"Where is he?"

"Cailan," Gethel mumbled. "I sent the quarrels to Cailan."

"You truly were a fool." The Thorn dismissed his spell with a single sharp word. "There is nothing else of use to be had from this one. Kill him."

Bitharn already had an arrow set to her bow. Before the last word passed Malentir's lips, she pulled back and let it fly. The arrow whipped between the two Blessed and buried itself in Gethel's throat.

The old man crumpled onto the wall of bones behind him. He sighed as he slid down, and the sound was echoed by a whistling through the bloodless hole that the arrow had punched in his throat. The doubled sigh went on and on, endless and unbearable. Gethel's body had fallen out of sight behind the bones, but Kelland saw a plume of black dust fountaining above them. His prayer-granted light shrank back as the dust billowed toward them, and the sense of evil intensified in its reach.

Baffled and alarmed, the knight strode forward to see what was happening.

Gethel was collapsing. His skin was a wrinkled husk, like the shell of a rag doll with its stuffing torn out. Black smoke poured from his ears, his nostrils, the hole scratched in his skull. It spread out with astonishing speed, stretching sooty fingers from the corpse to the labyrinth around him. The smoke vanished into the crannies between the piled bones, and all around him Kelland heard the groan of walls tearing themselves up from their foundations, loud as the breaking of the world.

Bitharn cried out in dismay. Kelland glanced back and saw that the smoke had reached past the labyrinth to the pit's blood-painted walls, high overhead. Wherever the cloud touched the walls, bone and metal fragments slid toward it like iron filings to a lodestone. Ropes of dried blood twisted up to join them, binding the shards of steel and bone into thrashing whips that cut off any retreat.

In front of him, the walls were pulling themselves apart with fleshless hands. The hands dug through the loose bones like five-legged ants, grasping pieces and fitting them together. From the rubble, skeletons rose. Some were so old that the bones of their limbs were brown and fractured; their skulls had no teeth, their feet no toes. Clouds of blackfire dust hung between their bones, forming ghostly replacements for missing ribs and jaws. Other skeletons were fresher, more intact; rags of skin clung to their shoulders and their joints squeaked over cartilage. The stench of sulfur and decay choked the air as they rose from the wreckage of the walls.

Some of the skeletons showed grins full of filed teeth, and all had bones webbed with blackfire corruption, but they were human. Mostly.

The four creatures that loped out from the back of the labyrinth to join them were not. They walked on two legs, and they had the rough shape of men, but their skin fitted over them strangely: bulging in some places, sunk into wrinkled pits elsewhere. Shiny scar tissue filled their eye sockets, smooth as rippled water. Steel rings pierced their throats, dragging down the wattled skin. Their tongues were enormous, so thick and long that Kelland couldn't imagine how they fit inside the creatures' mouths. Each was raddled with a line of holes that whistled as the creatures flicked their monstrous tongues through the air.

The song they sang was strangely hypnotizing. Thin and discordant, it slipped under Kelland's armor, past the protection of his holy light; it vibrated along his skin, creating a physical sensation as real, and as hard to ignore, as centipedes crawling over his flesh. He could shut it out with an effort, but that was a distraction in itself, and in the tumult of battle it might well prove fatal.

"That's the monster that led the miners to the boy on Devils' Ridge. The one they ate," Bitharn whispered. "There's more than one of those?"

"What are they?" Kelland asked.

"Mine," Malentir answered, shaking back his sleeves. His wrists were wet with blood. The bracelets drew it up along their thorns and diffused it between their points, surrounding his hands in crimson fog. "Destroy the lesser creatures."

"Don't look at me," Bitharn said. Her voice was steady, but tension radiated through every word. "Bones don't bleed. My arrows won't help."

Only a scattering of small bones remained of the labyrinth's walls. The skeletons were crowded too closely for him to count, but Kelland guessed there might be twenty to one against them, and he could feel the Mad God's touch corroding his magic. Sunfire wouldn't work. Even if he could have destroyed them all with it, he wasn't eager to unleash that prayer here. It had raged out of control in Duradh Mal; he had no idea what it might do in this place. Magic became dangerously unpredictable, even deadly, when one god's power directly challenged another's. If he had no alternative, he might risk the inferno a but there were better choices.

