Divine Travails of Rats

Metamor Keep

 

Divine Travails of Rats

by Charles Matthias and Ryx

 

 

Pars IV

Infernus

 

 

Tuesday, June 22, 724 CR – The Fall of Night

 

“It is getting late and I have been talking for some time,” Baron Matthias announced.

Charlie felt as if he'd been slapped across the other cheek, stinging no less than when his mother struck a few hours ago. “I am not going to wait for tomorrow after what you have just said!'

“And you aren't going to,” Charles put a hand to his throat and frowned. “I am parched and I am sure you must be famished. Let us have some refreshments brought and then we can continue. I will continue, my son.”

He wished that his sire would stop calling him that, no matter how true it was. He simmered quietly as he sat with arms crossed on the bench. But at last he nodded. “Fine, you have something brought. I'm not leaving.”

“Is there anything you'd like?”

He wanted to snap back some importune remark, but steadied himself, claws digging into his trousers. Charlie took a deep breath and had to admit that he was feeling hungry. There was a grumbling emptiness in his stomach that been there since he'd climbed down from the mage's tower, but his anger and shame had crowded it out. “Whatever can be found will be fine for me. I just want to hear this story. Because it seems like unless I indulge you I'm not going to learn any of these vast secrets.”

His sire sighed and shook his head. “You're young. You want the answer right away. It is as you have always been told. But if you want to understand why the answer is, you need to hear the story. You need to see what happened then, Charlie.”

“Fine,” Charlie groused and crossed his arms. “I'm sitting here waiting for the food and drink and then, with our repast, we can continue the story.” He grimaced at his tone and in a quieter voice added. “I am owed this.”

“Aye, you are,” Charles agreed as he stepped toward the door leading back into the sanctuary. “I will only be gone a moment, my son. Bishop Hough keeps a supply of food and drink for those in need. I will send him some of my stores in recompense.” So saying Charles slipped out the oaken door and gently closed it behind him. A faint whiff of sweet incense drifted through the air, and Charlie rubbed his snout and whiskers with one paw to rid his nose of it.

As he waited, Charlie took a moment to study the chamber in which they had hid from the Followers come to pray and adore. He sat upon one of the tiered benches where the schola practiced their chants or practiced with instruments, while on the front wall were cabinets for instruments, robes, candles and music. On the other three walls, the usual gray stone of Metamor greeted him, though not in its usual guise. Here, the walls had been coated in plaster by loving hands and frescoes painted. He could see a young dark-skinned human king dancing with lyre in his arms in the midst of a throng and an ancient city. Next to this was a host of winged men with bright and strong faced blowing long-fluted trumpets in the midst of a field of cloud overlooking a small stable in which Yanlin, Yosae, and the baby Yahshua could clearly be seen. He saw several other scenes from the life of Yahshua he recognized from his studies culminating in the death on the Yew, the Resurrection, and glorified return the Patildor hoped for. There were a few details he had difficulty discerning through the benches, and as he tried to lean over to get a better view of them he heard his sire returning followed by something large.

Baron Matthias returned with a pair of goblets in one hand and a corked bottle in the other. Behind him lumbered the giant, three-horned reptile, Sir Zachary. The Yesbearn knight held in his tree-trunk think arms a covered basket that reeked of savory meat and aged cheese. A patina of fruit and bread was mixed into the delectable bouquet, as well as the suggestion of something else he could not quite identify. The doorway was not large enough for Zacahary to fit through easily and so the Kharrakhaz knight waited there, one horn and the front of his beak beneath the lintel, watching and waiting with placid calm. His eye met Charlie and his beak opened in what must have been intended as a reassuring smile; Charlie nodded to him but could do no more.

After setting the goblets and corked bottle on the bench next to Charlie, he returned to the massive reptile and took the basket from his meaty hands. “Thank you, Sir Zachary. I'm sorry to have disturbed your prayers.”

“Think nothing of it, friend,” the knight replied in a deep voice that had a surprising nasal quality to it, as if he were honking some of his words. “If you need anything more, Father Felsah and I will be here for another hour, and then Father Patric will take our place.”

Charles cradled the basket and nodded his head as he stared up at the reptile. “Thank you, my friend. Give Father Felsah my thanks as well.”

“Eli be with you.”

“And with your spirit.”

The three-horned reptile pulled the door shut so gently that the only sound it made was the clicking of the latch. His footfalls did throb the floor as he walked away, but by then Charlie's attention was on the basket his sire carried. “Perhaps,” he admitted begrudgingly, “I was hungrier than I thought. That smells very good.”

“The bottle has some of the cider Bishop Hough taught the Brothers to make,” Charles said as he set the basket down and drew back the cover to reveal two loaves of bread, salted pork, two wedges of a very sharp cheddar, two peaches, and small pouches with a blend of spices. He spread the cover between them and then offered the basket to Charlie. “Divide this between us and I'll pour the cider.”

Since there were two of most things the division was a simple matter of taking each item from the basket and laying it on one side or the other of the linen cloth used to cover the basket and now smoothly draped over the bench like a peasant's table cloth. As Charlie split the meal he watched his sire slip a claw into the cork and twist it free with ease. Had Charlie tried that he would have nothing to show for it but a broken claw and a cork wedged more firmly in the bottle. At least his sire put his strange powers to good use from time to time.

After filling both goblets with the sweet-smelling cider, Charles tipped his back and swallowed half of it. A pleased sigh escaped his throat and his smiled at the edges of his snout. “Truly Bishop Hough's recipe never fails to please. Well, now that I have had something to drink, and I see you have arranged our meal, I am ready to continue.

“The bargain was struck but it was chicanery; a ruse to distract Nocturna long enough to open a way beyond her reach. And it worked. Your father helped me find my way into the Dreamland and to meet Nocturna face to face. That was my secret intent even if I did not understand what I truly intended. As I look back on it,” his sire mused as he sipped another small gulp of cider, “I must confess I believe that Nocturna knew more of what was happening in all of our lives than she ever admitted. Naturally I have no interest in learning that for myself. Your father and you may comport with her because of your ability to slip awake into dreams, but I have no such skill and thus no reason to converse with her again, though before all of this was over I did speak to her one last time.”

Charlie sniffed at one of the small pouches of spices and detected a blend of rosemary and thyme. He sprinkled some onto his salted pork and cheese before breaking a chunk free of each to eat with the bread. “So where did you go if not to Nocturna's realm? Where could you go that the Mistress of Dreams could not reach?”

“I went...” Charles' shoulders slumped for a moment and his entire posture seemed to collapse inward. His eyes stared as if he were seeing all of the Valley and more in a single glance. The rat's tail curled around his legs as if protecting them. His tunic fell open at the top revealing the scar of stone across his chest. His whiskers drooped and his ears lowered as if he were in mourning.

And then he shook his head and downed the last of his goblet. “Forgive me... it is not a place I ever wish to see again. It is a place no man should ever wish to go. With each step it grew more terrible and with each step what shreds of hope a man had would be abandoned forever.

“Because, my son, I had stepped across a bridge from the Dreamlands into the very Hells themselves.”

Charlie swallowed, his whole being suddenly cold. His ears lifted and turned toward his sire so that not a word would be missed.

 

 

Saturday, May 12, 708 CR

 

The tor, the stone table, and the silver moon shining on both vanished in a flash of darkness. The last thing he saw was his eldest son's sleeping form on that table and then he fell through a darkness that opened out into another night. Although it seemed as if he fell for a very long time, like an old memory savored during a day's journey, it whisked passed in the blink of an eye. He landed on his side, a painful ringing in his ears as he struggled to put his hands and legs beneath him. The ground was tangled with gnarled roots, upthrust stones, and briars, all of it suffused in a deep gloom as of a moonlit night obscured by thick clouds. His rodent eyes were well-suited to the dark and after a moment he began to make sense of everything around him.

He crouched in a forest tangled with the roots and limbs of misshaped trees rattling dry branches in a crisp autumn wind. Bushes and brambles choked the underbrush, each sporting a profusion of long thorns that grasped and tore at his cloak. Beneath of these and climbing nearly every tree he could see were mushrooms and fungus of all sorts, brown and crimson like rust in the midnight pallor. His whiskers trembled with every brush of air and the impression of other things watching him in the sullen wood. His ears lifted and turned to capture any sounds, but for the moaning of wind and clattering of empty limbs he heard nothing.

The forest stretched impenetrable in every direction. Above him and through the tangle of branches he could see nothing but an impression of cloud. He had no marker to guide him. As he stared upward, one hand brushing brambles and twigs from his cloak, he realized that the branches overhead were intact and that apart from those crushed beneath him there was no sign anywhere that he had fallen. And yet he was sore as if he'd tumbled out of a loft. He stretched, taking slow, careful breaths, listening and wondering.

Where was he? Was this another dream? What happened to Malger? Wasn't the marten supposed to be guiding him?

Or perhaps you are somewhere beyond their reach.

Perhaps, he mused. Still, one thing was clear, there was no sense in remaining where he was, but at the same time there was no indication which direction might prove helpful. He lifted his nose and sniffed, turning into the wind, but he felt nothing but the bitterness of dried leaves and the putrefaction of mushrooms coating everything. He grimaced and gingerly began to make his way into the wind.

The underbrush clawed at his legs and tail, while thick branches at head height made him duck and weave as he pushed forward into the inconsistent but palpable breeze. It was difficult to move without making noise as twigs snapped from branches at the slightest touch, but Charles managed reasonably well. Only a few times did a branch snap so loudly that he winced and waited to hear if anything would stir in that spectral gloom, but as much as he turned his ears what few sounds he could detect all seemed far away and unconcerned.

He couldn't tell how long he walked through the deep forest beneath a cloud-blackened sky as he felt no exhaustion and the only soreness that lingered was from where he'd landed after crossing the bridge on the tor. He felt neither hunger nor thirst, but something assured him that he could slake either should he choose. The woods were not inviting and they certainly did not feel alive, but something must be in this place.

Eventually the wind brought him the odors of some animals and he quickened his pace. He couldn't tell what they were but it was the first thing he could feel in this place that seemed alive. Even the few stones he'd felt beneath his toes were impenetrable to him. He worked his way up a gentle slope toward spires of upthrust rock, the very first he had seen other than the wood. Though his eyes were meant for seeing in dark places, the gloom was so complete and the tangle of trees so dense that he was nearly upon those spires before he first glimpsed them.

The spires stood much taller than any of the trees and appeared to be formed from basalt with massive channels of smooth stone like the teeth of a gear rising up each side. The trees flanking their sides were roughly the same height as those covering the Narrows. Beneath both he felt small, as if he were only the size of a normal rat instead of his usual twelve hands from toes to ears. Between them the ground dropped suddenly, framed by a ring of rock across which empty branches stretched. The air beyond was open and hazy, though he could discern the outline of even taller trees in the distance.

Charles eased his way through the brush until his paws rested on the stone lip between the basalt towers overlooking a small clearing below. The clearing stretched a hundred feet in each direction, as if a great circle had been ripped out of the earth. The center of the clearing was raised with slabs of speckled granite laid one on top the other at odd angles, so that it appeared to be a gray sunburst. Had there been any light the rat knew its reflection would have made the cairn appear to dance. The rest of the clearing seemed to be a mix of grass and moss.

There did not appear to be an easy way down to the clearing. The lip of stone overlooked a steep cliff that had been polished smooth. Charles would break a leg or worse trying to climb down. Even the basalt towers with their columns had been smoothed where rough and filled in everywhere else with granite so that they were a seamless whole. The towers stood like sentinels in the wood, or the horns of some vast nameless thing staring up at the cloud-scarred sky with its eye of layered stone.

A brief chill ran through the wind and Charles shrank back. The scent of animal musk grew stronger as the breeze skirled over the stone and rattled the branches above. Twigs snapped behind him and he spun his head to one side, but there was nothing in the midnight gloom but the dense cluster of trees and brush. He swallowed and eased himself back from the lip of stone, walking carefully toward the left tower.

He had walked into the wind so he might know what waited ahead of him. Was there something else following him too?

Charles reached into his cloak and ran his claws along the compact Sondeshike. Its cool, metallic surface settled his anxiety some, but in this strange forest he knew he could never feel completely safe. He followed the towering spire around the hillock, and the ground quickly fell away. He climbed down hillocks and outcroppings, trying to stay as close to the basalt as possible, never letting it stray too far from his right.

The clearing came into view again, only a short distance below him, when he heard the sound of several somethings moving through the wood on the opposite end. Charles crouched low beneath the roots of one trees that stretched against the tower, dangling like a monstrous hand before a cavernous maw. He waited, one hand wrapped about his Sondeshike, watching the trees on the other side of the clearing.

The sound of movement, the crush of twigs and the rustling of bushes, grew nearer and nearer until out of the trees emerged a quartet of what he first took for wolves and then for wolf Keepers, but quickly realized that they were neither. They loped and they were coated for the most part in lupine pelts, but there were parts of them that seemed more man-like and not in the manner of Keepers. They did not have beastly features grafted onto a human shape, but bits and pieces of human shape mingled with their wolf guise. Their snouts ranged from long, black, with yellowed fangs flecking spittle, to short, almost pug-like protrusions with flatter teeth but for the canines which protruded from thick black lips beneath swollen nostrils. Their arms seemed to end in both paws and clawed hands, some coated in fur and others just swollen from calluses. Patches of sickly pale skin showed through the otherwise scraggly fur on their chest and back. Only their legs and tails seemed wholly beast.

Two of them dragged a fifth figure between them. Charles peered from his cover and sucked in his breath when he saw that it was a woman of child-bearing years draped in rough skins and cloth rudely stitched together. Long black hair streaked with white lashed across her back, mixed with blood smeared across her neck and shoulders. The rat swallowed, claws digging into the roots around him, as he watched the four beasts carry the dead woman toward the cairn of stones.

They stretched her body across the sunburst. Even though the air was cool, the blood sizzled when it struck the stone as if it were a skillet on which to cook their meal. And then, turning his stomach once more, the woman stirred, arms and legs quivering as if she were gasping from a sudden fall. Her eyes flicked open even as the blood oozed from a fang-torn rend in her neck. As she began to struggle, the four wolf-things grabbed her limbs and held her down, some with hands and others with jaws, crunching through flesh and bone to spurt more blood onto the cairn. The scent scalded his eyes.

He pulled the Sondeshike from its place in his cloak, but stopped when more figures dashed from out of the woods, clubs and axes raised above their heads. Charles marveled as the axes appeared to be stone rather than steel, and each of them was garbed in animal skins of various quality. They were ten in number, men of various ages and appearances, both light-skinned and dark, short and tall, stocky and lanky. But only on one of them did his eyes rest. That one was not a man at all.

In the clearing at the front of the party, silent all of them but for the fall of their feet against the turf, ran a Keeper. He had almost non-existent ears, in the midst of a thick brown fur, dark eyes, short angled snout, whiskers, and incisors. Little claws tipped his hands, and a short tail emerged from his pudgy middle. Charles swallowed, too stunned to move any further.

He knew this Keeper. He had briefly served alongside him in the Longs. He had a widow and two daughters in Tarrelton whom Caroline the otter visited from time to time.

Craig Latoner.

But Craig Latoner had died almost two years ago.

Two of the four beasts leaped from the cairn, their jaws slavering in delight as they stretched outward, proportions shifting to make them even more top heavy. They clattered into the men and Keeper, knocking the first group over before the others fell on them, beating them down with heavy clubs and stone axe. The wolf-things howled in rage as they snarled and snapped, ripping flesh from legs and arms and staining the earth red with blood, but their attackers continued to crush them. Charles winced at the sound of snapping bone that accompanied every blow, and yet not one of the men nor either beast showed any sign of injury. Even a pack of wild dogs fighting over the last scraps were not more violent than what he witnessed. No horde of Lutins in fury could match the primal hunger he witnessed.

Charles noted that the woman on the cairn had managed to slip all but one arm free and even as her head dangled from her shoulders, she kicked and jabbed at the last of the beasts with all of her strength. Mad as it was, he lifted one foot from his hiding place to go and help her.

And then a long-fingered hand rested on his shoulder.

The touch was so gentle, he did not even feel a breeze from the motion of his limb. No whisker gave twitch to show the presence of the other behind him. One moment he was alone in the crook and then ext there was a tall figure beside him along the roots of the tree. Charles stiffened his spine and tail, turning only his head enough to glimpse to his left at the mystery that found him.

The figure was thin but draped in an elegant green and blue cloak atop a prismatic brocade running from his neck down to his waist. The cloak divided into hundreds of thin tassels spun with gold and silver thread that shimmered about soft boots of a brown so rich he felt a hunger well in his throat. His flesh, where it was visible amidst the gentle folds of cloth, was a pearl gray. High angular cheekbones framed his face, with ancient eyes peering as if from a great distance, beneath a gentle brow. Long white hair fell behind pointed ears with a grace that the fiercest wind could not disturb.

Charles blinked and turned his head completely, jaw gaping in recognition. His tongue moved to speak the name, but the figure narrow his eyes. The glance silenced him, and with a swallow the rat slowly turned back toward the clearing.

Craig and the humans managed to beat down the wolf-things and half carried the woman from the cairn. The last beast still crawling leaped over the sunburst platform only to have the prairie dog drive the stone axe clear through his skull. Blood and brains spewed out to either side, sizzling atop the otherwise cool stone, as the beast twitched with fast jerky motions. The woman, her neck stronger and no longer torn raw, draped her arms over Craig's shoulder, while the remaining hunters kept the other three beasts at bay. Even as the stone axe left the ruined skull the flesh began to knit together and the head reshape.

Craig and the humans all fled back the way they'd come, their faces set in grim lines, but each of them wordless and, it seemed to Charles, panicked. The rat tensed but the hand on his shoulder kept him from moving. He heard it in the same moment, a crashing lumbering thing coming toward the clearing at great speed. The trees across from the towers shook in its passage, branches clattering and snapping to send a rain of twigs and debris in every direction. Even the four beasts, struggling to regain their paws, shrunk back away from the thunderous mass.

And then something standing three times the size of any man erupted with a heavy thump from edge of the clearing. It walked on two legs and had two arms, but each arm split in two at the elbow so that it had four grasping hands which stretched toward the humans and Keeper desperate to escape. Each of its hands had three fingers and a thumb, all of which were tipped by jagged black talons. So too was the rest of it, covered alternately in greasy, black fur and broad, obsidian scales.

But the most horrifying feature was the creature's head. Oblong with protruding eyes as brilliant as jasper on either side, the entire middle from top to bottom was split in a toothsome jaw. This opened in unearthly silence as a meaty tongue snaked out between sickle fangs to invite all in the clearing within the cavernous maw. Charles' heart thumped so loudly in terror that even the deaf would hear it.

Craig swung his axe as he and the humans ran toward the left-most edge of the clearing from where Charles hid. The creature's right arm batted the stone wedge aside and with one hand grasped the man behind the Keeper by his arm. For the first time one of the combatants finally began to scream as he was hoisted into the air and shoved between the abomination's jaws and onto the waiting tongue. The jaws pressed down slowly into the main's chest, fountaining blood across its cheeks and down its chest where it glistened on its belly scales.

The four wolf-things slavered their jaws at the spilled blood for a moment before turning to run in the opposite direction. The monstrosity ignored them and took three more steps toward the fleeing men before sweeping out its left arm. Craig spun on his paws and threw his axe. The blade, poorly balanced, spun with a whistle and wobble before smacking the creature across the face where a single human arm had wedged in between its teeth. The blow did not seem to harm the nightmare, but it surprised it just long enough for the humans to scatter back into the trees.

Charles watched helpless as the thing reached up one of its strange two handed arms and shoved the errant limbs from the man he'd crushed between his jaws into his strange maw. The oblong head tilted back until the jaws pointed at the cloud scarred sky and then with a grinding rumble those jaws worked back and forth, chest swelling with breath, throat distending as morsels of flesh and bone were swallowed. This continued for more seconds than he dared remember. Finally, the towering thing lowered its now empty jaws, and proceeded to lick the blood from either side of its vertical jaw.

The wind shifted slightly, and Charles felt a heavy revulsion come over him anew as the scent of the creature reached him. Offal and metallic from the blood, it had as well a sickly sweet odor that made his nostrils and whiskers tremble. He could only be grateful that with the shifting wind, so too did the monstrosity's attention, as it turned to lumber off into the forest in the direction that the wolf-things had fled.

He remained where he hid until the sound of its frightful footfalls faded into the eerie silence that swallowed the forest. Even the echo of the unfortunate man's scream which had reverberated in his ears, was gone as if smothered. Charles lifted one arm to rub the scent from his nose, and then took a slow, deep breath. When he exhaled he lifted his gaze to the figure still standing impassively and immovably at his side.

One pearl gray hand lifted a slender finger to touch his lips. The gesture was measured, simple, but clear. Charles kept his jaws closed, but he narrowed his eyes to suggest a question. The other extended that same hand off in a direction away from the basalt towers and away from all of the combatants. Charles shifted from his hiding spot beneath the roots and followed after, finding it very easy to avoid making any sounds in the ancient one's wake.

The forest delved into a broad valley with the trickling of a brook through a culvert on the other side of a line of short hills. The wind pushed down the valley at first, but was soon blocked by thick shields of rock so that they were for a moment protected. The ground, once dry but for the soft carpet of moss, was now squishy with tracks of mud and puddles of rancid water. Their steps avoided these, but Charles still felt the mire pressing into his toes and wedged beneath his claws. The further they descended the tighter the branches interlocked above them, blocking out even the suggestions of shifting light from the clouds. The colors on his guide's garments were muted to gray, and only the luminous green glow from lichen and mushrooms brought any light to their eyes.

The valley came to an abrupt end after a short rise when the ground dropped away in a series of steep cliffs. The trees grasped for every scrap of earth, their roots dangling off the edge in empty air, branches stretching out perilously as if the entire tree could be pushed with a hand across the precipice. Charles gaped at the dizzying height for he could not penetrate the gloom far enough to see if there was even a bottom. He felt as if he stood on the edge of the very world and only the emptiness of nothing was open to him with a single foolish step.

His guide turned to the left, following a track along the promontory that slowly descended amidst a shelter of rock. As the rock stretched upward on their left, the cliff yawning on their right, the trees dwindled and then disappeared altogether leaving the rat anxious and exposed. A bitter wind grasped at his cloak and from somewhere up above he felt certain he saw broad-winged shapes circling and swooping in the scarred blackness.

For several long minutes they traveled on the narrow track of rock with an endless pit at his right and a steep wall of stone he did not dare commune with on his left. The glimmer of lichen, pale and sickly green, cast an eerie pall on their path and the walls enclosing about them like a fist. Charles crept as close behind the gray-skinned figure as he dared, eager to quit this place where even his breath felt too loud.

Eventually the cliffs veered to their right and the passage dove through a cleft in the rocks. Down this passage his guide walked with unnatural serenity and Charles followed. He felt panic filling him at the tight corridor that twisted back and forth. He wanted to shrink away from the enclosing walls, slick with fungi whose incongruous yellow and blue glow made portions of his guide's cloak glimmer while dimming others to invisibility.

After several twists and turns so that Charles lost all sense of direction, the passage opened out onto a sloping hillside covered once more in forest. To his right the ground continued to fall away at a measured pace, while on his left it climbed up against a promontory towering behind them. The trees here still had some of their leaves, but they were all sickly brown and crumpled to the point that Charles could not identify what sort of tree they might be. Beech, alder, oak, maple, walnut, it was impossible to tell. Not even the bark seemed wholly familiar, though with the profusion of mushrooms and other slimes clinging to their trunks he had no intention of touching them to be sure.

The stone still sheltered them on two sides in a quasi-alcove and it was there that the figure half turned and with one hand bid him wait. Charles felt relieved to be out of the passage and took a few more steps to put a little distance between him and the black hole behind him before obeying the command. His benefactor lifted his other arm high above his head, spreading his fingers as if he were strumming gossamer threads, while he cast his eyes in every direction.

Half-a-minute later the tall figure turned toward Charles and with kindly eyes and long-fingered hands bent down and ever so gently grasped the soft fur on his cheeks. He applied a slight pressure to the rat's cheekbones, forcing him to tilt his head downward. Charles blinked but allowed his guide move him, too frightened to do anything but obey. The pearl gray-skinned figure bent so that his tall forehead rested against the broad dome of Charles' head between his saucer-shaped ears. And then a glimmer as of a tiny pinprick pushed between his thoughts as he heard a comforting voice without his ears.

It is not safe to speak aloud in this place. For a moment we may speak with our minds. How came you to this place, Charles Matthias, for you are not dead of flesh, nor is your soul bound to this wood for consumption?

Charles blinked for a moment, but then closed his eyes and concentrated on thinking clear words.

I have crossed over from Nocturna's realm in search of my son who was stolen from me. How have you come to be here, Qan-af-årael?

He could feel the corner's of his benefactor's lips lift in amusement.

My presence here should not be a surprise. I died and my being has come to rest in the Dreamlands. It is the place of repose for all virtuous souls both of my kind and of yours except for those who, as you do, follow the ways of Eli. They are taken beyond these demesnes and not even the Daedra lords know where they have gone.

Qan-af-årael's thoughts were silent, and the needle-like presence in his mind withdrew for a moment as if he were considering something. And then he felt the surge of power gently intrude again.

What happened to your son?

A cruel malady killed him in my absence. I go to reclaim him if possible and to say goodbye if not.

To reclaim a soul is very difficult indeed. Be careful in what you wish, especially in this place. You are not safe here, but if you seek a soul that has gone beyond, you have little choice.

The presence withdrew and Qan-af-årael lifted his head from the rat's own, casting a furtive glance at the surrounding trees. His eyes glimmered with a spectral radiance in the febrile illumination. Even in the heart of Marzac in the Chamber of Unearthly Light Charles had never seen the ancient Åelf appear frightened. He had faced the Marquis and his deck of cards with equanimity even though it had bled him of his very life. A serene peace always surrounded him. But for one brief moment in that gaze, something disturbed that peace, some awareness of a danger greater than that which they'd contended against in the bowels of Jagoduun.

For a moment, Charles regretted his request of Malger. But then he steeled himself and favored the Åelf with a curious gaze.

When Qan-af-årael returned his stare he bore the mask that cloaked his thoughts and feelings yet exuded a simple confidence in the order of all things. He motioned for Charles to follow him once more and together they left the sheltering alcove behind, driving straight across the sloping ground, working their way beneath the canopy of trees. The rustle of dead leaves rubbing together as a wind drifted through the upper branches covered what little sound their steps made, but still the rat feared that the pounding of his heart would draw every beast in a mile to them. The rock wall and promontory behind them quickly disappeared in the gloom and one again all he could see about him was the endless and seemingly dead forest.

After they had walked for several minutes he heard a soft crunching behind them. It was some distance yet, but it was clearly not of the same character as the rustling leaves or rattling branches. The footfalls sounded heavy and deliberate, the strides large, but it did not seem to bring with it a crashing of wood as the four-armed monstrosity he witnessed by the towers and cairn had caused. Charles glanced behind him but the wood gave no sign other than that sound which came every few seconds. The wind stopped and all else became still around them yet the soft crunching continued to follow.

Qan-af-årael guided them down the slope a short distance until they could hear the babbling of a shallow brook cutting through the hillside. Frame on one side by a line of low rocks, the stream wound a jagged course downhill. Strange little flowers with drooping petals lined the other bank. Qan-af-årael put a gentle hand on his shoulder and gestured to the flowers with his other hand. His expression was grave and full of warning. Charles nodded in understanding, glancing down at his legs to beware his step.

They followed the brook for a few minutes before the line of flowers with their tear-drop shaped petals which glistened in the watery spray with a faintly luminous purple glow broke for a stretch of slick rock. Across this his benefactor stepped, his gait so light that his soft boot did not even break the surface of the water. Charles followed him and winced as he felt a burning sensation on the bottom of his toes.

Once they were across and nestled against a series of upthrust stones which were being crushed within the grip of tree roots, Qan-af-årael bid him recline. Charles, his toes curled in pain, ground his incisors together and tightened his claws into his sleeves to keep from crying out. He felt as if hot coals were being dragged across his toes. Tears pressed at the sides of his eyes.

But the Åelf moved his lips without speaking, and gently touched each of his toes in turn. With that touch the pain went away and he felt whole again. Charles took a deep breath and let the tension ease from his hands and legs, smiling in thanks to the Åelf before pushing himself off the rocks to follow behind again.

A heavy whump sounded from behind them, and then a faint cascade of water like a rock plunged in a lake. The Åelf glanced back once, and then beckoned for the rat to move faster. Charles did not bother to look, but slipped one hand into his tunic to grab his Sondeshike as he chased after the slender man as they fought to slink through the wood, ever descending through the folds of the land. The slope grew steeper as they went, and the sound of the creek turned from babbling to splashing as the creek ran through a series of falls and pools, swelling with each passing foot. Still whatever followed them gained, until Charles felt it was right behind him. Little gusts of warm air shot across the tops of his ears.

And then the ground fell away from them and they were striding into the open air. Charles flailed his arms as their cloaks spread wide, the feet tumbling past invisibly. Something screamed above them, a deep throaty roar filled with fury. And then he gasped as they crashed into the trunk of a tree, the landing smashing the wind from his chest while his arms scrambled to grab onto something, anything. He felt as if he was going to fall backward into an abyss, his eyes seeing nothing while his ears reverberated with that ravenous growling roar. His tail wrapped about the limb beneath him, his toe claws scrambled to dig into the bark, and his eyes searched for some sign of the Åelf, all the while his heart and lungs ached beneath the bruised cage of his ribs.

I am here.

To his surprise he felt the comforting presence of the Åelf intrude on his thoughts with the subtlety of a cat slipping beneath a tapestry. His panicked breathing slowed and he realized that not only were they secure on a large branch, but that Qan-af-årael was covering him with his cloak, hiding them from whatever beast they narrowly escaped. He could feel the tall forehead pressed into the fur of his brow, and he relaxed. Only the bruising of his chest where he landed still ached.

Are we safe?

We are never safe here, came the reply. But the creature will not follow us down.

Where are we?

Lilith's demesnes. What the race of man deems the second Hell.

Charles pondered that for a moment. When faced with Nocturna herself all he could do was buy time while a bridge was established. He had never considered where the bridge would take him except closer to his son. And that had led him now to Lilith's realm? He had heard dreadful tales of the Daedra queen of vampires and all dark places and foul creatures of the deepest wild. Were the horrors he'd already seen and felt her creatures? But how had his friend and fellow Long Scout Craig Latoner come to be in this place?

The Keeper we saw, Craig, he was a friend. Why is he in this place?

Good souls who have done some ill will struggle here for as long as they remain.

Good souls must face this?

And some worse. Qan-af-årael shifted above him but the connection remained. An immortal soul can face dangers mortal flesh cannot.

Is that why you are here?

I am here because I saw a great bridge plunging into a deep and bottomless chasm through the Dreamlands. I saw my friend, my companion, and the dear one who had announced my departure from Ava-shavåis crossing that bridge into the darkness. I followed because I knew you were not dead, curious, and concerned. You should not be here, Charles.

The rat frowned and took a deep breath, the pain in his chest less. I cannot leave until I have found my son.

He will be beyond all of the hells. Your faith in Eli tells you that he is in a greater paradise than can be imagined. Perhaps it is better to abandon your search before some other terror comes to destroy you. There will be no rest for your soul if you die here, Charles.

The thought of one of those four-armed freaks slowly squeezing its fangs through his flesh send shudders up his spine and down his tail. But with a shuddering sigh he gave his head the slightest of shakes. I must at least try to find him. Please.

His benefactor was quiet for a long time, the presence withdrawn. Charles felt barren and exposed despite their concealment. He felt something brushing against his tail but it was only his own cloak. He quivered but steeled himself, forcing his breath to come slowly, his heart to beat without racing.

Charles, you are in great danger here. I will help protect you and help you find your way. But we have lingered here too long. Come.

Qan-af-årael slipped from over top of him and with the cloak what little light existed in Lilith's domain returned to the rat's eyes. Above him he could see the edge of a cliff above from whence they must have leaped, and the wide branches of large trees stretching ever upward and on all sides. The stone wall continued downward beyond where his eyes could penetrate. He could not even see the main trunk of the tree on which they rested, so large and wide were the branches. And down that branch the Åelf walked as if it were no more than any other track through the forest. Charles climbed to his paws and followed after him, grateful for his Sondecki training in balance.

The branch stayed mostly even as it twisted its way through the tangle of smaller branches and creepers strewn throughout. Charles could not see the ground below, nor the sky above, nor anything but more branches in any direction he looked. All that he could see was the pale shadow of Qan-af-årael's back which he followed without murmur or complaint. His guide followed their branch for several minutes before stopping, kneeling, and sliding down to another wide branch a few feet below that cut across at a right angle. He waited there until the rat dangled himself off the first branch. His feet hung in the empty air as his claws dug into the bark, kicking around to find the ground before Åelven hands grasped him about the waist and eased him down.

Four times more they scrambled to a lower branch and each time the distance between branches was just high enough that the rat had to be helped down. His focus remained on everything around him, eyes straining to pierce the darkness, ears turned to hear the slightest catch of breath in the air, nostrils stretching to test each odor, whiskers alert for the slightest twitch. But until they climbed down their fifth branch there had been nothing.

It started as a subtle tickling in his nose. He rubbed his snout with one hand, blinking as he followed down the branch which was slightly lop-sided. In a few places he had to crouch to keep his balance, as did the Åelf, and this left them vulnerable. In one such spot he realized what it was he had begun to smell, and with a start he scrambled along the branch until he could swing his tail around and strike his guide in the side. Qan-af-årael turned his head in surprise, and then his deep eyes narrowed and fixed on some point in the gloom the rat couldn't see.

The same sickly sweetness he'd noted along the stream had returned. Charles turned his nose to follow the scent, and while the Åelf glanced upward, his whiskers pulled his snout downward.

From out of the deep black below them lunged a toothsome maw, long and narrow, that lunged and snapped at the branch beneath their feet. Charles jumped toward his guide, pushing him out of the way as the jaws snapped and tore jagged gouges out of the wood. A second eyeless maw balked them both when it hove from the shadows below to tear at the branch a few paces ahead.

“Run!” Charles hissed between his incisors, pushing the Åelf along the branch, even as thick teeth sawed back and forth, splintering the wood and making the branch wobble. He felt his tail tip bump the end of the thing's snout as he ran past, and felt a sickening heat there as if he'd dabbed it with a fuller's lye. The first jaw disengaged and shifted as they could hear the heavy tread of feet now incautiously rushed somewhere below them. Even through the impenetrable gloom, the ground could not be too far below them, but with that thing down there it was the last place they wanted to be.

The branch angled upward after twenty paces, for a moment putting them out of reach of the snarling beast below. A third and fourth set of jaws snapped at them, moving to cut them off where the branch dipped back down. Qan-af-årael pointed at another branch ten feet above them and then lowered his hands. Charles understood his meaning and stepped on the Åelf's hands, his own holding his shoulders for a moment as he steadied himself. Despite his frail and ancient appearance, the Åelf had no difficulty hoisting the rat over his head so that he was almost within reach of the branch above.

Charles stretched his claws toward the wood but could not get a grip. He nearly buckled when the branch beneath them jarred. The monster was tearing at the branch in a freakish rage, chewing gouges loose and spitting them out. In another minute the branch would break completely and they would quickly follow the splinters into the cavernous maws. Charles lifted his paws as much as he could, standing on the very tips of his toes, short, sharp claws, digging into the flesh beneath them, as he strained to grasp the branch above.

After several tense seconds in which he could scrape the bark his claws found purchase in a crevice. He poured his Sondeck into his arm and pulled himself upward. He dangled in the air for several seconds, grunting as he searched the bark above him for any other purchase. He scratched and scratched, chest aching, and then found another crevice. Paw over paw he pulled himself up, even as his benefactor waited below on the cracking limb.

He crested the top of the branch and turned, bracing his legs with the Sondeck at the other side, he bent his front half down an extended his Sondeshike. He lowered the weapon as far as he could, waving the tip in little circles above Qan-af-årael's head. The Åelf wrapped his hands about it and Charles pulled him up. The branch cracked and groaned before disappearing with a thunderous crash. The sound, after so much silence, felt like an earthquake in his ears. It took all his self-control to keep lifting the Sondeshike.

But the moment passed and he helped the Åelf climb atop the branch. Charles started to stand when the Åelf grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back down. Something brushed over his back as it hurtled past. And then a second something jabbed at him as it followed the first something. Six others followed, each of them clawing at his or the Åelf's back on their way down. Charles winced at each touch, but none of them felt deep enough to pierce his clothes let alone his hide. He tentatively looked up and sniffed.

The sickeningly sweet aroma saturated the air, but with it now was something sharper and altogether unpleasant. He felt nauseated by the combination, but there was no further sign of what passed overhead. Only the furious raging of the beast below as it snapped with its jaws at the branches within reach. Charles tentatively rouse to a crouch. His benefactor nodded and did the same. The two of them moved as quietly and as quickly as possible along the new branch.

They made it not more than thirty paces before that melliferous odor returned with such strength that the rat nearly gagged. A huge maw, long with a hundred fangs per side, thrust up from the obnubilated depths. It was attached to a snaking neck whose rubbery flesh shimmered with a slimy sheen. The maw had no eyes, only the mouth with fangs, and a gaping maw with no tongue so that it was impossible to tell which was the top and bottom side. It curled itself around the branch, and snapped at them as it held fast. The branch shook, knocking them from their feet even as a second head and tentacle-neck secured the other end.

