"Kill her?" Karfhud stood, wincing in pain. His body was laced with gashes and covered in golden ichor, but several small husks of pain had somehow survived the battle without bursting; with each pulse of the fiend's heart, they grew a little larger. "How can we kill her? It would be easier to flatten the mazes themselves!"
Theseus scowled. If the fiend did not want to slay the monster, then why was he chasing her?
"I have my reasons, and so do you-or are you afraid to recall what you did on that island?" The fiend pulled Theseus to his feet, then thrust the Thrasson's star-forged sword into his hands. "Now help me with the gate. If we hurry, we will catch Sheba and end this thing."
As the tanar'ri turned toward the ironclad manstile, Theseus recalled Sheba's decoy. He had a sinking feeling, then turned and saw the matted pelt lying in the shallow water at the far end of the gate. It was no longer squirming.
"Karfhud, we've forgotten about Silverwind."
The fiend glanced down the length of the gate. "We have no time to waste on the dead. Minutes have passed already since she escaped^"
"If Sllverwind is truly dead, this won't take long." Theseus wetted his sword with the fiend's blood, then sloshed over to the sticky pelt and stuck the tip into the empty mouth hole. "Silverwind? Are you in there?"
When he teceived no answer and the pelt did not move, he carefully sliced it open. Inside, eyes closed and curled into a tight fetal ball, lay the old bariaur. His brief captivity had left him covered with slime and filth, but his chest was rising at regular intervals, his hooves were twitching as in a dream, and he was still covered with throbbing husks of pain.
"Silverwind, wake up." Theseus reached down and gently shook him. "We've got to hurry."
Silverwind's eyes snapped open, and he gave a start of surprise. "Theseus?" The old bariaur raised his head and took in his surroundings. "I thought I had imploded! Can you imagine? I would have had to imagine it all again – the whole thing!"
"You may yet," growled Karfhud, waiting at the far end of the gate. The fiend shifted his gaze to Theseus. "Have you done with this stalling?"
Theseus helped Silverwind out of the monster's empty hide, then the two of them joined Karfhud. Sometime earlier, no doubt before deciding that he still had need of the Thrasson's help, the fiend had tried to push aside the heavy gate and managed only to crack it open – this despite the fact that Sheba, sorely wounded and in a huny, had closed the thing with only one arm. Theseus began to wonder who was hunting whom.
"Does it matter?" Karfhud laid his hands on the iron sheathing and leaned into the stile. "She has your amphora."
Theseus pressed his shoulder to the gate. "And what do you want from her, if you cannot hope to slay her?"
Karfhud gave him a sidelong glance. "I am surprised you have not guessed that by now, Thrasson."
From the gate's center pivot rose a loud grating noise. The heavy stile slowly started to open. A moment later, Silverwind butted into it at a full sprint; there was a loud bang, and Theseus and Karfhud nearly fell as the gate bucked forward. They pumped their legs to catch up, then smoothly pushed the stile back to its original position.
In the adjacent passage stood Tessali, Jayk's limp body resting across his handless arms. Theseus's heart jumped; for a moment, he thought she might still be alive – then he noticed how her spine bent in the wrong direction, and how the ends of her broken ribs formed a ring around the sunken hollow in the center of her chest The Thrasson saw no ichor on her body; at least her pain was gone.
"Theseus, she died with your name on her lips." Tessali shuffled forward, his accusing gaze fixed on the Thrasson. "She asked that you bum her body and cany the ashes with you."
Theseus moved forward to take the corpse, but Karfhud shoved in front of him.
"We have no time for pyres, Thrasson. If we let Sheba put herself back together, more of us will die."
Theseus glared into the fiend's fiery eyes, knowing that he spoke the truth and silently cursing him for it.
"I am not to blame. You are the hero, Theseus; you must bear the burden: will you risk the lives of four to grant the wish of one?" Karfhud paused, gently scratching his broken talons along his chin. "It occurs to me that your choice is similar to the one Dionysus presented you; either way, you betray someone. How unfortunate that you cannot recall how you resolved that dilemma."
"Damn you, Karfhud!"
The fiend cocked a wrinkled brow and gazed around the narrow passage. "This? Hardly." He chuckled and shook his head. "The mazes are as nothing to the Abyss."
Theseus scowled at the tanar'ri's mocking snicker, but motioned to Tessali. "Come with me. We can wrap her in Karfhud's wing until after the battle."
The elf glanced at the dark wound where the fiend's wing had been ripped from his shoulder blade, then grimaced and looked back to the Thrasson.
"What if we don't-"
"Then we will rot with her!" Theseus snapped. "I don't suppose she could blame us for that."
The Thrasson paused just long enough to scan the area and make certain the monster had taken the amphora – she had – before leading the way back around the stile. He pulled Karfhud's tattered wing from the water and swaddled Jayk's body inside, then laid the bundle back in Tessali's arms and went to cut some long mats from Sheba's discarded pelt. The elf followed close behind, holding the cocoon as Theseus wrapped it in gummy tangles of fur.
"I would have cured her, you know," Tessali said. "Even without my hands and my spells, I was beginning to make her understand. I don't think she wanted to die, there at the last"
Theseus suspected that Jayk's change of heart had more to do with her dose call with Karfhud than any Bleaker wisdom Tessali had imparted to her, but he held his tongue. The elf had lost enough already; if he found comfort in such delusions, it was not the Thrasson's place to disabuse him.
After encasing Jayk's cocoon in the monster's gummy fur, Theseus took the bundle and stuck it to the stile, affixing it as high as he could reach. Though he had seen no scavengers in the mazes, neither had he seen any untended carcasses or skeletons, and the dead bodies had to be going somewhere.
By the time Theseus and Tessali returned to the others, Karfhud had already taken a mapping parchment from his battered back-satchel and marked the locations of the adjoining passages. He motioned the Thrasson to follow close behind, then set off down the opposite corridor without a word. Despite Karfhud's condition-he was limping badly and hunched over a broken rib-he moved through the crooked, narrow passages in near silence, sketching in junctions and side-corridors as he went. There was no fog, so they could see that the walls were lined by arrow loops and murder holes, all located well above the reach of even Karfhud. Every so often, they would glimpse a heavy wooden shutter or an oaken door guarding some portal far above their heads, but there were never any such entryways down in the bottom of the labyrinth.
As before, they had little trouble following the monster. Although there were ankle-deep streams in all the corridors, the currents were gentle and slow. Sheba's black blood marked her path as clearly as it had in the swamp; the companions found beads of the gummy stuff everywhere: clinging to the walls, bobbing in the comers, stuck on the jagged stones that littered the passage floors.
Sheba also seemed to be having trouble containing the contents of the broken amphora. Every now and then, they ran across strands of golden hair hovering in the damp air, and twice they met scraps of black sail cloth wafting up the passage. The first ribbon circled Theseus three times: he saw himself running a golden comb – the same one he had with him when he washed ashore near Thrassos-through the auburn hair of his dead wife Antiope, who had perished at the hands of her own people for loving him.