"Steel Mirror." It was an untried spell, something the Sun Knights had developed in the wake of Thelyand Ford but never tested. They hadn't faced masses of the walking dead since that battle.

But it was the best weapon they had. Bitharn nodded, reaching back to her quiver, and her bow began its savage song. At such close range she could hardly miss. Each shaft lodged in a hollow rib cage, one after the other.

With the eyeless ones' discordant whistling in his ears, Kelland recited the unfamiliar words for Steel Mirror. The prayer drew from the one all Celestia's Blessed learned to keep themselves warm through northern winters. That one used fragments of glass to amplify the sun's heat just as ordinary mirrors amplified light, filling a sickhouse or a castle with goddess-granted heat. The variant wasa"if it worked, if he remembered its versesa"more lethal.

Sunlight twinkled on the bodkin in the nearest skeleton's chest. It was the barest of glimmers, scarcely visible through the smoke, but it shone more brightly from the two flanking the first, and brighter still from the two flanking those. The light danced from arrowhead to arrowhead, gaining brilliance with every leap. Halfway through its course, it was strong enough that a blazing beam could be seen lancing from each skeleton to the next, and the steel bodkins burned inside each one as if their hearts were fallen stars.

The last skeleton burst apart in smoke and glowing cinders as the sunfire struck. Immediately the light retraced its path, still intensifying with each leap, and springing out to new ones as Bitharn continued to empty her quiver. The skeletons in its path crumbled into belching smoke, burning away too swiftly for a single dust mote to escape. As the last arrow-struck skeleton toppled into white-gold flame, the holy magic vanished. It was over before Bitharn had finished shooting.

Kelland blinked the stinging afterimages from his eyes. They'd destroyed a third of the skeletons. Perhaps half. But the rest kept coming, trampling through the dissolving smoke of their decimated companions, and now they were too close to risk a second prayer. Knots of dark smoke pulsed in the skeletons' chests; embers flared in their eyes. And Bitharn was nearly out of arrows.

Abruptly Kelland realized that the skeletons' march and their own breathing were the only sounds he could hear. The eyeless ones had fallen still and silent, their tongues clamped, bloody, between their teeth. Ivory mist climbed their limbs in ghostly vines, drawing out streaks of livid blackfire wherever they passed. Those dark streaks reacted violently to the incursion of Malentir's magic; the spell strands tumbled and spun around one another like the breaking of cloud and light at the end of a storm, each tearing at the other with no sign of which might prevail.

The Thornlord was as motionless as his victims. Shadows cloaked the man, obscuring everything but the outline of his face and his long white hands. Utterly absorbed in his own arcane fight, he was oblivious to the danger marching toward them.

"Stay back," Kelland told Bitharn. He could hardly hear his own voice over the click of fleshless feet. Bitharn nodded and retreated toward the stairs, trying to stay out of the thrashing tentacles' reach.

If he'd had time, Kelland would have woven a trapfire wall to guard his back and give the others some protection a but there was no time. He'd barely chosen his position and raised his shield before they were upon him.

The skeletons raked at him with fleshless fingers, prying at his mail; they belched sulfur and fire, blinding him in a many-throated haze of smoke. Kelland bashed them away with his shield, trying to keep them from reaching Bitharn or circling around to attack him from behind.

One seized Kelland's blade, trying to wrench the weapon from his grasp even as its holy aura blasted the thing's fingers away. They died around him in waves, unable to withstand his goddess' fury, and yet they kept coming. He wondered if they wanted to die, as the maelgloth had, or if they simply had no minds left with which to comprehend their doom.

Or, he thought bleakly, as a malignant presence rose overwhelming in his soul, blotting out his own magic like a cloud over the sun, if they were only meant to delay.

The marching dead slowed and stopped. A great shadow rose above them. Where it fell, the light fled from the skeletons' eyes, the coiled smoke flowed up through their ribs to join it, and their bones clattered, empty, to the ground. The eyeless ones resisted an instant longer, but they, too, surrendered with spectral wails, their innards dissolving into fine black sand and pouring from their mouths. As it spilled across the floor, that sand melted into black mist and sifted upward into the shadow. Malentir gasped, staggered by the sudden dissolution of his spell.