Charles grabbed the Åelf by the ankle to keep him from tumbling over the side, and then swung his Sondeshike at the nearer of the two heads. The jaws snapped shut inches from him, and then cracked when the full force of his Sondeck caved in the side of the maw. A vile white mucus splattered everywhere and stung his left eye. Charles took a step back, claws grasping the branch beneath him for support as he tried to rub the ichor from his face.

And then he heard the beast roar from every direction as he felt other figures join them on the branch. He blinked with his good eye and marveled as the pelt-wearing humans from before beat back the monster with careful jabs and furious swings of their stone weapons. Amongst them he saw attacking from a lower branch his friend and fellow Long Scout Craig Latoner. The prairie dog was especially vicious as he drove his axe deep into one of the creature's necks. The white mucus fountained but did not seem to touch him.

Charles felt another hand press a small cloth to his face. He trembled but stilled when he realized that they were clearing his left cheek and eye of the horrible slime. He blinked his left eye but everything seemed blurred and so he closed it again. The figure that he could not make out pushed him further along the branch, and soon all of them were running down the wooden path faster than he would have dared with only one clear eye.

They only dropped branches twice before they were finally on the ground rushing through massive roots and towering sentinels that dwarfed the mighty redwoods of Glen Avery. Charles felt immeasurably small next to those titans. Amongst those running he could see Qan-af-årael as a shaft of white light in front of him, while the humans were various shades popping in and out of the surrounding darkness. To his right he noticed Craig grinning to him with a devious glint in his incisors.

Charles wasn't sure when exactly it happened, but as they navigated their way between the maze of roots standing twice their heights they vanished underground into halls of earth and stone. Roots now framed the ceiling of narrow passages. Within he could only smell humans and few beastly scents more like those he knew from Metamor. Craig fell a few steps behind him but still they ran. His legs felt sore and he could not help but wonder how far they still had to go.

The answer came suddenly and after a dizzying set of twists and turns in the passage that nearly had him run into the wall on three occasions. The passage opened up into a warren of little holes amidst bridges and ladders with blue flaming lights hanging from the roof of the cavern. Charles blinked both eyes and held up an arm to shield them at the sudden comparable brilliance. He felt Craig's paw on his shoulder and he let himself be led along one of those paths hugging the exterior of the cavern. Both he and Qan-af-årael found themselves in a small hole with a few pallets of crushed leaves and feathers, with rough-hewn blankets and small blue lights that did not seem to either burn or give off heat.

Craig motioned for them both to sit down, and then he offered a chittering laugh. “What are you doing here, Charles? Not only are you a Follower but you aren't even dead! We can all see it. And aye, it is safe to speak here.”

“Craig!,” Charles gasped, wincing at the sullen pain in the left side of his face. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I died!” The prairie dog laughed again. “Don't worry about the slime on your face. Somebody is bringing something to clean that off. The pain will go away and you'll see clearly in a moment.” In a quieter voice, one that did not hurt their sensitive ears as much, he added, “You are lucky we found you.”

“What was that thing?” Charles asked, his throat raw from keeping silent.

“Who knows. Some experiment of the night mistress. We don't say her name here as we do not want her attention. You should not say it either.”

He nodded. “I won't.”

Another pair of humans came into the small wood and stone framed room carrying a ewer and bowl. Craig said nothing as they dipped a little bit of cloth in the bowl and gently cleaned the rat's face. Charles felt the sting of the mucus lessen with each swipe. It took them a few minutes to finish, but when they did he blinked his left eye and found the blurriness gone. He glanced at Qan-af-årael who reclined on one of the pallets with the same reserved and distant grace he had always possessed, and then returned his regard to Craig his fellow Long Scout. There was a subtle luminous quality to his appearance, as if he weren't wholly solid.

“Thank you,” Charles said with a smile. The two humans smiled at him, then to Craig, and quickly departed, leaving the three of them alone.

“What happened to your face?” Craig asked, pointing to the rat's right side.

Charles lifted one paw and traced along the edge of the ruined, black scar and the fur that stopped just beneath it. He could not feel anything through that charred skin, but the fur trembled at his touch. “I was struck by a Shrieker. A single brief touch was all it took to melt my flesh; only magic saved my eye. But the Shriekers were destroyed and I survived.”

Craig crossed his arms. “I can see that. You aren't dead, Charles, and you,” he turned toward Qan-af-årael and stared at him as if trying to pierce the deeps of a clouded lake. “You don't belong here either, but I cannot see why.”

“He was in the Dreamlands and followed me here,” Charles noted. “His name is Qan-af-årael and he is a dear friend. He's promised to help protect me on my way.”

Craig favored him a skeptical glance, one he knew from his days testing for the Long Scouts. “And what are you doing here, Charles? No living soul comes here of its own choice without dire need. And certainly I have heard of none in the memories of any here in this place.”

“I am here trying to find my son who was stolen from me. I am not going to give up just because of strange monsters here.”

“Stolen?” Craig's brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“He died while I was fighting a terrible evil far away and the aedra would not help him. I have to... see him one last time.”

Craig shook his head. “I am dead, Charles. I hope never to see any of the living again until their years have run out and they come to this place, or we all meet again in the place Beyond. I am sorry for what happened to your son but you should wait until your time has come.” He blinked and then smiled a little. “When did you have a family? You weren't even married when I – left,” he finished after a weighted pause.

“It was the year after you died. I am going to seek him out, Craig. Please don't try to stop me. But, he is not here and would not be in any place the daedra hold sway.”

“He is Beyond,” Qan-af-årael said in a quiet voice, one full of mystery. Craig's fur appeared to shudder at the sound, the first uttered by the Åelf in the nightmare darkness. “We must go beyond to find him.”

“There are only two ways I know to go beyond. You either let yourself be torn limb from limb by one of those monsters out there, or you let your blood be drained on one of the night mistress's altars. Either one is horrible and we do our best to make sure we do not end that way.”

“The altars?”

Craig favored the rat with a grin so wide both sets of incisors were visible. “You were there. I smelled you hiding behind one of the towers. Where her pups tried to cut Beth's throat and drain all her blood. Anything taken there feeds the mistress directly. We'd all rather be eaten by one of those monsters than end up a sacrifice like that.”

He unfolded his arms but clasped one wrist in his hand at his waist. His large rounded snout frowned, dark eyes lowering. “Beth is going to be all right. If you aren't torn to pieces or eaten you always heal here. Martin... well, he is gone now from this plane. Either Beyond, or elsewhere still. I assume you do not wish to follow him like that.” One corner of his muzzle drew up in a rueful, mirthless half-grin. “To be bled for Her sustenance destroys the spirit; there is no Beyond. To pass as poor Martin did – we do not know the fate of such passing, but even if he did pass Beyond it cannot be to the bright paradise of absolution we all hope for in the final end. It's a fate best avoided, especially for a Living soul, like you.”

“There is another way,” Qan-af-årael said with slow, careful tones.

“What way is that?” Charles asked, turning from the prairie dog to the Åelf.

The pearl gray being smiled in a subtle but gentle way. “There are two additional ways to reach beyond. We are in what is known as the Axis. The heavens above and hells below, each realm being the demesnes of a particular aedra and daedra lord. The Axis serves as a means by which they harness spiritual energy and maintain their power. The Axis also serves as a way that they and their minions can easily move from one realm to the next.”

Craig nodded. “So I was told. But you cannot use the Axis. They guard all the entrances.”

“Their minions do guard the Axis and it would be very foolish to attempt to use it. But there is another way to pass from one realm to the next. Charles has already done so and I followed him here. At certain places in each realm, there are bridges that span the gap between them. Passages that siphon spiritual energies from lesser sources, that never passes through the Axis. Energy gained through lies, if you will, which sustains the darker spirits of the lower Hells whose worshipers are far fewer than those of the Aedra. If you can find one end of the bridge you can reach the next realm, either ascending to the heavens or descending through the hells. Understandably, there are more leading down than up. It does mean we must travel great distances in each realm to find the bridge. And there is no guarantee that a bridge will not be guarded.”

“Could we use these bridges to escape this place?” Craig asked, a curious wonder touching his voice.

“Not in great numbers,” Qan-af-årael admitted with a measure of regret, reserved but real. “Your night mistress will not take well to her livestock escaping. And the only bridge I know to enter the Dreamlands will be guarded by now. Nocturna knows the passage and will be waiting on the other side, ill-disposed at Charles' chicanery.”

“But how does this take us Beyond?” Charles pressed, shifting about and rubbing his tail where it had been

“The only ways Beyond are from the highest heaven and the lowest hell. Nocturna guards the way up. If you wish to go beyond, the only way is to go down.”

“Down?” Craig asked, his chittering voice rising an incredulous glare. “Down where it is an even worse than this place? Charles, think! You cannot risk that!”

He turned and stared at the Åelf for several seconds. Qan-af-årael's regard was calm and assured. There was no suggestion of fear in his angular features nor diffidence in his golden eyes. Charles felt a subtle affirmation in his friend's countenance. A faint smile stretched the rat's snout and cheeks; with this he returned to answer the prairie dog's admonition.

“I can and I must. If it is the only way then it is my way. Qan-af-årael is powerful even in death in ways we cannot imagine. I will be as safe as I can be here while in his company. I hope that I can have your help as well to reach the next bridge. I have no idea where it might be.”

“It is not far,” Qan-af-årael noted with a faint pinching of his lips. “I can see it in a way though I fear there will be danger to reach it as we must cross a plain.”

“The plain?” Craig stammered.

Charles blinked. “You know of it? What is it?”

“A place too dangerous to trod. If you think the beasts you've seen here in the forest are terrifying, then you cannot imagine what makes the plain its home.”

“If we are quick and subtle we should be able to reach the bridge with the denizens of the plain ignorant of our passage. We are small and not worth their regard.”

Craig shook his head and turned once more to Charles. There was actual agony in his expression as he held out his arms. “Charles, please, reconsider. I have never heard tell of anyone returning from the plain. It is better to spend eternity hiding in these holes and lightless forests than to dare the dazzle of a cloudless night for one twinkling star on that derelict plain!”

He could see his dead friend's anguish and for a moment felt some pity for him. But he steeled his reserve against such temptations and shook his head. “I am resolved to do this, Craig. You can either help me or not, but I would prefer your company a little while longer.”

“You are so stubborn!” Craig growled beneath his breath and shook his head, glaring down his snout. “I will not help you destroy yourself. Not I. If you intend to cross the plain then you must do it on your own.”

Charles stood and stretched. “Then I suppose we shall take our leave of you, supposing we have your permission to do that!” He asked, leveling a glower at his fellow rodent Keeper.

Craig reached out a hand and grabbed the rat by his tunic. “Charles, don't you understand? If you are killed here, your soul will not escape the daedra. You will be theirs to torment for as long as they wish. Do you understand this?” His angry words ended in a breathless hiss, the gaze in his dark eyes almost desperate with panic that his old friend realize the risks he already knew well.

Charles rested his hand atop the other, his claws pressing beneath each finger to pry them loose from his tunic. “I understand and I will risk. You cannot keep me here, and you certainly cannot keep Qan-af-årael here.”

Craig's face contorted with anger for a moment before the rictus melted and the prairie dog could do aught but release him. “Very well, if that is your wish. Before I show you the way, I must ask one thing of you, because once you leave this cavern it will not be safe to speak.” Charles nodded for his fellow Long to continue. “How are my wife and daughters? And... is Caroline all right?”

The rat's expression softened, and this time it was he who placed a paw on his friend's shoulder. “They are all well. Caroline was rescued and recovered and she visits your wife and daughters every week. I'm told the eldest just changed into a prairie dog like you.”

“Anna... a prairie dog like me?”

“She even has a little sable stripe down her back and tail.”

Craig's eyes brimmed with tears even as a smile of hope and warmth filled him. “My little... thank you, Charles.” He took a deep breath to steady himself, even wiping his cheeks and eyes with the back of his wrist. Once dry, those dark eyes fixed on the rat. “I will gather some of the others and we will show you both a secret way toward the plain. We will go no further than that. I can only hope that you are as fast and as unregarded as you claim.”

 

Charles and Qan-af-årael remained in the little cave with leaf and feather mattresses. The rat played with the blue light dangling from the ceiling while they waited. He could make it curl around his claws but no matter what he did to it he never felt the slightest sensation of heat. He wondered if he could convince Kimberly to conjure a blue witchlight, and for a moment he felt a surge of love well in his heart. Her arms slid beneath his and her head pressed against his chest. Her warmth, her delicate scent, her inner strength, her very humility, all of it washed across him as if she were actually there.

And then he felt Qan-af-årael's steadying hand and the vision broke. “Your friend is returning.”

Craig and five human men stopped at the entrance to the little cave and waved for them to follow. Rat and Åelf were lithe on their feet, offering only a cursory glance at the array of bridges, lights and ladders filling the cavern. They stopped before an ominous dark hole leading away in a new direction and the prairie dog put a finger to his snout. “Charles, these are the last words you will hear us speak. If you have anything to ask, do so now because you will not speak again in this realm.”

He shook his head and swallowed. “I do not think there is anything I need. I trust you will not lead us awry.”

“Much as I wish to deter you from your course, I will not lead you falsely.” His shoulders rose and fell with a weary sigh. “Very well then, stay with us and say nothing.”

The eight of them plunged into the dark passage at a brisk pace. After the cool blue light of the cavern, the tunnel felt oppressive and complete in its darkness. Charles felt a twinge of claustrophobia and could not help but recall the bleakness of the tunnel beneath Metamor that took them all the way to the forested hills north of Glen Avery. At least then they had brought lights to illumine the pearl black walls. Here he had only the sensation of those around him brought to him by his whiskers to guide him.

But his eyes adjusted after a few minutes, and soon he recognized the overhanging walls of roots, dirt and stone as much the same they had seen on their way down into the caverns. After a time that may have been five or fifty minutes, they emerged from the tunnel into a dense forest of oak and beech intermingled with nose-tickling pine. All of them tensed and wrapped their hands about axes and heavy clubs. Charles wrapped one hand about the shrunken haft of his Sondeshike tucked into his tunic as he warily glanced above and to every side.

The perpetual gloom of the night mistress's demesnes had returned and with it he felt his tongue fix fast to the roof of his mouth. Not a murmur would pass the rat's lips while they remained here. He could only hope that the bridge was not far away.

Craig led them through a series of winding hills and down a small slope, staying always within a little cleft that protected them on either side. Charles sniffed the air afraid that the five-headed monster would be waiting to ambush them, but he never detected that sweet odor nor any others save the prickling of the trees. And where the trees of Glen Avery felt safe and comforting, these felt ominous, as if they resented the passage of anything at their feet.

When the cleft finally opened out and the hills stopped, Craig and the other humans did as well. Craig offered Charles a few scouting signs and the rat knew that this was as far as they would go. Charles signed that he understood before clasping the prairie dog one last time. Craig returned the gesture with a firm and determined grin, holding Charles by the shoulders at arm's length for a moment. With a smile he nodded his head slowly for his old friend to go in peace before incongruously sketching a brief sign of the Tree upon his own breast to wish Charles well. Without a word or a whisper of sound he and the humans all melted back into the shadows within the cleft, wary eyes ever watching above.

Together, Charles and Qan-af-årael continued in the direction his friend had gestured. The trees continued at their lofty, impenetrable height for several minutes more before coming to an abrupt end. Even the gloom of darkness seemed to lift, offering them a view that stretched for miles before them. And so too did the plain, vast and endless and completely flat, it stretched from the boundary of wood until consumed by the darkness in the distance. Charles turned to the Åelf who appeared to be concentrating, as if his eyes could pierce not just shadow but earth and rock as well.

The moment lasted only a few seconds before the Åelf offered Charles an affirming nod, angular features betraying nothing of what he felt. As one they stepped out onto the plain, their strides purposeful and their aim sure. Tall blades of grass rose up on all sides to the rat's waist, and its velvet touch made his tail shudder with a chill. The earth beneath their feet was soft as if it had rained a few days before.

After only a few minutes of walking Charles glanced behind them to see that the forest was only a smear on the horizon. If he stared above them he could discern a blanket of clouds, but all else was lost in the darkness. How anything at all grew here he neither wanted to nor could he fathom. The only thing that remained different in the sea of grass where every blade looked the same as all the rest was his friend. He walked as closely as he could to the Åelf.

They traveled this way for some time without sight, sound, or scent of anything else on the plain with them. Charles had no way of knowing how long it was except that it felt far longer than their journey from the caverns to the edge of the forest. His body ached in strange ways, as if his muscles were sore though he was in no need of rest. He continued to put one paw before the other, tail curled close to his back to keep it from brushing against the grass, and hoped they'd reach the bridge soon.

By the time it started they could see nothing but the plain in all directions. Whatever sense that Qan-af-årael had to find the bridge led them inexorably forward, though what direction forward was Charles had no idea. He dare not leave the ancient one's side for even a moment lest he become lost in a field of grass in which every direction looked exactly the same. And just as the paranoia of an endless sea of grass began to burrow into his heart, he felt a faint tremble in the ground.

The first few he dismissed as the fluttering of his heart. But its pace did not match the beat within his breast like a fist jabbed between his lungs; it was slower, heavier, and felt altogether distant and separate. It pressed through the callused flesh of his long toes and narrow feet with a single broad pulse, rising up through his legs, hips, chest, head, until it rebounded from the tips of his ears back down to vibrate every scraggly hair growing from his tail. A few seconds later, its energy spent, the pulse would come again but with greater vigor.

It was getting closer.

Qan-af-årael touched the rat on the shoulder as they walked and then extended his arm ahead of them. He pointed at something in the distance and Charles squinted as he tried not to dwell on the ever-growing thrum of the earth beneath them. In every direction he saw only the tall grass swaying with a wind he could not feel. But where the Åelf pointed he saw something gray smearing the horizon as if they were nearing some structure that rose up from the plain. The bridge?

With another jolt beneath his paws, Charles stepped faster than before, pushing the grass aside with his hands in his anxiety. Qan-af-årael matched his pace and then resumed his position just ahead to lead them both by whatever invisible arrow he followed. The trembling of the earth carried with it a sullen echo now, as of something impossibly heavy. Charles turned his ears to listen for it, all the while keeping his eyes on the gray something ahead of them.

What was before them grew in size as they continued to move faster. But louder still the footfalls coming toward them. After a minute Charles felt convinced that whatever it was approached from their left. He turned his head that direction for a moment and immediately wished he hadn't. In the distance still and wrapped in shadows so that he could make out nothing but an outline were two legs so large that even the redwoods they climbed through were but saplings in comparison. The legs rose up into the gloom and there the rat could see nothing but a senseless shifting of line and contour. Shapeless and amorphous yet with mass beyond reckoning, whatever this abomination was, it headed straight for them.

Gasping and nearly choking as he tried to catch his breath, Charles grabbed Qan-af-årael's sleeve and gestured wildly with his left arm at the perfidious horror. The Åelf glanced that way, and the gray of his face blanched.

They ran.

The gray mass to which they ran grew before them, spreading out in a wide arc before them though still distant. The legs strode with unerring malevolence, thundering with each step so that the ground now shook and threatened to tumble them over. Charles felt queasy from the almost rolling lurch of the earth as he tried to stay upright and on course. He wanted to avert his eyes from the doom stalking them, but with hapless perversity his left eye ever trailed to those gargantuan legs. The outline of their shape had at first seemed smooth at a great distance, but as they neared the rat could see that they were anything but. Almost liquefied in their peculiar shape, they flowed and gibbered as if composed of thousands of gaping mouths, opening to moan and ooze, before slipping shut with nebulous almost turgid insouciance. Those maws heaved and spewed mucous, murmuring obsequious and insane slobbering cries. The only solid thing he could see on those legs was the black, cloven hooves which were drenched in the leprous puss squishing out of each suppurating rent in its rubbery flesh.

Charles ran as fast as his legs allowed him.

The gray smear ahead of them took on structure and soon Charles was able to discern its shape. Rising a short distance into the sky it appeared to be an ordered collection of stone slabs each over a hundred paces in length on their long side and twenty paces on their short. These were layered together cross-ways to create a large stepped pyramid that rose at least fifty feet into the sky. It may have been higher but the gloom was too deep that far up for the rat to see clearly. Qan-af-årael guided them around to the right, one hand outstretched but never touching the stone.

The towering beast was now so close that Charles did stumble with every one of its steps. He could hear more than just that thunderclap of each hoof striking the ground and flattening the grass. Above the length of its legs where his eyes could not see he heard the yammering palpitations of its pitiless mouths and something more. It sounded like the sliding of fish-like blubber over one atop another as if the whole upper body were a writhing and shapeless mass. And it was a mass that Charles was thankful disappeared behind the stone pyramid as they raced around to the right side.

Qan-af-årael stopped abruptly halfway along the length of an otherwise unremarkable slab of stone. Charles felt an inchoate desire to plunge himself into the protected depths of stone, but a horrible vision of his substance trapped within only to be slobbered for aeons by profane tentacled evils slaughtered the nascent thought. The Åelf bent toward one section of the stone and extended his arms, fingers tracing invisible runes in the air as his eyes narrowed. Charles clutched to his robes like a frightened child to his mother as the beast began to move around the pyramid. His legs felt like jelly, and it was only the Sondeck that kept him from falling into a pile and quivering like a feral rat.

He gasped aloud when above them the gloom parted like a rent in fabric. The clouds broken asunder and the sparkling blue light of stars danced above, bringing with it a moon's illumination across the pyramid and the field of grass. Invisible before, runes of a particularly loathsome sort, suggestive of violence and blood, reflected that pale light all across the stone slabs in a profusion that scattered the remaining gloom for miles around.

Charles chanced a glance upward, stunned and blinded by the radiance, and then shrieked, shrinking in on himself with Metamor's curse to make himself a normal rat. His tunic, breeches, and cape grew loose as he shrank inch by inch away from the horror now revealed in full. Rising to a titanic height lost amidst the remaining clouds, the legs, a sickly pale hue, were joined to a writhing mass of tentacles each of which seemed to be fashioned from smaller interwoven tentacles. Now that it was leaning over them he could smell the charnal miasma of unearthed graves. Two of the tentacles slid down across the stones, leaving a trail of mucus, before pressing into the ground and withering the grass, sliding with a gasping, sucking sound toward them. Their width would pulverize them before smothering them in its grip. With luck they would be dead before they were squeezed to jelly and smeared into the gaping mouths drooling a chalky puss.

Insensible from fear, the rat shrank down as if he could make himself small enough to be of no notice. Another tentacle slithered its way down the pyramid of evil light, its tip, a corpuscular amalgamation of little mouths all opening and spluttering, aimed for them without err. A hand grasped Charles on the back and thrust him forward toward a yawning opening within the stone slab. A hideous gibbering peal erupted above them before the darkness swallowed them whole.

 

 

When the light returned to eyes and mind, Charles first felt a hand resting on his back. It was a long-fingered hand, large, gentle, and warm. He quivered beneath it, molars grinding and paws scratching at the ground, tail curled up around him as close as possible. There was cloth about him, some tough and some loose, wrinkled and bundled like heavy blankets. Beneath him the ground felt strong and unyielding; against this his claws, short but sharp, could do nothing.

The hand drew him back.

He blinked several times as the paralyzing anxiety faded. A sense of indignation settled in its place, focusing his nerves and his attention. His eyes focused on his prodigious snout and beyond to his thumbless paws and the piles of clothing bunched around him. His back arched as he huddled on his haunches with the tip of his tail beneath his nose. Not as small as a normal rat, but small enough that a hand could rest on his back and nearly span its length from tail root to neck.

Flush both with embarrassment and irritation at himself, he turned his head from side to side, sniffing the air and surprised to find no scent but those they carried with them. A limitless nothing shrouded everything in any direction he glanced, something so odd that it turned his eyes away as if they were lodestones. Beneath him and extending forward beyond any distance he could fathom was a gray path. The bridge.

No stones or wood were used to fashion this bridge. It was of a single piece, smooth and remarkable only in its perfection. In width he doubted if two men could walk side by side and with no rails guarding them from tumbling off the side he felt a disquieting vertigo whenever he looked more than a few feet ahead.

Charles lowered his snout back to his tail and paws and took a long deep breath. He felt no air rush into his lungs and yet felt neither pain nor panic at its absence. All that remained was his indignation at being so easily cowed, and a renewed determination to face the new horrors that awaited them on the other side of the bridge.

But first the rat had to recover his dignity. He willed himself to grow in size and return to the most human shape the Curses of Metamor allowed. His long tail slid behind him as short, squat legs stretched and pushed the rest of him upward in the midst of his tangled garments. Thumbs emerged from his paws, returning once more to clawed hands, as his snout dwindled in measure to return some semblance of human proportions to his eyes and face.

The hand and presence at his side backed away to give him room to right himself. In shrinking in size he had shrunk out of his clothes and now that he had returned to normal Charles found himself with only a single leg in his pants and both arms trapped within his tunic. His scouting cape nearly fell from the side of the bridge before Qan-af-årael put a soft boot in its middle. Charles fidgeted with his garments for a moment until he'd righted each, and then bent down to claim the cloak.

As on either side, there was nothing beneath the bridge. He swayed unsteadily for a moment as his eyes trained on the gray surface, only to feel a shiver race through him when he saw that it had no thickness. He stood upon a single scrap of paper in the midst of a barren abyss bereft of all sight, sound, and scent. He wished that he could see even a single star in the firmament, either above or below, but there was nothing.

Charles closed his eyes as he wrapped the cloak about his shoulders and fixed its clasp.

“Is it safe?” he asked in a whisper. His words did not echo, but they seemed louder than the thundering of that brobdingnagian horror hunting them across the plain. The tremble of a frightened squeak was discernible in his speech.

In comparison the Åelf's voice felt smooth and inoffensive, as suited to this emptiness as it was to the lofty forested towers of his ancient home. “It is safe for now. But we should not linger here long. The mistress of night did not know we were in her domain, nor does he who lives below know we are coming into his. The longer we stay here the sooner they will learn of us. Are you ready to continue, Charles?”

The rat nodded and pulled his cloak tight, fixing his eyes on the ancient one. Upon him he could gaze for an eternity and never lack for confidence. But with haste pressing upon them, he too felt pressed, turning and walking carefully along the gray bridge toward the other end.

The ground beneath him felt neither warm nor cold, and though it was as smooth as glass, he did not ever once feel his paw slip. He felt as if he were walking across immaculate snow and leaving no prints. Before him the bridge stretched as if to infinity, lost amidst the darkness which permitted no eye's inspection. He continued to step forward, one paw before the other, tail swaying ever so slightly from side to side though never off the path. Behind him he felt rather than saw Qan-af-årael's presence, ever there but allowing Charles to lead.

The bridge contracted as if the limitless expanse were nearing his grasp. He had a strange sensation of swelling to immense proportions as if he too had become a giant balancing upon the bridge by the tips of his toes. And then the bridge stopped and the world opened in a wash of light.

Charles stumbled as he left the bridge, finding himself in a bath of yellow brilliance and suspended a few feet from the ground. Into this ground he tumbled and groaned, shielding his eyes from the flood of light. He gasped and felt air return to his lungs, though it had a pungent quality, too sweet as to be febrile. Behind him he heard the Åelf land with more grace, but it took several seconds rubbing his eyes before he could open them.

He had walked from the deepest night into the noon day sun. Above them the sky was clear though jaundiced, with a brilliant sun that hovered far nearer than their own ever could. From this he averted his eyes, gazing around them and beneath them. All around he saw row upon row of plants: flowers of every shape and hue, bushes twisted and sculpted with devilish taint, short trees bearing fruit, nuts, and cones, and layered with mushrooms along their trunks. Everything was neatly cultivated and carefully planned.

A garden.

Charles rubbed his eyes a few more times as he stood up. They were standing on a path of tightly fit stones that ran straight in either direction. Beyond the line of trees he could see stone walls partitioning the room with glass canopies overhanging the trees. Additional panes could be added to enclose the entire area, but for the moment all was open to the sky.

Not just a garden, he realized, but a greenhouse.

He bent down to peer at a tall stemmed flower near the path when Qan-af-årael gripped his shoulder. “Do not touch them,” he advised in a quiet voice, barely above a whisper. “They will be poisoned in some way.”

“They look healthy,” Charles noted, even as he warily leaned away. The flower, lavender with nine soft petals framing a bulbous yellow head, was nothing he had ever seen before. Innocuous, but appealing to both eye and nose, it seemed to beckon him to come closer. His fingers yearned to rub the soft velvet of its petals, and his nose hungered to breathe its delicate aroma.

“The master of this place cultivates such life only to observe as his poisons and plagues make everything wither and die. This garden will kill anything that disturbs it until the day it is burned to the ground in readiness for his next experiment.”

Charles exhaled, feeling rather vulnerable. “Where is the bridge to the next realm?”

“I must first know this place a little better before I am certain. It is not here, and that is all I know of it at this moment. Choose a direction and we shall follow it. When I am certain I will guide you. But in any of these places we should not linger.”

The rat nodded and, eyes better if still smarting from the bright sun, glanced along the path. There did not appear to be any difference in going left or right, and so started walking in the direction the bridge had pointed. Though the flowers, both tall and petite, had been planted up to the edge of the stone path, he saw no weeds or creepers trying to work their way between the close-fitting stones. Nevertheless he walked in the middle of the path, keeping a wary eye out. For all he knew even the very air could be filled with a poison he had already consumed. But until he felt nausea or palsy he had to assume he'd been spared.

The room beyond was another garden in a similar state of upkeep. There was no sign of a gardener nor anything that moved. Charles was used to spotting rabbits or moles burrowing holes even in the Keep's well tended gardens. But here there was only the plants.

The path continued without turning or forking through three more rooms. Each room was a few hundred paces in length and each of them appeared to be one part of a vast greenhouse. There were a few clouds that drifted across the sky above but they always seemed to avoid the too large sun. And though the temperature never seemed to change, the foliage seemed to vary from the bloom of Spring through the vibrancy of Summer to the apex of Autumn. In one room he found brilliant purple, yellow, and cherry blossoms dotting the trees, the next was lush with broad green leaves, while a third glowed with bronze and crimson light. And despite the Åelf's warning, nothing in any of the chambers appeared to be deprived of the least vitality.

And then he came to another chamber and immediately put a hand over his shout. What had once been a lovely garden in the throes of Spring now was riddled with mildew and decay. Along either side of the path he could see wilting flowers, drooping bushes, and trees with sickly white growths pressing out through their bark. Leaves were corroded by veins of a bright, almost iridescent green fungus. Red pustules oozed from barren branches on all the bushes. The garden soil was littered with dead petals, leaves, and collapsed stems of flowers now shriveled and gooey. The air reeked with a rancid miasma that made the rat gag.

He stepped back out of the room, wrapped his cloak over his snout, and charged back in. Charles moved as quickly as he could without making any noise. He felt Qan-af-årael rushing along behind him but the ancient one was also preternaturally silent. The rooms that followed were no better, and in some cases worse than that first. The range of disease and putrefaction that choked the air and nauseated the eyes seemed to have no limit.

But eventually the path which had stretched forever before them reached a branch. Charles paused only long enough to glance in either direction before settling on the right fork. This led into a long stone hallway with several alcoves that seemed to break apart the air. With each division they passed the air grew fresher. After the seventh the rat felt comfortable lowering his cloak and taking a deep breath. He waited only a moment for the Åelf to do the same.

They stood in the passage enjoying the fresh air for a few seconds before the rat asked in a low voice, “Do you know where the bridge is?” Though nothing here sought to gorge on their flesh at least in Lilith's realm he had not been afraid to breath or touch anything.

Qan-af-årael closed his eyes and made a stilling gesture with one hand. His long fingers seemed to be lifted by some other agency as he concentrated. Charles rocked from one paw to another as he waited.

“It does not seem far away,” the Åelf said after nearly a minute of silent contemplation. The rat cast furtive glances in either direction, though it was impossible to see beyond the next fork in the hall. His ears strained for any sound but nothing came, not even the brush of wind across his whiskers. “Follow the right path ahead. But be careful. We are leaving the gardens behind.”

Charles was not sure what he expected to find down the right path but certainly not what greeted them at the end of another long series of alcove chambers. The passage opened up into an even larger space than had been set aside for each of the gardens. The stone walls spread out in a perfect rectangle to three times the distance in each direction. The stone path branched at regular intervals around deep pits fashioned from the same stone. Little baubles were affixed to iron posts above each though Charles could not divine their purpose. Coming from each was the stink of animal flesh.

Unable to resist, Charles peered over the nearest pit. The walls dropped fifteen feet to a flat bottom that sloped down to each side. In one corner he saw a rancid pool of water, and in the opposite corner a puddle of urine and droppings. Sprawled on all fours in the middle was a small mare. Her hide was falling off in patches and misshapen lumps pressed against several of her ribs and legs. Blotchy pustules smeared beneath her soulless eyes and a yellow froth trickled from between her shriveled lips. One eye roved in the unmoving head to find the rat up above and then she stared at him uncaring.

Charles stepped back and dug his claws into his palms. “What is this place?” His eyes stole across the many pits within the large room. He lost count after thirty and wasn't even half way done.

“Quiet,” Qan-af-årael cautioned, tapping his arm and motioning him to step back. His eyes fixed upon something in the distance. Charles did not waste time trying to see what; a rat's eyes would never compare at distances. They retreated to one corner where they could hide behind pits whose walls were just tall enough to conceal them. Crouching low, they waited for several seconds before they heard the sound of footsteps from the other end.

Charles sucked in his breath and held it. He strained his ears, one hand spread across his chest to keep the pounding of his heart from echoing against his ribs. There were a pair of creatures to judge from the disjointed steps. A part of him yearned to peer around the side of the wall but the rest of him remembered the diseased horse and the decaying gardens. A flash of madness from that thing on the plain stilled whatever nascent desire to sate his curiosity remained. He quivered, whiskers trembling, and hoped he would never see them.

Their pace was slow. They would take a dozen steps, and then they would stop for a long time before taking another twelve steps. He could hear some faint clicking sounds as of crickets chirping. Charles swallowed and fought to keep from gasping when he realized it was the two creatures who made that noise.

At first he tried to count the number of times that they stopped but after seven he stopped caring. Their path through the room seemed methodical and systematic. They swept from left to right along a single row, and then right to left along the next. Their clicks would grow closer and more irritated, and then they would recede and their hateful speech would leave his ears.

Above them the sun remained in its place. Charles bristled beneath its constant and now sweltering rays. He itched all along his back and down his legs. His muscles strained from his crouched position. He leaned ever slightly against the wall of the pit and wished he hadn't. Though pleasantly cool to the touch, there was also a thin film coating it. As quietly as he could he rubbed his fingers clean on his cloak, flexing them and hoping he would still find flesh there when he was finished.

His head sprang upward at the sound of terrified screaming. Somewhere in one of the pits in the center of the chamber they had a human captive. Charles stuffed the edge of his cloak between his incisors and gnawed to keep silent. The scream rose in pitch for a moment before dying off only to start again after a gasp of breath. The clicking, chirping insect speech continued as if this were no more a remarkable occasion than a cloud drifting across the sky.

Qan-af-årael set one hand on the rat's shoulders as he quivered, tail thumping back and forth against Åelven boots. He reached around his free arm and grabbed his tail and clutched it tightly to his chest as his incisors tore a hole into his cloak.

The screaming continued with its rise and fall for several unbearable minutes. And then it turned into a shriek before falling completely silent. The clicking voices carried an air of self-satisfaction that made Charles bite a second hole in his cloak. And then, as if nothing else had happened, they continued on their way inspecting the other pits. A faint moaning echo followed them but even that died away shortly after the insect-things finished their next victim.

Charles was able to regain control of his breathing, but the wait was excruciating. Surely they could sneak along the exterior wall while the creatures were investigating a pit on the far side. He half turned his head to the Åelf to suggest this when another scream erupted from their next pit. Only this one was blended with the howling whine of a dog. Neither man nor beast it was another Keeper.

He bit into his cloak once more and shifted his stance, leveling up his head to peer just past the wall. A good fifty paces away he saw them. They were vaguely man-shaped, but even in a dark corridor without a single candle to light the way it was clear that they anything but men. Eight spindly arms stretched from either side of their bright green torso, each ending in a pair of black claws, and with these they manipulated various instruments both long and spectral. Their heads were those of crickets with huge compound eyes, waggling antennae, and gyrating mandibles.

The rat saw no more than that before Qan-af-årael pulled him back down. The Åelf pushed him downward and leaned over, pressing their foreheads together as before.

Be careful, Charles. We do not want to be seen.

That's a Keeper they're torturing!

I know. But listen to what they say.

Listen, how?

Even as he thought the question, the various clicks and chirps that could be heard even through the Keeper's howling anguish suddenly seemed full of words. And not just single words, but entire sentences laid atop one another like quilts on a bed. The words felt clipped and precise, offered each as an assessment bereft of emotional touch. Cold and uncaring, they betrayed a detached inhumanity that was in some ways worse than the clicks or their appearance.

The progression of the disease has not affected the projection of the subject's larynx. The subject displays control over volume but can no longer produce discernible sounds.

