The Cormyrians, mounted on sure-footed mountain ponies, had dogged their trail through most of the night. The enemy patrol had only turned back when Cyric’s band of cutthroats ambushed them in a narrow gorge. The Zhentish outlaws had taken the rest of the night to find the road and their present resting place. Along the way, the Zhentish sergeant, Fane, had broken both his legs in a bad fall, two horses had stepped off cliffs, and half the mounts had gone lame stumbling through the rocky terrain. Though he had originally snickered when he saw the Cormyrians’ riding ponies, Dalzhel would now gladly trade three men for a dozen of the sure-footed beasts.
Cyric placed his swordtip north of the spot representing his company. “The Farsea Marshes. Home to the Lizard People.” He touched the sword to the west. “Darkhold, Zhentilar stronghold.”
“We have nothing to fear from that direction, at least,” Dalzhel said. “Darkhold’s forces were decimated in the battles at Shadowdale and Tantras.”
Fane wailed again, causing the horses to whinny. Both men glanced in his direction, then returned to their conversation.
“We have plenty to fear from Darkhold,” Cyric snapped. “With his numbers decimated, the garrison commander is surely sending raiders into the Tun Plain to look for recruits. Don’t you think they’d come after us?”
Dalzhel reluctantly nodded. “Aye.” A puff of steam came out of his mouth with his voice and obscured his face. “We’d be stuck on garrison duty for the rest of our lives.”
“If they didn’t recognize us as deserters,” Cyric added.
Dalzhel shivered. “This had better be worth the trouble. Fighting Cormyrians I can take—but being tortured as a deserter is another matter.”
“You don’t have a choice, do you?” Cyric snarled, irritated. A staggering urge to kill his lieutenant washed over him. He lifted his sword, then realized what he was doing and stopped. The thief closed his eyes and calmed himself.
“Is something wrong?” Dalzhel asked.
Cyric opened his eyes. The anger had faded, but bloodlust had replaced it—a bloodlust more powerful and more sinister than anything the thief had ever felt. The emotion was not his own, and that made Cyric truly angry.
“You’d better check on the watch,” the hawk-nosed man grumbled, thinking of an excuse to get Dalzhel out of his sight. “And let me know the minute our spies report from High Horn.”
Dalzhel obeyed immediately and without question. He had no wish to add to the tension that was playing over his commander’s face.
Cyric sighed in relief, then laid his sword across his knees. The blade had paled and was now beige instead of a healthy red. Pity for the weapon washed over him.
Cyric laughed aloud. Feeling sorry for a sword was no more his emotion than the thirst he had felt for Dalzhel’s blood.
Fane howled again, sending a shiver of irritation down the thief’s spine.
Kill him.
Cyric hurled the sword off his knees and watched it clatter to the rocky ground. The words had come unbidden to his mind in a wispy, feminine voice.
“You’re alive!” Cyric hissed, the cold biting his ears and nose for the first time.
The sword remained silent.
“Speak to me!”
His only answer was Fane’s pitiful groan.
Cyric retrieved the sword and immediately grew warm. The desire to kill Fane washed over him, but he made no move to act on the urge. Instead, the thief sat back down and laid the sword across his knees again.
“I have not decided to kill him,” Cyric said, glaring angrily at the weapon.
Before his eyes, the blade began to pale. Hunger and disappointment crept into his heart, and the thief found himself completely absorbed with pangs of hunger. As the blade grew more pale, Cyric became increasingly oblivious to his environment. By the time the weapon had turned completely white, he was aware of nothing else.
At Cyric’s back, a girl’s voice said, “I’m hungry.”
He stood and spun around. An adolescent girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, stood before him. She wore a diaphanous red frock that hinted at ripening womanhood, but which also betrayed a half-dozen protruding ribs and a stomach distended with starvation. Black satiny hair framed a gaunt face, and her eyes were sunken with fatigue and desperation.
Behind her stretched an endless white plain. Cyric was standing in a wasteland as flat as a table and as featureless as the air itself. The boulders on which he had been sitting were gone, as were the mountains that had surrounded him, and even the sword that had been lying across his knees.
“Where am I?” Cyric asked.
Ignoring his question, the girl dropped to her knees. “Cyric, please help me,” she pleaded. “I haven’t eaten in days.”
The thief didn’t need to ask how she knew his name. The girl and his sword were the same. She had moved him into a sphere where she could disguise her true form and assume a more sympathetic one.
“Send me back!” Cyric demanded.
“Then feed me.”
“Feed you what?” he asked.
“Feed me Fane,” the girl begged.
Though the plea might have shocked Midnight or Kelemvor, Cyric did not recoil from its hideousness. Instead, he frowned, considering her request. Finally, he shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?” she asked. “Fane means nothing to you. None of your men do.”
“True,” Cyric admitted. “But I decide when they die.”
“I’m weak. If I don’t eat, we can’t return.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Cyric warned. An idea occurred to him. Without taking his eye off the girl, he turned his attention inward. Perhaps she was manipulating his imagination and he could break free by force of will.
“I’m dying!” The girl staggered a few steps and collapsed at the thief’s feet.
The girl’s scream broke Cyric’s concentration. They remained in the wasteland. The young girl’s skin had turned gray and doughy, and it truly looked as though she would perish. “Then, good-bye,” Cyric said.
The girl’s eyes glazed over. “Please. Have mercy on me.”
“No,” the thief growled, returning her gaze with a cold stare. “Absolutely not.”
Whatever the sword’s true nature, there was no doubt it was evil and manipulative. Cyric knew that to give in to its plea was to become its servant.
The girl buried her head in her arms and began to sob. Cyric ignored her and looked at his feet, trying to visualize the jumbled, gray rocks upon which he had been sitting. When that didn’t work, he turned his gaze to the sky, trying to see the soft, curved lines of clouds in the barren bowl above.
The sky remained a white void.
Cyric stared at the horizon, searching for the towering peaks that had encircled him just minutes ago. They were gone.
As if reading his mind, the girl said, “Disbelief won’t save you.” Her voice had grown deeper, more sultry and mature.
Cyric looked at her. She had become a woman, her red frock now clinging to a full, round figure. As he watched, the void upon which she lay formed itself into a white bed and lifted her off the ground.
“You’re in my world now,” the woman purred. “And it’s as real as your own.”
Cyric didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but he realized that it made no difference. Whether she had truly transported him or was only playing games with his mind, he could not leave this place on his own. He had to force her to return him.
“I’m yours,” the woman cooed.
Despite the dark circles beneath her eyes, she was voluptuous, and Cyric might have been tempted had he not known that she was trying to lure him into servitude.
“Every gift has a cost,” the thief said. “What is the price of yours?”
The woman tried to redirect the conversation. “I’ll keep you warm when others are cold. When you’re wounded, I’ll make you well. In battle, I’ll give you the strength to prevail.”