Kelland lowered his sword, straining to see through the forest of paralyzed and failing skeletons. Sweat and smoke-stung tears blurred his sight. But he saw a shape rise from the shadows, and he felt its power roll over him like the tide.

The creature in the darkness wore Gethel's tattered skin as a cloak. Only that wrinkled fall of skin, and the glowing heat of its eyes, gave it any shape. It loomed over them, three times the height of a man, and its breath was a furnace blast. The cloak of skin burned where it touched that infernal body, leaving patches of bright, ash-edged lace smoldering across the dead man's hide. The bones of Gethel's skull could be glimpsed in its face, rising and receding like the spines of a reef in a wind-wracked sea, but nothing more was left of the man. Kelland knew, as he stood before that hellish presence, that the scholar's soul was gone, consumed by the deity he had unwittingly served.

Its appetite had not ended with Gethel. As the shadow creature gathered magic into itself, it destroyed more than the skeletons and long-tongued slaves. It drained the walls' thrashing tentacles into inert limpness; it drew the pit's unnatural gloom into its own body.

And in that hungera"in the sheer extremity of the power gathered against hima"Kelland found an unexpected sliver of hope. With the Maolite magic pulled back, consumed to fuel the avatar before him, only ordinary darkness remained a and in it, the knight saw a gleam of steel amid the ancient bones on the floor.

Aurandane. He felt the echo of Celestia's magic reverberate in the fallen sword, muted and garbled but still as familiar as the return verse to a song he had begun. He sensed that his goddess' presence in her perethil was not wholea"it felt sick, somehow, or woundeda"but it was still, unmistakably, hers. Unlike the magic of the poisoned perethil that had taken them to Duradh Mal and Shadefell, the Sword of the Dawn was still sacred.

But it was too far away to do him any good.

Bitharn or Malentir might be able to reach Aurandane, but Kelland was on the wrong side of the pit. He'd have to pass the thing in Gethel's hide to reach it. The shadow's fiery eyes fixed on Kelland as if alerted by his thoughts, and he wondered if it knew he had seen Aurandane. If it did, they had no hope at all.

Submit, it thundered, in a soundless voice that crashed against the insides of Kelland's skulla"the voice from the perethil's shadowland. His own, stolen and amplified and made monstrous. Give in, and your death will be quick. Fight, and you will suffer.

Kelland shook his head mutely. His throat was parched; his lungs felt blistered. The shells in his hair cracked from the heat. Celestia's presence was fragile as a candleflame in his soul, and it dimmed by the moment. "No. You cannot have this place."

Submit. You will die. She will die. The burning eyes lifted from him, and the suffocating intensity of its presence relented. Behind him, Bitharn screamed. The scream went on for an eternity, tearing at him, but he did not turn. He kept his face hard, despite the plummeting emptiness in his gut, and never lowered his guard. It was the hardest thing he'd done in his life.

A pity. The fiery eyes returned to him, and he heard cruel amusement in its thought. Bitharn's scream ended, cut off in a wet thud of flesh against stone. Something cracked viciously; he didn't know if it was her bow or her bones.

I will ask you once more. Only once. A gentle death. Or agony. I will make a puppet of her corpse. A whore for worms and maelgloth. They will make their own holes, burrowing into her flesh. Give in, and you may rejoin her just as swiftly.

Delay him, said a second voice in his thoughts, as direct as the shadow creature's but infinitely softer. Delay him, and I will strike.

He didn't know whether the new voice was a fragment of his desperate imagination or some new gambit of the Mad God's meant to distract him, but Kelland ignored it as he had the first booming threats. In his peripheral vision, Malentir got shakily back to his feet. The Thornlord's shielding shadows were gone. Blood streamed from his nose and mouth, shockingly bright against the pallor of his skin.

Listen to me, fool. I sense the sword, as you do. Malentir's black eyes were fixed on the knight's. There was no mistaking the source of that second voice now. Distract the creature, and I will use it to strike him down.

Will you? Kelland wondered. Or will you flee through the shadows with the sword, and take it back to your mistress in her tower? But what did it matter? He had no prayer of defeating the shadow creature on his own, and Bitharn was dead, or near it. Aurandane was their only hope. Aurandane, and Malentir.