The collapse and failure of the lungs will proceed once all tone has been lost. Notice the manner in which the subject attempts to crawl. The distinct limp in its rear left limb indicates a possible source of necrosis. A sample will be necessary to be certain.

I concur, a sample will be necessary to be certain.

Before we proceed with the sample, notice the slight protuberance on the subject's back above the tail. It has attempted to hide this from us by turning away from us, but a spasm of pain followed the application of pressure to the hips. Observe.

The Keeper howled in renewed grief, a pitch that made Charles tighten his eyes.

The protuberance is quite real. I suspect that it indicates a new direction for the disease. Normally such growths would appear on the rib cage first. Could there be an abnormality in the subject's biology that would produce such anomalous behavior?

We will require a sample to be certain, and a thorough test of the chest area to ensure that no protuberances aren't hidden by the coat of fur. The best indication will be the rictus of pain and howl we witnessed a moment ago when the tumor on the back was distended.

Let us proceed then with haste.

Charles found his paw wrapping about his Sondeshike. The cool metal felt good in his palm, and the coursing of power between flesh and weapon invigorated him. He trembled beneath Qan-af-årael's arms, eager to break theirs.

The screams continued, sometimes muted and tired, other times refreshed and with such an exquisite peal that the rat began to weep in frustration.

The advance of the disease has entered into the rib cage. The reaction of the subject indicates several areas of intense localized pain which can only be caused by the growth of tumors from within the marrow of each rib. I postulate that at our next observation they will have fully developed and the subject will be incapable of touching its chest without crippling agony.

We will need to be certain because the infestation of the ribs cannot proceed without the concomitant consumption of the lungs.

Agreed. A regenerative will be required in order to check certain advances of the disease so that these new developments can be more fully explored. Administer oral regenerative but isolate the area of the back where we observed the anomalous protuberance.

Charles finally quivered enough to break his connection with the Åelf. “Enough!” he hissed through the holes he'd chewed in his cloak.

No sooner was the word out of his muzzle came his regret. For the clicking and chirping stopped and the footfalls, bizarrely common and human-sounding, resumed, but with greater urgency and in their direction. Charles glanced at the Åelf but Qan-af-årael only appeared more determined, his normally peaceful countenance radiating both a calm assurance and a bitter resolution. Charles tightened his grip on his Sondeshike while looking to see if there was anywhere they could flee. The last place he wanted to begin a fight against strange enemies was in a corner.

As the almost rhythmic clicking and footfalls grew closer, Charles realized that they were more in front of him than to their left. And so he slipped out from beneath the Åelf's touch and crept around behind the wall toward the left. His steps made no noise, even as his tail uncurled from his lap and his cloak fell from his jaws. And though he feared these beasts could hear things beyond his ears, they did not seem to change direction.

Qan-af-årael followed behind him. Charles paused at the edge of the wall for only a moment before dashing across the open space toward the next pit and protective wall. The clicking-things turned as one toward him and moved with greater intensity. Charles chanced a look behind him and saw his Åelf protector remaining behind, long-fingered hands crafting something invisible between them.

If Charles was to be distraction, then he would distract.

The rat leaped up into the air, unleashing his Sondeshike to its full length, and striking the tip against the wall. He expected a shattering of stone. All he received was a small blossom of sparks and a resounding, but hollow-sounding, thunk as of a child striking the stone of a wall with a bar of pot-metal. The insect creatures turned toward him, stretching out all eight of their limbs and waving their mandibles. At twenty paces distant, he saw that they were easily twice his height and more, whose long legs were actually jointed backward at such an angle that if they stood up straight they would have gained another eight feet in height. A swollen, greasy yellow abdomen hung between those legs, the end of which oozed a puss-white miasma that trailed along behind them, drying into the floor like wax.

The creatures paused for one moment when they saw him before bending their legs down further and leaping into the air with the unexpected, and startling, speed of fleas leaping from a hound. Charles dove to the side, rolling quickly with all the speed of the Sondeckis, and slashed up and back, where the monstrosities would come down, as he tumbled expertly to his paws. The insects crunched into the ground only a few feet behind him and the deadly steel of his Sondeshike whacked hollowly when one of the insects batted his swing aside with one of its arms. Spittle from the frothing mandibles stung his face as it hove over him, a breaker towering over the shore a moment before falling in a crush of water and foam.

Charles dashed further into the room between two of the pits. He half turned and began spinning the Sondeshike hand over hand so it would form an impenetrable disk. Keeping that at his side while he ran caused his steps to turn inward, but he had no time to fret as the monsters leaped again. One landed directly ahead of him and the rat bounced off the bulbous abdomen, the Sondeshike clattering from his hands. The steel did not ring with the bell-like purity Charles knew; it rattled as if it were a bar of mere tin, skittering to rest against the lip of a pit nearby. He felt sharp claws grasp his arms, shoulders, sides, and legs, lifting him into the air. He struggled and lashed with his tail but no other limb could he move.

He screamed as the insect-thing lifted him toward its mandibles. But the jagged saw-toothed face did not grasp him. Rather the long antennae brushed across his face and chest, sending a shiver racing through his flesh and fur. Charles screamed louder, throat raw in moments from both anger and fear.

The other insect ran its limbs across his pants and cloak, rending with care and precision, never once biting into the flesh beneath. Charles gasped, yanked, tugged at each of his limbs and swung his tail from side to side, trying anything to get himself from their grasp. Even his Sondeck availed him nothing in the monstrous grip of the gardeners. Their obsidian hexagonal eyes glimmered with the satisfaction of having a new subject on which to perform their grisly contamination.

And then a child's voice cried in the distance and a blaze of light seared through the head of the insect slicing him free of his garments. A putrid green ichor gushed through the vertical gap indenting the middle of its head. The eight limbs shook, all their strength gone, before the body collapsed into a heap, toppling into the nearest pit. A forlorn, bovine low sounded briefly from below before a heavy crunch and wet splatter brought it to a final end.

The other insect held onto Charles with four of its limbs, one each on his wrists and ankles which he pulled until his shoulders and hips lanced with pain. With its four other limbs it began drawing out spectral objects that glimmered with power. They seemed a mix of sickle and sword, and with these it slashed and deflected bolts of energy erupting from the opposite side of the chamber. Charles could barely see any of it as his snout was pressed into the chitinous armor of its thorax. He gagged on the scent of filth and putrefaction that lathered its iridescent green armor.

Just as he was certain his limbs would all be dislocated, Charles turned his ears at the sound of a fiery scream. He felt a rush of heat against his arms, legs and tail, and then all of the beast's limbs went limp. Charles collapsed on the ground and rolled out of the way as the monstrous insect crumpled, a blue fire consuming it from behind. The abdomen erupted in a fountain of molten sinew before its entire form caved inward and smoldered a foul smelling smoke.

Charles grabbed his Sondeshike from where it had fallen and felt intense relief that neither he nor it had been touched by the mucus lathering both insects. His trousers were a ruin with one leg cut off just above his knee and the other cut into strips halfway up his thighs. The cloak was in better shape, but the corners had both been cleaved through, leaving it open at his paws unless he crouched. He swept up what pieces he could in one arm, and then looked around the chamber for the Åelf and whoever else had come to his aid.

Qan-af-årael still had a blue nimbus around his arms as he stepped out from their hiding place, a look of damaged serenity present in his eyes. A faint smile touched his angular cheeks when he saw that Charles stood, and then they looked past him toward the other end of the chamber.

Following his gaze, Charles stared in both relief and amazement at a group of six men and a single boy checking in each of the pits as they moved through the chamber. They wore scraps of clothes no larger than the pieces Charles grasped in one hand except for the boy who was garbed in pleasant but plain raiment adjusted for his small stature. He felt a strange awe when he recognized the boy.

“Wessex!” He called, his voice hollow after his screams.

The boy looked at him and nodded, but waved a hand to bid him wait. At the urging of two of the other men leaning over one of the pits, Wessex rushed over, drew arcane symbols in the air, and concentrated, lifting his arms up over his head. Charles marveled as up from the pit floated an old woman riddled with vicious red sores and black shriveled hands and feet. Her hair, white and scraggly, looked smeared with excrement. She was naked and for this the men averted their gaze while they gently grasped her arms and eased her weightless body to the floor.

Wessex and one of the other men bent over her and whispered little incantations. A white glow proceeded from their hands that settled across the woman's flesh. The boils and pustules whitened and sealed, disappearing into whole flesh. The black necrosis in her hands and feet faded, the skin and sinew taking on life again. Even her age seemed to retreat as if it had been a foul air cast out by a billowing wind. Charles gaped in wonder, and then approached, offering the scraps of cloth cut free from his pants and cloak.

One of the men, a youth of no more than nineteen, smiled and took the cloths from him, gently tying them across the woman to give her some modesty back. Wessex and the other healer continued their work for a moment more before turning to another pit from which one of their number beckoned. Charles reached out and grasped the boy on the shoulder. “Wessex! It's me! Charles Matthias.”

Wessex looked up the short distance to him and smiled. Though his body was ten years in appearance, he was still very short for those years. “I know it is you, Charles. But we have to rescue as many as we can from this place before other gardeners come. Or worse, the master himself.” The boy's eyes narrowed and he added, before shaking off the rat's hand. “You should not be here. I can see you still live. What they would have done to you... you dare not imagine. Stay and help us if you will, but please do not hinder us.”

Charles nodded and followed after the boy. Qan-af-årael walked toward them though kept at a subtle distance. In this pit they found an older man with black pustules protruding from his body. He lay naked, curled into a ball weeping, though Charles could hear nothing of what transpired in the pit. But once Wessex and his companion had levitated him past the opening the choked cries and whimpering filled his ears and heart.

“Do not touch him,” Wessex cautioned with a glance at the rat. “The sickness they torture him with spreads easily. Give us a moment to heal it.”

Wessex and the other healer bent over the quivering, suffering man and began their incantations. Charles stepped back several paces, blinked, and then moved down along the pits, glancing into each to see if he could find the other Keeper. Most of them just contained animals of various sizes, with horses and cows being the largest, to sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs as the smallest. He saw only a couple of other humans and past these he ran with a sickness in his heart after making sure one of the other human rescuers noticed him pointing them out.

Despite his best efforts, running from pit to pit, he could not find the Keeper he'd heard. Charles swore under his breath as he turned away from yet another pustule-laden sheep and then almost ran snout first into Qan-af-årael's chest. He gasped and bowed his head in apology. When he looked back up at the Åelf, he noticed a warning in his golden eyes. “We cannot linger here any longer. Something is coming.”

Charles blinked and lifted his ears. He heard nothing other than Wessex and the other healer. “But there are so many who need help here.”

“Not even your friend can save them all. Look how many they are and how desperate. If you wish to pass through this place without becoming one of its victims, you must not linger any longer. You have helped save one, but you cannot save any more.”

“He's right,” Wessex announced as he climbed to his feet. The older man crumpled on the floor was free of his sores and taking short, shallow breaths as he flexed his muscles. The other healer wrapped one of the last of Charles' scraps across his waist to give him the dignity of a loincloth. “Something is coming. One of the chief gardeners. None of us can be here when it arrives. We have only minutes.” He narrowed his eyes and stared at Qan-af-årael. “I do not know how you know these things. You don't belong here either.”

“I am guarding and guiding Charles. He is the reason we are here.”

Charles grimaced. “My son was taken from me and I'm here to find him and bring him back if I can. If not, then I am here to say goodbye. Either way, I must find him. He is Beyond, which means we need to find the bridge to the next realm.”

Wessex shook his head. “I do not know what you mean by bridge or next realm. Beyond... the gardeners are very cautious to deny anyone that surcease. They will keep you at the point of death for thousands of years if they can. As if years mean anything here.” He turned to his companions and waved them closer. “We have to leave now. Tell any you see on our way that we are sorry and will be back for them soon. Let us take these two to safety.”

Wessex wasted no more words, and none of his companions offered them anything other than a hard glance. Charles and Qan-af-årael fell in behind them as they headed back the way they'd come. Charles turned his ears at a faint whumping sound coming from the other direction. The chief gardener? He shuddered and kept walking.

They reentered the stone passage and continued down the other fork. It turned to the right before opening out on another chamber. This was filled with small cages stacked one atop the other. Little creatures like mice, moles, rats, and birds were housed therein each in a state of distress; only a few showed interest in them. Through this chamber they passed unmolested and came to another similar chamber but with larger cages, this filled with animals more the size of cats and ferrets as well as many more that he did not recognize.

After two more similar rooms they came to one with more pits. But these pits were thirty or forty paces across and housed very large animals. Charles felt his heart stabbed over and over as he saw the sufferings of elephants, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and even large reptiles like alligators, pythons, and fantastic shapes he didn't even recognize.

At the center of the room Qan-af-årael put a hand on Charles' shoulder and bid him stop. The rat let out a sudden squeak and chided himself for letting his anxiety get the better of him. Wessex turned as well, brow furrowed in a very child-like way. “We cannot stop here,” he hissed between his teeth.

“The bridge lies that way,” Qan-af-årael gestured to a passage leading off from the right. “I can feel it now.”

Wessex followed his arm and sucked in his breath. One of the other men with him made some sign to ward off evil. “That path leads toward the master's gardens. It is very dangerous. Few of us ever escape there.”

“It is where I must go,” Charles said with a sigh. “I am glad to see you are... faring well, Wessex.”

“As well as the souls of the dead can fare, you mean?” The boy snorted, but a real smile emerged on his lips. “Thank you, Charles. I'm sorry we did not always get along, but...” He shook his head and rubbed his hands together. “Just one question I have before you go. How are Jessica and my other students?”

“Jessica is married to Weyden and very, very happy. Your other students are all learning well enough at the guild from what I hear. But Jessica, she speaks of you from time to time. If they have a son she wants to name him after you. You were like a father to her.”

“And she a daughter to me,” Wessex replied, his smile warm and deeper than any child could profess. “Thank you, Charles. May your Eli protect you in all the dark places you must walk.”

Charles put a paw on Wessex's shoulder and then the two of them embraced. “Thank you,Wessex. Rescue every one you can. I will tell Jessica that you are well.”

“Do not let her come after me,” Wessex cautioned sternly. “I am dead and this is where I must serve. Good bye, Charles.”

“Good bye, Wessex.”

Gently, Qan-af-årael turned Charles away from the others and guided him toward the portal on the right through which they would find the bridge. Charles turned his head slightly to watch Wessex and his companions help the woman and old man on their path. He hoped they'd find their safety.

Beyond the portal was another short corridor of stone followed by another series of large pits in which languished beasts of remarkable size and girth. Charles averted his eyes from each pit and from each cage, but the suffering seemed to exude from each. He could hear no cries, but each step tore at his heart, calling to his eyes, summoning him to the edge to peer over and know misery. He stumbled as he walked, drawn against his will to sate a morbid curiosity that balked at understanding.

How could anyone be so cruel to everything that had life?

The deep silence was penetrated only by the soft crush of stone beneath his paws and Qan-af-årael's gentle boots. The pits slipped past them like empty boats at a dock, miserable from rain and fog. Charles tightened his grip on his Sondeshike and finally stepped toward one, the effervescent touch of the Åelf's fingers at his shoulder bidding him come back. He slipped beneath his protector's grasp and peered down into the pit and ground his teeth together, hissing in sudden fury.

The pits in the chamber were large as if they were meant to contain an elephant or young dragon. Instead what he found was a small series of chambers separated only by different sorts of walls, some stone, others clay, and some wood, in each of which trembled a naked human. Three of the humans were covered with pustules bleeding a greenish ooze, with the old man in the corner also bleeding out of his nose and blinking rheumy, yellow eyes up at the rat. The other three did not appear to have succumbed to the sickness yet but they were chained to the ground so tightly that any motion caused them to bleed around their bonds.

Charles met the old man's gaze and shuddered when he saw the man's lips moving. Rotted teeth, blackened and loose hid just behind his lips. He tried to speak, but the enchantments placed over the pit prevented any sound, any glimmer of the words from reaching the rat's ears.

The rat lashed his tail back and forth and glowered. “We have to do something!” he hissed with a glance back at the Åelf.

“There is nothing you can do. Come,” Qan-af-årael beckoned with an outstretched hand. “This is the task of those who dwell here. You can do nothing.”

Charles seethed and peered back into the pit. The old man was bleeding from his ears as well as his nose. Horrified, he could only watch as the flesh of the old man's head ruptured in place after place, collapsing and then expanding as if some great pump were operating within. Blood trickled down out of his eyes, as the rictus of pain stitched itself across his cheeks and cracking his lips. It could have been only seconds that the rat watched but it felt as if hours drained past while the man's entire body fell apart. And yet, even as his flesh sundered, sloughing off like snow sliding from a roof, the life never seemed to leave his eyes. Blood-streaked and yellow from jaundice, nevertheless, a faint spark of life remained therein even as they dangled from his eyes sockets and bounced against the rotten flesh collapsing beneath.

Overwhelmed by nausea, and unable to look at the other victims, Charles flung himself to the stone path, one paw over his snout, the other against his belly willing everything within to stay there. His stomach protested, heaving, even as he clenched tight his throat and eyes. Something touched him softly between his ears and he felt a warmth fill him. The heaving subsided, and his nausea passed. His heart stilled and beat at a steady, unhurried pace.

He opened his eyes and stared into the pearl gray-skinned and golden eyed face of Qan-af-årael. There was an assurance there, a confidence that called to him, beckoned him to belief. Here was one in whom he could place his trust. Here was one in whom he would always find rest.

“When you are ready.” The words were warm silk and as satisfying as a long drought of cool milk. Charles nodded and climbed to his paws, averting his eyes from the pit, focusing instead upon the Åelf. He kept one hand wrapped about his Sondeshike, but otherwise looked only at his protector and guide, walking at his side and doing his best to ignore all else.

They made their way through several more rooms filled with larger and more complicated pits. No longer did they just reside beneath them, but seemed to tunnel around in a vast burrow network like a gigantic colony into which the lord of this realm poured his infectious experiments. Twice they were forced to wait and hide while pairs of Gardeners checked on the victims, but both times they were fortunate not to be noticed by the monstrous insects.

Their fortune could not continue forever. In the granite passageway between rooms Qan-af-årael turned to him with a brow faintly furrowed with concern and whispered, “The Bridge is in the next chamber. So is this realm's master.”

Charles grimaced and nodded, trying not to let his friend see the fear clenching in his heart. How could they evade the author of the tortures and disease riddling this place? The rat steeled himself and rolled the Sondeshike back and forth in his hand, short claws tapping the brass ferrules at each end. His snout fixed in a moue. His tail curled at his ankles and his toe claws dug into the stone beneath them. But even though he tensed for a conflict beyond his reckoning, the Åelf remained calm, radiating a sense of peace and stillness as of an ageless forest or a vast sea.

The passage widened as they continued and opened above them to the bitter sun much larger in the sky as if it were plummeting to the earth. A wide arched doorway stood open, and beyond a room fashioned from dark stone, and arranged in three tiers. The lowest tier had a pit of indeterminate size in its middle with sloping walls down to a small puddle of putrid brown water framed by blooms of yellow mushrooms with oozing phosphorescent caps. At either side of the pit waited two of the Gardeners, their green chitinous armor vaguely dimmed despite the blazing sun. Their faces were turned downward into the pit, and their antennae stilled as if they too were quiescent until beckoned.

The second tier rose up a horse's height from the first, and across this stretched a small garden replete with wilting flowers, drooping vines, stumpy trees riddled with blight, and a fungal bloom infesting every inch as if it were the ground from which all else sprang. Along either wall at the side of the second tier were cabinets filled with bottles and beakers and all other sorts of containers brimming with liquids, stews, and other concoctions of every hue and consistency. Though each were sealed and through the otherwise overwhelming stench of decay a miasma of chemical pungency jabbed at the inside of his nostrils.

But what he saw above this filled him with a terror beyond any horror of the nightmare forest that had driven him nearly to beasthood. The topmost tier was lined with shelves of what appeared to be books each with bindings wider than the rat was tall. These rose upward in stacks that stretched beyond his sight. A vast desk fashioned from bones from humans and animals surmounted the tier, stretching at least twenty feet wide and over six feet in height. Some of the skulls could have been those of Keepers, but it was impossible to tell if they were truly his kin or mere beasts. A few were still coated in rotting flesh and all of them were discolored yellow or purple to varying degrees; not a one of them had been polished white.

Sitting at the desk and writing with a quill pen, the strands of feather shriveled, was a tall emaciated man with pale skin garbed in a voluminous brown robe. His expression was cold and detached, dour without appearing hostile or contemptuous. His eyes were sunken so deep in his skull that Charles could not see their color or even if they had color at all. He had no hair anywhere that the rat could see. The pale dome of his head seemed blotchy but he could discern no imperfection; pasty and white it seemed an affectation rather than something natural. His entire form shimmered with a febrile sheen of a yellowish green mucus. Charles felt as if stricken with palsy at the mere glimpse of him.

He did not lift his head from what he wrote, but his voice coursed through the room, echoed off the walls, and enclosed them as if they had been grasped by a fist. “It is fitting that a mortal rat would peruse my work. You are untouched by the variety of my experiments though I am not unaware of your escape from my nurses. I am always keenly interested in the progression of disease through mortal kind and the effect it has on your physical well-being, but also the deterioration it causes in your mental and spiritual health. Your presence here provides a most advantageous opportunity. Though I am certain you are unaware of the necessity of control subjects in any experiment, allow me to expound on the importunity of your arrival in my demesnes and my intentions for your ultimate disposition.

“But first you must pardon my inattention as the chronicles of my work occupy my hands for but a moment more. I am confident that you will not proffer any argument at my necessary delay.”

The two gardeners – 'nurses' as Tallakath had called them – turned toward them both but made no move to intercept them. The reverberating echo of the daedra lord's voice held Charles immobile more firmly than the insects could even with all of their limbs. An iciness crept up his legs and his grip on the Sondeshike faltered. Out of the corner of his eye Charles could see the edges of Qan-af-årael's lips moving though no sound escaped his tongue.

After a few seconds more the daedra lowered the quill and folded his hands over the volume in such a way that despite the angle Charles could see them clearly. His fingers were long and bony, the nails a discolored yellow at their tips, but otherwise perfectly manicured. The flesh covering his bones appeared cold as if he himself possessed no life. And yet the daedra's words, firm and unyielding, returned with an icy grip that clenched deep into his heart. Charles felt certain this being could snuff his life with an errant blink.

Tallakath studied him for only a moment, seeming to pay no heed to the Åelf at his side. “Your method of travel into my demesnes is of no interest to me nor is your intention to leave. In any event that is no longer possible. Very shortly I will provide you with a place that you will remain so that you can offer an invaluable service to the pursuit of knowledge I am undertaking and which occupies my time. It is the work of generations and aeons but it is work of inestimable value and numerous applications.”

Charles had an image of himself, fully disrobed and cast into one of the stone pits he'd witnessed, shivering in the bitter cold shade, and blistering in the unforgiving fire of the sun. And all the while suffering from the terrible consumption of disease as something devoured his flesh and riddled him with endless agony. All to satisfy this daedra's curiosity and nothing more. He would become a data point in one of those volumes, a curiosity dictating further experiments to be unleashed on his brethren in Metamor at the first opportunity.

Tallakath's lips did not even offer him the suggestion of a cruel smile. “But before that you can assist me in expanding the wealth of knowledge concerning the mental anguish that accrues to mortal-kind when witness to suffering. You have seen many in this place who are in various stages of disease, consumption, and degradation. As a mortal you are naturally equipped with a degree of empathy that allows you to vicariously share in the sufferings of others; I noted this while you witnessed my nurses at their tasks. I am keenly interested in sampling that voyeuristic pain. Please, in detail and with complete honesty, provide for me an account of the anguish you experienced in your soul.” Bony shoulders rose and fell negligently beneath his robes. “Also, quickened by a live, beating heart and flesh, you offer a rare opportunity to examine the effects of my research. I have long sought to understand how the illnesses I initiate here can be transferred to a living host, which requires a living host – such as yourself.” He tapped the ragged end of the quill pen against his lips as if in thought. “And that will allow me to sicken, and remove, a tool of my sister by which you came into this realm. The Dreamers have long thwarted my nurses when they seek to find mortals wandering her realm to aid in my work.”

The icy grip that heretofore rooted him in place seemed to withdraw from him. Charles blinked several times as he tried to understand how that could be and what he was being asked to do. The Gardeners with their multifaceted eyes, glimmering black like diseased fish eggs, stepped closer, rubbing their arms against one another in a discordant hum. Qan-af-årael did not move apart from his lips which framed soundless words. The rat took a deep breath and stood as tall as he could. One paw traced the sign of the Yew and with a defiant stammer he said, “You will learn nothing from me! I deny you, and in Eli's name I confound you!”

The ancient scientist scoffed with a lazy chuckle. “Your contumacious reply is hardly unexpected.” Tallakath waved one hand before resting it back on its twin. “Nor is it entirely as uninformative as you have no doubt intended it to be. By demonstrating a degree of resistance you also demonstrate that the suffering you have witnessed during your journey has not caused a level of anguish requisite to inducing compliance. However, it does imply that the suffering you have seen has wounded you. You are affronted by it; your personal sense of justice has been violated by it. What anguish you did experience has hardened you to a degree so that in some aspects you are no longer concerned for your physical well-being. Yet as you did not come to this chamber to challenge me under the misguided assumption that you could bring what transpires in my demesnes to an end it is clear to me that you have not been disturbed to the point of seeking to right a perceived a wrong. This leads to one of three possibilities regarding the initial state of your character which will provide the necessary baseline for my subsequent analysis. Either you are a callous individual for whom the sufferings of others provides only a minor degree of discomfort, or you have hardened yourself against the sufferings of others in order to accomplish some other goal which is more important to you than the well-being of your fellow kind, or lastly you have hidden away your empathic reactions in order to avoid the emotional instability engendered by them for the purpose of escaping this place.

“The interesting question at this time is which of these three will be the true response you will choose. In order to discern that it is necessary to continue my experiments. Now that I have you within my presence I am capable of directly noting your reactions to various stimuli. Given what I know of your travels through my demesnes the first possibility, that of a callous spirit bereft of all but a meager empathy appears the least likely and so unless your reactions indicate otherwise we can dismiss this for the moment and focus instead on gauging whether you have steeled yourself or hidden yourself in the face of suffering.”

Charles flicked wide his Sondeshike, and began twirling it over and over in his paws. What else did he have left but bravado? If not this he truly should be a rat in mind and body. “If you don't want two more of your gardeners to die you'll keep them away from us both. I warn you I will not hold back if you do not.”

The emaciated figure picked up his quill and jotted something in the volume resting upon the desk of bone. “An intriguing reaction. I have not yet provided any stimuli of suffering to gauge your internal state and yet you react with hostility. A curious reaction given that at present I am not interested in bringing you to any physical harm.” His fingers splayed toward the insectile servitors, “I am worried not of their fate, I have more. As I previously noted I am interested in your reactions as a control subject at this time. Your experiences will expand the horizons of knowledge and contribute to our understanding of the human spirit and enable me to expand my work more directly through your somnolent flesh while it is still quickened with Life. While I can glean the truth from anything you say and any reaction you provide, it is simpler if you would convey your internal state without useless posturing or threats you lack the ability to consummate.”

Charles kept spinning his Sondeshike, focusing all of his fearful trembling into his tail to keep it from his snout. His whiskers twitched anyway as the Gardeners shifted back and forth, their mandibles rubbing over one another and dripping.

Tallakath's musings continued as if silence were unnatural for him; and yet, though his voice enclosed them in the room and drove out all thoughts from their minds, it never raised above a conversational din, nor seemed emotional in any way. Cool, detached, and without empathy, it chilled the rat's limbs anew. “Perhaps it may help ease the transmission of your valuable data if I were to describe my intended experiment once I no longer have need of you as a control subject. The souls which I usually have at my disposal react somewhat differently to the various contagions I prepare for use on the mortal plane than a mortal such as yourself would. They are not capable of death as you are, merely of being drained of all useful essence. Your ability to die – your living flesh, to be precise, as I will retain the spirit wrestled from it – provides a valuable data point in my studies, as well the progress of that contagion through the mortal realm you have created such a convenient bridge to by coming here, to my very workroom. By allowing a disease to run its course very near to completion in you I will be able to better determine the final stages of the disease's development before expiration. And if I am careful enough in the application of restorative measures I will be able to obtain valuable data on the progression of not just one but many different diseases, and perhaps even begin to understand the interplay of multiple active diseases in your system. The fact that your human physiognomy has been supplemented with that of a rodent will not be an impediment to my investigations as there is a great deal of similarity between the two. The points of convergence far outweigh those that diverge; there will be little issue of your rodent nature compromising the value of any data I obtain.

“Do you have any thoughts on my proposal? As the host for the development of pathogens I am keenly interested in understanding your perspective on the experience and not just the physiological changes that will naturally occur during the course of any disease's progression. Please, be honest in your appraisal.”

With each question the lord of pestilence seemed to withdraw his hold on the rat. He could take him and break him at any time and he wanted Charles to know it. Knowing it might be his last moment, Charles snorted, casting a quick furtive glance at the Åelf whose eyes had narrowed to slits. His pearl-gray body seemed rigid yet soft, as if it were waiting. His gaze pierced the edge of the pit toward the brown pool below.

He turned back to the daedra lord and spun his Sondeshike faster. “You like to hear yourself talk don't you? Well keep talking if you wish! You will learn nothing from me, nor through me!” With a lift of the spinning shaft he struck downward, ringing the ferrules upon the stone at his feet with a scintillating bell-like note that reverberated in his ears even as the shaft continued it humming revolutions. “The only words you will have from me are contempt!”

“Your intransigence is not unexpected,” Tallakath replied without any change in emotion. Despite Charles' bravado, he felt a terrible weight in the daedra's words, one wearing heavily on his soul. He could not help but remember all of the people and beasts he had seen in the pits, left to wallow in their own excrement and covered with sores of such excruciating pain that to even move was to invite mind-rending agony. “Seeing as revealing my intentions for you has not secured your cooperation I will proceed with my original intent of determining a baseline for your spiritual and mental health.”

He made no motion. From his place behind the desk of skulls and bones the lord of pestilence and plague vanished, to appear on the second tier in that same moment. He had in one hand a long, thin blade the likes of which Charles had seen in a healer's hands, only longer and larger, intended to harm rather than heal. In the other was a carved human leg bone inscribed with green script of no language Charles knew. “There are certain elements of both physical contagion and magical inducement I will demonstrate that I might elicit a response to indicate your current state. Your guardian has prepared while my attention was focused but I cannot allow its work to be completed, nor its spirit to persist though it can offer me no insights.” Tallakath's wrist flicked toward Qan-af-årael, the edge of the blade in his grasp gleaming a pestilent hue. “It will be eliminated, for it can no longer protect you, mortal.”

The Gardeners advanced on Qan-af-årael who remained where he stood for only a second more. His voice was quiet but sure, and with simple assurance murmured, “It is done.” He spread his arms wide and a fiery blue light erupted from both palms to bathe the Gardeners. Chittering screams erupted from both as their armor seared away, arms flailing and abdomens erupting in a vile yellow froth. Bilious and filthy, the mucus smeared across the wall up to the second tier and ringed the outside of the pit as the two Gardeners crumpled into writhing piles of flailing limbs.

“Into the pool!”Qan-af-årael pushed the rat forward. While Tallakath watched with the same dour expression he had borne on their arrival, rat and Åelf raced down the sloped wall into the pit. Charles held his Sondeshike tightly at his side and took a deep breath, narrowing his eyes shut as he jumped into the pool, sinking quickly into a limitless depth beyond.

As they disappeared within, his tail whipping over his head, he heard the master of that vile realm murmur, “So that was your secret purpose. Hardened against suffering...” And then his head plunged beneath the slick surface and all went black.

 

 

Charles shivered as he crouched on the narrow strip of gray slipping through a hole in reality. He could almost feel the spectral touch of Tallakath wrapped about his limbs, and the horror of it left him only by degrees. The ancient Åelf stood behind him implacable and silent. A few minutes without seeing such terror was all he yearned for, but the unreality of the bridge was too great to give him even that surcease.

The rat grabbed his tail in both hands and rubbed his thumbs across the short strands of fur dotting its otherwise scaly surface. Warm to the touch, a mark of the beast he had long ago accepted with delight and a measure of pride, it soothed him to hold it. He wiggled the tip up and down so that it brushed across his snout and whiskers.

For a moment he imagined that it was not his tail he touched with his nose but his children. Their bright faces all eager to press against his own, each overjoyed to see their father and to be in his arms. He yearned to hold them and press their little bodies with wiggling limbs and tails against his chest and feel every breath they took and every laughing squeak. And how he wished it were Ladero he could hold.

The rat sighed and lowered his tail to the bridge before straightening. He did not turn, but felt the Åelf's presence at his back. “What shall we see at the next realm?”

Qan-af-årael's reply was gentle despite its severity. “It is the realm of the mad one, and that is what you should expect to see and feel – madness. Everyone we see there will be mad. Talk to none of them, for they will try to drown you in their madness.”

“Surely they cannot all be mad? Not everyone was a prisoner of the pits.”

“Perhaps those who only recently arrived have not succumbed to the madness. But can you tell them apart?”

Charles pondered that for a moment and then shrugged. “I do not know. I just know I have to keep going if I am to reach Beyond.” He set one paw before the other, and the non-reality beyond the edge of the bridge twisted around them like a lens coming into focus. His steps carried him closer and closer to the ever narrowing point of the bridge. He sucked in his breath waiting for the end.

The sensation of all things becoming microscopic returned for a brief moment before he stumbled into a colorful landscape overlaid with wave after wave of swaying grass, flowers, mushrooms, and ferns. He stared in bewildered awe at the vivacious colors, each of them bold and sharp with contrast, the reds a pure red as deep as blood, the blue as peerless as cobalt, the green as rich as jade, and every other shade each striking with such distinction that he could almost see lines marking the boundary of each with each other. The flowers towered above him, their fragrances overwhelming him with a sweetness so strong that he felt nauseous. Mushrooms strove to a purple sky dashed with golden clouds, their caps swollen like a watchtower cupola and their base as hard as mountain stone.

Charles stood upon a patch of bare earth that felt as smooth as glass despite being pockmarked with little roots and stones. A breeze rushed over him that seemed hot on his left and cold on his right. A sticky miasma seemed to coat the inside of his mouth from his incisors to the rear molars. All around him the susurrus of the wind and brushing fronds of petal and pistol carried a suggestion of chattering voices, screams, and hysterical laughter, all blended so tightly that he could not discern which was which.

Wincing, Charles narrowed his eyes and attempted to cover his ears with his hands. Even though he pressed his palms over the holes – he felt the prick of his head fur on the soft backs of his ears as the jabs of needless – the strange discordant flow of voices penetrated as if they were breathed into his mind from some other direction. He grunted and tried to scan the overlarge garden for some signs of where he might go, but every direction appeared the same as any other.

Qan-af-årael appeared a moment later only a few feet behind him. The Åelf's countenance twisted ever so slightly as the ground beneath him buckled as if the stones, dirt, and roots were all as malleable as taffy. Their eyes found each other, and the first thing Charles noted was that the colors in his friend's guise were all muted in comparison to the realm. He could look at the Åelf without discomfort.

“Please tell me you know the way to the next bridge. This place doesn't feel...” Charles stopped and blinked, ears lifted higher in surprise at the sound of his own voice. The words came from his throat but the pitch was off; even for a rat it was far too high and light. The intonation and inflection that he heard from within his chest and through his ears was clearly feminine. His paws lifted to his chest, but he found nothing unexpected there. His tunic, the cape about his shoulders, and smooth chest beneath was as he'd always known them to be.

The Åelf's expression was quizzical, even as he took an experimental step, one eye watching the ground bend beneath him as if he were standing on the skin of a large drum. Charles sucked in his breath and asked, “Do I sound like my wife?”

“No,” he replied, and whatever oddities seemed to exist in this place were for the breath of time it took for the sound to strike his ears and register in his mind completely annulled. “But this place does not always show us the same things. The Bridge... I do not feel it yet. I will tell you when I do.”

“Thank you,” Charles said, and winced at the hearing what almost seemed his wife's voice from his throat. He rubbed his paws together, and took a tentative step into the tall grass. The flowers may tower above him but the blades of grass only came to his middle. The ground which bent beneath the Åelf's boots seemed solid, if extraordinarily smooth. And then he took another step and felt as if he'd shoved a knife through his foot.

“Ah!” Charles leaped backward then fell onto his side, face pressing into the ground which flowed up across his snout as if it were the surface of a still lake. And yet, though his eyes were pushed into the dirt, he could dimly see something stretching into limitless depths before him. It was faint and gray, a dull color drained of all vitality. He could see no edge to it but it had shape. Something in its manner suggested a disc of impossible width and breadth. His gaze was drawn along as if by an arm, spinning about a central point. It sucked at him like a lodestone, vanishing deep within itself in a place where no detail or differentiation could be made. All substance, all thought, all being, funneled into a mass from which there was no escape and into which he felt himself drawn.

The maelstrom vanished as he felt a hand grip his shoulder and pull him upright into the brightness of the over-sized field. Charles gasped and swung his limbs, eyes wild as the vibrancy struck him. But they found Qan-af-årael and settled there as in an oasis. Charles stilled himself, stretched out a hand, and gripped the ancient one's robe, savoring the soft feel of the fabric and the way it caught his claws. This felt right.

