“Am I alive?” she whispered to the ground. You are alive.
“I thought he killed me.” He killed Stheam.
She raised her head. The Way stretched ahead of her, empty. The warrior had vanished and the eerie shadows were deserted. She felt her abdomen with nervous fingers, but found no wound. The awful pain had gone, too.
Her convulsive shivers warned her that she would freeze if she stayed. She struggled to her knees on the sharp rocks and then to her feet. She did not look behind her. She began to walk unsteadily through the frosty stillness of the night. Her shadow walked at her feet, sometimes two shadows.
Was that all? Could that be all? Had she survived the ordeal? Then why did she still see two shadows? Whatever was casting that second shadow was not human. Had some experience like Stheam been enough to drive Mist into madness?
Something moved in the darkness ahead and her heart leaped wildly. She stopped. Not again!
Again. She saw another movement. Hint became form as she watched; form became substance. Tricks of the light became watchers. Three shapes waited for her on one side, two more on the other. She tried to take a step backward and there was a wall there. The rocks were more like corners of buildings, high board fences. The moonlight was yellowish, not so bright now, it was lamplight from a window, but they had seen her. She had no weapons this time. She was a woman, trapped in a courtyard.
Trapped by shadows-but she could see them solidify as they approached, and their voices were becoming audible. They were between her and the gateway. They were chuckling and making jokes in words she did not understand and did not need to. The wall was cold, rough stone at her back. It was not to be death this time, at least not at first.
“Stop them!” she screamed.
You are Hoon, sighed that faint inhuman voice in her mind. They are imps, the dark-haired demons.
“They are men!” They were real men, not mere shadows, living bodies, brown-skinned, dark and bearded and armored. They were not as large as jotnar, but every one was larger than Hoon. Hoon could hear her sister-in-law yelling at the children upstairs. She could hear horses and wagons going by in the street. She opened her mouth to scream for help and legionaries rushed at her. She dived for the gap between them. Hands caught her and reeled her in, in to the heavy male laughter.
More hands seized her face and forced it up to meet bearded lips. His mouth was foul. Hands held wrists and ankles. More hands were fumbling with her clothes, stripping them off, fumbling with her body . . . Pain and humiliation. Then just pain. And finally death of course, when they were all satisfied.
Again Thaile lay on the cold, cold gravel of the Way, and the moon had not moved in the sky.
“How many more?” she whimpered. All you can endure, and then more.
She was uninjured, except where she had scraped her hands on the ground. Her body was uninjured. Her mind was another matter. It would crumble to nothing if it had to take much more of this. She heaved herself up again and stumbled forward. There was no going back.
She had not gone a dozen paces before she was Keem, drowning while a boot forced his face down into the mud. She was Drume. She was Shile.
“What lies Outside?”
Death and torture and slavery. All of those, and more.
She died in darkness and in sunlight. She was stabbed, and clubbed, and raped to death by jotnar twice her size. She was a soldier in a squad trapped by a dragon, rampaging in quest of bronze as the men desperately stripped off their armor and hurled it at the searing, incandescent monster. It roared and flamed, and charred skin from flesh and then flesh and bones, too.
Reen was tending his father’s herd when a squad of refugee djinns came by. He did not realize his danger, or he would not have waited to speak with them. They spread him over a stump and sodomized him repeatedly. He lost a lot of blood and died two days later of a fever.
Quole had screamed for help until she could scream no more, and none had come. Clutching her child tightly, she backed into a corner of the cellar. The gnomes knew she was trapped now. They came creeping forward through the gloom, piping in shrill excitement. There was barely enough light even to show the gleam of their eyes and their innumerable little sharp teeth and nails. Gnomes could see in the dark, though. They were tiny and had no weapons, but they were starving.
The red-haired demons were djinns, cruel and ruthless. The gold-haired demons were elves, whose arrows nailed living bodies together.
“We need to make an example,” the impish centurion said. “Take that one. String him up and flog him to death.” It was all real, every time. Always it was real death, personal death. It was never Thaile, never just pretend. It was Why me? and I am not ready! It was always pain and humiliation and the discovery that a human body was only a sack of fluids that could be made to leak and suffer unbearably. Dying was the ultimate degradation, and sometimes it took days.
And always it was becoming Thaile again, and realizing that this was not Thaile’s death, not yet, and climbing to her feet again afterward and going onward until the next one came.
Kaim was chained in the cell. He smelled smoke . . . They were the wraiths of the pixies who had died in the War of the Five Warlocks. They had been waiting in the Defile for a thousand years for someone to die their deaths again and release them—someone with Faculty.
Looq was a slave, being worked to death as a matter of policy.
“You will talk,” the djinn told Reil. “You will tell us everything.”
Reil did not even know what they wanted to know. And it could all happen again! The demons were still there, Outside, waiting. Only the College and the Keeper kept them away.
Thaile knew that, in the moments when she was Thaile, staggering along the Way in the moonlight, waiting for the next wraith. She knew that her own death, whenever it came, could never be so bad. She knew why she had been sent to walk the Defile, why everyone in the College was sent to walk the Defile.
She knew who followed her.
She knew also what she would tell the Keeper in the morning—that Leeb did not matter anymore.
Lonesome road:
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a fearful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
— Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
THREE
Doubt and sorrow
1
A cruel north wind was marching flurries of snow over the moors. The sun had already lost whatever slight warmth it had offered at noontide. The foothills of the Isdruthuds lay ahead, white and inhospitable, while the towering ranges beyond promised much worse.
No defined road crossed the scaly gray landscape. The convoy of wagons was well scattered, as each driver sought the smoothest way. Being neither foot-sloggers nor good horsemen, dwarves traveled on wheels by preference. Their wagons were always stoutly built, and a single vehicle hauled by six dogged mountain ponies could carry a dozen or more armed warriors all day. In this instance most of the carts were high-piled with loot, but one of them included a couple of prisoners.
Wrapped in several layers of fur, Inos huddled next to the imperor, using him as a windbreak. She wished that those famous Dwanishian craftsmen had thought to provide at least an awning to keep off the weather, plus springs of the superb steel that only they could manufacture—but doubtless dwarves would view both as decadent luxuries. Dwarvish transportation rapidly converted nondwarves into bruised jellies, baked or frozen as the case might be.
Up front, the driver slouched on the bench as if half asleep, yet he bounced at every rock. The next wagon ahead was being driven by Raspnex. Imperors as windbreaks, warlocks driving carts? The world had gone mad. She twisted her head to make sure Gath was still in sight. He preferred to walk as much as he could, just as she would if she had a decent pair of boots. He was visible in the distance, striding along between two diminutive trotting goblins. The guards did not object because the goblins were allies and could run down any jotunn pup with one leg tied behind their backs.
The caravan’s nominal commander, Sergeant Girthar, was a mundane, but he took orders from the warlock. That seemed to be more politics than sorcery. There was another sign of insanity in the world—that sorcery should now be banned as dangerous. Raspnex had discarded his Long Runner goblin disguise; he had refused to use power to save Kadie. And where was poor Kadie now? What was she doing, seeing, suffering, feeling? Inos sighed.