The Thornlord wiped the blood from his mouth. It turned to vapor between his fingers, paling to the yellow of old bruises and then luminous ivory. He closed his eyes, breathing hard, and took a step to the side. Toward Aurandane.

Kelland thought of a winter wood, and of sunlight on snow. Of another Thorn, and another fight.

He had walked into death then, with so much less at stake. He could do it again.

Leading with his shield, the knight charged across the carpet of scattered bones toward the fire-eyed shadow. As he did, Kelland drew on the faltering flicker of Celestia's magic, struggling to gird and arm himself with faith in this place that blasted it away.

The thing in Gethel's skin coughed a guttural command as he came. The fallen skeletons' bones exploded. Jagged shards tore into Kelland, clanging off his shield and lacerating his flesh. Smaller fragments slashed across his face. He turned his head to the right, trying to protect his eyes, and saw Malentir dart toward the sword.

Almost there. Three steps. Two. Kelland had to hold the shadow creature's attention; he couldn't stop, couldn't fall. But he slowed, driven off balance by the shattering bones and dizzied by the sweat and blood that ran into his eyes. And as he stumbled in his blindness, the skin-robed shadow unhinged its jaw and exhaled a torrent of swirling murk.

It was not fire. It burned like fire, scorching Kelland's skin and covering his arms with drooping black blisters, but it reeked of corruption and it clung to him like mucus, dissolving his flesh and melting into it so that he could not tell where his own body ended and the Maolite filth began. The stench of his own putrefaction filled his nostrils. He could see things swimming in the blisters' bulges, half formed and hideous and growing larger by the moment.

He prayed. He gagged, and prayed, and ran, angling left to pull the shadow creature's attention away from Malentir. Celestia answered his call, filling his soul with radiance and purging the taint from his flesh. The burns healed, shedding great ashy flakes; the blisters burst, expelling their fetal monsters. They spattered on the ground, dying, as Kelland charged on.

The creature in the shadows was waiting. It raised a fist of solid darkness, Gethel's fingers dangling from its wrist in a smoldering bracelet, and when the knight came within reach it struck.

Kelland saw the blow coming and raised his shield over his head to deflect it. He slashed a counterstrike at the creature's arm, even as he dodged the incoming swing.

His shield caught the shadow giant's fist, and might have deflected it a but the steel groaned, corroding into rust faster than he could believe. The oak panel in the center crumbled into spongy splinters; the leather straps turned brittle and gray and cracked apart. Before Kelland recovered from the shock, the creature struck his arm through the decayed remnants of his shield.

The impact knocked him sideways. It was like getting hit by a giant's maula"and the physical blow was the least of it. His flesh rotted as quickly as the shield had. Creeping corruption purpled his arm, spreading outward from the point of impact. At its edges, feverish heat and the swollen tenderness of a sickened wound assailed him. At its center, he felt nothing at all. That flesh was dead, or beyond dead; sickly yellow bone poked out from its soft, stinking pulp. Kelland knew that if the fist had hit his chest, or his head, he would be a corpse already. Even with the blow partly deflected, he was dying fast.

But he had served his purpose. Malentir crept silently behind the hulking, faceless creature, and Aurandane was in his hands. Swift as a snake, the Thorn drove the steel into its side. He was holding it wrong, Kelland thought, dizzy and distanta"like a spear, not a sworda"but that did not seem to matter. The Sword of the Dawn plunged smoothly into unreal flesh, its blade sheathed in a nimbus of watery, tainted blue.

And the thing in the shadows was dying, melting, breaking apart. Sheets of darkness sloughed from its body. The scraps of skin and blackened bone that remained of Gethel crumbled into pale gray ash, translucent smoke, nothingness.

It didn't feel like victory. It didn't feel like anything.

Kelland couldn't breathe. Everything below his neck was a single pulse of pain. Malentir dropped the sword, and its blue blaze dimmed as it sank into the creature's failing ashes. It was a slower fade than usual, gentler, as if Celestia was loath to leave a place taken from her for so long. But it went black in the end.

Silence fell. The faraway gleam of starlight sifted through the wreckage of the tower, sending shafts of softer grayness into the bruised dark. Kelland could hear nothing but his own labored panting and the creak of chains. He couldn't hear Bitharn breathing.