Together they pulled him to his feet, and he winced anew at the strange texture of the ground. “I feel like I'm either standing on ice or knives. I wish I had boots!” He grimaced at the sound of his voice which now croaked like a frog. Even some of the words seemed to be more animal noises than actual speech.

“It is not real. Hold on to me and you will be able to walk.”

Charles held on to the robe long enough to grab his sleeve with his other hand, and then side-by-side the pair began to walk through the grass. The ground felt odd beneath his feet and continued to change with each step. Sometimes it was soft as if he really were walking upon the ground; other times it was hot like coals, and then sharp as blades, and then again smooth as glass. When the pain came he clutched more tightly to the Åelf who did not seem affected by the randomness of sensation.

Nor was it only through his feet he felt so assaulted. The blades of grass felt like trailing claws, soft feathers, cold iron, brittle dirt, jagged clay, supple leather, porcupine quills, silky hair, snakeskin, and many more things he could not describe. Charles flinched from their touch after only ten paces and huddled close to the Åelf like a child pressing to his father in the midst of a strange crowd.

The grass parted after another thirty paces. Above them swayed the flowers and mushrooms as a foul and sweet-smelling wind rushed just above their heads. The whispered glimmer of laughter and screaming danced at the edge of his hearing. The syrupy fragrance poured from each petal like a bottle of perfume emptied onto his head. A burning taste lingered on his tongue.

Beyond the grass they were met with a sight more remarkable and more unbearable than tall flowers. The ground, if it could be called that, curved upward and then backward before breaking into trailing paths that spread in every direction and at every orientation. And yet, though Charles could discern actual ribbons of land curving in the distance without horizon, each ribbon seemed impossibly wide, as if it contained a world infinite in each dimension, all of them folded one atop another. He stared for only a few seconds before the attempt to place each piece of ribbon in proportion to every other piece left him with a sharp headache.

The rat groaned and lowered his eyes to the ground which was too bright a contrast in green, brown, pink, blue, and red between a layer of moss growing over broad slabs of vibrant granite suffused with various minerals. Frustrated, he just closed his eyes completely, tightening his grip on the Åelf's robe. “Guide me, please. I cannot look.”

His voice boomed in his ears and he winced, lowering them against the back of his head. He felt a soft touch from the Åelf's hand on his own, and then they kept walking. He set one foot ahead of the other tentatively, hoping for once he would feel the ground as it was.

For several long minutes he endured oddity after oddity. His toes felt sore from all of the changes they suffered; from bitter cold to searing heat, from ice smooth to razor sharp, from gooey soft to steel hard, and from desiccation to hoariness. Charles attempted to block the sensations by willing his feet turn to stone but even that accomplished nothing. When his feet brushed against each other he could indeed tell that he had made them stone, but the myriad touches continued, each one different than the last. He pondered if he could use his Sondeck to fight back the sensations, but how to even begin?

He attempted to guess what he would feel with each step. Sticks, stones, mud, moss, glass, ice, fire, steel, coals, brass, and anything else he could think of that he might recognize through the callused flesh of his feet and the prick of his toe claws. At first he was always wrong. He sought some pattern in the order in which each sensation came, but after more paces than he could count he abandoned any such thought. Why, in a place where the ground did not feel as it should, where scents were not as they ought to be, and where everything appeared wrong and the land itself was impossible, should he expect an order to any of it?

Even as he continued to guess with a near perfect record of failure, one paw gripping tightly the robe of his Åelf guide, his ears danced with a melody which cavorted in the air as if the entire world were speaking to him. The longer he kept his eyes closed the clearer the sound became to him. There was no rhythm to the melody which seemed to at times be played by a flute and at others by some stringed instrument. And there were moments when he felt certain this strange, sinuous, and almost innocuous melody was performed by shattering rocks beneath a hammer. That too gave way to the strident sensation of claws dragged against glass. But through all of those changes he could still discern a true melody, even if it was one that seemed to have neither beginning nor end.

To the rat's surprise, the more he listened to the melody, the more he let it seep into his thoughts, the better he was able to guess what sensation he would feel beneath his feet. Now when he heard a fragment of tune he knew that he would feel dry leaves between his toes. A upswing in the melody guided him to a hard iron slab. A stuttering murmur signaled the chill of ice. And a sforzando tone announced that he was about to be stabbed.

Charles discovered that this sensation, not only predicted by the melody wending its way through his thoughts, could also be altered by pausing just a moment to allow the melody to change. He experimented haphazardly at first, by making a brief pause as if he were about to stumble whenever the sforzando notes struck. Something else would always follow, and soon he no longer felt the jabbing pain of standing on knives.

Not only could he avoid that anguish, but he soon learned how to avoid the burning of coals and the freezing of ice. He was, in some strange way, dancing to the music of the world. In that dance, a strange sort of conforming to a meander without meter and to a pace without purpose, Charles found he could determine what sensations he would feel beneath his feet. Not only could he avoid those that were unpleasant but he could dictate the sensations he actually wanted. Should he desire dry leaves to crunch between his toes so he might know the pleasure of a warm autumn afternoon he merely had to step with a drifting theme that floated ever down. When he sought the soft loam of freshly turned earth a pastoral lilt sufficed. And should he seek the solace of stone a three note question amidst the cascade of melody would guide him true.

Charles delighted in this for a time though the length of time was lost to him. Mere seconds of discovery and only few steps did he make, or had it been hours and he'd been dancing with abandon in a forest glade of his imagination? He did not know. All he knew was that at some point when the melody made him wait longer than he liked before settling on the motif he desired that he was no longer gripping Qan-af-årael's robe.

Charles blinked open his eyes and screamed as light poured in like water sucked down a sinkhole. He slapped his hands over his face and opened one of them a sliver, peering out between his fingers at the tiny cleft of the world before him. Even that sliver stung but through it he began to make what sense there was to be had.

The rat found himself on a small moss-covered path that rose up before him, curved over his head, until it joined itself back again. The world beyond his little wheel was tilted at an odd angle so that it seemed he would fall to his death should he step outside the wheel. Charles blinked several more times until he could finally lower his hands from his face. The music that had guided him, once so present to him, now seemed absent and he had to strain to hear it.

No matter which way he turned he could see no trace of his guide. He cupped his paws to either side of his snout and bellowed, “Qan-af-årael!” This time, to his surprise, he could barely hear his own voice. It was as if his ears and his throat were on mountain peaks standing on opposite sides of Metamor Valley. Only the faintest of echoes of that shout remained.

“Qan-af-årael! Help me! I'm lost!” Charles shouted again, but as before it was as if the words were stolen in the air before he could even utter them. “Qan-af-årael!”

A strangely appetizing smell touched his nose and he found his head turning back into the wheel. Right in front of him, along the path, he felt all of his animal senses drawing him. His jaw gaped, whiskers twitching, and tail dancing behind him as he found himself leaning forward, taking step after step along the path. The ground twisted beneath him, the wheel turning, even as the world beyond the wheel rocked back and forth like a boat on the sea. Before he quite knew what was happening he had fallen to all fours and clawed at the ground with both hands and paws.

The rat felt helpless as he continued to run forward. Any slight turn he managed to push his body to take was punished with the sensation of stepping on knives. And, as his pace quickened, he became aware of not only the allurement that was always only a few paces ahead of him, but he could feel a heat building behind him, as of an oven following behind, the bristling snarl of flame licking across black iron grates, ravenous and roaring as it grew hotter and hotter.

The rat scampered faster and faster, the world outside his little path tossing back and forth. Before him his whiskers felt and his nose savored a delectable flavor of indescribable desire. His posture pushed him forward, legs and arms shortening, body stretching, and back arching. He could not make himself think of anything except obtaining that which was just before him other than escaping the fire that raged just behind him. His tail sizzled and he dug his claws into the ground and pushed faster, uncomfortable in the strange bindings that bounced along his back and legs.

Those bindings eventually tangled in his hindquarters and made him trip, smacking his snout into the ground. The wheel rushed forward for a moment before settling back down, as he kicked his legs and scrambled to get free. Rolling onto his side, the rat blinked at the dark brown thing wrapped about his hind paws, and the strange black thing dangling from his shoulders, as well as the other brown thing wrapped over his chest. He bent his head forward and nibbled at it to get it off.

The rat just managed to wriggle his legs free and gnaw through part of the thing clinging to his forelimbs when a strange but pleasant warmth filled him from whiskers to tail. For a brief moment all fear of the fire behind him or the inducement before him was washed free and his mind, stretched thin between those two extremes was suddenly vibrant again. It was like he was being loved. He took a deep breath, staring down at himself and his beastly posture, and began to tremble.

My name is Charles Matthias.

He repeated this thought several times while forcing his body to take on its most human shape. He pulled his trousers back up and secured them over his tail, then inspected the damage down to his shirt. The tunic had been chewed through along his right breast up to the side, but the lacing at his sternum still held it together. And with his cloak drawn over his chest none would notice the damage. Slowly, Charles stood up and surveyed his surroundings.

The heady scent that had rendered him for a short moment a beast in mind and almost wholly in body returned. He gagged and put a hand over his nose, casting his eyes around the wheel of grass and dirt, and then out at the landscape beyond the edge which seemed miles away. The scent slipped through his fingers and his nostrils flared, his legs and back beginning to buckle, the compulsion, the raw need to chase after this scent already eating at his mind.

With what will Charles had left he turned and jumped out of the wheel.

The world whirled around him so that he could not tell what bit of ground he saw spinning around him was actually the ground and which was the sky. Lush vegetation of so many colors that it hurt to stare rushed past as he hurled aimlessly. Trees with roots spread in every direction swam past him with their leafy boughs like a man doing the backstroke. Giant fish bounced along after them, flapping their fins as if striking drums. Streams of color like ribbons of light which smelled like frying fat and decaying eggs bounced between each and then spun around Charles, sending him spinning on his side so that he had to close his eyes to keep from throwing up.

Air grasped him from every direction. Things struck him and pushed him along, slicing as they went so he was sure half of his tail had been chopped off. Something wet smacked him in the face and chest and for a moment he thought it his own blood. He screamed and flailed, hoping for any purchase at all in the madness of his fall.

And then, for no apparent reason at all, the air around him slowed and he felt something soft gliding past his whiskers. Charles opened his eyes. Little petals of bright yellow drifted in the air as if a child had blown them there from a flower picked on a lazy summer afternoon. He stared for a moment in wonder, stretching out one hand. The petals brushed against the pink flesh of his fingers, broke and shattered like pollen into a scintillating dust.

After passing through the petals, Charles looked around him to see where he was. There was no where since there was no sense to be made of anything he saw. But a seeming short distance to his right he saw a broad field of wildflowers that from his vantage looked normal. He waved his arms as if swimming to angle himself in that direction. And to his surprise it worked. A moment later and he was setting his paws on the ground. He grimaced as he felt hard stone where he should have felt grass, but he would not risk listening to the music again.

He did not breathe too deeply on landing, rather he glanced at his tail to make sure it was not shorn in two. The pink flesh was whole without any sign of injury. He gripped his tail, pressed it to his snout, and was comforted by the scraggly smoothness he always felt from it. At least he was real and felt as he should. Charles lowered his tail, sighed, and glanced around wondering what might have happened to his guide.

The field he landed in was rich with wildflowers of red, white, yellow, blue, and violet blossoms. An eerie breeze of such gentleness flowed through the meadow but its direction changed moment to moment as if in a tempest. The meadow was framed by trees whose roots were bushy with leaves and whose branches were gnarled and coated in dirt, as if they had grown upside down from the air and were now burrowing into the meadow. Beneath one of them a colorful awning had been built from poles with red stripes down the sides. Sitting under the awning was a dark-skinned man in a black robe.

Charles gaped in surprise as he stared at the man in the robe not only because he was the first person he'd seen here, but also because he was familiar to him. Unlike Craig or Wessex, this was a man he'd known from his life in Sondeshara before he'd ever even heard of a place called Metamor. How often he had dreaded standing in the shaded market squares while this man asked them question after question to force their minds. Unlike most Sondeckis he had never been a Follower and had been content with the consolations of philosophy and abiding by the call of justice he felt from his Sondeck. A Master, a man of erudition, and one of Charles' instructors, he had died from old age ere Charles fled the Order.

Now he seemed advanced in years but with a renewed vitality. The skin of his cheeks and head were smooth as if freshly shaven. Long ears framed a wide face with wide-set, penetrating eyes which remained closed. Hands with spidery-long fingers covered his knees. The robe, black, had upon the breast the familiar symbol of upturned white sword in a palm inscribed in a red shield. His posture appeared relaxed, but from it the man could leap and cleave the air with a thunderclap. Or so he had once shown many years ago.

Charles walked toward him and saw that the man's eyes were closed. The rat took a deep breath and stopped seven paces away. “Master Hindemar,” he called, only to wince as his voice sounded like a woman's voice again. “Master Hindemar!”

The face turned ever so slightly, but not quite in his direction. “Hindemar is merely a collection of sounds to indicate that something other than myself seeks the attention of my mind. Or so its sounding would suggest if I paid any trust to such things. Rather than the word of some other whose existence cannot be proven, it is more likely that I am, for the purpose of testing ratiocination, imagining a vocal emanation originating from outside myself. To provide verisimilitude to this imagination, and, concurrently though not primarily, allow for the possibility that an actual other than myself is participating, I shall provide my responses to this apparently imagined inquiry with the use of my tongue, or at least, what I imagine to be my tongue.”

The voice, the scholarly enunciation, and dizzying circumlocution were familiar to Charles, and for a moment it was as if one of his teachers had come back from the dead. And then, an upward glance at the upside down trees recalled where he was. The woman's voice resonated from his throat as he said, “I'm really here standing in front of you, Master Hindemar. It is I, your old student, Charles Matthias of the Sondeckis.”

“An identity to this emanation? If offered as evidence of a separate existence it is insufficient. The operation of thought is capable of providing an identity to offer verisimilitude to its imaginative construct. To borrow from the vaults of memory is also possible, but the Charles Matthias I recall was a man and did not possess the aural characteristics suggested by this apparent voice which has more of woman about it. But neither is this proof of the existence of the other for the mind is very capable of engaging in error when presenting ideas to the self.”

One of the man's hands lifted and a single long finger was held up though not toward the rat, as if to bid him silence a moment longer. “Because of the obviousness of the ploy, and its inherent weakness, I would like to forestall the apparent other from offering up recollections to demonstrate its veracity. Any memory that it could recall to convince me is a memory my own mind will possess and so the assumption of my imagination conjuring this conversation is also satisfied. Nor would stating a memory that I do not have because the mind is fully capable of developing ideas in absence of sense perceptions.”

Charles felt a bit flustered as he tried to follow the chain of logic that was presented before him in Hindemar's rapid Sondesh. His nose tickled with an earthy scent as if somebody were cooking some sort of meat nearby. He brushed his paw over his whiskers and tried again. “Then I won't, Master. But I am who I say I am. Why not open your eyes and see for yourself?” He grimaced a bit when he realized that he'd still been human when his teacher had seen him last.

“To what end should I open my eyes? They are a tool of sense and as such cannot be trusted.”

“My eyes brought me to you,” he squeaked in that persistent female voice that was starting to bother him. “I trust my eyes.”

“Then you, O murmuring thought who claims to be my student, have much to learn. Perception is fickle and cannot be relied upon to form our thoughts. Our thoughts must be clear and reasoned first through introspective ratiocination before our senses can be tested for comportment with thought.”

“I do not understand your meaning, Master. Please, speak words that I can understand.”

A grimace touched the dark-skinned man's pink lips. “Clarity of thought requires clarity of diction to express it. Imprecision in my words will mar the purity of my thought. If you are other, then you are capable of thought. Allow my instruction to challenge your thought so that it will be trained to understanding.”

Charles grimaced at the rebuke. During his years in Sondeshara he had often had to ask Master Hindemar to speak with simpler words. Never before had he been denied that request. Hindemar had once prided himself on his ability to be understood by everyone who came to ask. He always began with exquisite and painstaking erudition, but if no one could understand he would reach down to their level and draw them up step by step.

What then did his rebuke mean? A possibility came to the rat, and so Charles twitched his whiskers and took a deep breath. “You refuse to speak more plainly not because you believe I can with careful thought follow all that you say, but because you do not believe I am here at all. You believe I am just an imagination!”

“That is a perceptive observation and one I would expect my imagination to note.”

“I am not part of your imagination!”

“To what end do you, O phantasm suggested by the ears that claims to be an old student named Charles yet who sounds the delicate tones of a woman, proffer such a denial? The imagination is equipped to test the acumen of intellect via false claims. Without a logical chain of reasoning to establish it a denial is of no substance.”

He ground his teeth in frustration and narrowed his eyes. “If I were to touch you, you would know that I am real.”

“A sensation proves nothing. It is only in thought that truth occurs.”

“We learn truth by our senses; it is the only way in which we are capable of having thoughts. If we do not experience through our senses, then we have nothing to think about!”

“Thought shapes our ideas. What we experience only conforms to our thoughts. It is only by thought that we know we exist. All that we sense must be doubted because the senses are not reliable.” The master's head tilted curiously though his face did not bear toward Charles, as if the man were lost in his own thoughts. “You, a noise in my ears that claims to be the voice – a woman's no less – of my long ago student, trust so keenly what your eyes offer, and your ears provide from my own lips? Are the words that I speak the words that reach your ears, if there are truly ears to perceive them, for I can discern only denial of wisdom and caution. Open mine eyes, these utterances that touch mine ears proclaim, trust that which cannot be trusted?”

“But our thoughts are reliable then? What we conceive, through logic, is what is real?”

Hindemar appeared to scoff at the suggestion. “Thought alone is incapable of verifying the verisimilitude of the other. Only the self is discernible through thought. Thought demonstrates the existence of the self but not the other. No amount of sensory perception can be employed to demonstrate the existence of the other due to the unreliability of sensory perception. It is equally likely that the other is a conjuration of the imagination as it is a distinct but unverifiable reality.”

Charles blinked. He could faintly hear the strange, wandering melody again. The scent of cooking meat was stronger and tantalizing. He had to fight to keep from panting in hunger. It made clinging to the slippery threads of epistemological pondering even more difficult than it was to begin with. Still, one thing was becoming clear and with a grating sigh, he lamented, “So you are saying that there is absolutely no way that I can convince you that I exist, Master. Will I always be just a figment of your imagination?”

“The senses are an unreliable means of information outside the self being conveyed to the self. In order for the other to demonstrate its existence it must rely on some other means of providing proof of itself.”

“What else is there but our eyes, our ears, our hands?” Matthias stretched his arms wide, flexing his fingers, and folding back his ears. The melody was growing stronger and he could not discern from whence it was coming. It seemed to almost follow the strange lilt he heard in his own feminine voice.

“The mind is all that there is,” Hindemar pronounced as if the matter were settled. “There is no other.”

Charles wrinkled his nose as the scent of refuse mingled with the cooked meat, and with it he thought he saw something dark at the edge of his vision, as if for a moment his hands were black instead of a fleshy pink. He glanced at them, turning them over once but saw nothing untoward. Anxious, his tail wagged.

How could he argue that the senses could be trusted when his own seemed to lie to him? Charles swallowed and decided to attempt one last time to convince this man whom he had once admired. “Master, you speak about the other and ponder its existence. But if you are all that exists, if there is nothing real except your thought, then how could you have pondered the other in the first place? If there is no other, how could you have even conceived of it?”

Hindemar's face tilted upward, though the eyes remained firmly shut. The tight lips and cheeks softened and a faint smile seemed to touch the edge of each. “Now that is the first intelligent question that you have asked of me. How could I conceive a you if I am all that there is? To suppose I am all that exists and then to imagine things that do not exist suggests that I am insufficient. But if I am insufficient, I can only be satisfied by something that must exist. Therefore, even though I may not be correct, and that my senses may indeed be suspect, nevertheless, my ability to imagine something beyond myself necessarily implies that something beyond myself does indeed exist. There is an 'other'.”

He lifted a finger and Charles fancied the melody danced around it like angels on a pin. “Nevertheless, while this does demonstrate that the other exists, it does not demonstrate it in a given case. Therefore, I still cannot conclude that you are anything other than a consciously derived phantasm.”

Charles grabbed his ears in his paws and tugged, claws digging through the fur at their tips. “Why can't you just open your eyes and look at me! I'm right here!”

“And now you sound like any other woman, incapable of reason and prone to frustration.”

He grimaced and tucked his tail between his legs. Charles took a deep breath, fairly certain that he would never learn anything useful from Hindemar. Is this what this place did to the souls captured here? Lied and lied and lied to them until they finally sat with their eyes closed, ears stopped, and mind running in circles like a cat chasing its own tail?

“All right, let me make one last challenge to you, Master, and then I will leave. How do you imagine I look?”

Hindemar's frown returned. “I recall how Charles Matthias appeared when last I saw him, and despite the woman's voice I hear I have imagined you, if there is a 'you', vaguely in his guise. Though of late I suspect you really are, if you really are, a woman and have lied to me about being Charles.”

“But you would not have suspected that I have been transformed so that I have an animal guise and not a human one.”

Hindemar opened his mouth and for a moment said nothing. At last the dark-skinned philosopher admitted. “No, I had not imagined that. Perhaps there is an other here speaking to me. Could it be that my senses for once are not betraying me?”

“Take a chance and open your eyes. See for yourself.”

Hindemar's face relaxed for a moment. The eyelids trembled as if they had not been used for years and were weighed down by more than just death. Charles stood with hands on hips, snout turned a little to the side so that his old teacher would see him in quarter profile. His eyes opened, white iris about a dark pupil filling with light.

The Sondecki leaped to his feet screaming. Charles stumbled backward as his old instructor shouted incoherently, his hands balling into fists. “Lies! Lies! Lies!” Charles managed to hear before the cries became strangled again. Hindemar punched himself in the forehead and temples again and again until the bones in his face cracked and all of the flesh fell forward like a pouch of broken pottery. His eyelids opened once more and the eyes fell out, dangling by syrupy red cords. They whipped against either side of his temples leaving bloody smears as they bounced.

Even through the screaming Charles could hear the melody without rhythm or repeat as if somebody were whistling into his ears. He turned to try and scramble away, but the ground beneath them both buckled, collapsing inward. Chunks of earth were sucked downward their vibrancy lost in a smear of gray. Hindemar sank with the shattered earth, hands wrapped about his retina cords to try and rip them free from the inside of his skull.

Charles dug his claws into the earth but froze in horror as his old Master sank into a huge maelstrom laying just beneath the ground. The dark-skinned man's flesh was bled of all hue as it stretched outward, bent like taffy as a thousand other wailing souls reached out and clutched at his legs. Hindemar screamed and laughed at the same time, his upper torso remaining in view for several long seconds before it too was whisked away into the spinning disc and its dark vortex which howled with the roar of a sea pouring down from the heavens. For one moment before it was swallowed in the maelstrom, Charles saw his mentor's face, eyes dangling against his stout, dark cheeks, the lips creasing in a rictus of insane laughter that had no end.

He felt something brushing against his legs and Charles scrambled upward against the sinking stones, trying to gain some purchase to keep from falling into the same abyss. Their taunting voices redoubled in his ears, and their touch seemed to fill him with a fiery thrill. The only other thing he knew was that strange song dancing around over his head. With one last grasp he reached for it.

And sat bolt upright in a comfortable bed. Sitting in a wicker chair was a handsome fox dressed as a hunter with knives in his vest. He held a flute in his paw-like hands and blew from his narrow snout that delicate melody. The room around them was bathed in the warm colors of autumn, but these colors were comfortable to the eyes. For once there did not appear to be any pain or anything strange about the sensations. Everything felt right from the touch of the quilts on fur, to the scent of cooking flesh and steaming vegetables, to the sound of the fox's gentle melody as if it had been something beloved from youth.

The handsome fox blinked open soft blue eyes and his snout opened in a smile that seemed to span years. He lowered the flute and a long sigh escaped his throat. “Mechtilde. Is it you at last?”

“Mechtilde?” Blinking and glancing downward, a new surprise came. Sitting in the bed and draped in a soft-white nightgown was the body of a red-furred vixen and not the rat expected. She blinked, trembling a moment as she lifted black-furred paw-like hands; she turned them over and then touched her narrow fang-filled snout. Triangular ears perked on either side of her head. A soft, luxuriant tail was tucked between her legs. She was not a rat as her memories suggested, but a vixen.

The fox rose from the wicker chair and came to her side, taking her right hand in his own and holding it to his chest. She could feel strong muscles beneath his warm fur. His gaze was filled with tenderness, patience, weariness, and love. She felt both vulnerable and assured in that gaze. “Is the curse broken, Mechtilde? I'm here. Your Kinder is here.”

“I'm Ma...” the name slipped from her mind. The voice she heard was familiar. Kinder was a name that resonated deep within her and stirred feelings of love and memories. The name she thought she'd had and the memories associated with it felt like errant flies that deftly escaped her paws. She could glimpse them, even take them in as a whole, and a whole life they seemed to span, but she could not linger upon any of them.

Kinder slipped his other arm around her back, through the long locks of braided fur between her ears, and rested his strong hand upon her shoulder. “Oh please, Mechtilde, tell me you're back to me. I have missed you so.”

“I... I don't understand,” she murmured, feeling lost and alone despite the comfortable surrounding and heartening fox.

Kinder pulled her into an embrace so that her snout rested against his chest. She could hear his voice, strong and certain build within amidst the pounding of his heart. “There was a curse on you, my sweet Mechtilde. A curse laid by the Rats! You thought yourself one of them no matter what we did. No matter what... I did.” A profound sadness filled him and Mechtilde felt a horror overcome her. How could she see an entire life's memory of a man who'd become a rat and have it only be a curse. This could not be!

And so she said, pushing against Kinder, shaking her head and trembling anew. “No, this cannot be! I... I am not a fox. I am not a vixen.”

“You are,” Kinder assured her, his snout opening into an inviting smile. She met his gaze and felt a warmth come to her. He was so handsome and sure of himself. His eyes were radiant like a deep lake warmed by hot springs. A part of her wanted to believe him. “You are not only a fox and a vixen, but you are my wife, Mechtilde. My wife of ten years now. Please tell me you remember! Do not break my heart again!”

She blinked and tried to remember, looking first at the memories of the rat, but they seemed to drift even further away now. Instead, what she found when she looked within were memories of a fox, a vixen true. Snatches of time as a little kit playing in the woods with her brothers and sisters rushed back to her. The first time she had met Kinder at a festival, staring across the fields at each other, neither daring to say a word to each other or even trying to approach, brought a smile to her snout and a twitch to her tail as it returned. She felt her heart warm as she remembered the first time they had danced together, minstrels playing the very tune Kinder had just serenaded her with. She almost wept when she felt anew the sorrow of losing their first kit even before he had been born, and did let go tears when the memory of their second kit's death from sickness came back to her.

She was Mechtilde, wife to Kinder the huntsman, and this was their home in the village at the edge of the forest. And yet, the memory of the rat remained. How could it have all just been a curse? The love the rat felt for his wife and family was so real and so tender.

Still, in those memories she could hear her husband's song, and she could her hear own voice speaking. What had happened?

“I... I do remember, Kinder. I do,” she admitted with a long sigh. “I'm... I'm just very confused right now.”

Kinder took a deep breath and then nodded, wagging his black-tipped tail. “I should not expect any less. I am overwhelmed with relief to have you back, my sweet. There is some food cooking, can I bring you something?”

She slipped out of the bed and set her paws on the ground, testing the feel of her legs. They felt weak, but not so weak that she could not stand. “It smells delicious,” she said with a winsome smile to her husband. By the gods was he handsome! The way his smile turned the red fur of snout and cheeks, and the little raising of his ears, it all made her heart flutter. A part of her seemed to assure her that with such desire for her husband there could be no doubt which set of memories was true. “Take me to it.”

She held out her hand and he grasped her paw in his. Little black claws pricked through the fur at their wrists, as callused palms rubbed together. They stepped around the bed, and then side by side their fingers threaded together. He stood a head taller than she, and his shoulders were broad with the rigors of outdoor life. She felt drained, and knew that in years past she had a healthy plump that the years of madness had sapped from her. Kinder was strong and would support her.

Mechtilde and Kinder stepped out of the bedroom through a cloth-covered door and into a modest chamber with a fire and grill on which a iron platter was set. Strips of flesh sizzled there and the heat of the fire made her feel flush again. Rows of cushions dotted the far wall, and a wooden doorway stood between two windows through which autumn light entered. Another doorway stood off beyond the firepit, this one banded with iron. Something rattled within. Her nose wrinkled with a faint scent of refuse and blood.

“Come and sit,” Kinder invited as he guided her toward the cushion. She reclined, grateful for the softness. Her legs were weak, but the strength would return in time. The scent of cooked meat made her ravenous. The scent of refuse felt familiar as well and did not bother her. As her husband took an earthenware bowl and scooped the strips of meat and seared vegetable within she realized that both scents mixed together had come to her in the final moments of the rat madness as well as her husband's melody. This he whistled from his curved tongue as his deep blue eyes cast quick glances to her, confidant and gentle, ears upturned and handsome.

He filled a second bowl with what remained on the iron platter and added a log to the fire before bringing both bowls to where she reclined. Mechtilde took the offered bowl in both paw-like hands and cradled them so that her thumb claws just gripped the edges. Kinder sat cross-legged with black-tipped tail swishing behind him, facing her over the lip of his bowl, snout lowered ever so slightly in a whispered prayer her ears inclined but could not catch. She felt entirely too famished to try and recall any prayers, but waited until her husband finished.

“Eat my love, my sweet Mechtilde come back to me. Eat.” So saying he dipped his snout into the bowl and began to gorge on the meat and vegetables within. She held the bowl to her snout, ravenous from the scent, and began to eat as well. The meat had a stringy quality and a well-seasoned flavor that stirred her memories. She did not ponder what sort of meat it was until her tongue lapped the insides of the bowl to capture all of the juices.

She had just eaten rat. And not just rat, but meat strips from the tail of a rat.

A rattling sounded through the iron door and she turned her head, a sullen horror touching her. She thought of the rat the curse made her think to be and their family, the gentle love and the children they possessed but which she'd been denied. A sickness overcame her and she had to struggle to hold the bowl in her paws. She lowered it to keep it from breaking but it still fell and clattered on the wooden floor, spinning for a brief second before settling upright.

Kinder's ears lifted in question. “Are you well, Mechtilde?”

She stammered, one paw clutching at her chest. “I... I just ate rat!”

Her fox husband smiled and a short chortle escaped his throat. “Of course my love. It is your favorite; it always has been. This is your own recipe passed down through your family.”

Mechtilde's horror increased, though her husband's gentle confidence sought to assure her. “But you said the Rats cursed me! This is not the flesh of just any animal!”

He reached out one paw and gripped her wrist, blue eyes limpid. “My love, the Rats did Curse you. There was a revolt among them, and they struck many of our people. They could not reach me, but before they were stopped and returned to their rightful place, they captured you and through you, struck at me. They have always been our food and always shall be.”

Mechtilde searched her memories and found everything her husband had told her was true. As a kit she had watched her parents kill captured rats, skin them, and then divide their flesh up for meat for a variety of recipes. She could even recall the day her dam had taught her how to make the choice cuts and how to properly season them so the meat would keep. Her heart fluttered weakly as she recalled her sire tending the pits where they raised the Rats. Their eyes stared back with hatred, the older ones clutching the young ones to their chest, wrapping them in their arms to protect them from the hooks and nets her sire used to draw them out before breaking or cleaving their necks.

And with those memories her head turned toward the iron door from which she could hear rattling. “Kinder, please, tell me this isn't real. What do we have behind that door?”

“It is how things are, my love,” he offered with a faint smile. “What they did to you still hurts you, I see. Come, let me show you.” He extended a paw and trembling she took it. They stood and crossed the small room to the iron door. The edges flecked with crimson rust. Kinder produced a brass key from inside his vest and slipped into the keyhole. He turned and a click sounded as the tumblers released. Mechtilde felt her heart jump and then fall silent in awe of the sound.

The room beyond was somewhat larger than their main room. One side was dominated by a stone cage with iron bars in which cowered five rats. Mechtilde stared at a mother rat, no taller than three feet, clutching around her four frightened children. One corner of the cage was filled with their filth, while bowls of fetid water and grain were placed in the other. The grain had not been disturbed. All of the rats appeared unhealthy as if they had barely eaten in weeks.

The other half of the room was dominated by a large table and basin on which was spread the body of a young rat. The head and skin were removed; the skin, white on the underbelly but black along the back, was stretched and drying against the wall, while the head, also skinned, was positioned on the cutting table so that its lifeless eyes watched the cage. Strips of salted meat hung from hooks, but some still remained to be cut free from the flesh. The tail was denuded so that only the sinew around the bones remained. Everything stunk of blood, filth, and death.

Kinder took one of the blades from his vest and made an expert cut through the flesh at the dead rat's ribs. “You see, my love? We have always eaten Rats. It is the way of we Foxes. The more you do the more you'll return to your true self and the faster their vicious curse will be wholly broken. Come, see for yourself. You know these cuts as well as I. You have made them all your life.” He offered her the knife and his handsome smile returned.

Mechtilde grasped the knife and stared at it. All of her memories showed her exactly what to do with the rat child's corpse. A faltering step brought her to the preparation table. She half turned so that she wouldn't see the rat mother and brood staring at her. The stretched skin stayed in the corner of her eyes. She trembled, wanting to please her husband, but horrified. It felt as if she were being asked to carve her own flesh. Kinder whistled that never-ending and always changing melody, one paw pressed to her shoulder.

A shadow besmirched the iron doorway and both their heads turned. Standing taller than the transom yet somehow unaffected by it was a pearl-gray skinned being with sharp, angular features. He was attired in rich silks filled with subtle colors. White hair cascaded from the dome of his head. Ancient eyes regarded her with sympathy, but were hard as steel toward Kinder.

“Do not put that knife to flesh if you ever wish to leave this place again. This is not your husband. You are not a vixen.” The voice, ageless and deep, brought the rat's memories to the fore again, and she knew him to be the companion guiding the rat through darkness. She yearned to trust him, but her memories of life as a vixen, and the attraction of Kinder, so dear to her, were hard to deny.

Still, his name came to her. “You are Qan-af-årael of the Åelf. How can you be real?”

“He is not,” Kinder snapped, a growl fetching his throat. “He is a liar! He would spin a false world about you, Mechtilde. Do not listen to him!”

“And you,” Qan-af-årael replied in an even but certain tone, eyes fixed upon the fox, “are Klepnos.”

Kinder blinked and shook his head. “Who? My name is Kinder. This is Mechtilde my wife. And you are a liar sent by the rats to steal her from me again! Get your vile presence from our home!”

But the Åelf paid him no more attention, merely staring at the vixen with a concerned moue. “Charles, he has lied to you and cast this net over you. Put down the knife and step away from him and the madness will leave. You will see true again.”

“Charles,” she murmured, looking over the red and black fur of her arms, legs and tail, and then down at the dead rat child on the preparation table. A moment ago she had scarfed down the meat from its tail and savored it. Now she felt like vomiting. The knife wavered in her hand.

“Mechtilde, please, let go of the what the rats did to you and stay here with me,” Kinder begged, his voice warm and smile fetching. Her heart fluttered with desire but it could not take flight. The dead rat, the scent of blood and filth, all of it balked her.

“Klepnos has spun an elaborate illusion about you, Charles. He wants you to let go because you are still holding my robes. If you let go of your past you will be consumed by him. Look at the rats in the cage. Look at the skin. That is your family. The skin is your son's.”

“He is lying to you. He is an ally of the rats who cursed you. I am your family,” Kinder insisted. He stepped closer to her to get between her and the Åelf, lifting his arms as if to shield her from the interloper. “Just cut free some of the meat and you will put all of this behind you forever.”

She glanced at the skin stretched across the rack and imagined it still on the body of the rat dead before her. It would have been of a white rat with a black hood down its back. Glancing into the rat's memories she could see that very rat child and how dear he was. The very child the rat had been seeking and for which reason he had passed into the realm of Klepnos.

The name, so familiar to her, but unfamiliar at the same time, now came into clear focus. The firm touch of the fox's paw on her shoulder made her shudder, and she turned her head to stare at the rats in the cell. The mother, though naked and filthy with matted fur and scars, bore the countenance of the rat's wife. The four children with her also matched the memories that had been pressed away from her. A subtle glow, a ruddy hue somewhere between purple and red, pulsed steadily from a stone about the female rat's neck. Her dark gaze held the vixen, resigned to the fate that was before her and her offspring at the blade held in black-pawed hands. While Mechtilde stared at the captured feast the rat's paw stole up to grasp the stone about her neck.

“You are a fox, Mechtilde,” Kinder added softly, cold nose nuzzling against her ear. The melody breathed from his throat. “You eat rats. Show him that you do. Show him what you are.” A throb of – something – washed over the vixen, staggering her back a pace. The sudden emanation that was neither sound nor light nor anything Mechtilde could lay a thought upon to put a name to filled her – him! – with such a feeling of Love to which her husband the fox could not compare that the room seemed to list and, for only the briefest of moments, only the female rat seemed upright and Whole. The stone in the grasp of her small paw shone brightly, spears of purplish light leaking between her fingers as she became the bottom of a downward falling funnel for the blink of an eye, the beat of a heart. Into that wellspring of – something – Mechtilde felt herself – himself! – fall, only to jerk back when reality seemed to right itself.

