She grunted, the wyrmling sound for yes, and they were off. They sprinted through the tall grass. Rabbits bounded away from their trail and finches flew up out of the thistles.
The sun began to crest the horizon, a cruel red light looming upon the edge of the world. The sight of it brought tears of pain to Cullossax s eyes.
But the tree line was just ahead, promising shade and protection from the sun.
Cullossax ran until he felt as if his heart would burst, and the girl began to fall behind. He grabbed her wrist and pulled, urging her to greater speed.
The sun was a blinding orb ahead of them, and Cullossax averted his eyes, threw an arm across his face, and tried to ignore the pain.
At last he staggered into the cool shadows of the woods. The girl threw herself to the ground well inside the tree line, and Cullossax stood for a moment, grabbing his knees, as he hunched in pain, gasping for breath.
He glanced back along the trail that they d taken, saw how the bent blades of summer wheat betrayed their path. In the distance, two miles back, three wyrmling warriors gave chase, loping down out of the hills.
Cullossax halted for an instant, studied them. They were running with incredible swiftness.
Speed, he realized. They ve taken attributes of speed. He did some mental calculations. It would have taken an hour or two for anyone to notice that he d gone missing, another hour to figure out where he d gone.
I should have had a great lead on them.
But these men moved faster than normal wyrmlings, twice as fast, perhaps three times. They d taken endowments of speed, and probably of strength and stamina as well.
I cannot outrun them, Cullossax realized. And I cannot hope to slay all three of them.
Yet as they raced down from the hills and reached the edge of the distant field, the rising sun smote them. They peered along the trail. They could not see him here, hidden in the shadows. They threw their hands up, trying to shelter their eyes.
At last, in defeat, they turned away and trudged back up into the hills, into the trees, to find some shadows deep enough where they could hide from the sun for the day.
It was with just such a hope that Cullossax had run to the east. No wyrmling could withstand such burning light.
He hid there in the shelter of the woods, and sat for a long moment, thinking. The girl lay gasping for breath.
"Do you have a name?" he asked. It was not an idle question. Many young wyrmlings of the lower castes were not permitted names. They had to be earned.
"Ki-rissa," she said. "Kirissa Mentarn."
"That is not your wyrmling name. It is an Inkarran name?"
She nodded. Cullossax frowned at the odd gesture, and she grunted yes, to appease him.
"Kirissa," he said. "There are soldiers on our trail. They ve been granted strength and speed by the new magic. Have you heard of it?"
"The rune magic? I know of it. It came from the other world."
This admission made Cullossax wonder what other helpful things she might recall.
"The soldiers trailing us are fast. We won t be able to outrun them. So we must outsmart them."
"All right," she said. She put on a studious face.
"They know which way we re running," he said. "So we must change directions. Instead of going south, we should go east or west. And we must take time to cover our trail, and hide our scent. We must hide it perfectly. To do less, is to die."
"All right," Kirissa agreed.
Nearby a squirrel began to give a warning chatter. Cullossax halted for a moment, listening, but realized that the squirrel was warning others away from him.
"One last thing," he said. "We must leave now. We can t afford to rest through the day. Those who hunt us are moving too fast. But the days are long, and the nights are short. It may be that if we can get far enough ahead of the Bloody Fist, they will lose our trail in the dark, and we will be safe."
"We will go sunblind," Kirissa argued, her face paling from fear.
"Close your eyes and hold on to my hand, if you must," Cullossax said. "I will watch for the both of us."
He did not say it, but if he tried to walk in the open sun for long, he was the one who would go sunblind. At that point, she would have to leave him.
Kirissa stared for a long moment and finally asked, "Why are you doing this? You were supposed to be my tormentor."
Cullossax wanted to answer, but when he opened his mouth, he could think of nothing to say.
He had no dreams. It wasn t as if he d secretly longed for escape his whole life.
Nor did it have to do with her. Kirissa was not quite old enough to mate. He had no lust for her, no desire to possess her. Even now, he imagined that he could strangle her if he wanted.
Yet he admired those who fought against their own executions. How had her Earth King put it, "The time will come when the small folk of the world must stand against the large"?
Certainly, in attacking him, Kirissa had fulfilled her Earth King s prophecy.
Cullossax wondered if he had spared her through idle curiosity. He wondered if he had spared her only because he had spent his whole life in the labyrinth, and secretly he yearned to see what life was like outside.
As a child he had played a game. The world was a harsh place, and instinct told him that he also had to be cruel in order to survive. But he had once heard a lord say that such instincts were bred into the wyrmlings. A man s chances to breed were tied to his ranking, and a man s ranking rose in proportion to his capacity for cruelty.
If that was true, he had considered, then would it not be possible to engineer a different kind of world, one that was less cruel?
He had not been able to imagine such a world. But Kirissa claimed to come from one. And so he was curious.
But that was not it, either. He d never been a man of great curiosity.
No, Cullossax felt inside himself, and knew only that something was broken, something more vital than bone-his very soul. He had grown sick of his life in the labyrinth. Life there seemed like no life at all, as if it was a walking death, and he had only been waiting for the day when he no longer breathed.
At last he answered, "I came with you because I am weary of living. I thought maybe that in another world, my life would have been better."
"You can t be weary of life," Kirissa said. She reached up and stroked Cullossax s face, a gesture that he found to be odd and discomfiting; it felt as if a bug were crawling on him. "Among the wyrmlings," she said, "no one is really alive."
6
Despair created the earth, the moon, and the stars. Despair owns them all-every world that spins about even the dimmest sun. That is why, when you look into the heavens at night, you feel so small and desolate. It is your heart bearing witness to your own insignificance, and to the overwhelming power of Despair.
The first full taste of a meadow in the netherworld was something that Talon would never forget.
The aroma staggered her senses: sweet grass, rich loam, and the perfume of tens of thousands of flowers-from deep beds of clover to vines of honeysuckle and stalks of wild mint. There were wood roses in the meadow, and flowers for which Talon had no name.
And all around, birdsong rose from the thickets, curiously complex in its music, as if by nature birds were meant to compose arias and had only somehow forgotten this upon Talon s world.
When the company was all gathered upon the netherworld, Daylan Hammer returned to the Door of Air, and with the Wizard Sisel s staff, drew another rune. In an instant there was a thundering boom, like lightning striking, and the door collapsed.
Daylan turned to the company.