Blindly the knight tried to push himself up, failed, fell. He was so weak. His magic was gone; the shadow creature's parting blow might have poisoned him, might have killed him, but there was nothing he could do to heal himself. He hadn't the strength to summon a fingerflame.

Someone stooped over him. His fingers caught on soft cloth, a warm limb. The Thorn staggered slightly and pushed him away. "Be still."

A wintry chill washed through the knight as Malentir prayed over hima"but it was a cleansing chill. The fever in his chest subsided; the throbbing of his arm became almost bearable. The numbness of near death receded, leaving him wracked with pain. "Bitharn," he mumbled when the constriction in his chest relaxed enough for him to speak. "Where is she? Is she alive?"

Malentir's eyes shone milky white. He straightened, surveying the pit. "Ah. It is not pretty, knight. Be glad you cannot see."

Fear seized Kelland's throat with icy fingers. He grabbed at the Thornlord's sleeve again, cutting his hand on the man's barbed bracelets. "Is she alive? Help her. Heal her."

"Be still, I said." Malentir jerked away, hobbling through the dark. "You do no one any good by stumbling around like a halfwit. She is alive, and I will not let her die."

"Thank you," Kelland breathed, collapsing onto the rubble.

The Thornlord stooped and began another spell. Ivory ghost-light swam around him, illumining Bitharn's broken body for the heartbeat it took the glow to seep beneath her skin. Even before the woman stirred, Malentir left her and turned his unearthly gaze to Kelland. "This is not kindness. It is a debt. You owe me a life a and you will soon have the chance to repay it. Aurandane was poisoned."

22.

Bitharn opened her eyes to a constellation of pain.

Every muscle in her body ached. Her bones ground against one another and popped at the slightest movement, as if they'd all been forced out of alignment and hadn't quite slid into their proper places. Blood and sweat soaked her clothing. Her lips were crusted with something that tasted of copper and salta"blood, of course it's blooda"and her teeth wiggled loosely when she poked them with her tongue. She still had them, though. That was something.

She still had her sight too. It was so dark that she wasn't sure of it for a moment, but she could make out a smoldering glow behind the walls of bone, and when she touched her lids she could feel the eyes moving underneath. She breathed a sigh of relief. Blindness was one of her great terrors. What good was an archer who couldn't see to shoot?

Her fingers slid downward and brushed against her cheeks. She felt the tracks of something too sticky to be tears, too thick to be blood.

Eyes. Bitharn jerked her hands away, flinching. No. No. She could see. Those couldn't be her eyes dripping down her cheeks.

Unless they were healed. Was that possible? Maybe. She didn't remember exactly what the thing in Gethel's skin had done to her. She didn't want to. The flashes that she did have were enough. It had soaked her in a cocoon of slime that forced its way into her mouth, her nose, every seam in her skin. She'd drowned in it, had swallowed it, had begun to welcome its foulness, just as she'd lusted after the corpse caresses in the perethil. That was the worst part, the wanting a Stop it. Stop. It's over.

Bitharn fumbled for her bow. It was miraculously unbroken, although she doubted that she had the strength to draw it. Not that it mattered. Her arrows were gone; the last three had tumbled out and broken when that shadow thing threw her against the wall.

"You're a well?" Kelland asked hesitantly, offering a hand. His shield was gone. The sleeve of his shield arm was soaked with blood and what looked like, but wasn't, pine tar. Malentir must have prayed over him, too, for the arm itself seemed whole inside that ruined sleeve, but smaller cuts still bled on his chest and shoulders. It was hard to see the extent of his wounds in the gloom; blood didn't stand out clearly on his dark skin. But he looked as battered as she felt.

The whole place looked battered. A pale, soft mass, studded with dull steel rings, lay crumpled to her right: the skins of the eyeless hunters. Nothing else was left of them. Around the pit's perimeter, a ring of bone debris and metal bits had collecteda"the remains of the skeletal army, Bitharn supposed. Many of the wooden planks had been ripped out of the walls and smashed into flinders by the tentacles' flailing, or perhaps by the thing in Gethel's skin. Whoever had destroyed them, there'd be no getting back up those stairs. The only way out, unless Malentir felt like carrying them through the shadows, was through a low-ceilinged doorway at the back of the pit. Through the Rosewayns' old dungeon.

