Beramun had spent a restless night. Even after downing the sleeping draught Karada had sent for, she twitched and moaned in her sleep. At one point Karada touched the girl’s forehead and found it blazing hot. Since her wound wasn’t visibly festering, the cause of the fever wasn’t clear. Now she was asleep. Soon enough, Harak appeared and asked to see Beramun.
The nomad chief was struck by the change wrought in the former raider. From a smooth, arrogant, rather lazy wanderer Harak had become almost likable. Maybe his love for Beramun had transformed him—or maybe, Karada reflected, he recognized that Beramun deserved an honorable mate.
They talked in hushed tones about the girl’s condition.
“It’s strange,” Karada murmured. “Her wound is painful, I’m sure, but it shouldn’t cause such distress.”
“It was Sthenn’s mark,” Harak said grimly. “Cutting it out may have done more harm than we know. It’s my fault.”
“Be strong. I think it was the saving of her.” Karada offered to share her meager meal of nuts and fruit with him. He took a handful of nuts and sat beside Beramun’s pallet, watching her brow furrow and the sweat bead on her lip.
After a moment, he said, “I have a boon to ask of you, Karada.”
She stopped eating to listen. In the same low tone, he added, “The rest of the men from Zannian’s band chose me to speak for them.”
“Go on.”
“It is said you’re leaving soon. The men and I want to go with you.”
She’d been half-expecting this. “I’ll not have raiders and killers in my band.”
“Wait, great chief. We’re all plainsfolk, aren’t we? I doubt anyone in our little pen has killed more men than you or the great Pakito.”
“I’ve never killed an innocent.”
His old, cunning look returned. “Never?”
“You won’t get far with me, questioning my word!”
Beramun sighed, shifting slightly on her pallet. Karada gestured at Harak. He put aside his uneaten breakfast, and they moved away from the sleeping girl to the entrance of the tent.
Changing his tone, Harak said, “Chief, any men you don’t take will fall back into stealing and raiding. I know them. They are not bad, not really. Some are lazy or coarse, but the worst from Zannian’s band are already dead or escaped. Those left need a strong leader to turn them around, someone we can follow. You can be that leader, Karada.”
Shorn of Harak’s flattery, his point about the captives going back to raiding if left on their own was undeniable.
Fifty men could cause a lot of trouble for small family bands wandering the plains. They could make life difficult for Amero’s villagers, too.
“Very well,” she said. “I will take them, and if they cause any trouble I will deal with them.”
It took Harak a moment to digest her blunt statement, then he exclaimed, “Thank you, Karada! You are the noblest chief of all!”
She held up her hand to stanch the flow of flattery. “Harak, I won’t be oiled like an old pouch. I will meet with each former raider. They will be inspected by the warriors of my band and by the people of Yala-tene. Any recognized as murderers, plunderers, and other yevi-spawn will meet a swift fate. Those who pass muster can come with us.”
“Certainly, Karada, certainly!” Harak said. “I’m sure the men will agree to your conditions. You’re even more wise than all the tales proclaim.”
“Shut up,” she said, but without rancor. Grinning, Harak did.
Hearing them, Beramun turned over and groaned. Her feet kicked at the fur covering her legs. Concerned, Harak went to her and took her hand. Her fingers closed around his with startling force.
He could see her eyes moving rapidly beneath her closed lids. “What is she seeing?” he wondered aloud. “What powerful dreams hold her in such sway?”
The tunnel was endless. Toadstools sprouted in the cracks between the stones of the floor, their yellow gills emitting a weird, cool light. The walls and ceiling were black soil, crumbling and rotten.
Beramun was icy cold. Barefoot, wearing only a tattered doeskin shift, she felt as though she’d been wandering in this bleak place forever. The air was clammy and smelled like moldering bones. She shivered, holding the neck of her shift together to keep out a little of the chill.
She heard footsteps behind her. Though they sounded only when she moved, she knew it wasn’t an echo.
All at once she whirled about. For the briefest instant she spotted the outline of something in the darkness. The shape melted into the shadows under her probing gaze, but it had been there.
Heart hammering, Beramun turned and ran. Her stride stretched out to bizarre lengths, covering many paces with every strike of her heel. The broad reach of her legs didn’t seem to get her anywhere, though. The dimly illuminated tunnel appeared to be endless and straight as a spearshaft.
The footfalls behind were louder than before. Closer.
Suddenly, a hole yawned in the floor ahead. Beramun tried to stop, but her momentum was too great, and she fell into the opening, feet kicking frantically. She flung out her hands and miraculously caught the far side of the hole. Her relief changed immediately to horror. The walls were so soft her feet could find no purchase but instead gouged deep holes in the soft black dirt. The dirt fell away.
Exhausted, she hung there, panting, above what she knew was a bottomless chasm. Footsteps approached, but these came not from behind her but from in front, on the other side of the hole. A face appeared above her.
It was Harak.
“Help me!” she gasped. “I can’t hold on much longer!”
“Of course you can’t,” he said, not moving to aid her. His smile revealed too many wolfish teeth. “Do you know where you are?”
“What? No, I... please, Harak!” The fingers of her left hand began to slide off the rim of the hole.
“This is the lair of the green dragon.”
A tremor of horror vibrated through her straining limbs. “It can’t be! I was in Yala-tene—and Sthenn’s dead!”
“Did you see him die?”
“No, but Duranix said—”
Harak threw back his head and laughed. “Little Duranix? You believe one dragon’s word about another? How sweet!”
He was neither acting nor speaking like the Harak she knew. As her grip continued to slip, Beramun felt a burning pain on her chest. She looked down and saw blood flowing freely from a deep wound where Sthenn’s green mark had been.
When she looked up again, Harak had leaned down, and their noses almost touched. His eyes gleamed oddly. They weren’t the dark brown she knew but had a greenish cast. The pupils were vertical, like a cat’s—or a dragon’s.
Terror rose in her throat like nausea to choke her. “You’re not Harak!”
In the blink of an eye, he metamorphosed into the grotesquely tall, misshapen body she knew was his Greengall form.
“Hee hee hee,” Greengall giggled, looking down at her and hugging himself with long, thin arms. “You can’t be rid of me so easily! Did I live a thousand years to have my neck wrung by that rodent-lover Duranix? I should say not! True, I am much changed, but the genius of Sthenn remains, and I will live again in your slender shell of flesh. What an honor for a mere rodent!”
Beramun could hardly breathe. Her fear was so great it made her dizzy. “No!” she said faintly.
“Keep saying that,” Greengall-Sthenn said in his ugly singsong voice. “Maybe it will come true! Let go, rodent. Give up. Let go and fall!”
He kept up this refrain, his words twisting through her skull like a snake. She dug her fingers into the lip of the hole, raised her right leg, and gripped the spongy soil with her toes. The earth crumbled, but she worked her toes into the black filth, deeper and deeper until she had enough support to raise her left foot. She began to work it into the dirt, too.
Greengall’s face twitched. “Stubborn little female,” he said, annoyed. “Still, if you weren’t so strong, your body wouldn’t be of much use to me.”