Or did he? All things equal, both bereft of their magic, Haplo was the younger of the two, the stronger. The fight would be crude, undignified, menschlike—two men rolling about on the sand, pummeling each other. Haplo thought it over, sighed, shook his head. He was just too damn tired. Besides, Samah looked to have suffered a beating already. Haplo waited quietly. Samah did not glance up from his troubled musings. He might conceivably have walked past the Patryn without seeing him. The dog, unable to contain itself, remembering past wrongs, barked a sharp warning—the Sartan had come close enough.
Samah raised his head, startled at the sound but not, apparently, startled to see either the dog or its master. The Sartan’s lips tightened. His gaze shifted from Haplo to the small submersible floating behind him.
“Returning to your lord?” Samah asked coldly.
Haplo saw no need to reply.
Samah nodded; he hadn’t expected a response. “You’ll be glad to know your minions are already on their way. They have preceded you. No doubt a hero’s welcome awaits you.” His tone was bitter, his gaze dark with hatred and, lurking beneath, fear.
“On their way...” Haplo stared at the Sartan, then, suddenly, he understood. Understood what had happened, understood the reason for his seemingly unreasonable fear. Now he knew where the serpents were... and why.
“You bloody fool!” Haplo swore. “You opened Death’s Gate!”
“I warned you we would do so, Patryn, if your mensch lackeys attacked us.”
“You were warned, Sartan. The dwarf told you what she overheard. The serpents wanted you to open Death’s Gate. That was their plan all along. Didn’t you listen to Grundle?”
“And so now I should be taking advice from mensch?” Samah sneered.
“They have more sense than you do, seemingly. You opened Death’s Gate, intending to do what? Flee? No, that wasn’t your plan. Help. You sought help. After what Alfred told you. You still don’t believe him. Nearly all your people are gone, Samah. You few on Chelestra are all that’s left, except for a couple of thousand animated corpses on Abarrach. You opened the Gate, but it was the serpents who passed through it. Now they’ll spread their evil throughout the four worlds. I hoped they stopped long enough to thank you!”
“The power of the Gate should have stopped the creatures!” Samah replied in a low voice. His fist clenched. “The serpents should not have been able to enter!”
“Just as mensch can’t enter without your help? You still don’t understand, do you, Sartan? These snakes are more powerful than you or I or my lord or maybe all of us put together. They don’t need help!”
“The serpents had help!” Samah retorted bitterly. “Patryn help.” Haplo opened his mouth to argue, decided it wasn’t worth it. He was wasting time. The evil was spreading. It was now even more imperative that he return to warn his lord.
Shaking his head, Haplo started for his ship. “C’mon, dog.” But the animal barked again, refused to budge. The dog looked at Haplo, ears cocked.
Don’t you have something you want to ask, master?
A thought did occur to Haplo. He turned back.
“What happened to Alfred?”
“Your friend?” Samah mocked. “He was sent to the Labyrinth—the fate of all who preach heresy and conspire with the enemy.”
“You know, don’t you, that he was the one person who might have stopped the evil.”
Samah was briefly amused. “If this Alfred is as powerful as you claim, then he could have prevented us from sending him to prison. He didn’t. He went to his punishment meekly enough.”
“Yes,” said Haplo softly. “I’ll bet he did.”
“You value your friend so dearly, Patryn, why don’t you go back to your prison and try to get him out?”
“Maybe I will. No, boy,” Haplo added, seeing the dog’s gaze go longingly to Samah’s throat. “You’d be up sick half the night.” He returned to his ship, cast off the moorings, dragged the dog—who was still growling at Samah—inside, slammed the hatch shut behind him. Once on board, Haplo hastened to the window in the steerage compartment to keep an eye on the Sartan. Magic or no magic, Haplo didn’t trust him.
Samah stood unmoving on the sand. His white robes were damp and bedraggled, the hem covered with slime and the ooze of the dead serpents. His shoulders sagged; his skin was gray. He looked exhausted to the point of falling, but—probably aware that he was under scrutiny—he remained standing upright, jaw thrust out, arms folded across his chest.
Satisfied that his enemy was harmless, Haplo turned his attention to the runes burned into the wooden planks of the ship’s interior. He traced each one again in his mind—runes of protection, runes of power, runes to take him once again on the strange and terrifying journey into Death’s Gate, runes to ensure his safety until he reached the Nexus. He spoke a word, and the sigla began to glow soft blue in response.
Haplo breathed a deep sigh. He was guarded, protected. He allowed himself to relax for the first time in a long, long while. Making certain his hands were dry, he placed them on the ship’s wheel. It, too, had been enhanced by runes. The mechanism wasn’t as powerful as the steering stone he’d used aboard Dragon Wing. But Dragon Wing and the steering stone were now at the bottom of the sea—if Chelestra’s sea had a bottom. The rune-magic on the wheel was crude, it had been hurriedly done. But it would take him through Death’s Gate and that was all that mattered.
Haplo guided his ship away from the shoreline. He glanced back at the Sartan, who seemed to dwindle in size as the expanse of black water separating them grew larger.
“What will you do now, Samah? Will you enter Death’s Gate, search for your people? No, I don’t think so. You’re scared, aren’t you, Sartan? You know you made a terrible mistake, a mistake that could mean the destruction of all you’ve worked to build. Whether you believe the serpents represent a higher, evil power or not, they’re a force you don’t understand, one you can’t control.
“You’ve sent death through Death’s Gate.”
3
Xar, lord of the Nexus, walked the streets of his quiet, twilight land, a land built by his enemy. The Nexus was a beautiful place, with rolling hills and meadows, verdant forests. Its structures were built with soft, rounded corners, unlike the inhabitants, who were sharp-edged and cold as steel. The sun’s light was muted, diffused, as if it shone through finely spun cloth. It was never day in the Nexus, never quite night. It was difficult to distinguish an object from its shadow, hard to tell where one left off and the other began. The Nexus seemed a land of shadows.
Xar was tired. He had just emerged from the Labyrinth, emerged victorious from a battle with the evil magicks of that dread land. This time, it had sent an army of chaodyn to destroy him. Intelligent, giant, insectlike creatures, the chaodyn are tall as men, with hard black-shelled bodies. The only way to destroy a chaodyn utterly is to hit it directly in the heart, kill it instantly. For if it lives, even a few seconds, it will cause a drop of its blood to spring into a copy of itself.
And he’d faced an army of these things, a hundred, two hundred; the numbers didn’t matter for they grew the moment he wounded one. He had faced them alone, and he’d had only moments before the tide of bulbous-eyed insects engulfed him.
Xar had spoken the runes, caused a wall of flame to leap up between him and the advance ranks of the chaodyn, protecting him from the first assault, giving him time to extend the wall.
The chaodyn had attempted to outrun the spreading flames that were feeding off the grasses in the Labyrinth, springing to magical life as Xar fanned them with magical winds. Those few chaodyn who ran through the fire, Xar had killed with a rune-inscribed sword, taking care to thrust beneath the carapace to reach the heart below. All the while, the wind blew and the flames crackled, feeding off the shells of the dead. The fire jumped from victim to victim now, decimating the ranks.