Despite the destruction, and the fact that the loss of the stairs left them trapped, the room felt safer than it had while the labyrinth of bones still stood. The suffocating malevolence had lessened a but, Bitharn realized with exhausted dismay, not gone. It lingered like a bad smell, stronger toward that doorway. We've won a battle, not the war. The thought was unbearably exhausting.

She nodded wearily to Kelland, using her bow to push herself up rather than taking his hand. He'd turned his back on her to fight. He had to. We'd be dead or worse if he hadn't. That was true, and took away some of the sting, but it had still been a shock to open her eyes and see the Thorn standing over her, ghostly eyed and pitiless, instead of Kelland.

She'd needed him. It wasn't fair, and she wasn't proud to admit it, but Bitharn was hurt he hadn't been there. "I'm alive. Not sure I'd say *well.' Kliasta's healing seems a little less than thorough."

"I do not have strength to spare on your comfort," Malentir said icily, picking his way through the rubble to the mouth of the tunnel. He moved stiffly, as if crippled by some hurt under his robes, and held the Sword of the Dawn as a walking stick to steady his steps. "You will live, and you will be unmarked. Anything more than that would be wasted. This way, your suffering repays some fraction of what I spent to restore you. If you had any sense you would be grateful for that. Neither of you is in any condition to fight, and we dare not use Aurandane again. Not while it is tainted. I am the only one with any strength left, and I do not expect we've seen the last of Maol's monsters."

"Well, it's a good thing we've got you to rely on," Bitharn muttered, shouldering her bow. Her lantern had been destroyed when she hit the wall, but Kelland's had survived the fight. She lit it and took the lead.

Past the shattered labyrinth was a small tunnel dug crookedly into the earth. Iron-grated cells gaped along both sides and in pits pocking the floor. Each held sprawled corpses, sometimes two or three to a cell. All wore the rough homespun of farmers or miners. Men and women alike had shaved heads, each one crowned with four blisters over four. Bitharn thought some of them might have been in the party that killed and ate the boy on Devils' Ridge, but the corpses looked so much alike that she couldn't be sure.

None had any wounds she could see, but they were dead just the same. "How?" she wondered aloud.

"Soul-drained," Malentir answered. He spared barely a glance for the dead, striding past their cells toward the tunnel's end. "For the Mad God to bring so much of his presence into the world, he needed power. He took it by consuming their souls a whatever was left of them. If his need was great enough that he devoured these wretches, this may be easier than I had thought."

The smell of sulfur grew stronger as Bitharn followed the Thorn. There were other smells too: stale urine, unwashed bodies, rotting food. Something had lived down here. Something other than the miners, she hoped.

The flicker of her lantern light sent phantoms dancing along the tunnel walls. The same phantoms that had haunted the smooth walls of the pit as they descended, Bitharn thought. They'd banished those, but the apparitions lingered here. A premonition of evil prickled at the back of her neck. She eyed the corpses in their cells, touching the hilt of her knife as she hurried past. It was such a small weapon, so close to useless, and it was all she had left.

Beyond the cells was another open archway, smooth and glossy black, as everything was down here. Runes were carved around it in a ring. They weren't in any language Bitharn knew, and they seemed to swim and shift when she looked at them, so after the first glance she kept her eyes away. Maol's magic might have lost its hosts, but it still lurked in this blood-soaked earth.

The room beyond the archway was dominated by a dais of black-flecked granite. On it sat a great tangled table that looked like a charred bramble bush or some undersea creature petrified in obsidian. Spikes and chains wrapped around the table in chaotic patterns, too unevenly spaced to be restraints. A cloak of dust coated the table and masked the faces of the onyx gargoyles that squatted at its base.

Kelland drew a sun sign over his chest. "The Rosewayns' altar."

"Once. It served another purpose more recently." Malentir approached the altar, his black eyes lit with macabre curiosity. The Thorn hooked a finger around the chains, following their course, and bent one of the table's twisted arms up for closer examination. The arms were jointed and eerily flexible; the piece of obsidian moved almost like a human limb. "There is blood on this one, and less dust. Gethel modified it to suit his needs. Here and here. But whya"aah. Of course."