She glanced down at the knife in her paw for several seconds and then closed her eyes tight. “No. No! I cannot!”

“You must or he will not leave us!”

She turned, putting the knife between her and Kinder, snarling at the edge of her jowl. “Why? If you are my husband, why do you not protect me from this stranger? Why is he still here if he is allied with the rats? Why must I choose?”

“Because he needs you to let go of me,” Qan-af-årael said in his measured but clear voice. “If you do not let go of me he cannot claim you for himself. You still clutch my robe, Charles, though your senses tell you otherwise.”

Kinder shook his head. “He lies to you for his own benefit. He will not leave this place unless he knows the curse on you is truly broken, Mechtilde, my love. That is why you have to prove to him that you are a fox once more. I could throw him out as many times as I like but until you choose he will keep coming back to torment us.”

“Klepnos, step back and let him decide.” Qan-af-årael challenged irritably.

Kinder sneered over his shoulder at the Åelf but he did take a step back. His snout favored Mechtilde with invitation and warmth. “I love you, Mechtilde. Do not listen to him. He is a liar and wants to destroy your world.”

Her ears perked at that, and her grip on the knife tightened. “ 'Your world'? Don't you mean, 'our world'?” She tried to level her angry, surprised glare at her husband but the throbbing glow from the cage kept the corner of her eye and she could not bring herself to fully turn her gaze away from it.

The fox blinked and then nodded. “Aye, of course, our world. He will tear you from me again if you let him. Just help me prepare the rest of this rat meat and you'll never need worry about him or those terrible memories again.”

Qan-af-årael stared at her in silence awaiting her decision.

She glanced at the imprisoned rats one last time before turning back to Åelf and fox. A long sigh escaped her chest. The knife fell to the ground and she stepped over it toward Qan-af-årael.

The house vanished in that moment, and with it drained away the memories and form of Mechtilde. Blinking, the rat came to himself and realized that his left hand was still firmly grasping the silken robes draping his guide and protector. Kinder remained as the fox, but his countenance now bore a sadistic moue. He bared his fangs and snarled in frustration for a moment, before stretching his back and letting out an exasperated sigh.

“I tried. I wouldn't have driven you completely insane quite so quickly either. You would have had many years to enjoy life as Mechtilde first.” His blue eyes glinted with malice, “And you would have become quite adept at killing rats, especially their young, my sweet vixen! Hah! Even that silly female and her bauble!”

And then, the red fox jumped with a flourish before vanishing into a smear of gray. His laughter bounced around them before spreading in an ever widening curl that was sucked away into the distance, ever stretching and never-ending. Charles shuddered as the laughter lingered for nearly a minute before it too had been absorbed in the maelstrom beneath them.

“Where are we?” Charles murmured, searching through his thoughts to see what traces of the vixen remained. Little snatches of the images that Klepnos had placed there, and what had happened since he had woken in that bed, but nothing else was left. The sight of his family cowering in prison waiting to be skinned and chopped to bits to feed others made him burn with hatred for the mad daedra.

“We stand in witness to the reality of this place,” Qan-af-årael gestured at the wide disk of gray above which they seemed to hover. Charles recognized it from the brief flashes he saw when first arriving and after Hindemar ripped his own eyes out. Around them the disc curved, bending beneath them down into a darkness his eyes could not pierce. A whirlpool of immense proportions, the fluid of which was made from mortal souls all lost in madness.

“I would have ended up in there too?” Charles asked, swallowing heavily and tightening his grip on Qan-af-årael's robe.

“Not at first,” his guide replied with a gentle touch on his back. “You still have your flesh. Klepnos would have you believe you were whatever he wished you to be so long as he could. By the time your body finally died you would have been so completely insane that he would have been able to absorb every last mote of your being and leave what was left of your soul to be torn to the tiniest shreds in his maelstrom before losing it to the Beyond. He wanted you to kill your own family to make the break in your mind complete, and to get you to let go of the one thing that kept you from his clutches.”

“You,” Charles replied. He shuddered, took a deep breath, and then exhaled. He did it again but still he felt weak and strangely violated.

“I am sorry you had to endure that. But I dared not break Klepnos's hold on you until I knew we could leave.”

Charles blinked and looked up at him. “You found the bridge?”

He nodded, a slight gesture accompanied by a slender smile. “It is here and open. Step forward and we continue. I caution you, we are continuing downward. It will only grow worse.”

“But I have no choice. Nocturna waits for me above,” Charles grimaced, and then steeled himself. “I trust you to protect me, Qan-af-årael.” So saying, he stepped forward. The maelstrom beneath their feet tipped toward them as if they were falling into its depths. It rushed past with one final scream of insanity before the darkness took them.

 

 

When Charles stepped off the end of the bridge into the infinitesimal gap he felt a curious stillness greet him on the other side. He blinked and twitched his whiskers, ears lifted for any sound, tail turning behind him in expectation of his guardian's arrival. The realm about him was washed out and gray, with a featureless plain stretching in every direction. The sky was leaden and dark. The ground was cold as on a night in early Spring when the mountain slopes had yet to thaw. There was a soft hush in the air as of a gentle autumn breeze catching at dead leaves. What few scents he tasted were muted. Everything around him felt cold.

What he did notice, unlike Klepnos's realm, was that in the distance he could see people huddled together. They were too far away for his eyes to discern any details, but their general shape was unmistakeable. For a brief moment he felt heartened to see other people. And then he recalled where he was and shuddered from more than the chill in the air. These people were all dead; and the further he descended in this pagan realm the worse these people would be.

A warming presence filled the space behind him and Charles turned toward his protector and guide. Qan-af-årael stood tall as a sapling with folded hands before him, golden eyes surveying the sullen landscape. His gaze lowered to the rat and a subtle smile played across his cheeks before a graver cast overtook his already gray features. In that barren landscape with oppressively colorless sky what few pigments remained to the Åelf were drained as well.

He set one hand on Charles' shoulder and the solid assuring presence of the Åelf filled not just his senses but his mind as well.

Do not use your voice unless you have no other choice. The very air will steal your warmth. It will steal it anyway, but you should not hasten it.

Charles nodded to show ascent and concentrated his thoughts in reply. I have felt colder than this. How much worse will it get?

We have been here but moments. It will never warm and will grow much, much colder ere we find the bridge. Qan-af-årael removed his hand but the presence within him remained. It felt as if he were not alone inside his flesh, but that through the sharing of minds there were two within him, himself and a great companion in whom he could trust to guide and protect him. There seemed to the rat some sequacious impulse inherent to the connection, as of an inchoate bearing from a compass that still spun. Insouciant, he turned from the Åelf, and gestured with the sweep of one arm.

Which way should we go? Everything appears the same here.

Cold and gray, and yet tinged with the blue of ice, he almost added.

In this place I do not believe it matters. All directions lead to Kilyarnie.

Charles wrapped his arms about his chest and grimaced. He did not need to think the question for it to be clear.

But the ancient one's thoughts were no comfort. His voice felt brittle in his mind, as if it were cool iron. It will not make sense until we are there. For now you must start moving and keep moving. Do not stop walking for any reason.

Charles nodded, glanced around at the vast gray plain, hesitating only a moment before picking the direction ahead of him. He raised one long-toed paw, stepped forward, and set it down again. No sharp knives or strange sensations met him. Only the barrenness of permafrost, the slight crunching of frozen ground beneath his weight, was there to greet him. His other paw lifted and swung forward past its sibling to crush more of the barren earth, leaving an impression of long toes and narrow sole behind.

The first two steps felt tentative, but thereafter his pace quickened and Charles soon strode across the cold plain without hesitation. His cloak billowed around him at first, but he quickly grasped it with either hand and pulled it tight around him to keep what warmth he still felt within. His tail he swung around his side until it could be looped about his middle; it hurt to have it twisted so much, but it was better than having it freeze. His toes and ears hurt from the cold after only a few minutes of walking. In mid-step he pulled the cowl of his cloak up over his head and felt some relief.

The sides of the cowl narrowed his vision; the blur of his whiskers and snout were ever before him. His breath misted in the air and clung to his whiskers. He flicked them from time to time when he felt that mist turning to ice. The rat shivered and kept walking.

Qan-af-årael was hidden by the cowl, but he could hear the crush of his boots on the ground to his right. The cold, already bitter and deeper than when he had emerged from the bridge, muted his scent, and there was a subtle disconnect in his presence, as if he were both at his side and some distance away. His mental being however felt nearer still; even though his thoughts did not intrude upon him they were always there on the other side of a little wall. At the breath of invitation Charles knew his protector and guide would come. The paltry barrier between them could never keep him out.

The plain ahead of him did not vary even after what felt like hours of walking. There was no breeze at all, leaving everything to feel as still as stone. The sky bore down upon them so that it felt as if the void of stars was within an arrow's reach. Charles bent forward, one hand clutching his tail, the other holding his cloak, nose sniffling through his own breath.

The groups of people clustered together he saw at a distance generally seemed to stay at a distance. What little of the plain he could see between the sides of his cowl hurt his eyes to follow too closely. Unlike Klepnos's realm which made no sense in any direction, here what happened if he glanced to either side was consistent in its incongruity. But it did not move as the real world did and that made it difficult to observe.

As long as Charles stared straight ahead at the point on the non-existent horizon toward which he walked, then only the way his vision seemed to stretch into infinity bothered him. Perspective was maintained along that straight path. But should his eyes veer a short distance – as a rat he could not keep them from veering as the shape of his head made him prefer to focus on what happened on either side of him – then he saw everything rushing away as if twisted on some giant disc, so that objects which had appeared near the path he followed would rush away like a Lutin fleeing the axe.

But there was something even stranger. A slight angle difference in either direction from the point directly ahead of him also seemed to remain fixed in place. And should he stare at something between those points that were fixed, the more he walked, the nearer they seemed to his destination! It was if he were walking through bubbles of soap, all sense of distance and perspective distorted so that he could no longer tell what was far away and what was near at all. The many groups of people he saw huddled together would one moment appear to be within shouting range and then the next they would be flung away off to his side to disappear beyond the folds of his cowl. Others seemed as if he would never near them only to be thrust within view for a moment's breath before they too were sucked away by the cold.

In a moment of curiosity, Charles turned his head as he walked to stare to his left. His impression of a vast disc on which everything turned was insufficient to describe what in those few seconds he witnessed. Groups of people, the slightest variations in the permafrost, all of it moved back and forth, here and there in a series of spirals whose intricate patterns were a mystery to him. It made him feel nauseated. He did not try it a second time.

But as disturbing as the strange way everything moved around him, he would not make the mistake of closing his eyes. All he heard was the crunch of the ground beneath his numb paws and the similar sound that came from the fall of Qan-af-årael's boots. As he forced his legs to take each step, he peered across the wall at the edge of his mind and whispered a question.

Why is it impossible to tell how far away anything is here?

The presence of his companion shifted to that wall, like a bank of fog climbing the ledge around Metamor. Because all paths here lead to Kilyarnie. Distance does not mean the same thing here as we are used to. Imagine you are walking on the inside of a vast funnel. If you do not walk straight toward the bottom, objects on one side will veer away from you, while those on the other will remain close for a time. It is not quite what we do here, but the idea is similar.

Charles tried to imagine what it might be like to walk along the inside of a funnel, but had difficulty grasping it. Qan-af-årael's presence intruded on his pondering as of a gate captain warning his people of an enemy without.

It is the least dangerous aspect of this place. We still tread its periphery. You must stay as warm as you can; do not turn to stone here or you will not survive to reach Kilyarnie much less the bridge.

Charles shuddered and gave a quick nod. He tried to quicken his pace but even with his Sondeck could only manage a little speed. He risked lifting one paw to adjust the cloak so that the tip of his snout was covered; this did expose one of his legs more than he would like – the section removed by Tallakath's gardeners and the section he'd given up to garb one of Tallakath's victims now haunted him – but it allowed him to breathe somewhat warmer air.

Though he could not be certain how long he had been walking, nor how far they had come or how far they had to go, but one thing that he did know was that the air had grown colder. The ground beneath his feet was sprinkled with ice crystals that added a shimmer of white to the dusky gray of the permafrost. The clouds above them seemed thinner than before, and from time to time they would open up to reveal the bleakness of a night sky. That black void felt much nearer as if the sky itself were only as tall as Metamor's cathedral and not spanning the expanse of mountains.

Charles shivered beneath the cloak and kept walking.

To his surprise, one of the groups of people huddled together appeared in view along one of the angles that seemed to stay fixed. He watched them for a time as he tried not to think of the pain in his legs and paws. At first he could make nothing out but as they closed he saw that there were more than a dozen men and women all pressed as closely as they could together. Charles first thought that they had done so for mutual benefit, helping to keep each other warm for just a bit longer. But as the group drew closer along that fixed angle, he realized that mutual benefit had nothing to do with what he saw.

The two dozen or so were formed in the middle by four larger men who had their arms wrapped about eight others, holding them in tight so there was no space between their flesh. The next eight out also had their arms wrapped about one or two others, keeping them as close as they possible could to steal their warmth. The dozen men and women on the outermost ring were there against their will. Not that, to judge by their blank expressions and their ice covered extremities, they had any will left to object. Their arms hung limply at their sides, fingers and toes all blue and swollen from frostbite. Their faces were sallow, with ice coating their hair, lashes, and beards. Their eyes were open and frozen in place, a sheen of pale blue coating them.

The next ring in, having exhausted the warmth of those on the outside, were also beginning to show the effects of the cold. Their flesh, where visible, had traces of frostbite, and their expressions were fixed in a rictus of resignation. Only the four larger men in the middle still seemed determined to keep the ice at bay; only they still had warmth around them to steal. And yet, not a one of them moved; they did not even blink. They were as frozen in place as those poor souls whose fires had already gone out.

Charles pulled his cloak more tightly about his chest and whimpered under his breath. He feared what would happen should they draw too close to this group of warmth-stealing souls, but his path from which he could not make himself deviate brought them right to him. His eyes ever stayed upon them as they neared, swelling and larger until he could see how they rose up above him. As a rat he was used to being a head or two shorter than most of his friends, but for some reason – or perhaps merely from the whims of the mistress of this barren place – the frozen human souls appeared to tower above him. He knew he should be at eye level with their chest, but instead he felt he had to glance upward just to find their knees.

And then, as they reached the edge of that collection of souls their swollen feet, frozen to the ground so that they were actually encased in slopes of ice, framed him as the roots of his tree in Glen Avery did.

Charles passed in between the ankles, head bowed ever so slightly to hold in his warmth. Veins of blue laced the ice that stretched across the ground from foot to foot. His claws found some purchase in the ice, but still he slipped and stumbled. Qan-af-årael steadied him with a single hand, and a nearness of presence urged him to keep walking. The rat did so, right into the center of that mass of thieving souls.

The second ring of souls were not encrusted by ice, though their extremities, some clad and some not, were all beginning to show the signs of it. Crystals formed along the edge of their feet; he saw swollen toes on some. Before him a pair of boots rose upward to an impossible height, greater than that of Metamor castle. And yet the sky still seemed to bear down on them ever closer. Had Charles and Qan-af-årael shrunk to the size of grasshoppers, or was this just one more strange distortion inimical to this realm?

The air in between the legs and feet of the innermost ring had a tinge of warmth to it. He could for the first time smell the sweat of flesh and hear the twinge of a heart beat in the giants above him. For a moment he considered pausing to allow that warmth to fill him. He could wait a few moments here. His shivering would still, the pain in his legs and paws from exposure would be healed. All he had to do was linger for a time and he would be himself again.

But how long a time? Would he become like these four thieves, unable to move for fear that they would lose what little heat they could still steal? At the wall in his mind he felt the presence of his guardian urging him onward, as if he were in agreement with this subtle warning.

Charles kept walking. The cooler air returned the moment he passed into the second circle of legs, and he resumed shivering when he stepped past the ice-caked legs of the frozen souls. When at last he emerged from beneath them he saw that the permafrost had completely surrendered to the ice. The vast plain of this barren realm was now covered for as far as his eyes could penetrate in a sheet of dull white ice. Gray, thin clouds sagged beneath the weight of the void pressing down on them from above. The pain in his legs grew worse with each step, but he continued to walk, shivering in his flesh and chittering in his teeth.

He well remembered the many winters at Metamor he had lived, and most especially the last two in which he'd been forced to survive in the elements as a scout for both Metamor and the Glen. In each case he had been better prepared for the elements with warmer cloaks, breeches, and tunics. He'd even had boots for his paws on the coldest of days to keep his toes from freezing. The rest of the time wrappings had been sufficient. Now he had nothing but a tunic, breeches, and torn cloak suitable for the Spring.

And when he had journeyed into the Barrier Range he had been trapped in a stone body. The iciness had been frightening in the sense that he feared having water seep into his body and then expand when it froze, cracking the granite sinews of his form. His fears had been the fears of stone, not of flesh. Now he was beginning to understand the misery his companions on that journey had endured. His body yearned for a single fire, and he began to regret not lingering beneath the legs of the warm people.

Flakes of snow drifted through the air and began whitening his dark cloak. One of them drifted into his cowl and settled in the ruined flesh over his right eye, melting only slowly. The icy water dribbled into his eye. He blinked and shifted about as he walked, rubbing his face against the inside of his cowl to dry it. As he did so the cowl fell away from his snout and the cloak back down around his lower legs. More snow settled onto his whiskers and nose as if drawn to him.

At first he twitched whiskers and snout to dislodge as much of the snow as he could. But as the minutes rolled past and the snow thickened in the air he stopped bothering. There was too much snow to fight and it was a distraction from his efforts to keep placing one paw in front of the other. He felt a sullen resignation weighing on his heart. The snowfall seemed only to emphasize the futility of his efforts. Each step expended more of his precious energy allowing this place to steal more and more of his heat. Were he to keep still the rat could conserve that warmth for much longer.

And were he to do that, he knew, he would never see his son again. Charles pushed on, digging his claws into the flesh of his tail enough to register a little pain. The agony in his legs increased with each step and so he dug his claws tighter and tighter to turn his mind from their pain. His other hand clutched the cloak tight, so tight that it was hard to breathe. Every gust of air from his snout misted before him, blinding him even more than the snowfall. Ice laced his whiskers and coated the tip of his snout. His paws, chapped, cracked and began to bleed.

He shifted his thoughts toward that wall against which the presence of his guardian reposed. His request tumbled through his thoughts.

Master Åelf, is there any way you can give me warmth? The cold is...

There was a note of regret in the reply.

Any spell I cast in this place will draw the attention of its mistress. If your life is threatened I will do what is necessary to preserve it. But we should avoid drawing attention to ourselves for as long as we can. You can endure more than this, Charles. I am here with you.

Despite the refusal, he did feel some comfort in the assurance. Charles gave a quick nod of his head to show he understood even as he continued to stumble through the snow. The ice encrusted ground was now coated with a layer of snow a hand deep, and through it the cracks in his paws left a spattered crimson trail.

While forcing himself to walk, Charles forced his thoughts toward his family. He walked this horrible way through the crucible of a soul to reach his lost son. A smile touched the edge of his snout as he remembered the day of his birth. The horrible news that the child was tangled in his umbilical cord and the great risk that Lady Avery, Jo, and Burris took in cutting open his wife to draw the child out, all of that fear had been erased in the moment when the child had been placed in his arms and he knew not only that his fifth child would live, but the flickering power of the Sondeck filled him too.

How well he could remember the leap in his heart at that sensation, the kindling of a kindred soul whose life would be forever tied to that of his father, a certainty that he would continue in his father's steps, and eventually take his father's duties as his successor. The hours they would spend together reaching for their Calm, singing the Sondlatharos, kneeling before the Sondecki shrine to bask in its power, and practicing arts beyond the ken of mortal men. Their union would be so complete that no force on earth could have torn them apart.

Save for death.

If not for Marzac he would have been there when the Sondtodt struck Ladero. He would have known what to do and whom to seek to save his son's life. With Garigan's aid they could have kept the tear from spreading and brought him to Sondeshara where he would have been healed. True, Charles would have had to endure the judgment of his clan, but that was a small price to pay to have his son with him.

His heart stiffened when he recalled the offered price to Nocturna to bring Ladero back. But it had been a ruse only, one that gave him access to the world beyond. The queen of dreams could exact nothing from him when the victory was of his own doing.

For a time these thoughts warmed him enough to keep moving. He even drew to mind his wife and other children so that he might delight in their memory and their eager, loving faces. But he did not struggle against the elements for their sake and so inevitably they would fall from his thoughts. Only Ladero was left.

But to what end was he enduring this? To glimpse his son and say goodbye? Was a mere goodbye worth the effort he expended. Was it worth the shedding of his blood, the raping of his mind, and the torture of his flesh?

The snow rose to two hands and he had to lift his legs to forge through. No wind blew to thwart him, but the cold deepened and his arms shook as if palsied. He stared past white whiskers, a snout flecked with ice, and the edge of his cowl coated with flakes that would not melt. He felt no heat in him, only the bitter cold sinking through fur, flesh, and settling into his bones. His heart throbbed with yearning for his son, but bit by bit that too surrendered to a mere yearning for some glimmer of warmth that would justify lifting one paw after another.

He trudged on, the presence at his side moving closer so that he could feel his cloak brushing against Qan-af-årael's side. There was a suggestion of warmth there still and so he leaned into it, trembling. Charles wanted to fall into his guardian's arms and curl against him just for even a moment to escape the freezing chill.

By the time the snow was as high as his knees the air began to thin even further. The snow continued to fall but grew sparse and finally abated altogether. Each step took several seconds as he was forced to climb through the snow, his hands slipped free of the cloak to push enough of the fresh-fallen snow away so his legs could step over them. The chapped flesh on his paws bled some and then froze gray and scarlet as if it were drops of rubies imbedded in granite. His tongue was too cold to whimper no matter the pain. His body yearned only for rest.

With the snow cleared Charles caught sight of something ahead along one of the peculiar angles. It was not, as he expected, another group of men clustered together in attempt to to steal warmth. Rather it was a single man standing with arms clutched to his chest, head lowered with chin on chest, and legs anchored to the ground by encasing ice that reached past his knees. Unlike Charles he appeared to have been dressed for colder climes, with two layers of fur-lined tunics and breeches, and a red-skinned cloak atop it all which was now pinched to his legs beneath the ice. His face was covered in a beard that had once been a ruddy brown but which now was white with frost. Icicles framed his eyes and dangled from his ears. His eyes were closed, but as the rat and Åelf trudged through the snow they blinked open and met them with a sudden glimmer of disdain.

Lips cracked and bleeding opened, and in a voice hoary with disuse, the man spoke. “Do you not recognize me, Sondecki? Your form may be that of a beast but I recognize you.”

Charles was taken aback, but at the touch of the Åelf kept moving forward. Like the group of men earlier this man seemed to swell in size as they neared. But their pace was so slow that he still only appeared to be a very large man. Each agonizing step thrust him taller by one or two hands.

The mention of Sondecki drove the rat into the vaults of memory as he searched the cold-scarred face for some hint of identity. But of all those he'd known from his years in Sondeshara this face had never been amongst them. He felt no glimmer of the Sondeck in this man, and even amongst the many people who made Sondeshara their home but had no share in their talent, this face and this voice was not to be found.

“You do not recall?” His voice felt drained of energy as if it struggled to make itself known. His breath was not even warm enough to cause a mist, and every exposed bit of flesh was frostbitten and cracked. “Do not dwell on your friends or neighbors for I was neither. We only saw each other once, but in that last moment I looked in your eyes and saw your soul. You were hard, determined, and naïve. You had no inkling of what you truly did.”

The edge in the man's voice, faint but present, pushed Charles' thoughts in other directions. If he were not a friend and not a neighbor then he could only be an enemy of the Sondeckis. Charles dwelt on the many foes he had once faced and felt his heart sink, the chill wrapping about it more firmly. Even thoughts of his son did not penetrate the bitter ice that gripped it.

He opened his mouth to speak and regretted it. A rush of cold air drove down into his throat and filled him. He shut his mouth but it was too late. His limbs would no longer move, his heart thrummed for a moment before quieting to a sullen tremble. His paws sank deep into the snow where the hardening ice began to grasp them.

The Åelf gripped his shoulder and dragged him from his sudden repose, a flicker of warmth extending down his arm and into his chest. Charles tucked his head to his chest and yearned to weep but nothing escaped his throat. He felt ice encrusting his cheeks where tears dribbled. The flesh of his paws tore again and the bloody trail resumed.

He thrust his mind toward the wall and the presence seeping across its battlements. There he found the strength and will to keep moving forward. A single coherent thought drifted up from his diminished being toward his protector. He is Kalevard of the Darkündlicht mountains and the first man I was sent to kill.

Kalevard now stood more than twice his height. His gloved hands were balled into fists then trembled as if trying to flex. “You remember now. It is fitting you would become a rat. Skulking in darkness you came to my fortress. While my wife and children slept you entered my chambers and broke my neck. And for what? For what crime did I commit against your clan?”

Charles tried to move his legs but still the Åelf had to drag him. Unable to even stretch out his arms he nevertheless tried to shift so that he would be pressed against his protector's side. Qan-af-årael seemed to anticipate his desire and let his still warm arm slip beneath his left shoulder and hoist him up. The rat leaned against his legs and belly, eyes never leaving Kalevard.

He raided villages and plundered them. He sold captives into slavery. What I did was necessary.

Kalevard's voice felt brittle. He seemed to want to call forth passion but there was none left in his heart. “I was generous. I never kept anything for myself when any of my people were cold and hungry. I protected them and brought them glory.”

Charles gave his head a little shake. Generous with his own people but brutal to anyone else.

Hard, blue eyes fixed on the rat. “I never attacked your people or put one to the sword. Those few I captured were always returned.”

Ransomed!

“I saw to the needs of all my people. I was a just leader. Even our slaves were treated well. I gave command that no slave could be beaten more than twenty lashes for any offense save murder. And for all of that you kill me with my wife and children in the next room. Not one hour before I had kissed them on their heads when I put them to sleep. Not one hour.”

Charles' thoughts were weary, but he could not let this man justify himself. The children of villages he raided were sold into slavery and never saw their families or homeland again.

Each of these thoughts were offered to his protector who accepted them without offering judgment. The Åelf continued to steady Charles and press him along the path. By the time Kalevard towered above them like a giant the febrile warmth he felt brought back his ability to stand on his own. Charles pulled his cloak so tight that the cowl pressed his frozen ears against the side of his head. He took his next steps without wavering.

“Pathetic Sondecki rat. What are you doing here at all? Will you not even speak against these charges? You are nothing but vermin. Now who is lord and master whose whims you obey? You are not worth crushing beneath my boot.”

The closer they came to Kalevard the shallower the snow became. Not that it had snowed less, but the lower layers had all condensed into ice. Every step pressed it firmer together, and though each step became easier to make, each one brought the grip of the ice back to his toes. His will, battered and sullen, was sufficient only to keep moving forward. He did not even bother dwelling on the brigand's words.

“You left my wife and children without a father! Do you even know what happened to them? Do you even care?”

His eyes flicked upward at the towering figure. A dozen steps more would bring them beneath his legs. Already they stood no taller than his knees. The ice holding him fast was laced with blue as of wintry vines stretching and growing as it consumed this man. The level of snow and ice had completely absorbed the man's ankles so that his feet were mere smears of color.

Three steps more and Charles found his mind wandering back to that brigand's camp high in the Darkündlicht peaks. Carved from the walls of the mountains in a shallow valley where the sun pierced three times a day for two hours each, it afforded them ample protection and several easy passes from which to descend on the villages which clustered on the verdant slopes overlooking the Sondesharan desert. It also gave them access to the passes southward and into those lands it was a simple matter to barter in slaves.

But until Kalevard had wrestled control of the brigands they had been an occasional nuisance. Under his leadership they had destroyed several smaller villages, slaughtering all of the men and taking the rest for slaves. Charles well remembered that night as he slipped unseen through their defenses. Newly made a black the task had been given to him by lot; still he had not come alone as his friends waited on the outskirts in case an alarm would sound. The sound of drunken warriors carousing and celebrating their victory echoed from their halls. Dogs bayed and snapped at each other over meaty bones in the streets. A bitter-tasting black smoke rose from most every hall and home. Kalevard ruled from the largest hall and into that Charles crept, draped black in his new robe, confidant of the many villages that would be spared with the shattering of the brigand alliance.

Charles yearned to lift his snout and glare in defiance at the frozen giant, but could feel no impulse to do so. Why waste any more warmth on him? He continued walking, noting only the way the ice climbed Kalevard's legs.

“You don't care, do you?” Kalevard asked, his voice losing any sense of inflection with each word he breathed. Charles and his protector stepped between his legs, which were nothing but towers of ice that swelled and stretched across more and more of his form. The flow of ice between his ankles rose beneath them like the crest of a wave. “You don't care at all what evil you do. You don't care. You don't care, Sondecki.”

Charles narrowed his eyes as he shivered, his paws slipping across the ice and his own blood. The ancient one steadied him and guided him through the arch of ice and leg. They emerged on the other side to witness a sky gone dark, gray only at the edge above their heads. All else seemed to drawn upward into an emptiness that was nowhere and everywhere in that midnight vault. Charles crouched and held his tail tight.

“You stole my family from me, Sondecki. And you say nothing to me. You do not care.” The voice did not echo from above, but seemed more remote as if Kalevard receded into the void. His words, faint, became taut and subsumed by the insistent crawling of ice. “You do not care. You belong here. Like me.” And then all was still and silent again.

Charles shuddered, and felt anew the cold sweep over him. There was no sensation in his legs anymore. His whiskers felt brittle and every intake of breath sent a lance of steely ice into the middle of his head. His chest shifted only to breathe. The trembling of his heart barely disturbed any of the muscles that held it in place. The plain before him, suffused white and gray, seemed to faintly shimmer with blue nimbus. Motes of some electric blue dust dotted the sheet of ice that pressed them upwards into the empty abyss.

The final words did not haunt so much as present themselves as uncaring signs placed aeons ago to inform travelers. He did not care. He belonged here. Could they be true? Didn't he care?

His heart tried to stir some concern, but it was stilled by a cold so deep even the relative warmth of his Åelf guide felt painful to him. The rat let his mind work instead, reviewing memories to see if there had been a time when he had cared. He thought on killing Kavelard. The man had been dressed in the same red cloak he'd born beneath the chrysalis of ice. He'd stood at a window with a cool mountain breeze drifting through and lofting away the smoke from the pipe clutched between his teeth. Charles slipped within from a different window, sliding through the shadows, hands outstretched to end the menace. It would not be the first time he had killed, for he had fought in battles many times. But it was the first man he'd killed because justice demanded it.

Even as the Sondeck surged in his flesh, he heard one of the children give out a sullen cry, that of a bad dream disturbing their slumber. Kalevard turned to the sound and caught sight of him. Charles had rushed, grappled him about the neck to silence him. The pipe bounced off his arm, hot ash burning his robe. The man's fiery blue eyes burned in anger as Charles' fingers tangled briefly in his beard before reaching their goal. A twist and a thrust of his power and it was done.

The child still cried even as Charles draped the brigand's body across the floor and smothered the last of the ashes beneath the man's red cloak. The complaint fell silent by the time the Sondecki slipped without sound from the hall. He trembled the entire way back. His fellow Sondeckis plied him with strong wine on their return home.

A miserable sadness enveloped him as the sound of the child's cry returned to him. How many nights had he woken hearing that cry again and again before the rigors of the Sondecki life and the presence of his Calm brought him a sense of peace again? Had he even confessed it? Did it matter?

He pushed himself onward even as he continued to crouch. Before him he could see the ice shimmer with his own image reflected. The visage was distorted so that his eyes appeared to be closed peacefully. He blinked and gazed into that reflection, bloodied paws stepping, slipping, and stepping again. His hands were clasped before him in the quiet repose of prayer. The ice was cold, but it was all that there was in this place. Nothing else mattered. He had no will anymore to be anything else. Stillness was all that was left.

Stone may be still but there was striving and power within it. There was desire. There was purpose. Even as stone Charles had been able to love his family and protect his friends. He yearned for them. Now, trying to dwell on them did nothing. He could imagine his wife's face, her whiskers and snout, her delicate ears, soft paws, and all the faces of his children, especially Ladero his Sondecki son. But each was veiled to him, encased in ice.

Ice did not feel.

Ice did not care.

Ice had no will to even move.

Charles felt nothing, could desire nothing, could will nothing but ice.

The image distorted as the ice in front of him shifted aside, revealing an inviting cavity into which he could descend. Charles moved one leg before the other, stepping into the depression. The cavern of ice rose up around him, smooth and numbing. He felt nothing as it slid up across his legs, tail, and back. His arms lowered before him, dipping into the substance and not returning, held fast forever. His eye lids drooped and his heart slowed, the smoking wick quenched in the embrace.

A thunderclap struck and sundered the world around him. Charles blinked and trembled as a wash of something intolerable shattered his tomb and drove every touch of numbness from him. His eyes dashed open, and into view stepped a blaze of yellow light. Before him towered the Åelf, aflame with silvery black hair and ears drawn to sharp points. His simple white garment with its wide sleeves and skirt with undulating hem were as burnished bronze. The eyes he knew were golden erupted in a fiery blue, the same blue of a clear day's sky. Ageless skin showered him with a grace that pierced the ice wrapped about his heart and for a moment he fell to his knees.

And then, the painful sensation became pleasant. It had a name. Warmth. That warmth suffused him until he felt his heart beating in his chest and the numbness and pain in all his limbs were driven away. He curled and uncurled his fingers and even let his tail slip from around his middle and lay across his paws stretched behind him. The white encrusting his snout and whiskers melted away as the fiery light bathed him in its radiance.

You must keep moving, Charles. Come. She will have seen that.

Charles breathed heavily for a moment, as Qan-af-årael's countenance returned to normal. His white hair and golden eyes glimmered in the fading light. The rat stared in awe as he savored his breath, then climbed to his paws, stretching his toes gratefully. He glanced at each leg and saw that his wounds were healed. He let out one last gust of breath and started walking again. His thoughts roved to the presence within his mind.

I almost died there.

You almost did. Kalevard spat the last of his warmth to induce you to waste your own. You should not have listened to anything he said.

The air about him already felt cold again; he pulled his tail back beneath his cloak and pulled it taut. His breath misted and froze. I had not thought on him or any other I killed as a Sondecki in a long time. Seeing him and hearing him... I forgot what you said. I will not forget again.

Qan-af-årael's presence felt comforting, as if he were smiling. There was a residue of warmth still in that voice. I know you will not. It is too dangerous now to do otherwise. Behold, the Wastelands of Kilyarnie.

Charles lifted his gaze and felt as if the ice were clutching his chest again. Before them stretched a circular plain that rose upward like the top of a dome. The sky was gone and only blackness remained where once it persisted. The ground was lathered with a crystal blue dust atop the thick ice beneath. Strange deformations in the dust suggested a vast shape entombed within. The dust did not glimmer and nothing within that wasteland moved.

Charles could not will himself forward, though his heart beat faster in his chest. What is that dust? It seems inhospitable.

The response was almost laconic. It is the very air frozen and fallen. Even with my protection you will not survive more than a few minutes within this place. This is the abode of the mistress of this land. All warmth has been driven from here. Our presence will be despised. It is certainly known. We must reach the bridge with incredible haste.

Anxious, he cast his thoughts back. Do you know where the bridge is?

I do. I can move with great speed through this place, but it is best for you if I carry you. Not as you are, but in your animal guise. I will cloak you next to my chest, and bury you within your garments to keep the bitterness of the void at bay for a minute or two longer.

Charles nodded, eyes the blue crystals ahead of them warily. The very air itself frozen and fallen? How cold must that be? Even in the far north where the snows departed the air was always air!

He ground his molars together and, still fully clad, imagined himself in his animal form. His clothes shifted about as he shrank in stature, thumbs withdrawing, back arching, hips thickening, thighs and arms shrinking, neck swelling until it and his shoulders were indistinguishable. Charles collapsed in on his clothes, trapped within one of the legs of his breeches which fell to the ice with a whump. He gasped for breath, and then shut his snout right away. There was a little warmth left in his clothing, but the frigid air had already crept within.

He curled up tail to nose where he was and felt something lifting him and his gear. He could not see through the fabric, and remembering the void, was grateful for it. Hands felt around the clothes until they had encircled him, and then he was pressed into something tight. He could feel warmth exuding along his back and leaned into it, little forepaws gripping the cloth in front of him as if he could keep himself in place.

Qan-af-årael's voice felt even more massive before, as if Charles' mental proportions had shrunk with his body. Do not move and make no noise. I only need one thing more from you before we enter Kilyarnie. I must accompany you through the bridge; it cannot be forced. Will you step across it?

The answer was obvious. I will.

The presence did not leave, but loomed over him, its attention briefly split between him and the greater goal. Charles settled where he was, comfortable as a normal rat, though even in the warmth of his protector's vest he could still feel the edge of ice stabbing him. He pressed his head against the Åelf's chest and for a moment felt surprise when he heard no heart beat. Then he recalled why.

Nothing else in this realm was alive save for him.

