching.
The carriage neared the Fire Sea, neared danger. Topping a rise, Alfred gazed down on the docks far below, gazed down on an army of dead, swirling and milling about the ships in chaos. He was reminded of a colony of coral grubs invaded by a hungry dragon hatchling. At first each grub sought only to escape the crunching jaws. After the initial confusion and panic, however, the threat united the insects and they turned, as one, to repel the invader. The mother dragon had rescued her young just in time.
Confusion and panic might reign on the docks at this moment, but a single goal would soon unite them.
The carriage dashed down the hill, veering in an easterly direction that would take them clear of the docks. Jonathan drove the maddened pauka at a breakneck pace. The army and ships vanished from Alfred’s sight.
The wild ride finally came to a halt. The carriage brought up on a rock shore of the Fire Sea. The pauka collapsed in the traces, sinking to the ground, breathing heavily.
Before them, the vast ocean of flaming magma gleamed orange-red, its fiery light reflecting off the glistening black stalactites spiraling downward from the cavern’s roof. Huge stalagmites, dark against the red background of the sea, formed a jagged-toothed shoreline. The magma washed and pushed against them sluggishly. A meandering stream of water, that had escaped from the city above plunged, hissing, into the sea, sending rolling clouds of steam into the hot, sulfurous air.
The living and the dead stood on the beach and stared out across the sea. Barely visible, in the distance, Alfred thought he could make out the opposite shore.
“I thought you said we’d find a boat here,” said Haplo, eyeing the prince grimly, suspiciously.
“I said you would find the way to cross here,” corrected Prince Edmund. “I said nothing about a boat.” The white, gleaming arm of the phantasm raised, an ethereal finger pointed.
At first Alfred thought Edmund meant them to use their magic to cross the sea of flame.
“I can’t,” the Sartan said meekly. “I’m too weak. Its costing me nearly all my energy, just to stay alive.”
He had never before felt the weight of his own mortality, never before realized that his powers had physical limits. He was beginning to understand the Sartan of Abarrach, beginning to understand them as he had begun to understand Haplo. He was walking in their skins.
The phantasm said nothing; again Alfred thought he saw a smile flicker on the translucent lips. It continued to point.
“A bridge,” said Haplo. “There’s a bridge.”
“Blessed . . .” Alfred had been about to say, Blessed Sartan. The words died on his lips. That was one oath he’d never use again, at least not without serious thought.
Now that Haplo had pointed it out, Alfred could see the bridge (he supposed one could dignify it by that appellation). In reality it was nothing more than a long row of large, oddly shaped boulders that happened to be arranged in a straight line extending from one shoreline to the other. It looked almost as if a gigantic column of rock had crashed into the sea, its skeletal remains forming the bridge.