Charles felt a jerk and then heard a sizzling scream resound from every side. He pressed his face into the enclosing clothes as a hideous chill penetrated within. His paws scraped over his head to try and keep the horrible screaming out but the noise only grew louder and more strident. He felt mists rushing up through the garments wrapped around him, each so cold that he felt his skin cracking and ice coating his fur. He kicked and scrambled against it., burrowing himself against his protector.

He had no sense of time in any of the places they had endured, but here the screaming and the chill beyond anything he had felt before were only the beginning of his agonies. His lungs strained to scoop even a thimble of air, and his eyes and chest were imbued with a fire that burned every mote. He tried to keep them shut, and tried to keep his nose from sucking at air that was not there. All that was around him beyond the clothes was void. There was nothing to breathe.

His head felt like termites were chewing their way out through his skull. His eyes pressed against the sockets, shifting about and pushing outward so that he could not keep them closed. He felt blood trickling from his jaw, from around his eyes, and out of his ears. He thrashed and gasped, sucking against the frozen mist that flashed against his splintered paws and tail. Cold iron raced across his tongue and all he could do was claw and claw and claw at the clothes beneath him where the slightest taste of air, colder than the bitterest ice, brought relief from the void above.

The screaming came to a stop with a thunderclap and he felt jostled in his little cave. The emptiness continued to make his entire body spasm and blood flow. He hacked and trembled, mouth opening to swallow breaths that would not come. His blood froze to his fur. He stared into a darkness that deepened. He couldn't even conceive of trying to grow again.

And then a gentle hand reached up and touched him behind his ears. A sweet warmth radiated through him and he felt something powerful peer into his mind. Benevolence and majesty. He trembled, but lifted his snout, sniffing and trembling his whiskers, curious to know. A rush of air filled his lungs. A sinuous light danced into his eyes.

The bridge is open.

The words meant nothing to him at first, but the presence remained, certain and inviting. He would listen to the presence and obey. The bridge to beyond. The way was clear. The path was before him. He had to take the first step.

Charles climbed out of the cocoon of clothes, still fully a rat, and marveled at what he saw. In a wide circle the blue dust had evaporated into a sultry cone of brilliant azure. Beneath them the ice had parted, and a sibilant light outlined the suggestion of a portal. In the distance amongst the void grew a blue light, the only thing he could see that struck him with menace.

She is coming swift. Go now.

Charles climbed onto Qan-af-årael's hand, perched on all fours, and leaped. The oasis rushed above him as he tumbled tail over toes. He fell headfirst into the portal and a welcome blackness swept over him.

 

 

The little rat did not so much as feel warmth on the bridge as he felt the lack of the life-stealing cold. Nothing surrounded him for a moment and even though he was only a hand tall this bridge seemed no larger than the others. His whiskers twitched and he breathed a long sigh of relief which turned into a coughing spasm. His thumbless paws rubbed across his snout and brushed free the encrusted blood, even as the presence of his guide appeared on the bridge.

Qan-af-årael smiled down at him from a distorted height. From the folds of his elegant robes he produced the rat's meager garments. “Are you well, Charles?” To hear his voice in his ears instead of his mind made him squeak in surprise.

Charles willed himself to grow and his body swelled, shifting proportions, straightening his back. When his thumbs returned, he grasped his breeches and held them before his waist for modesty. His bare chest rose and fell as he attained his full height, still looking up at the Åelf but not nearly as far. “I am whole. And I am very grateful for your protection. I know that I could not have come this far on my own. How much torment remains?”

“Four realms more you must cross before the Beyond can be reached. Any souls you meet in these realms will be far more evil and corrupted by sin. You will have no friends below.” This last was said with an almost apologetic sigh, as if the Åelf thought himself responsible for the composition of the daedra realms and the souls trapped within.

Charles stepped into the breeches and pulled them to his waist. He cinched them with his belt, a pensive claw rubbing across the rat-head buckler “I haven't had any friends since the Gardens save you.” He grimaced but offered his guardian a lop-sided grin that stretched his snout and jumbled his whiskers. “Thank you again for helping me.” He pulled the tunic over his snout before he said anything more.

“I will protect you and bring you where you must go,” Qan-af-årael assured him. “After all that you have done to aid my people and save our world, how could I do less? Such base ingratitude is a terrible injustice toward one such as yourself, Charles.”

Charles shimmed into his tunic and then donned his vest. He checked his gear, found the Sondeshike where he had kept it inside a secret fold, and rubbed it between his fingers. “Thank you again. What must we face now?”

“The Lord of Rage,” Qan-af-årael replied with a veneer of disgust. “You will need your weapon.”

Charles took his torn Long Scout cloak and threw it across his shoulders; it brushed over the rat's ears as it settled against his back. “More creatures like the Gardeners, or those things we saw in the forest?”

“Worse things than they await us below.”

He swallowed and flicked his tail. “Of course.”

Charles pulled the Sondeshike from its place within his tunic and extended it. The ferrules snapped out to either side, but did not fully extend. It appeared that they had struck something immovable, but all that the rat could discern was the curving boundary to the bridge. They could not extend because there was no reality into which they could reach. Through his weapon Charles had touched an edge of creation.

Unsettled, the rat turned the Sondeshike sideways; the staff extended the rest of the way along-side him. He ground his molars together and wished for something to chew as he walked down the bridge. The optical distortion rushed to meet him as everything shrunk to a single point. And then he stepped through.

A snarling noise rose up around him as he fell to all fours, the Sondeshike still gripped in his hand. He lifted his head and blinked at the shifting of fiery red fur and rippling muscles that surrounded him. The muscles twisted, each attached to four legs which ended in paws with sickle-sharp claws, as they turned to reveal monstrous dog heads lathered in saliva with fangs so large they could never close their jaws. Their eyes were black as coals and burning with anger and hunger.

Charles felt their breath strike him like a muddy field after a brutal battle in which bodies had been left to rot. Boxy snouts snarled and snapped at the rat as he scrambled to his feet and leaped backward.

Standing, Charles was finally able to make sense of what he saw. Before him, standing nearly as tall as he did, were six infernal hounds. Spiked collars of black iron were fastened around each of their necks, and the chains disappeared he knew not where. Slavering jaws snapped at him, heavy paws dug into the ground and launched them forward.

Charles lifted the Sondeshike and spun it as fast as he could before him. The nearest of the hounds struck the spinning disc with its ravenous snout. Bones cracked as his momentum scuttled him sideways, his face caved inward where it had been struck. Yet still the beast rose, blood frothing forth in a mist as it scraped its claws over caked stone.

The hounds bounced on their paws, moving around him to attack from either side. Charles stepped back to keep himself from being surrounded, shifting the spinning disc from side to side as he tried to decide on what else to do. He summoned forth his Sondeck, willing it to fill his arms and legs as he danced on his paws looking for a way out.

A second hound lunged from his right as he turned aside. Had he been human he would not have seen the attack, but as a rat his eyes were better placed to see what happened at either side and even a little bit behind. He side-stepped, lashing his tail toward the left even as he drove the tip of his Sondeshike into the face of his attacker. The brass ferrules smashed into the hound's forehead, caving it inward with a sickening crunch. Blood and gore spewed through the open jaws only to be turned into a fine mist where Charles spun his Sondeshike through what was left of the hound's jaws and upper body. The bones snapped and the muscles fell to paroxysms as the creature was knocked aside. And yet it too climbed back to its feet, the ruin of its head disorienting it but otherwise availing the rat nothing.

The other four hounds bounded away from him for a moment before rushing to encircle him. Charles tried to find some place he could escape, but there did not appear to be anywhere he could go. For the first time, in that brief moment when their hideous jaws were not snapping at him, the rat could glimpse at the desolate land to which he had come. Light suffused the place, and an uncomfortable heat permeated everything, but it was not a desert sun crisping his skin. Rather it was the blaze of a flame that breathed across the sky; all of the land lay scorched and appeared to be nothing more than a maze of jagged red rocks.

The red was not the mesmerizing glow of a warm fire, nor was it the delicate sensuous hue of a Spring rose in full bloom. This was no twilight sun kissing the horizon, nor was it the amorous rouge of his wife's tongue reaching to kiss him. This red had no royal aspirations, had no clerical dignity, and no use to heraldry. It was not even the color of blood spilled from a wound.

Those were all reds Charles knew. Most of them were reds he loved.

This red was neither.

This red was putrid and formed by the spilling, the baking, the burning, the freezing, and the cracking of blood over ages uncountable. This was blood dried upon the rocks, pounded by foot, hoof and paw, beaten and slavered by parched tongues, ground beneath all until it had become the very dust of the air. This red was that dust of blood bound together, forged and fused until it rose up as the very rocks upthrust in every direction. The sinew of the realm beneath his feet was fashioned from this beaten, crushed, pulverized, and reformed blood. Drained of all its potency, there was nothing left but desiccation; a barren red fed only by the endless effusion of dismemberment.

No paint could make this red and no ink could illuminate it. No wine could be soiled as this. His heart beat with fury at the mere sight of it; at the sight of the bloodstone.

While the two injured hounds shook their heads about as if they could force the bones and muscles back into place, the other four surrounded the rat and snarled, licking their jowls, posture tensed. Charles danced back and forth, keeping his Sondeshike spinning as fat as he could. He willed his Sondeck into his tail and lashed it about, sending little strikes through the air to slow them down. He knew he could probably crush two more heads before the other two would be on him and it would be over. He could only hope that they attacked one at a time.

He had no such luck. All four charged as one. Charles stood in the very center and spun on his paws, eyes narrowed, entering the Tanze wie Zherd. The dance could only properly be done with two Sondeckis, but it was the only thing he knew that would allow him to strike in all directions. He turned and turned and turned, hands spinning one over the other, as the silver disc ran through the air, kicking up a red dust that enfolded him in a crimson pillar of choking air. All of the world about him, barren and dangerous, skipped by in a flash.

The hounds crashed into his Sondeshike. He felt more than saw as the first one was clipped on the side of the neck by the end of the metal staff, the bones shattering and the body flung outward in a heap of scarlet fur and claws. The second nearly snatched his tail in its jaws when the staff crashed down into its head, pushed through the flesh, and ripped the jaws apart in a spray of ichor. From the third he felt stinking hot breath and then the Sondeshike lifted it up from beneath its forelimbs and flung it, chest caved in, out across the rocks.

He even managed to strike the fourth, but not before its momentum crashed into his side and knocked him from his paws. Charles sprawled from the Tanze and struck the earth so hard that the cloud of red coated him in a fine mist. He gasped for breath and choked on the dust, his hands clawing at his neck as if they could rip out all the poisoned air. He forced himself to grab his Sondeshike with his right hand even as the left continued to dig, choking and coughing for a single breath of pure air.

The sixth hound limped as the Sondeshike had shattered one of its back legs, but the jaws, the head, and the chest were all fine. Yellowed fangs dripped with spittle, and a meaty red tongue pressed out between those fangs, eyes burning with hunger. It stepped toward him, confident that Charles could do nothing more to stop him.

Beside the hound the first two he'd injured rose up, their faces reforming, their wounds mending. Charles stared in horror but could not make his arms work. The three beasts stepped closer, snarling and ready to feast.

A brilliant plume of green light struck downward from the side, and the lead hound's head bounced across the ground as its body fell to pieces behind it. Stepping out from behind a stand of rocks was Qan-af-årael, bearing in each hand a blade of brilliant green that bifurcated like a vast tree. Charles remembered seeing those same blades in the Hall of Unearthly Light when he had done battle with the Marquis. Then he had been matched by a foe of limitless power and the blades had only managed to dissipate the Marquis's attacks. Never before had he seen their true potential.

The other two hounds bayed, turning to attack the interloper, but were themselves reduced to slices of flesh that did not even bleed. The remaining three hounds, each of them in varying states of recovery, tried to circle this new bit of prey like they had Charles moments before. As the rat continued to hack, eyes glazing over from the bitter poison, all three advanced with powerful leaps.

The Åelf lifted his arboreal blades and skewered two of them. Their flesh bounced from his chest and legs in chunks, carried forward only by their momentum. The third hound was only grazed, not from a lack of skill on Qan-af-årael's part, but only because its wounds kept it from leaping true; this final beast had veered off course and fell to the ground with a snarling yipe and half its tail missing, before turning tail and fleeing into a cleft in the maze of rocks.

The brilliant green light of the tree blades vanished from the Åelf's hands, replaced by a pulsing orb of blue. Unlike the red all around, the blue was a pleasant blend like a carefully polished bit of lapis lazuli in the process of melting. Qan-af-årael extended this orb in his arm and then dropped it on the ground in front of the gagging rat. It splashed and erupted a gust of sweet air. The blood dust lifted from the ground and scattered in every direction. Even the dust in his throat was drawn free.

Charles gulped the sweet tasting air. The panicked trembling of his limbs subsided, and after several deep breaths he stood, clutching his Sondeshike close. “You saved me again. Thank you, ancient one. I am in your debt more times than I can count.”

“You may have the chance to repay a portion of that debt here. Everything we see will try to kill us.”

Charles grimaced and nudged a hunk of scorched flesh with his toes. Blood a dull red in hue oozed from every side. “Can we avoid them? I don't see anything else here.”

“It is better to kill anything we find.”

The rat frowned and held his Sondeshike tighter. “But won't it attract attention if we are constantly fighting everything we see?”

“In this realm, the surest way to draw the attention of its master is not to fight. He will not care who we are so long as we fight and kill.” Qan-af-årael's expression was touched by a glimmer of profound disgust. “At least until we reach the bridge.”

The rat lifted his ears in hope. “You know where it is?”

“I do. It will not be easy to reach. Charles, are you prepared to kill anything you see in this place? There is no quarter offered, no mercy shown, and no victims here. Strike without anger, for rage is what the master of this place wants, but strike nonetheless.”

He swallowed and nodded. “If I must. What of the hound who got away?”

“The hound is returning to its master.” Qan-af-årael gestured to a small cleft between the rocks. Without sun in the bloodshot sky, it was impossible to tell the difference between any direction. “We must move quickly before they return.” And then he felt the presence resume in his mind. And for now you will wish only to speak in this fashion. The air is poison; cover your snout.

Charles nodded and drew his cloak over his snout. It felt awkward, but at least he could breathe.

His protector led him down into the cleft which twisted in either direction for a few minutes as if trying to shake them off before straightening and opening out onto a jagged tumble of hard, red rock between ridges on either side. Charles eyed them warily. His ears and whiskers twitched at the sound of snarling and anguished screaming that carried over the almost serrated saw-like bluffs accompanied by rending and gnashing of fangs of a more beastly character. Who was killing who and what? The rat neither knew nor wished to know.

The ridge to their right grew in size until it stretched into the murky scorched air, lost to sight amidst choking clouds. To their left, the labyrinth of crimson stone fell away to reveal a long slope toward a chasm. Charles sucked in his breath at the sight of the precipice which stretched at least a league in width if not more, and whose bottom was imperceptible and swallowed in darkness. Equally forbidding peaks rose beyond the chasm, crater-domed volcanoes busily spewing ash and disgorging streams of blazing lava. A faint echo cast across the chasm, and his ears turned to catch its receding touch.

More screams.

Qan-af-årael turned to him and his thoughts coalesced in words. It is as you fear. Souls cooked in the lava before being consumed by the lord of this realm's minions.

For once I am glad a rat's eyes cannot see that far. Charles almost spat the thought toward his companion, and then grimaced as he fought the rising of his gorge. He tasted the red dust on his tongue and grimaced. At least it did not seem to choke him anymore.

The path sloped toward the chasm but they cut across near the escarpment on their right. The heat from the volcanoes cooked the air, and the ash made it even more difficult to breathe. Charles focused his thoughts on moving forward and breathing as slowly as he could. Still his heart would not settle; the disquiet made his claws twitch and dig into his cloak.

The attack came without warning. The escarpment did not run in a clean line along the top of the defile, but was riddled with alcoves and jutting rock that forced them to risk the steep incline above the yawning abyss. As they navigated around one such bend, from the rocks above leaped a trio of shapes that landed on their backs and sent them sprawling. Charles slammed snout first into the stone, his arms and legs scratching at the stone as it slid past, little pebbles hammering his chest and legs as he careened down the defile. Something blunt beat at his back and between his ears.

An upthrust stone caught him in the side. He wrapped one arm about it and rolled upward. The thing on his back snatched a meaty hand at his cloak, ripping the front from his snout and pulling the clasp tight against his neck. Charles gagged, inhaling a mouthful of the red dust, even as his free hand searched for his Sondeshike. He caught a glance of Qan-af-årael throwing a red and black striped almost Lutin-like creature from his shoulders, the lanky creature vanishing with a wail over the side of the chasm, while another had its baboon-like arms firmly wrapped about his protector's legs.

The creature hanging on by his cloak dug its feet into the ground, found purchase, and began climbing up the rat's back. He felt a gust of hot, putrid breath stream across the back of his neck. Charles shivered in fury; his tail lashed from side to side even as he dug the claws of his left hand into the stone that had saved him from a fall into impossible depths. He felt the firm smack of flesh against a scraggly hide and heard a satisfying screech. Still it climbed.

His claws touched metal, and he wrapped his hand about the weapon of his clan. Charles stretched out his arm, and extended the Sondeshike over the top of his back. A wet splatter struck him and it burned as if he'd been dipped in lye. He twisted the staff and felt the weight from his back move with it. He turned his head and glimpsed the creature's head sliding off the end of the ferrules. It dropped to the defile and in a clatter of stone disappeared over the edge.

Charles ground his molars together, got his feet under him, and dashed back up the incline. Qan-af-årael had summoned his tree blades and was carefully nudging the meaty remnants of his last attacker over the edge of the defile where it tumbled down into the abyss. Radiant blue eyes regarded him with disapproval. The presence filled him. You must not let anger guide you here. It is a chain that will bind you to this place.

I'm not, I...

His objection was cut short by the sound of small stones clattering down the slope. The staccato bouncing lasted for several seconds before vanishing into silence. Charles held his breath, fingers tightening about the bloodied haft of his Sondeshike. Qan-af-årael turned, silvery-black locks gliding between his pointed ears. Something hunts us. Let us move. Calm your rage, my little friend.

The Åelf offered him a faint, but reassuring smile. Charles nodded and continued on their way along the escarpment. All the while he sought the Calm within himself, that very center of his Sondeck that all in his clan were trained to know and abide in. It proved elusive, for his focus was on stepping swiftly and with silence across the shattered rock and loose pebbles covering the blood-fused sandstone, a task already made difficult just by the slant of the rock. Nevertheless, the mere search for his Calm settled the trembling in his flesh.

The depth of his Sondeck imbued him with preternatural strength. This he felt and savored against the ravages of this realm. He could feel the power in each of his limbs and knew it would not fail him in his time of need. His arms were limber and his blows could strike mountains. His claws were hard as steel and could rend the very rocks around him. His legs could propel him into the air any height he should require, and no fall could break his bones.

He twitched his whiskers against the cowl stretched across his muzzle, eyes spread wide and ears turning to capture the tiniest sounds. Distant screams lined the other side of the chasm, but they were too faint to distinguish with any detail. A cry resounded from above and both Charles and Qan-af-årael lifted their heads. A figure, misshaped but not by Metamor, hurtled down from the top of the escarpment, limbs flailing. Charles had only time to extend his Sondeshike before the creature smashed into the defile not twenty feet away, its body crushed. A cloud of red dust scattered in the impact so that he could make out no details of its form. The shape quivered and groaned even as it slid down the slope over the edge into the precipice. The screaming began again; it did not stop this time, but merely dwindled until the rat could no longer hear the thing's fall.

A faint stirring in the air brushed the whiskers above his left eye – those over his right a year gone beneath the Shrieker's touch – and he lifted his gaze to the escarpment. Another form hurtled downward, but this one with bat-like wings spread, angling its trajectory as if it were chasing the creature that had already fallen. Charles snarled and bared his incisors behind the cowl, snapping the Sondeshike into place. His fingers turned and turned that metal shaft until it spun in a silver disc limned crimson from the dust ripped from the rocks.

The creature swung away from the rock wall, banked its wings, and came about until it had turned to face them. The wings flapped with a heavy beat that made the stones bounces on the defile, scattering them around until they poured over the edge in a rippling tide. Charles braced himself against the escarpment with his left hand, claws digging at the stone. His cowl slipped across his snout and the red dust tickled his nose. Fire filled him, a fire he poured into the spinning Sondeshike.

The winged creature bore a long, thick lizard-like tail covered in spikes ending in a broad, flat spade that glistened a bilious green. Muscular arms and legs suggested a form similar to a Keeper, but infernal with protruding spikes and vicious claws on an eight-fingered hand. Each digit splayed in a radial direction as if it each were a thumb. The head was sunk against its shoulders and was shaped like its hands and feet, with eight starfish arms spreading out around a vacuous black maw that opened like a sphincter into whatever hellish torments could be imagined inside. From this abyss poured a burbling insanity laced with strident peals as of claws slowly scrapping against glass. A wave of revulsion struck him and Charles felt a sickness in his stomach and a weakness in his knees.

The rat snarled deeper, and let his Sondeck hold him upright in the face of the terror. Qan-af-årael spread his arms wide, a sheen of verdant life ringing round the both of them like a vast shield. The monster dived forward, crashing into that shield and bending it out of proportion. But the spell held it at bay for a moment, long enough for the rat to regain his composure.

Out of the sphincter-like mouth erupted a stream of perfidious vomit. The leprous mass spread across the shield and ate through it like a legion of maggots gorging upon a pit of corpses. His protector watched this without fear, the tree blades springing to life in his hands. Charles kept away from the ichorous mass and kept spinning his Sondeshike. His thoughts were jumbled in the face of the winged-horror. As he ground his teeth together in his attempts to focus on the hell-beast, an image kept intruding into his thoughts. It took shape only dimly, as if in a dark room lit only the smoldering wick of a single candle. Twilight rust in hue, it seemed to be metal, thin, and stretched beyond his sight.

His attention was called back when the beast smacked its tail against the remnant of the shield, cracking it and bringing it down. The beast dropped onto the defile as if it had dived into it. Charles felt the ground shake beneath his feet, and to his horror, realized that it had come loose from the rest of the rock around it and started to slide down the precipice. He jumped to the side, and then ducked as the colossal tail swung toward him. He felt the edge of the of its spade brush against the back of his left ear, which immediately began to itch and burn. Charles gasped and clawed at the back of his ear with his free arm, digging so deeply that he drew blood as the flesh was shredded.

One of the octopus feet stomped the ground next to him, and Charles bounced into the air where eight long fingers wrapped him round the middle, upending him on a journey toward the yawning maw. The flash of green from the tree blades interposed itself and he felt a searing heat at its presence. The creature howled with a nightmarish cacophony that afforded the rat a view down into its gullet. What little light penetrated to those depths revealed a long sarcophagus lined with gangrenous, serrated teeth that would reduce anything consumed to a vitreous mush, but only after interminable hours of chewing and scraping.

The wound his protector had inflicted convinced the beast to flap its wings and propel it backward over the precipice, carrying Charles with it. Death stood moments away. Charles stared at it, and felt an enormous hatred fill him. He had not come this far to become a meal to this fetid monstrosity. The image in his mind grew in radiance, and he realized it was a vast chain, each link of a substance similar to his Sondeshike; they conveyed strength and power. All that he should need was his for the asking.

Charles blinked the image away, letting the rage in him fuel his Sondeck. He spun the Sondeshike before him, battering it against the creature's head. The eight tentacles ringing that maw quivered and bent beneath his assault, and another scream of protest erupted from it, bringing with it an otherworldly hissing as of a thousand distant screams all clawing one atop the other.

Its arm pulled the rat away from its maw, and now he could see the wound Qan-af-årael had inflicted. A deep gash rent into its chest, leaving behind a bright, red scar into which a jaundiced set of ribs protruded. Seething, Charles drove one of the brass ferrules beneath the bones, and then spun outward. The front of the creature's chest exploded in a spray of blood which coated the rat's face and chest. It flung its arms wide in a roar of anguish and Charles found himself flying through the air.

The precipice and escarpment twirled in his vision, but he demanded it stop with a furious beat of his heart. For just a moment everything seemed clear to him and his trajectory his own to command. His paws landed on the defile, claws digging into the stone for purchase, as momentum returned and he buckled beneath its pitiless strength. But his grip held and he readied his staff for another volley.

The octopoid horror let lose another vomitous mass, but Qan-af-årael had slipped behind it. With a downward strike the tree blades shore the beast through the middle down to its waist. It quivered one last time, before, limp and oozing blood and puss from every sinew, it collapsed against the defile and slid down into the waiting abyss. Only a wide smear of its vomit and blood remained to show it had ever been.

Charles took a deep breath and reached one hand toward the ruin of his left ear, wincing as he did so. There seemed to him a strange weight against his shoulders and around his neck, but felt nothing there apart from the cowl of his tattered cloak. The flesh of his ear still itched even though he'd already ripped it apart, and it took all of his will power to keep from tearing into it further. Instead he grabbed at the collar of his tunic and tightened his grip. A faint rattling of chains echoed in his mind.

Qan-af-årael surveyed him and a glimmer of a frown crossed his lips. He crossed the short distance to where the rat stood and laid a gentle hand upon his torn ear. The presence filled him with a warmth that cooled the anger of battle. No mortal wounds taken in this place will leave with it. Your ear will be restored to you once you cross the bridge. But a mortal wound if not healed by my hand will trap you here.

The rat stood straighter, snout turned in a defiant moue. I will take no such injury from anything we face here! Not with your protection, Master Åelf!

There are wounds mortal to the soul as well you must ware. Do not listen to the false promise of anger.

He could only grimace anew and nod his head. The scent of blood staining his cloak nauseated him but he tried to ignore it. The vision of the vast chain dimmed in his eyes but did not go dark. He glanced down at his cloak and wiped a smear of blood covering the Long Scout insignia on the front breast. These foul beasts would not besmirch the company of friends and family.

Charles lifted his good ear at the sound of baying. Qan-af-årael glanced behind them but there was nothing to see but the escarpment, the defile, and clouds of red blistering the horizon. The hunter is closing on his prey. We must make haste.

They climbed back up to the base of the escarpment where the ground was level and moved swiftly along the path. The towering cliffs diminished as the seconds turned to long minutes. The chasm narrowed enough that he could make out creatures moving on the other side, but the depths remained impenetrable and there was no sign of any way to cross short of sprouting wings. And every way that he turned he saw that vile shade of red covering everything.

Red. Red. Red! Even that poisonous green on the spade of the beast that had ruined his ear had been a delight to savor in comparison to the never-ending panorama of baleful red. What words could he use to bring it some vitality, some inkling of interest to assuage his disquiet? Scarlet brought to mind a fire which this place kindled only in the heart. Crimson reminded him of the spilling of blood which came all too often. Rouge suggested the anger searing his cheeks. Cardinal? For him that had always been associated with the Ecclesia and this place rejected such holiness. Roseate? That was an outpouring of love and there was none to be found here. Damask? A product of luxury and here all but brutality was spurned.

The chain he saw in his mind was not red. It seemed to be a shimmering steel alloy, glistening with chrome so that in the oddly tilting light a veritable panoply of colors limned each link. He pondered it as they walked, each step stretching their legs as far as they could. The strength he felt in each link was not one of flesh and blood, nor did it depend on the sinews for its vitality. It was the strength of a current, rising and falling with the tide, impossible to resist, and all of it offered into his hands.

Would he not need a strength beyond the ken of men if he were to reclaim the son stolen from him? Did he truly know what awaited them on the levels beneath where things were even more dangerous and vile than he witnessed here? Could he possibly imagine the Beyond and what he must fight through there? Strength awaited him in that chain, a strength beyond even what the Sondeck was capable of.

But there was something unsettling about that strength as well, something the clarity in his mind noted now that he'd had a few minutes free from combat to consider. Although the links in the chain were clear and shone with a brilliant luster, he could not see either end of it. It was not that the end stretched out beyond his sight, but that he could not bring either end into view. It was as if the end nearer him came to some place on his flesh that no matter how he twisted would not reveal itself. And the other was lost in a darkness that would not lift.

Charles pushed the chain from his thoughts and focused on the barren landscape around him. The escarpment had dwindled until it was no more than a tall bluff. The chasm had also narrowed. There were no more volcanoes on the other side, only a line of ridges across which he could not see. A group of men and deformed beasts clawed and fought each other there, their attention lost on each other. Charles winced at the sound of bones crushing, violent screams, and hideous laughter all mingled together so tightly that he could not discern one from the others.

The path ahead was lost behind another turn to the right about the escarpment. Charles peered backward and turned his good ear. The baying sounded from time to time, always closer but never in sight. But now there was nothing behind them to give their hunters away. Charles grimaced, rubbed his snout with the back of his hand to clear it of the blood dust, and resumed their relentless march.

Step back!

The alarm nearly came too late. Reflexes drove the rat backward at the urgent command. A split second later a huge boulder crushed into the spot where he'd stood. He glanced upward and saw arranged at the cusp of the bluff a quartet of vaguely man-shaped creatures whose scaly skin was dusky red and who had horns protruding from their flesh at random. These lifted boulders as large as themselves and hurled them down the side of bluff toward rat and Åelf.

Charles pressed himself against the bluff and gasped for breath. The second boulder struck, shattering into a thousand fragments that bit into his flesh. Qan-af-årael also took refuge against the bluff, but he stretched out one hand, spreading a green nimbus around them. The third boulder careened off the shield to scatter down the defile harmlessly.

Charles trembled, gritting his incisors as he pulled a sliver of stone from the side of his leg. Blood oozed between his fingers as he pressed down on the wound. The pain lanced into his mind and with it a fire that trapped his thoughts. The chain lifted before him and he knew he only had to stretch out his hand for it. Instead he lifted his eyes to the top of the bluff and hissed between his teeth. Saturated by the blood of countless aeons, the stone before him was still, at its heart, stone.

With a glint in his eye and fire in his veins, Charles drove his right arm into the bluff, merged it with the stone, and reached upward the hundred feet or so that separated them. He could feel the rage of a million murders pouring through him. He swam through the strangulation and gouging of throats. He waltzed with disembowelment and performed a pirouette with dismemberment. He gorged on a thousand severed heads and slurped their entrails. He bathed in the blood of his enemies, countless enemies for whom he felt nothing but hate which burned as a fire that consumed even him.

And through all of that horror he felt the feet of the quartet of monsters stomping about atop the bluff. With a heave of his will and Sondeck, he shattered the rock on which they stood. Their laughter turned to screams as they upended and hurtled through the air, limbs flailing but catching nothing. One of them was cast into the chasm and continued to scream as he fell. The other three all smashed into the defile, crushing their bodies before they too slipped into the abyss.

Charles withdrew his arm and fell to his knees, gasping, with tears pouring from his eyes. A heavy weight bound his neck and he felt something tugging him to the ground. The chain. One hand still pressing down on the wound at his neck, he lifted his other hand to pull the chain away, but it passed through as if the metal links were as insubstantial as fog.

He vomited, disgorging everything that he could. Blood splattered from his jaws and seeped into the stones beneath him. He trembled, gasping for any breath he could take. Something was wrapped about his neck and every gasp made him flinch from it. Yet his searching paw found nothing. With each second the memory of all the death faded, though the enormity of it lingered with him, and the burning sensation still filled him and licked at him.

A hand rested on his back and then beneath his arm, lifting him to his feet. Charles grimaced at the pain in his leg but still managed to stand. The chain no longer dragged him down. He focused his thoughts on the presence that lingered at his side. Can you heal my leg?

I can, but that is not your most pressing need. A little more and you will belong to the master of this realm.

Help me!

I am.

Even as those two words ricocheted through the rat's mind, the ancient one lowered his hand to the wound at his side and touched it with a faint blue glimmer of light. For a blissful moment Charles could feel a renewal of energy and a dimming of the flames that burned and made him tremble with a rage that he could not put aside.

In that moment he cast his thoughts beyond the misery of the damned to another soul. He saw her face, with gentle tan fur, soft pink ears, slender whiskers, and deep black eyes of such elegant softness and warmth that they could only belong to his beloved. He ached for her touch. Her name hovered at the edge of his thoughts but it was too blessed to be uttered in so blasphemous a place. The chain before him and the weight upon his neck faded as he pondered his wife. His strength dimmed, but still he managed to stand.

It is too late! Run!

The hands upon him pulled him forward. Charles, snapped from his reverie, felt his revulsion and the weight of anger bear him down again. Turning, he cast his glance backward and felt his body stiffen in alarm. Coming around the last turn a few hundred paces back was a pack of eight blood-red hounds like the ones they slaughtered on entering the realm. Cavorting above them in the air were little winged gremlins bearing short spears and wicked yellow eyes. Behind them, and holding the chains of the hounds was a gargantuan creature that filled him with immense terror.

The creature was vaguely man-shaped at first glance, with a bristling golden countenance, a head full of wavy auburn hair, and a chest rippling with muscle and glimmering as if smeared in oil. But the expression was filled with a malice beyond mortal ken, and from its side sprung six arms, five of which brandished scimitars taller than the Åelf. It possessed no legs. Where the torso ended a serpent's body began, thick and wide with iridescent vermillion and violet scales that glimmered with the vibrancy of coral. Stones were crushed to dust beneath the undulating scales as it traversed the defile. The end of its tail was lost to sight.

Charles gasped and started to run. His thoughts frantically turned to his protector. What is it?

The most dangerous thing you could face in this realm apart from its masters. A marilith. They command the armies of the daedra lords and are utterly without mercy or honor.

Both of them ran. Charles felt a small tremble in his left leg where the stone had bit, but whatever healing Qan-af-årael had provided kept him moving. The hounds bayed, unleashed from their chains, they closed fast. Charles felt Qan-af-årael slow beside him but he kept moving. Yet in his heart he felt the anger swell. Where could they possibly go?

The question answered itself as he rounded the bend. The bluff came to an abrupt stop as the chasm bent around at a sharp angle. The defile came a single pointed outcropping overlooking the abyss which had narrowed considerably. Across that span stretched a stone bridge in the shape of a single shallow arch. The width was not even two paces wide, and its length was greater than the distance that separated them from the hounds. One wrong step would drop him into depths he could not fathom.

But there was nowhere else to go. Grinding his teeth the rat ran, tail flashing behind him as he pushed with his Sondeck to gain every mote of speed he could. Even the spectral chain seemed to draw him forward. His feet ached from the biting stones beneath him but still he ran. Behind him he heard the snarling of the hounds, vicious and ravenous, growing ever closer. The slithering and grinding of the marilith followed with inexorable doom.

Charles slowed as he reached the narrow bridge to cast one last glance backward. Qan-af-årael had stopped as well thirty paces behind him wielding the brilliant tree blades in either arm. The hounds were snapping at him in an attempt to find a way around him. These knew not to come within reach of the blades. Bearing ever closer was the marilith, his expression one of malicious triumph as of a giant ready to crush a fly. The coterie of gremlins was nowhere to be seen.

Charles glanced down at the bridge, peered over the edge once, and instantly regretted it. Whereas the bridge between realms was impossible to fall off because there was literally no reality beyond into which one could fall, here the nothing was quite real and from that abyss he knew there was no hope of rescue.

He stepped onto the bridge, crouching as he did so. Slinking in a posture more suited to his feral form, the rat scurried across that narrow strip of rock as fast as he dared. Where the air next to the escarpment had been stagnant without even a slight breeze to give them some relief, the bridge was buffeted by sudden gusts of wind that made him sink his hands and feet into the stone to anchor himself. Every inch of immersion bathed him in the screams of myriads caught upon the bridge, crushed against its span, and then cast into the darkness below. The rage, insatiable in its fiery presence, devoured him.

The chain at his neck glimmered to life, both frightening him but giving him strength to counter the wind. The clasp about his neck bit into his shoulders and forced his head upward. Before him the links in the chain grew taut, lifting off the surface of the bridge, pulling him forward. Charles gasped and with one hand tried to claw at the chain. Its substance was immaterial, but there was a slight resistance as his claws passed through the chrome, as if it were gaining in strength with every hateful thought and blasphemous emotion fed into him through the stone.

Charles pulled all of his limbs from the bridge and collapsed against its surface. The wind ripped at his back, tugging him toward the abyss at his right. His tail lashed to the side, and he felt himself sliding against the surface of the rock. He dug his claws into any crevice he could find. His right leg scratched at the stone, slipped, and then spilled over the edge. He gasped and pressed down harder with his left, and felt the tear in his flesh break open again. A lance of agony raced up his leg and made his arms tremble as if palsied. The wind pounded, tugging at the cowl of his cloak as the darkness, an almost conscious thing, hungrily growled below.

A thought permeated that fear, clear and brilliant in its simplicity. Take the chain and you will cross the bridge alive.

He could feel it now, and not just something he perceived. His snout rested atop the links, warm to the touch and stronger than the stone beneath him. It stretched across the bridge and in between the cleft of rock at its end. In the distance he could see a figure at the other end. Clad in dark mail and burnished an infernal red between each of the chinks in the plate, there was an aura of dread and a celebration of anger in his countenance. Strength unchallengeable was in that chain, and an offer of safe passage across the bridge was certain in it.

But the chain was not the only thing which he could now feel against his flesh. About his neck latched a collar of steel from which protruded spikes that gouged the bridge where they touched. Strength beyond measure was being offered to him as was an assurance that he would not die on this bridge. But whose will would guide that strength? And whose will would direct that life?

Charles knew in that moment that if he took the chain he would be a slave to the master of this realm, to the lord of rage and hate. And he knew that if he joined with the stone of spilled blood again he would be so consumed by aeons of hate that he would gladly enslave himself. What of Kimberly then? What of Ladero? All would be lost to him.

Charles closed his eyes and scrabbled with his right leg at the stone, focusing his Sondeck, even as he mouthed the words to its Song. The wind battered, but did not dislodge. Charles felt it ebb and he scrambled back into place, gasping for breath, claws digging deep into the stone in case the wind returned. The chain remained as did the collar but for the moment they were faded. They were a promise; the lord of this realm had not yet attempted his final gambit to claim him.

The rat chanced a glance behind him and saw that Qan-af-årael had backed onto the bridge. Three of the eight hounds lay in pieces on the defile. A fourth was missing entirely. The other four snapped at the Åelf, snarling in rage at their inability to get around him. One of them leaped across the span toward where the rat was pinned only to scatter into chunks of flesh as his protector stretched out the tree blade to meet him.

The marilith coiled where the bluff came to an end and drove two of its swords into the rock. Hands with bronzed fingers stretched outward, a darkness spinning between them as of a thousand pieces of thread weaving together in a net. Charles swallowed at the sight of it and risked crawling across the surface of the bridge. He managed no more than six paces before the wind struck him again and his hindquarters slipped off the side. He kicked and clawed at the stone, but with the wind pressing into his face, he continued to slide. One foot passed the bottom of the bridge and kicked at the empty air. He screamed in a panic, only to have his voice cut short when the collar dug into the side of the bridge as his chest was pressed over the side. Choking for breath, his arms grasped for any purchase at all.

The chain glimmered solid and sure.

The black mailed monster holding the other end seemed to smirk across the distance. Perhaps your protector can break the chain? If he survives. Wouldn't you like the strength to defeat your enemies?

Charles grunted, staring at the chain for only a moment longer before casting his gaze back at Qan-af-årael. The Åelf summoned a giant blue shield that stood at the end of the bridge, and then brilliant plumes of yellow light cascaded from his body to circle the air. The wind fell silent as they coursed around the bridge. Charles, eyes blurring from lack of breath, finally found purchase for his claws and pulled himself back onto the bridge. The links rattled against each other as he heaved his legs and tail to safety.

He turned back to thank the Åelf when he saw something hurtling through the shield at them. All three of the remaining hounds bayed as they tumbled end over end through the air, thrown by the marilith in its fury. “Look out!” Charles shouted, voice so ragged that the sound was barely a whisper.

But the Åelf understood, spun, and with two swipes sent the last remnants of the hounds to the darkness below. And then the shield shattered with a titanic roar that knocked the rat back against the bridge, the spikes in his collar digging into the stone so that for a moment he could not move at all.

The marilith slithered forward, wreathed in black light, four scimitars waving about through the air, his other two hands crafting another series of obnubilating ribbons that snaked out to strangle the yellow efflorescence. Qan-af-årael half turned, brandishing his tree blade, while the other lowered to kiss the bridge. Trails of light coursed across the bridge, and then down beneath it.

Charles tugged at the collar until he loosed the spike from the stone, and resumed crawling. A volley of spells bounced back and forth between the marilith and his protector, spells against which Charles had no defense that would not damn him as well. He glared at the chain and felt the links grow heavier and the collar tighter against his neck. He winced and narrowed his eyes, whiskers drooping, and forced himself to look away from it. Rage was only going to make a slave of him. It had almost done so already.

Yes. I am your master now. Come, little rat. Come to me.

To his horror, he felt a compulsion to obey. He could not stop on the bridge, there was nowhere to go. But every step brought him closer to the being at the other end of the chain. Charles allowed himself no measure of defiance as he stepped forward, but neither was it obedience to that voice. It was his will that led him onward. His alone.

Charles! Above you!

The more familiar voice, that of his protector, resounded in his mind. The rat glanced upward, and then felt the chain yank him back down. From out of red-smeared sky descended more than a dozen little gremlins with their nasty spears. Charles forced himself to spin onto his back, swinging out the Sondeshike as he did. He struck the first of the gremlins on the side of its head. The skull caved in and the creature spiraled out of sight beneath him. Three more he dislodged with those first spins of his staff before the others banked away out of reach.

He counted ten gremlins left but these were banking and swirling so quickly that even with his widely spaced eyes he had trouble watching all of them. Two dove for his left, but only one of them was able to avoid the crushing blow of his staff. Another three came from his left and none of them escaped, two with severed wings and the third whose snarl-faced head bounced across Charles' belly before falling off the other side of the bridge.

Two more flew toward his legs and he angled the Sondeshike to intercept hem when he felt the chain yank him forward again. He gagged and nearly lost his grip on the spinning staff. As he tightened his grip, he felt a lance of pain in his tail. He kicked with his right leg, caught the gremlin square in the back, and sent it hurtling off the edge of the bridge. The second drove its spear deep into the flesh of his tail, severing the bone and flesh in twain. A horrified squeak erupted from his throat as the bottom half of his tail rolled off the bridge, blood pouring from the wound.

The laughing gremlin was silenced when his left leg caved in its chest. But the chain continued to draw him backward. The spikes dug into the stone leaving a trio of gouges behind that the blood from his tail filled as they passed. The last four gremlins flew just out of range, laughing and mocking him.

Charles felt the flare of rage return, pricking and pounding on the door of his heart for admittance. He stared past his severed tail instead at the Åelf. His thoughts hurtled outward, a plea simple and immediate. Help me!

Qan-af-årael appeared to be bending under the onslaught of the marilith's dark ribbons. He had fallen to one knee, the tree blade between them the only thing keeping him from being consumed by the obsidian plasma.

Another voice replied to his cry. He cannot help you. I can. Take the chain or the gremlins will!

And they did. The four gremlins, as if hearing the same command, flew further along the bridge and grasped the links of the chain. Charles no longer felt drawn along and was able to stand. The gremlins, weak though they were individually, were pushing the chain toward the edge of the bridge. In horror Charles raised his arms and then flung them downward. The Longfugos rush of air knocked all of them from their feet. They scattered into the air, flapped their wings, and then settled further along the bridge to try again.

And then all of them were knocked to their feet as a titanic bloom of green light engulfed the other end of the bridge. The marilith screamed in an agony so piercing that Charles felt his ribs turn brittle in his chest. He collapsed to his knees, wincing as he brushed the severed tip of his tail, and gasped in awe at the sight of the six-limbed monstrosity wreathed in verdant light so encompassing that all other light faded. For the first time since they arrived, Charles did not see any red at all.

The marilith launched into the air as if flung from a catapult. The fire consuming him dwindled his flesh, shrinking him inward. Yet his momentum carried him forward, fury incalculable writ unending in his face. By the time he reached the rat, he was no larger than his gremlins. Arms lashed out, and he felt a spasm in his flesh. A moment more and the being of terror was swallowed by the green light and winked out.

Behind him the gremlins dropped the chain and fled as fast as their wings could carry them. Before him Qan-af-årael walked across the bridge, hands empty but for a fading green light. Something slick began to slide into his hands. Charles glanced down and stared uncomprehending as his entrails slipped from his belly into his arms and down across his Sondeshike.

He collapsed on the bridge a moment later, the fiery red all around him fading into a nightmare. The collar on his neck tightened and he could feel himself being dragged away. All of his limbs went cold and numb. He tried to think of his wife and son, but there was only the darkness come to envelop him. Charles saw nothing but smears of red dwindling away.

Into the void appeared a figure bathed in a divine white light. Around him all things seemed to brighten, and Charles felt himself immersed in that vivifying warmth. A soft voice echoed around him, speaking beautiful words he could not comprehend. All stilled in that moment of renewal. Pain did not return, but a sense of wholeness and purpose resumed in his flesh. Charles felt motion imbued in his limbs, and with it a tingling sensation as if he were waking from a deep sleep.

In his vision, he glimpsed a world of beauty surrounding the figure of white light. His protector and guardian, the ageless power, did not seem to be a figure of antiquity but one of endless youth and vitality. Radiant blue eyes regarded him from the folds of white cascading one over another. Thin lips bore a smile of supreme pleasure and unparalleled magnanimity. The words of power uttered were sweeter in his ears than the song of the most delicate violin. All was rightly ordered in his presence.

Charles blinked and the vision faded. His hands stretched to touch his stomach and found it whole. He blinked, reached to his neck and found it free. His hand climbed higher but his left ear was still torn. Shifting his tail he still felt where it had been shorn in two. But he was alive, and the chain was gone.

He turned about, and saw that they stood uncontested in the center span of the bridge. His protector knelt before him, smiling, the power fading from his countenance. As the red returned to his field of view, his thoughts scattered, but the question reached its goal. What happened to me?

You received a mortal wound. The marilith was powerful in its death. But that wound opened the doorway to break the chain you wove for yourself. You are now free to leave this place with me.

My ear and tail?

They will be restored when you leave. Healing magic in this place must be used with care. Only to save your life would I extend it as I have. In this place, healing can poison you. Only the nature of your wound allowed me to work.

Charles lifted the severed stump that remained of his tail, reduced to half its length. But my tail!

Qan-af-årael's smile broadened in bemusement. It will return. No Rat should be without his tail. But it is best to leave it as is for now.

Charles was certain he did not understand and knew no matter how many questions he asked he would never understand. Instead he choose gratitude. Thank you, Master Qan-af-årael. Are we ready to leave this place yet?

Not yet. There is but a little further to go first. Come. We must enter the spectacle of rage.

Charles frowned, fingered the severed flesh of his tail one last time, before letting it fall behind him. The wind had completely stilled and the stone bridge no longer filled him with dread. Their steps carried them across the abyss and into a broad, winding ravine between low ridges of jagged rock. The land remained barren with no sign of life. He could hear in the distance more screaming but nothing any closer.

His gait felt awkward with half his tail missing, but Charles adjusted after a few minutes and felt his balance restored. He walked beside his protector, right hand wrapped about his Sondeshike, the left gripping his cloak, though he felt no more need to cover his snout. Whatever influence the blood dust had held over him was broken. It stank and revolted him but nothing more.

To his surprise, they walked unmolested for more minutes than he could count. The ravine widened and flattened until they reached another ledge and beheld a vast plain spread as far as his eyes could penetrate the crimson gloom. In the midst of that plain he beheld a vast circle of stone, fiery columns at every turn, and a monstrous castle capping the field whose towers seemed deformed as if each had been beaten into place with a giant hammer. The walls seemed to be giant arms stretched outward from the fortress to encompass everything in sight. Charles tried to swallow but had no spit.

His protector's voice filled him deeper than before, as if it were reaching to the wounds already healed. The abode of the master of this realm. The bridge and our escape lie beneath the center of his arena. Do not hesitate to strike anything that attacks you in this place. Not even for a breath.

Of course, Master Åelf.

A narrow track along the ledge guided them down to the plain; at points it turned too steep to walk and so they scrambled part of the way. Charles grimaced at each bump of his tail stump against one of the stones, but tried not to think of it or the ruin of his ear. One hand over one stone at a time they climbed down until the slope leveled and they were able to walk again.

The plain stretched in every direction, seeming wholly empty but for the castle and arena. The screams that echoed faintly in every direction were now accompanied by some other sound. Charles grimaced as he realized it was a thousand monstrous voices cheering some infernal victory. He tried not to let his imagination ponder anything they might see there, but he could still remember the image of the black armored daedra. He could not stop the shudder from shaking his fur.

The trek across the plain did not take nearly as long as the distance suggested it would. What demons chose to watch from those walls appeared more interested in what transpired within than what lurked without, and Charles and Qan-af-årael reached them without any alarm sounding. They were fashioned from the same blood-imbued rock that festered in every direction. Charles again had the impression that they were beaten into the ground instead of built up from it.

He saw no opening, but Qan-af-årael turned to the right and after only thirty paces came to a cleft in the wall wide enough for both of them to pass through. Charles gripped his Sondeshike so tightly that his claws pricked his palm. Darkness closed in around them as they passed through, but the Åelf seemed to know the way twisting without striking either wall. He turned Charles and the rat obeyed.

They emerged in the midst of a long series of wide steps, rising behind them and descending to the arena floor before them. On every side Charles glimpsed some monstrosity. Hell hounds bayed where they were chained, gremlins cavorted and hooted in tiny, nasty voices, while larger creatures roared their approval in tones that could grind stone. For the moment, their attention was on the arena floor and both Åelf and rat went unnoticed. They walked down the steps.

Charles felt his eyes drawn to the castle yawning over the field. A figure garbed in black armor lounged upon a hideous throne of skulls, one hand wrapped about a basalt iron chain. The coils of chain dangled off the parapet and into the arena, ending in a spiked collar about the neck of a gargantuan wolf-monster, its red-stained fur so soaked in blood and gore that it was impossible to tell what color it might once originally have been. The beast was gnawing into the entrails of some other creature it had just killed, something that might once have been man-shaped. All that could be recognized now was a man-like arm ending in a golden lion's paw. Charles averted his eyes.

They reached the bottom of the stairs and another wall, this one only slightly higher than the rat himself. Qan-af-årael hoisted himself onto the wall, and then helped Charles scramble over. They dropped a good twenty feet into the arena below. Charles brushed a bit of dust from his scouting cloak, and then resumed following the Åelf toward the center. They walked a good thirty paces before the roar of approval and malicious delight of the crowd gave way to bewilderment and calls for blood.

The thing in black armor stirred in its seat, the chain in its hand rasping over the stone like a coiling snake, and Charles felt his neck tighten even without the collar. The beast gorging itself at the other end of the chain lifted its head. Eyes of solid, featureless gold blazed with fury at the intrusion into its domain, and blood-soaked jaws spread in a warning growl. Fire licked the ground at its feet, followed by spindles of ice lacing the dusty sand covering the arena floor. None of it came near them, and for a moment Charles wondered if they were not mere warnings to keep away from its kill.

“Ah, new victims for the Beast!” shouted the thing in black armor. The voice thundered and almost cavorted in its malevolence and amusement. The head, limned with red at every crevice, turned toward Charles. “Handicap your rage here, little Rat, and I guarantee you a slow and torturous death.”

Charles tensed at the voice, fearful that a chain would sprout from his neck again, but there was nothing before him but the sand, the glimmers of ice, and the immense wolf wreathed in a wintry tempest. Qan-af-årael continued walking, though from his hands the tree blades sprouted, burning a bright blue instead of their usual green. Charles started spinning the Sondeshike, eyes transfixed on the wolf.

From the ends of each thread of ice sprang another five wolves, equal in size and indistinguishable in appearance. The six wolves opened their jaws as one, and from those maws erupted a shower of ice that flashed across the arena. Qan-af-årael swung both blades and deflected the worst of the storm, but the stinging frost still burst through. Charles raised the spinning disk, and felt the stab of chill rush through him. Icicles shattered against his shield like hail against stone.

From his right a large shape bounded. Charles turned to strike, but met only air as his staff passed through the image of the beast, seeming to shatter it into a thousand immaterial fragments. He tensed when he realized it was an illusion and spun on his feet anticipating a real attack from behind. But this was only a probe of skill and perception, and nothing but cold struck at him, snow and ice closing a veil around him. Charles spun around, trying to locate the wolf, and then realized with sickening suddenness that he could not find Qan-af-årael in the maelstrom either.

“The fire of anger will burn through the snow, little rat!” the mocking voice called out, booming across the field and over the cheers of the crowd. They shouted a name, a name of hard edges and slashing bite, but he allowed none of it to distract him, not even the poisoned suggestions. Anger clouded his thoughts and he needed them clear.

A second wolf struck him from behind, but this too shattered at the merest touch of his Sondeshike. The scattered blistering red fur enveloped him for a moment and he gasped at the blindness that took him.

And then he heard it. So subtle and so small, something that an untrained ear would never discern, but also something that came and went so quickly that only reflexes trained for a lifetime could understand in time. He heard the faint clinking of a chain. He knew that sound for it had almost been his chains. The wolf, the real wolf and not one of its illusions, had leaped into the air at his right.

Charles ducked and lifted the Sondeshike in an overhand swing just as the monstrous beast hurtled through the screen of sleet. The staff struck it in the shoulder, diverting its trajectory just far enough aside that its jaws, which snapped shut with the finality of a headsman's axe, claimed but a whisker from the rat's jowls instead of the entirety of his face. The wolf landed behind him, metal claws of one forepaw grinding into the stone for a pivot point to maintain its momentum, and then hurled itself back in for a second bite. Charles twisted to bring his staff to bear, but the beast moved as lightning, faster even than a Sondecki locked in the Tanze. He would draw blood.

Through the tempest, the blue fire of the tree sword crashed down with a thunderclap into the beast's back. Charles flinched and brought his hands up, expecting to be battered backward by the bisected pieces of the wolf, but the blade did not pierce its bloodied fur. The beast was instead driven for a moment into the ground. Twisting in place without even a hint of pain, the wolf snatched the end of the blade in its jaws, and bit through. The light flared, momentarily resisting the assault with an ear-flattening screech, before exploding in a cerulean cascade of sparks.

The black-armored thing laughed, and his voice cleaved through the battle noise as clear as if he were standing next to them. “What's the matter rat? Have you forgotten how to fight? Use the rocks! They are yours to command; they will bend to your need; they will answer to your rage!”

Charles resolved anew not to turn his flesh to stone for any reason as he turned the Sondeshike hand over hand, twisting it back and forth before him as he drove through the wintry veil. Swirls of white cascaded around him as he struck at the beast's momentarily unprotected head. In response, the golden-eyed wolf leaped upward thirty feet into the air from a dead crouch, opened jaws vomiting forth a wave of ice that splashed across the ground, engulfing both Charles and Qan-af-årael. The wolf then vanished back into the fog of snow, impossible to follow among all the swirling gusts and illusory shadows.

Charles dashed the Sondeshike against the ice encrusting his feet; two blows was all it took to free them. It took only moments, but it still took too long.

The rattle of the chain reached his ears just as he drove the brass ferrules into the ice the second time. Without other options, Charles shrank as fast as he could, dwindling almost to a full rat, and the Beast's red jaws slashed through where Charles been standing only a moment before. Charles willed himself to grow again, tight fist rising in an uppercut arc, only for the Beast to yank sharply to the side, jerking its iron chain hard against the back of the rat's knees. A shaggy shoulder slammed the rat further off-balance an instant later, toppling him completely. His eyesight filled with slavering jaws and bared teeth, his nose with icy, blood-metallic breath, and his chest was crushed by heavy paws.

And then suddenly the wolf's head was not there. Or rather, half of its head flew off in a spray of gore when a violet nimbus so dark it seemed black, ripped through the air and cleaved the monstrous wolf's head in twain. Charles slid both his Sondeshike and his legs between him and the wolf's body and heaved upward, catapulting the corpse into the air as Charles sprang back to his feet.

But the wolf with half a head, to the rat's surprise, landed on its feet. A snarl escaped its throat as it swung a somehow undiminished glare back to rat and Åelf. The blow had removed the top right half of its head, from the left eye down to the jaw. All of it grew back as if the flesh were a swarming mass of leprous thread tying itself together. But unlike the rest of him, this flesh and fur regrew white and the eye that opened was a soft but lively brown.

For a moment Charles felt a stab in his heart. His gaze swept across that almost friendly half-visage, the spiked collar at his neck, and the long, iron chain that bound him to the master of this realm. He trembled in the certainty that this is the sort of monster he would have become had he accepted the chain still offered to him. This beast had once been a man like him.

But that two-faced moment did not last. The great wolf shook its head, and the red coating the rest of its body seeped across to swallow the white, as if the blood were a living thing ever feasting upon the beast's hide. The brown eye flared into golden fire to match its malevolent twin, and together they turned a wrathful glare on Qan-af-årael. Its paws braced and its jaws stretched wide, each fang shimmering with a unearthly white light in the glow of the deep violet blades while the rest of it seemed to retreat into darkness. Its maw was a cavernous emptiness into which no living thing could come out. Something crackled within.

Then, with a series of ground-shaking crashed, bolt after thunderous bolt streaked across the arena and slammed against Qan-af-årael's parrying purple blades like a battering ram against a castle wall. The warring magics clashed with a scream so strident that Charles clasped his paws over his ears, nearly defeaned. Even the hellish crown cringed away from the aural assault. Charles began to fear that even Qan-af-årael might not be able to withstand this, and he was not about to wait to find out. He danced back out of the way, lifted his arms, and flung them downward. The burst of Longfugos ripped up the surface of the rock and ice, carrying with it a sheen of white and red in its wake like a wedge aimed directly at the wolf's head but the beast split itself with illusion and leaped in three directions to dodge the strike. Its chain, glowing as if white-hot, hissed as the ice-filled blast struck it but otherwise showed no damage. The lightning bolts ceased and did not return.

“Good! Good! Use your fury, Rat! Exult in your hate and anger and you can defeat the Wolf!”

Charles instead sang beneath his breath the Song of the Sondeck. He would not hate and he would not be dispossessed of his Calm. And in the moment of clarity his denial gave him, an idea arrived. Everything in this place yearned for violence. He could strike his enemies without ever touching them. Why not the stones as well? They were ravenous for it. Could he touch them without being touched by them?

The wolf tilted back its heads and loosed a thunderous howl that split the sky and shook the stands. Charles struggled to keep his feet while the Åelf remained immovable. From the stands rushed forward all of the hell hounds that had been gathered in observance. Some of these came up short when their masters restrained them, but more than three dozen rushed onto the field from every direction, jaws slavering for blood.

Charles sucked in his breath, raised his Sondeshike in the air, and then struck the ground beneath his feet. A ring of stone erupted around the arena, knocking most of the hounds backward and even impaling some who yelped in anguish as their blood splattered in every direction. Another dozen continued to rush forward. He struck the earth again and half of them were balked. They scrambled to climb over the wall of jutting stone, but it bought them time.

The war wolf actually appeared surprised by this attack, but that surprise only seemed to delight him, as he licked his jaws and brought another swirling tempest into life: this one a mix of both brimstone and snow that stung, singed, and chilled at the same time. Golden eyes glinted with savor.

Hold him at bay a moment longer. I stand upon the bridge.

Charles felt a twinge of anger slipping in through his hands and up his arms. The black-armored figure rose from his seat and applauded, both hands holding chains. The first was the iron chain about the wolf's neck. The second was spectral and incomplete. Charles renewed the song in his heart. He would not let that second chain appear.

The wolf thrust its tornadoes of ice and fire loose, and they careened one off another, turning the air into a churn through which the rat found it impossible to see. He twisted the Sondeshike again, stepping deftly through each hole in the air, always keeping near the Åelf. His heart raced as he danced, but he held tight to that sliver of Calm he'd found.

Jaws snapped from his left but the rat heard no chain and he ignored it. The bite crushed down upon him before vanishing in a wisp of ice that cut his flesh and made his ruined ear twitch. The clink of chain then sounded from his right, and he flicked the Sondeshike without touching the ground. The stone rose up in a long set of spikes. The wolf appeared through the midst of his tornadoes, crashed into the spikes and shattered them with its body. Its momentum stalled, the wolf regathered its strength and leaped again with a snarl. Charles flicked his staff upward and a tower of stone erupted from the ground to knock the wolf aside.

“Brilliant! Now strike with anger unfurled and your stone will crush all!”

A glimmer of weight touched his neck and Charles began to sing the Song out loud. The weight vanished with those sweet words that soothed his heart. Still he could hear the chain-bearer's mocking laugh and trembled.

The snarling of the hell hounds that had crossed his barrier turned his ears. Charles spun on his paws, smacking each out of the way with gusts of air and force, doing his best not to move the rock unless he had to. Charles heard the snap of bones and the yelps of pain but refused to savor them. He struck to kill them because he must, not for love of their death, but for love of his family.

Even so, there were more rushing him from all sides than he could stop, and the beast wolf was still out there prowling and waiting for its chance to fell him low. Charles sucked in his breath, and then swung the Sondeshike out in a wide arc all around. The ground in every direction save for near the Åelf erupted into a thousand spears so narrow and sharp that over a dozen of the hounds were skewered immediately. The rest bayed and snarled at the periphery, clawing at the spires with no way to get through.

The chain stretched out from the black-armored thing's mailed hand, rushing out to meet the rat. He could feel the collar at his neck as a weight coming into being. The chain did not quite reach him, but another such blast from his hands would tie him to it forever. Charles wailed at the deception of material strength.

He felt it more than heard it. A gust of freezing wind whipped his cloak from behind, and Charles spun in time to see his stone spear barricade engulfed in a coalescing wave of ice. The blood-red wolf leaped atop the nullified obstacle with a triumphant snarl, and then launched intself at Charles with jaws and claws outstretched. Charles lifted his Sondeshike, ready to sweep out another thrust of stone, but into that moment came a still, small voice, like a whisper that even a gentle breeze would steal away. But through the cacophony of the cheering mass of demons and monsters, through the snarling of the attacking hounds, through the throbbing of Qan-af-årael's efforts, and even through the mocking laughter of the demon lord, this voice touched him.

In weakness, power reaches perfection.

Charles did not swing his Sondeshike, staring down death for the moment unafraid. The paws smashed into his chest and the two of them crashed into the ground, shattering the remnants of ice still there. He felt the nearly-completed collar dig into his shoulders as momentum bore him into the rock. Before him, paws ready to eviscerate his gullet, jaws eager to feed, was the red dire wolf. Charles gasped for breath but found none, the brutish weight of the beast nearly collapsing his ribcage.

The beast snarled its victory and then glanced down at his chest as if choosing where to take its first bite. From the corner of his eye, Charles saw Qan-af-årael's violet blade descend toward the creature's back. All time seemed to still into that moment. Golden eyes, blazing in their fire, fixed upon his chest, and then froze. A blink as the countenance of the wolf changed, softened, filled with surprise and wonder, as if confronted with something from a half-remembered dream. The tongue lanced between fangs, shaping a word that could not escape its throat as anything more than a choking whimper.

A hopeless plea lived in that shaping and in those golden eyes. An unproven yet absolutely certain conviction filled Charles in that moment. He knew this creature not just as a victim of the Lord of Rage, but as a man and a fellow Keeper.

The purple blade descended even as the wolf darted its head forward to strike at Charles' throat. Teeth capped in a dark black metal crunched into the ephemeral collar with a shriek of rending spellcraft. Charles thrust his Sondeshike upward against the wolf's side, sprawling them both away from Qan-af-årael and against the rocky spears; the wolf's back passed a hair's breadth from the touch of his protector's blades.

Time crashed back into them both, and the wolf bounded up the spears and snapped its jaws in a fury rekindled. The only difference was the direction: outward. The remaining hellhounds balked and milled in confusion, not daring to risk the War Wolf's abruptly turned wrath and, for a moment, an unexpected stillness blanketed the arena. Charles ran one hand over his neck and savored the feel of nothing but fur there. His hand fell down onto his chest, and trembled at the stitching of the Long Scout heraldry there. A whisper passed his tongue, “You're Misha's friend.”

“NO!” A voice thundered with such magnitude that the rat lost his balance. A wave of power crashed into the spears, shattering them into flecks of sand and hurling the Beast through the far arena wall with a crunch of stone. “YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE!”

The black-armored man stepped over the wall into the arena, his form stretching nearly a hundred feet into the air. A blade dark and twisted, limned with bloody light, filled the hand that had once gripped a chain unforged. Hell hounds yipped in terror as they tried to get away. Several fell beneath his boots and were crushed. Gremlins flew down from the stands and fought over the ruined jelly left behind.

“The bridge is ready, Charles. You must go now.” Qan-af-årael's real voice felt so soft that for a moment Charles thought it stranger than the tyrannical blast from the lord of rage. His eyes flicked to the Åelf and marveled as he too seemed to swell in proportion to match that of the deadra. His countenance was imperious and full of a majesty untouchable by death. At his feet lay a circle of darkness that pushed apart the red sands of the arena like a beast shouldering aside the earth as it sprang forth from its burrow.

“NO! YOU ARE MINE, LITTLE RAT!” Out of the corner of his eye, Charles saw the sword drive point-first into the arena floor. The ground split in a thousand sections, fiery red light erupting in a mist of flame through each crack. Charles danced back from the nearest blaze, wincing as the searing heat reduced the fur on his left side to blackened curls. The flesh beneath screamed and burned as on the day he'd been struck by the Shrieker.

Qan-af-årael swung his violet blade through the flames; they wailed and fell leaving no trace of their presence. Charles crawled forward, barely able to move either left arm or leg. He kept the Sondeshike tucked beneath his good arm as he dragged himself toward the bridge. Only a few feet separated him from the nightmare conflagration and safety.

The Åelf stepped forward a pace, his rich blue eyes ageless and unquestionable in their authority. “He does not belong to you. But take that which is yours.” So saying, the Åelf reached down, grasped the iron chain, and lifted the half-buried dire wolf into the air. With a twirl, he cast the blood red beast toward the lord of rage, who was so shocked that any creature could defy him that he paused just long enough for the wolf to bounce off the black plate covering his face.

“YOU DARE! I WILL DESTROY YOU BOTH!” he roared and the earth heaved and dust howled in every direction. The crowds in the stands started to scatter. A brilliant plume of crimson light cascaded from the armored thing's body, blasting outward like a detonating storehouse of dragon dust. Charles stretched his arm as far as it could go, slipped his hand into the gap between the folds of the arena sand, and then was upended head over heels when the wall of tremendous energy struck him. Into the gap he fell and all through the bridge the force thrust him. For a single moment all became dark and silent as if his eyes and ears had been plucked out.

 

 

The bridge swept past in the blink of an eye and Charles struck hard against a bright yellow road. He groaned and gasped for breath as he lay there, his teeth rattled by the jarring impact, pain throbbing through his entire body. But as he lay there those pains faded to aches and his racing heart slowed along with the rapid whoops of his gasping breath. For several seconds he did nothing but lay where he had come to rest, staring at the rough surface of the incongruously yellow road upon which he sprawled.

As the pain ebbed he began to notice two things for which he felt a swell of gratitude.

The first was that his flesh was whole again. The burns that had seared his left side were no more; healed as thoroughly as if they had never occurred. His ear, savaged by terrible claws, was whole and unblemished and his tail – severed most cruelly – had been restored. Qan-af-årael had promised his tail would return and so it had! Every terrible injury had been reversed, every scratch and bruise he had suffered in the savage daedra's arena – gone utterly. Charles pulled the tip of his tail to his snout and pressed it against his cleft lips in a delighted kiss.

The second thing he noticed was that the suffocating red that had infested both the earth and the air in the violent daedra's realm was gone. The surface of the yellow road upon which he had come to rest, and his eyes had been staring at fixedly during the long moments he waited for the pains to fade and his heart to slow, appeared to be of a single material. There were no stones, nor seams to indicate stone or brick or anything else, but whatever it was made of defied Charles' understanding. It was neither gold, nor sulfur, or anything he knew. Charles, remembering the chain and collar, was loathe to reach within to learn more.

Taking his tail in both hands Charles levered himself up to take in the new vista into which had had been cast with such brutal strength his arrival had left a furrow in the soft grass for almost ten paces before reaching the road upon which he had finally come to rest.

Grass.

Green, verdant, welcoming. The smell of it had been in his nostrils since arriving but only as his eyes took in the terrible wound left by his arrival – though no bridge or other means of entry were visible – did the unmistakeable reality of that smell strike him. The soft lawn of nearly tended grass begged him to lie in it and simply let his cares fade away. Charles felt himself leaning toward it, furrow of churned earth notwithstanding, to do just that.

Catching himself, Charles reared back in surprise.

Where was he, after all?!

Shifting to his knees and then standing, the pain of his travels and battles faded, Charles looked around.

He had come to a sprawling stop in what appeared to be a sizable courtyard bounded on one side by a hedge that towered twice his own height, a single gap offering welcome entry into what he assumed was merely a garden labyrinth. Pavilions of the sort he'd find in a southern Pyralian villa, both open and tented, dotted the green, the diaphanous material of roof and wall billowing on a breeze on the perfect side of cool. Rich colors, damask and lavender in particular though he could not count the variety of azure and jade he also glimpsed, adorned everything in sight like dropped silks. Above him the sky appeared draped in a twilight glow from some unseen source as if he were actually in a vast, warm room. There were no stars in the sky, no sun nor moon to offer him any sense of time. He could imagine that the glow were offered by countless candles and lanterns; light enough to see easily but just dim enough to invite intimacy.

And judging by the giggles and growls, gasping and moaning, grunts and cries of pleasure, that invitation was not ignored. Charles was a man grown, even if he were now a rat, and he understood those sounds well. In pavilions lacking walls he could see shadowy forms in earnest motion but chanced not to look more closely or intrude upon the sources of those pleasured sounds coming at him from every direction save down.

Incense tickled at his nose with a whiff of opiates and the effervescence of hashish. He swallowed heavily, senses dulled in that haze of perfume that shamed the most redolent boudoir. That particular essence he had long savored that lingered in the air of his bedchambers after a passionate night with his wife now teased at his whiskers.

But more compelling was the scent of food. Glorious, luscious, delectable aromas of fresh fruit, cured meats, delicious cheeses sharp, mellow, or musky all made his mouth water. His tongue slipped free at the tang of exotic spices in never-ending combinations that called to him more firmly than tug of chain. He felt lifted from the earth by the promise of cumin and rosemary, anise and nutmeg, cinnamon and thyme, paprika and sesame, and many others he could not name. The biting promise of wine in unending profusion reminded him just how long it had been since he had even sipped a thimble-full of water.

There were countless other scents as well, all natural, some tantalizing, some heavily pungent but all bespeaking of a single overwhelming desire beyond hunger. One struck Charles as particularly overwhelming, a scent he never would have paid heed to before he became a rat for it was unique to being what he now was.

A very feminine scent that lanced through his senses as keenly as the sharpest sword and lit a fire within his loins that left him reeling.

Lifting his head slightly Charles cast his nose toward that musk, his whiskers trembling, but at the same time he sought to withdraw from it; from the complete relinquishment of control its appeasement would demand. Where was Qan-af-årael, he wondered, sending his thoughts in search of him beyond his nose though his body turned and his upraised snout sought the source of those mingles aromas of food and flesh. The lordly Åelf had contended against the very Lord of Rage in the dark god's own house. Did his contest continue, a stalemate of violence, as his protector ever sought to enter the bridge? Had Revonos defeated him and fitted him with a collar of his own, leaving Charles to face what he might encounter alone?

Charles shuddered at the thought of being left without his guide and protector, a soul so ancient and so unimaginably powerful that he could stand against the gods in their own thronerooms and escape undefeated. Padding down the pathway of unidentifiable yellow material the rat crept past the nearest of the pavilions, this with its silken walls drawn down. That thin barrier showed shadows writhing within, but did nothing to mask the sounds that they made. Backing his ears Charles sidled past, leaving the garden, going from where he had no idea where he was to another place that he knew not where it was; but the bridge would be there.

He had to trust in the Åelf. Qan-af-årael would appear, as unblemished as Charles, after he vanquished Rage, to lead his little rat beyond this place of suffering and woe.

Creeping along the walls, ducking quickly past doors, Charles entered a wide corridor paved in that yellow material. Under his paws it felt like sand that had been frozen in place; rough enough that his paws did not slip but smooth enough to be comfortable underfoot. It was neither hot nor cold nor, particularly, hard. It did not deform with each step but there was a subtle yield to it as if he were walking on tamped earth.

In short, it was a perfect surface upon which to walk unfatigued if that were his desire.

Charles had no such desire; he only wished to achieve the next bridge or to find where Qan-af-årael had come to rest after escaping from Revonos' realm.

When a hand seized his arm Charles let out an indecorous chuff of surprise and tried to pull away but the grip was like iron. He leaned against the grasp, which turned out to be nothing more than a purely ordinary hand unblemished by the callouses of labor or color of work out-of-doors. An aristocrat's hand, or noble's, though the owner of that hand was dressed in the rags of the meanest peasant. At one time they had been the cloths of a courtesan but time and depredations had reduced them to tatters barely sufficient to clothe the woman's flesh. Despite the fact that he planted his paws Charles felt himself dragged into the room from which the woman's hands had groped for, and found, a hapless passing victim.

Within were a score or two of similarly dressed fallen nobles both men and women, their formal clothing stained and ragged with unknowable age, milling about a table from which the mouthwatering scents of a wondrous feast arose. Charles felt his paws forfeit their firm grasp of the yellow pathway and his weight drifting toward that table under the desperate pull of the woman's hand. The table was as long as the Great Hall of Metamor and weighted to groaning under the mass of delicacies being brought out by an endless line of servitors. Here and there forms cavorted upon the table, ignoring the food and the results their activities had upon the dishes nearest, and Charles cast his gaze away from them and deafened his ears to their urgent sounds.

He then understood the shabbily clothed woman's plea when he saw another of the beggared nobles snatch up an apple backed in cinnamon. Even as the man brought it toward his face the apple putrefied and crumbled in a sodden mass of corruption. Despite that the man shoved the remains at his mouth only to have them arrive as dust. Nothing was left even on his fingers to lick; the apple had been utterly consumed by decay. Tentatively, moved by pity, Charles picked up a meat pastry and offered it to the woman. With a look of wondrous thanks the woman released his arm and snatched the pastry with both hands sparing him not another look.

The moment she raised it from his palm the pastry sloughed into mold and the meat crumbled to dust leaving her noble hands unblemished by so much as a crumb.

While she moaned at the failure of her desperate thoughts Charles made his escape, darting back out into the passage of the yellow path and almost collided with the most ideal image of beauty he had ever crossed in all the days of his mortal life – human or rodent. Standing just beyond the doorway was a rat – a female rat – of radiant white garbed in the finest of royal gowns. Her eyes were an arresting shade of azure blue that did not gaze upon him beatifically; they were level, appraising, and hungry in a most coquettish manner.

To her beauty – perfectly smooth pink nose, exquisitely shaped incisors, whiskers of exact measure and breadth, ears delicate and round, and breasts ample but not overflowing – the Lady Kimberly was the meanest of peasants, a visage so revolting to look upon her after this comely beauty would be enough to make him nauseous.

In such proximity her bouquet – a plethora of mixed aromas – struck him like a hammerblow. Under the scents of perfume perfect for her natural musk, of the finest silks and oils, was another scent altogether. The scent of her nature refined, at the peak of ripeness, lit a fire within the rat that burned his thought to a whirling fog.

The candle, the flame; shield with sword inscribed; center and cleanse! The simple meditations of Charles' youth was all he could find to cling to lest he fling himself into that ravishing beauty and be lost. He reeled back, focusing on the inner calm, the center that would allow him to purge the fire that threatened his sanity and the very love he had for his own wife. Throwing a hand up as if suddenly facing a blinding light Charles turned and fled down the passageway.

The image of beauty and lustful desire did not pursue, merely looking after his retreating form with a slight smile pulling at the corners of her perfect muzzle, perfect tail and immaculate whiskers twitching. A challenge!

Accepted.

Walking swiftly, wondering if his master and protector Qan-af-årael had finally fallen, was still fighting, or had escaped, Charles darted quick glances in doors as he passed. Each seemed more alluring than the last, but at the same time more revolting to his morals. Taking a corner when the path turned, he found a pair standing – or, rather, leaning – in the corner of two walls. A woman, perfectly human in form and beauty, was pinned against the corner with her legs wrapped about the swarthy muscular hips of a man whose clothes had been shed only enough to accomplish the task.

Something told Charles that the man was more than he appeared; some itch deep in his gut told him that he looked upon an entity as sinister as Tallakath's insectile nurses. The demon had its back to him, his head bent to the woman's shoulder. Quickly sidling around them Charles saw in the woman's face not rapture or even pleasure at all.

What he saw was a deep, unappeasable frustration as desperate as the lady at the table. While the two couple with boundless energy in the public venue of the yellow floored passageway Charles knew that she had not – and never would – achieve what she desired. She was as much a tortured soul as those clambering madly after foods that became dust in their hands. The woman's fingers clawed at the demon's back in the throes of rapturous pleasure that her body felt but her soul could not; an appetite that could never be slaked no matter how she yearned for that release – just once – that would allow her damned soul to slip free its bonds of lust.

Backing down the corridor until he felt safe that the demon would not turn, with the woman's hungry eyes boring into him as if wondering that he might offer her what the demon could not, Charles felt his upper lip curl from his teeth. Clearly, the hellish being was achieving precisely what his victim wanted, while she was denied.

 

Deeper and deeper into the warren of architecture designed for royalty Charles descended, darting past doors that offered brief views into the desires that came in so many varieties and forms that the rat was left bewildered. He had imaged that desire was a simple thing – one love for his partner's desire – but staggering past rooms full of art gazed upon by the blind, symphonies attended by the deaf, and feast where those who sought to feast were themselves the main course Charles found that his understanding was flawed.

Even something as simple as cheese left him staggering trying to escape its alluring scent and the hint of its delicious bouquet. Were those damned souls left tortured in this hellish afterlife those who gave their eternal fate over to whichever dark god held sway in this place those who sought to satisfy a desire so profound – for feasts, for music? For art? For possessions that now buried them under an immovable weight?

What had they desired so much? What did he?

In the realm of Klepnos all the scents, sounds, and sights had overwhelmed him with their potency. But here there was a sick center to each, as if the delectable enticements were merely a chocolate shell about a rotten egg. Here there was no feast as in the Duke's hall where the revelers were making merry and enjoying each other's company. Nor were the cries he heard the practiced exhalation of a whore house where those selling their body at least had some coin to cover the death of their dignity. This was even worse than the carnal weeping lining unseemly docks at night as those who had nothing left to hope for but a scrap of bread or moldy potato offered their diseased carcasses to the lust of sailors who never glimpsed anything but flesh.

The moans and groans were dead voices unable to resist, and incapable of hoping for any return on the use of their flesh to sate lust. The scent of consummation, so filled with love in his own home, was nothing here but lust hardened by hate.

To desire this deep was to enslave. A hand lifted to the torn fabric at the nape of his neck and the cowl hanging down his back. Hours before a spiked black-iron collar had been enclosed around his neck, and he felt all the fire of rage course through him. Power over the very stones had been at his command. And yet the price had been enslavement beneath the heel of Revonos. Would he now risk another slavery for the mere satisfaction of the scrumptious scent of cheese? Charles, unable to bear witness to any of desire's manifestations, kept moving along the myriad yellow pathways as he waited for the Åelf's rescue.

To his horror after navigating a broad set of stairs that appeared to be fashioned from smoky marble, the short walls on either side came to an end. Before him stretched a vast hall between two rows of decorative pillars which towered into the shadows of the groined ceiling high above. In the center of the huge space was a broad fountain of wine so heady that the mere scent of it made him dizzy. Arrayed about the fountain were monstrous shapes and things that seemed to have once been human unable to escape their grasp.

The path descended the stairs, splitting at the fountain, and continued into the distance toward the far end of the Hall. But to reach it he would have to pass unmolested through the gaggle of demons which he knew was impossible.

All but one of the creatures arranged about the fountain were voluptuous and sensuous with nubile curves on every inch of their flesh. They bore no clothing and so there was nothing that the rat couldn't see. He tried to make the sign of the Yew, but his arm had become a thing of lead that he could not lift. They lounged around the fountain, some laying half in, others just on the edge, their long hair drenched and purple, concealing wicked horns that spiraled from their temples. Their skin was lusciously tanned with a veneer of scarlet. Manicured hands with fingernails stretched into sharp razors ran down their bodies, emphasizing and forcefully exposing their breasts, hips, thighs, and everything else that there was to see.

The other monstrous figure was mostly man-shape. Chiseled muscles that gleamed as if oiled rippled across his chest. The flesh was burnished as if on fire with nary a hair to mar the perfect gleam of its sheen. Long wavy locks descended from the crown of his head, flowing across a quartet of horns that lifted upward and outward like the setting for a ring. His feet ended in cloven hooves of obsidian black, and these were beset upon by the ruby lips of a quartet of the succubae. The incubus reclined with supreme contempt as it gnawed upon quivering flesh, juices spilling across its perfect chest only to be washed away by the spattering fountain.

The monsters were not alone as they reclined on the fountain. Things that had once been human but were now missing parts of themselves were also kept close. The rat's beady eyes flicked from one to another as he trembled in his dark corner. For what parts they possessed they appeared human though they were as naked as the monsters. Some were missing only a hand or an ear, though no scar remained to show it, only empty flesh as there was nothing but more skin underneath. A few had no limbs at all, only stubs that left them prone on the ground, with only their torsos intact for the pleasure and consumption of their masters. Yet they still moaned, unable to move, unable to feel anything at all except the ministrations of the succubae deadening everything that they were.

Charles' eyes swept to the pavilions nearby in search of some escape, and there he saw even more of the denuded humans. Some were molested by the demons and could only cry their misery of lust. Others were molesting each other. One pair had been reduced not just to their torsos, but just to the skin of their chest, belly, face, and genitals, so that they looked like nothing more than a pair of desiccated leaves buffeted together by the wind.

One of the succubus had taken the skin of a human and stretched it out across her own body – despite being quite a bit more voluptuous than the unfortunate soul she had garbed herself with – so that the man's face was distorted by her breasts, the rest of him stitched across so that only his hands, feet, and loins extended beyond the frame of the succubus' body. Mad black eyes roved from that disgusting countenance, even as the succubus laughed and poured a ewer of wine down across her face and chest, bouncing it behind the taut, suffering skin. Charles met those eyes and quivered in a panic and the certainty that he knew that face.

The form was ruined, the shape devoured until all that was left was the skin, but there was something there that could not be mistaken. Charles could see the puffy cheeks, the corpulent frame, the dark hair, the meaty fingers, and the avaricious glint that sought to absorb all into itself and yet could never be satisfied. Those black eyes spat hate with every lustful thought, and pined for any measure of vengeance it could obtain. Charles knew those eyes. Charles had almost been a slave to them but for the intervention of a white rabbit.

The name came, one that filled him with loathing. Altera Loriod.

Once a man of low nobility and connoisseur of the darkest of carnal lists, now become nothing more than the carnal accessory of a succubus.

As if sensing that the garment stretched taut across her chest had been distracted by something beyond the tortures she had for it the succubus raised her gaze toward the stair upon which Charles had halted. A smile drew the corners of her succulent lips and a forked tongue slipped from between them to caress the glistening mouth with a seductive lick. Loriod's mad gaze never wavered, fixed on Charles with a rabid hunger that seemed to infuse the demoness that wore him with a degree of yearning as well. Slipping from her recumbent pose at the edge of the fountain she languidly strolled across the hall, her smile becoming more broad, revealing the tips of sharp teeth behind. Every move, each step, each twitch and jiggle of the succubus' salacious form, made the taut flesh of the late Altera Lodiod moan with unfulfilled lust.

Charles trembled for only a moment before retreating backwards up the stair hastily only to stumble against something that was not marble. A long, serpentine tail that was of no rat ever born and most certainly not his own, fouled his footing and sent him reeling backward to smack his head upon the marble terrazzo. Blinking, the rat pushed himself up only to gape at the long sinuous shape before him, wreathed in a glow of shimmering red. The long, serpentine body spilled down the stair in relaxed curves, the tail which Charles had fallen over tapering from a long body that led upwards to a svelte feminine shape.

And that shape was of a white rat so unspeakably beautiful that Charles felt his heart and body trembling in awe of her. Even having lost her legs to the abalone white scales of the serpent emerging from beneath her royal gown she was the perfections angels would yearn to achieve and mortals could not so much imagine. Hungry blue eyes gazed down at Charles and a smile lifted her whiskers, perfectly scalloped pink ears twitched toward him while she held something cradled in one arm. The other reached down to offer him a hand getting his paws back beneath him.

“Hello,” the word, so simple, yet offering something beneath it smooth askance that went beyond desire, beyond hunger, to a promise of things that would leave Charles' very immortal soul struck dumb with pleasure. The people at the table, the deaf attendees of an orchestra, and the woman pinned in the corner of a corridor were mere motes – barely even sparks – in the face of what that single word offered him.

This creature; half milk white serpent and half opaline furred white rat, was the embodiment of yearning. All lust and all desire were consummated in her form; scale and whisker and azure blue gaze. Charles wept and cowered but could not raise his arm to take that offered hand.

Her eyes glimmered but there was no warmth within them, “I like you.” Never had words lied so sensuously and Charles' ears burned to hear more.

“He is mine!” A voice, strained to the baritone croaking of a strangled frog, rumbled from somewhere forgotten behind Charles' back. Not the succubus' voice, for he knew that one would be a pale shadow of the rat Queen's voice before him, but another voice. The low, cultured, but wheedling voice of a spoiled aristocrat stretched impossibly over the breasts of a hell creature. Charles could see them now, from the corner of his eye, as the succubus with her damned attire had waddled up the stair to stand to one side of the angelic serpentine rat. Loriod's dark eyes filled with hate as if they could launch themselves from the shell of flesh to bore into the rat's chest and perforate his hammering heart. “He agreed to be mine! I want him!”

The beatific queenly rat, a presence as powerful as any of the daedra Charles had thus far encountered, seemed amused by this request and, with a nonchalant gesture of nothing more than her white, claw-tipped figures, signaled her acquiescence. The succubus on which stretched the flesh of Loriod like some bedchamber fancy licked her lips and leaned in closer. Charles pressed himself back, away from both rat-topped naga and succubus, against the baluster of the stair. Feeling the cold stone of the railing Charles tried to gather his feet beneath him as the leering, distorted face of Loriod stretched before him atop twin mountains of soft flesh.

None of the other demons – succubae or lone incubus – seemed to express the slightest interest in their tet'a'tet. Charles could not trust in that indifference but he would have to take that risk. The only thing he lamented was the inevitable displeasure of the lovely rat whose scent still filled his nostrils and left his loins aching with need. But the memory of the woman in the hall banked that fire and cleared his mind enough to consider his actions. Did a naga even have the right anatomy? Such thoughts, dancing about within his mind like flame-drunk moths, served only to repulse him and curb those needs further.

Planting his hands upon the baluster Charles turned and leaped at the same moment. The fall on the other side was not great and managed to land upright, briefly crouching to absorb the impact before darting along the yellow pathway across the Hall. Before Charles had managed to clear the sprawl of the stair's lowest steps the naga's tail spilled over the curled knoll post and lashed across his front like a wall of opalescent white scales. He jumped again but not high enough.

The blow upended him in mid-leap forcing him to adopt an awkward tumble that found him on his feet, and moving with little loss of speed, when he recovered. She moved with blinding speed, her upper body swaying only slightly with the rapid sinuous writhing of her long serpentine length, to cut across his path. Snatching the Sondeshike from his cloak he gave a single jerk to extend it and drove the top through the meat of the naga's python body. It stabbed through, and skirled angrily from the floor beneath, as if there were nothing there. Charles blinked in surprise, staggering a step when the resistance he expected was not there to react against, and then gasped when the white tail entwined him and pinned his arms at his sides. The naga's regal, royal rodentine muzzle rested against the back of his ears and a forked serpent's tongue flicked past her prominent front teeth to caress them. The coils squeezed around him and he gasped for breath, unable to move. Her voice, soft and perfectly cultured yet alluring and sultry in the same breath, filled his ears and mind with ideas that shamed him with only a pleased exhalation. The claw-tipped fingers of one hand, much like his own but white, caressed his chin and throat suggestively – both with what those fingers could do to please his flesh as well what they could do to rend it.

“He wants you, handsome little rat.” The queen rat-serpent crooned delicately, her whiskers tickling his ears and cheek as her perfectly white muzzle and one brilliant blue eye filled the field of view on one side. “I enjoy...” the word was drawn out as if nothing satisfied her more, “helping people get what they want.”

Charles gnashed his teeth and dug the tips of his finger claws into the pads of his palms. The pain was sharp compared to the aching crush of her coils; sharp enough to drive the seductive undertones of her unspoken promises into the darkest corners of his mind. “I am not alone.”

A sibilant, churring chuckle and a warm caress of breath across the back of her ears sent a tingle racing through his chest, down his stomach, to drop into the furnace of his loins like a dollop of molten wax into a chandler's kiln. “It is as you say, little rat.” The coils undulated, massaging his body from every direction with surprising facility. It tugged at his tail, drew his legs out straight, pushed inward at his belly, and then rolled against him so that he could feel his hips moving back and forth, grinding him against the cool, smooth surface of the serpent's muscular body. The gentle fingers of one hand raked up the back of his neck, the tips of her claws rasping against the flesh beneath his fur and sending a tingle down his spine, upward across his scalp. Charles tightened his fists wincing at the feel of his clawtips pressing against the tough pads of his palms until they pierced his flesh to draw forth blood and pain. “You are not alone.” In the corner of his vision he could see her lips move; the glisten of teeth and tongue beyond while in his mind's eye he could see what those lips and tongue could do when they were not talking. Shame clutched at his heart, but instead of reaching for a prayer to Eli in that moment of lustful doubt he could only envision the face of his wife, the Lady Kimberly, who even in the sight of his memory was a trollish visage in comparison to the serpentine rat queen who now held him.

But, trollishly grotesque or not, it was the face of his Love that pushed those dark, carnal thoughts back. It was Love that buffered the hard edged fire of raw lust. With no hesitation Charles grasped at those memories and held them fast; of Kimberly's smile as she reclined – unconsciously seductive – upon a picnic blanket in the shadow of Metamor's walls. Of the glimmer in her dark eyes when she held her first child.

Her first child.

His first child.

THEIR first child. Nothing in the beauteous serpent's promises offered that. They could never offer that.

Her whiskers and warm breath tickled his ears, but the seductive warmth washed against a glacial wall within the mind of the mortal held within her coils. “Merely call my name and I will rescue you from him.” Past the prominent rodentine teeth her forked tongue snaked out to brush across his muzzle and whiskers, leaving a glistening trail of saliva as it slid across the fur of his cheek and across the ruined flesh around his eye before slipping along one ear to disappear between those lips with so many promises. “He wants you, and he has been ever SO loyal.”

“He is damned,” Charles rasped, ignoring the tantalizing of her fingers, tongue, and voice with images of Kimberly's joy. He could feel that joy suffusing his heart against the fire of his loins; a spark before a furnace but also a spark against the darkness. “The damned can ask for nothing!”

“Ahh, my pretty rat, the damned ask for all.” Charles felt her hand working down his chest beneath his jerkin, combing at his short fur as if seeking the pulse of his heart. Her nose brushed his ear; a nuzzle of promises that he already knew were offered by another with more meaning. “And yet, here you have come. Because you are seeking something.”

“I do not come alone!” Charles snarled again, yielding against the grasp of those coils he could not pry himself out of. His Sondeshike was pinned at his side as neatly as his arms. Even collapsing it would do nothing against those pearlescent scales as he now knew. Where was his protector Åelf, Charles wondered with a rising panic. The warmth within his heart was a steady strength, but against the wiles of the beast in whose embrace he was bound it was such a small thing.

“Perhaps not.” He could hear the shrug in her voice. For his demands Loriod had fallen completely silent. After his vault over the stair railing Charles had lost sight of him, which was all for the better. “But you came seeking, and what did I say, my handsome little rat?”

“Nothing I listened to,” Charles bluffed, fighting to keep Kimberly's beautiful smile – a real smile as opposed to the artifice drawn across the muzzle hovering near his own – in his mind's eye.

“I do so enjoy helping people get what they want.” Soft, warm, seductive, and so very, very close at hand. A turn of his head and her nose, so perfect as if sculpted, would brush against his cheek in a rush of heat. “Call my name – you know it, oh, you do – and we can find what you seek.” The coils tightened briefly about him, and he felt his legs and tail pressed tight together, before the undulating motion resumed which buckled his hips. Out of the corner of his eye Charles glimpsed the succubus with Loriod's skin sewn into her flesh leisurely glide around the base of the stairs. Hungry eyes found him immediately and the rat grimaced.

Qan-af-årael, where are you?

The queen rat dangled her arms across his neck and he felt his ears pressed against her breasts. The soft warmth of her fur and the delicate touch of her arms felt relaxed and enticing. If they but belonged to Kimberly instead he could enjoy them! “But until you are ready to let me help you, and it would give me great pleasure, to do so, little rat, I will let this one have what he wants.” Charles swallowed as the succubus sensuously ran her hands across Loriod's flesh as she walked around the abalone coils that had ensnared Charles, until she and the vile, distorted face of Loriod were in front of him.

And then the petty little noble's skin began to stretch, drawn outward across the succubus' body until the limp hands slipped over her manicured nails, his feet encased her own, and his head engulfed her neck and face. The succubus pulled by her queen's consent the skin of Loriod across herself as if he were nothing more than a costume to be donned.

Loriod's flesh was distorted in every direction by the shape of the succubus within, yet she appeared to show no distress at the revolting consumption. The flesh of his head was drawn so taut that his corpulent features were stretched bone thin. His lips spread and his mouth distended as if he too were a serpent. Charles felt the rat queen's coils tighten about his chest so that he could neither breath nor bend. His body, straight as a rod, was angled toward that gaping maw in which he saw nothing but darkness.

Charles choked for even a gasp of air as he tried to twist his head away even though in his writhing he was brought almost lip to lip with the rodentine opalescent naga. The corpulent mass of damned soul and succubus pressed closer, their combined breath a fetid warmth across Charles' whiskers. Loriod's lips had been drawn so thin that they were nothing more than a scarlet circle, but there was no creature hiding within. All Charles could see was darkness; a void that passed around his snout no matter how he fought to escape. The coils of the serpent were far too powerful to force and too tight to slip out of. His fevered brain screamed the name of his protector, but Loriod's lips wrapped themselves around his head. He felt the flesh tighten against his neck and then crawl across his shoulders as the coil undulated over his body, releasing more and more into the monstrous jaws of his tormentor. Yet he felt nothing inside that maw; there was neither tongue nor teeth to greet and grind him, nor stink of breath to gag him or succubus to tease his tortured soul. And into that emptiness his body was shoved and swallowed until for one brief moment he felt nothing at all.

 

Light sprang back into his eyes, the stench of fresh manure clogged his nose, and Loriod's contemptuous voice crooned above him. Charles blinked a moment as his eyes focused on the pile of excrement in front of him and in which his hands were half-buried. Richly booted feet stood a short distance away across a floor covered in hay where not despoiled by heaps of neglected, decaying animal droppings. The hobnailed boots of soldiers surrounded him just clear of the manure but he dared not look up, suffused with sudden, heart-crushing fear. He felt a terrible pain in his back where a gauntlet had struck him.

“You promised me, Matthias.” Loriod's condescending croon cut through him like a rusted blade; jagged and rough, compounding that sudden fear. “You promised that you would come live on my land and swear fealty to me; your true lord and master.” He lifted his head just enough to see Loriod – whole and fat with jewels on his fingers with an expensive doublet and hose hiding his girth – gloating from beyond the muck of the stall into which Charles had apparently been cast. The corpulent lord's smile was one of triumph. Beside him were two solders, hard faced and thick, their expressions ones of blank ferocity and vapid brutality regarding him with disgust. “You did not do as you promised. Now, for all eternity, you will. You are charged with the manure and cleaning the privies. Henceforth and forevermore.”

Charles snarled, finding no restraint on his flesh, and willed – he willed – but he could not think of what it was he was striving for. A strength, something within himself, but whatever it was he could not grasp it and it would not come at his desire. “I'll never do anything for you!” He snapped even as he realized that something that should have been there, something that had been with him since the earliest days of his youth, was simply not there. His eyes widened in alarm as he sought within, mentally scrabbling about like a mouse in an urn but finding nothing to grasp. Something was supposed to be there, he knew it!

He just could not remember what!

One of the soldiers shifted and Charles was too slow to move, caught in the horror of his missing – something. A heavy fist drove into his back and Charles collapsed into the pile of manure, unable to catch himself with arms suddenly gone weak. His face plunged into a heap of the vile leavings and the putrescence of his tongue nearly made him vomit.

“That is not what you are to call me,” Loriod snapped in anger as he stared down at the fallen man, as if Charles were of middling consequence. Next to him and lashed to a stall was a sable-black horse whose features were very familiar, but Charles did not know from where. He knew that horse; it had – or should have – been a noble steed but somehow Loriod's corruption had fouled it; reduced it to a bony nag that stared listlessly at Charles with no care for its own fate or that it stood hock deep in its own excrement. No hint of fire glimmered in those equine eyes and his coat looked unkempt from neglect. The walls behind him, and parts of the ceiling, were an off-white hue perfect in its uniformity as if it were part of a canvas that had been touched by paint. Everywhere else appeared to be the main stables in Lorland but somehow washed out; like the walls and ceiling – roughed out but incomplete.

Charles slowly pushed himself back up, spitting the crap from his mouth and scrubbing his nose with the back of one wrist. His skin was hardly paler than the manure that fouled it – stained by the muck as thoroughly as leather in a tanner's cauldron. Somehow the sight of his own hands, bony and thin and pale under the tanning of manure soup, struck him as maddeningly wrong but he could not understand exactly why. His fingers squelched through the mire and his back screamed in protest; a rib was surely broken. Someone – he knew not whom, but someone, surely – would come for him. In this he would trust; he had to trust, for he had no other escape. Let Loriod think he had won for now. “Milord.” The word burned his tongue worse than the manure, but it kindled a gleam of victory in the fat man's eyes.

Loriod turned back to the man crouched on his knees in the worst sty in the land and smiled. Once proud, but no more. Now he was the meanest of the low. “Do your duty then.”

Charles nodded as slow as he dared. “Aye, milord. I will.”

Loriod laughed and nodded, glancing at the two guards. They had kept perfectly still until Loriod looked at them; then they began to breath and move slightly. Puppets, each of them. One soldier kicked him in the stomach and he dared not flinch away under the lord's regard, and then both of them turned to follow after their master. Loriod stopped a few paces past the stall and half-turned. His voice savored every word. “Until you learn your place your family will not receive anything from the stores.”

He will save me, Charles thought grimly, even though he did not know who that 'He' was. Someone important, he knew. Another lord, but nobler, and far more powerful, than the corpulent monster stumping away on legs as thick as Charles' torso. Someone Charles would follow, willingly, when asked. This thought kept the humiliated man moving despite the agony in his back. Somehow his past had prepared him for cleaning a stables though much of it was incomplete like the wall and ceiling, but that past he could not recall. It was there, but a fog. Somehow, in the depths of that fog, the nag roped to the wall was more than a mere broken down flea hostel – he was a Royal. But Charles, knees in the muck, could not imagine who, or how, or why he might bend knee to the beast – or any beast – yet somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he had, and would again.

There was no pitchfork to gather the used straw and no other tools to improvise. In the end Charles used his hands and arms, scooping the revolting mass into his embrace to transfer to a heap outside. By the time he had finished spreading fresh hay he stank worse than the meanest peasant and his back was in so much pain he could barely rise past a crouch. He crawled from the stables on all fours.

Somehow he found a little hovel crudely fashioned from a few planks of wood, mud, and bits of cloth that was meant to be his home. The thatch of the sagging roof was little better than the straw Charles had mucked out of that revolting stall. Lorland castle glimmered like a diamond in the midst of the fields and mudpits, clearly visible from any place within the hovel through gaps in the walls. Charles found Kimberly there also coated in mud up to her ankles, while his children cried with stomachs distended from starvation.

There were four of them, but somehow he knew there should have been more. A small chair of rough twigs drew his eyes. In it sat a pitifully small object, some strange sort of effigy, but somehow wrong. It had a tail emerging from the feed sack that adorned it as well as the twisted-straw legs. The effigy's head – an old rotten apple – was horribly misshapen into a pointed taper where a face should have been.

Kimberly glowered at him. “You fought his grace again, didn't you? Fool! Now we will all go hungry again!” she snapped, fists on bony hips garbed in little more than cast off feed sacks. His own children were similarly clothed in sack-cloth so crude that they were little more than actual sacks in which holes had been poorly cut for their heads and scrawny arms.

Charles shook his head. “He is not our lord.” He hissed, trying to stand but succeeding only in rising to a bent stoop. Like a viper her hand lashed out and laid smartly across his cheek. He recoiled and closed his eyes. This is not my wife, Charles thought. But she looked like his wife – but then, somehow she did not. Under the grime of her hard life her skin was still pale and dotted with freckles now made invisible under the overall brown; her hair a natty tangle colored as much by dirt as its natural hue. She looked like Kimberly, sounded like her, smelled like her, but it couldn't really be her. Surely not, he tried to tell himself. Yet, he did not know why she seemed so – alien.

“You force me to beg again just for scraps!” She shouted over the cries of the children. Charles collapsed against the straw-strewn ground, trying to cover his ears. “Don't you hide from them!” She jerked a finger toward the wailing children, all of a similar age. How had she whelped so many, being as waif thin as she was? “Shameful husband! Be obedient to him and we can eat!” Stomping toward the door she wrenched it open. The gleaming lines of Lorland castle shone on a rise in the distance. How, then, could it also be seen through the gaps in the wall at the back of the house? “Now I must go to him and beg! I will have to pay for your stubbornness!”

Kimberly climbed from the hovel, bumping him in the side where the guard had kicked him. He felt the lance of pain from the broken rib stab him in the back. He gasped and collapsed against the dirt. He could only gasp two words between the coughs and agony. “Beg? Pay?”

Kimberly turned and shot him a scowl as she started toward the castle. Another woman stood on the pathway, her beatific expression curious, as she gazed upon Charles stooped in the ramshackle doorway. The stranger was breathtakingly beautiful but Kimberly did not seem to notice her. Even the dust of the pathway failed to find purchase on her immaculate white gown. “Beg for succor, fool! Pay by giving him what he wants, of course!” The woman – his wife, yet somehow not – snapped back at him as she trudged up the dusty trail. “My body to use as he will. Again!” The fact that the strange woman, an observer to their familial strife, bore the countenance of a rat seemed not to dawn on any of them.

“No!” Charles tried to stretch out and stop her but she was already too far away. Charles beat the mud with his manure-soaked fists and gagged on his own stench. The wails of his children filled his ears for hours.

 

“Charles,” A soft voice, seductive in its gentle caress, whispered in his ear. “What is it you desire, Charles? Not this, surely.” A hand touched his cheek, heedless of the dirt and filth that turned his tanned skin almost treebark brown, but it brought no surcease to the pain. “I am right here, Charles, if you but say my name. I can free you of him, if you say my name.”

Charles turned ever so slightly at the suggestion. He could not form the words, but he wondered after her name.

“You know it. Merely say my name and he will have no more power over you. You... you will have power over him. Only say my name.” Her hand, soft yet tipped by a sharp nail like an animal's claw, brushed over his cheek one last time and then she was gone.

 

Thought he could not recall sleeping, nor eating whatever slop that Kimberly had brought back save that it was revolting, it seemed to Charles that a day had passed. The same two burly, stone-faced guards dragged Charles to the latrines used by – it seemed – an entire city, handed him a bucket and rope, and then shoved him down into the pit beneath the privies to clean them. Other than the bucket he was given no tools, and the underside of the privies was too low for him to stand. He spent hours upon hours scooping refuse, including his own vomit when the stench proved too great, into the bucket. The soldiers emptied this into a cart, and then tossed it back down, often aiming for his head. Many times their aim was true. All of this he did while the latrines were still being used by the hudreds of servile peasants under the fat lord's thumb. Most looked almost identical; shambling manikins who only showed a facsimile of life when their lord was near.

Loriod put in a single appearance that day. Charles stared at him without feeling. The fat noble sneered. “Do you not kneel before your sovereign?”

He groaned and did so in a spot he'd managed to clean. “Forgive me, milord.”

“Do not rise until I give you leave.” Charles held his pose for several minutes, his entire body trembling with the strain. Something warm, heavy and slick splattered atop his head. A stream drenched his back. Charles closed his eyes and thought of rescue.

 

Each day he toiled, that strange rat woman in the white gown would watch from a short remove, unobserved by Loriod, his guards, or anyone else that lived under the corpulent lord's crushing boot. Each day she came to him when he retired to the whip sharp lash of Kimberly's anger and watched her storm off to bed – and pay – for some succor for their children. And the effigy in the chair stared on, but Charles could never wrench his eyes from it. Therein lie what he most desired, but he had forgotten what it meant. Each day her seductive voice would croon in his ear, promising surcease, if only he let her know his inmost desire.

All he could do was point, voice stolen by her beatific presence, at the effigy in its little twig chair. Was it that she was a rat and he a man that turned his desire to a twist of straw topped by a misshaped old apple rather than her?

Somehow, he knew, it was not her rodentine appearance. That, if anything, was strangely familiar.

 

He slept twisted by agony; the ache of his labors and fresh new insults delivered at the boots and fists of Loriod's brutal guards, and never ate anything fit for consumption of man or beast. The scent of manure never dimmed. And yet days passed with no end to his labors, humiliations, and the sudden violence from the soldiers or from his wife. His children never stopped crying. Loriod never touched him and he didn't have to.

He merely watched and gloated. Often he did so while performing acts that left Charles revolved, knowing that those actions alone were as insulting to the tortured muckrakes as the labor itself.

 

“Good milord,” the shrewish woman who claimed to be Charles' wife called from the edge of a corral in which Charles labored to remove a decade's worth of heaped manure. Small ponds of vile black water surged into each hole left by the shovel he was given as he bore the noisome load to a wagon parked nearby. The bony black nag stood in the traces, another victim of the corpulent monster's conquest. Seated on the headboard, idly striking the haunches of the nag with a short whip solidly enough to draw bloody weals through the black coat, Loriod glanced up at the inquiry. “Again that slovenly creature has let us go without food, Milord, in sufferance of your grace with his unrestrained tongue.” She glared past the wagon at Charles laboring before a pile of dung nearly as tall as he would be if he could stand straight. Around her legs Charles' four starvation bloated children clustered sullenly. The queer effigy from the chair was clutched in the arms of the eldest.

The wagon groaned as Loriod turned and dropped down from the buckboard. Despite its load of leaking manure it lifted noticeably once the fat caricature of ignobility dropped to the ground. “Oh, yes, he has left you going hungry yet again?” He crooned, his voice grating to Charles' ears though no doubt the epitome of masculine nobility to the speaker. “Come, come.” With a fat arm he bade the group of woman and children around nearer the rear of the wagon. Once there, where Charles could see everything, Loriod turned his back to him. The clink and creak of a buckle and belt came to Charles' ears. “Come to your lord, I have more than enough to see you all fed.”

Out of the corner of his eye he espied the strange woman, beautiful even though a rat, standing upon the road watching. She regarded him with an arched stare; for a moment their eyes met. His fingers bent tightly around the shovel and though his tongue was fixed behind his teeth, he sensed at the same time some part of him yet not himself turn toward that rat and murmur a single word.

Suspira.

If it were possible, the eyes, whiskers, and snout of the rat woman stretched out in satisfaction beyond his ability to describe. Her voice carried across the air as if shouted, but caressed him as if whispered into his ear. “O my champion of Dream and Hells, he is now yours.”

Before he was aware of his feet moving or thoughts of his actions Charles found himself turned from the watcher and moving across the soupy ground as if across hard packed earth. He charged out of the corral, between the two inert guards who stared vacantly at the lord and his supplicants, with the old iron shovel raised high. With a snarl he brought it down, the dented, nicked, rusty metal edge cleaving into the back of Loriod's head with a meaty crunch. Jerking it up, even as his snarl rose to a shriek, Charles brought the shovel down again; and again; and again. Each time flesh and hair was sent skyward in an arc of gore. Five times the shovel rose and fell before Loriod hit the ground. The guards, wagon, Kimberly and the children all simply ceased existing.

There was only one existence; that of Charles and Loriod sprawled upon the polished flagstones of the courtyard. Beneath his knees the tattered remains of a form rendered unrecognizable as human save for the pale hue of the furless flesh. Charles' hands rose and fell, fingers extended and splayed not as fists but claws. Again they rose, striking down and across, shredding the flesh of the form beneath him even as it cried out in agony and fear. That what remained of Loriod could still cry out was testament that his flesh was not truly alive – Charles could spend an eternity rending him, and for that one moment fervently desired to. With each slashing plunge of his claw-tipped fingers Charles ripped away more of Loriod's flesh but, rather than casting the shreds away, he brought them to his muzzle and consumed them.

Like a starving man suddenly placed before a banquet he stuffed himself gluttonously with the flesh of the damned lord, the man's piteous cries as much succor to him as the flesh he shoved into his muzzle. He relished it! There was a taste; cold and harsh like biting a rusty rod of iron. Yet Charles savored it and basked in the wails of the damned.

A gentle hand grasping his shoulder brought his head up with a snap.

“Who are you?” The slim, aristocratic man asked. His face was sharp; chiseled and angular with sharply angled brows and ears drawn up into tapered tips. His eyes were intense, blue and boring into Charles like badgers after a vole. The rat tried to wrench away, his desire to do nothing more than return to the violence he was wreaking on the tattered remnants of his foe. All that remained of Loriod was a bit of shoulder and his corpulent face. That face was not stretched, not distorted. There was no trace of the creature that had worn him like a garment. The fingers of the slender man's hand tightened powerfully on Charles' shoulder. “Who are you?” He asked again, more sharply.

Blood dripping from his muzzle Charles looked up at the man, his dark rat eyes wild. “Vengeance!” The rat snapped gleefully. “Rage! Fury! Hunger!”

The man held before him a bit of twisted straw, sack cloth, and apple. “Who are you?” He asked again, hissing as if afraid to be overhead. “What do you seek?” Before his eyes the effigy softened; straw became flesh and fur, sack cloth to swaddling, and the apple to a head; a face. The effigy faded to nothing the moment he recognized it.

“Ladero,” Charles growled, stumbling in his rage even as he distractedly shoveled a torn hank of flesh past his bloody whiskers. “I – I am – am – Charles? Charles? Matthias...!” He gasped, suddenly realizing how lost he had become in his rage.

What Loriod wished; what he desired, Charles had lived! But there was no Loriod left beyond a few bits of blood, flesh, and bone slowly fading into the polished flagstones of the courtyard. He had lost his desire, and found fury... for that shrew of a woman; his not-wife. As she had been, or might have been, had the curse of Metamor not touched her. Somehow that love had seen past the unpleasant masquerade. He blinked and looked at his hands but saw no blood, no lingering remnants of the creature that had buried him in the dark desires that had led him to the rat queen's realm.

“Good.” Qan-af-årael hissed with a nod, his hand giving a last squeeze before he stood. “She will not be distracted long, we must slip past while she chases your simulacrum.” The Åelf nodded toward the stairwell upon which sprawled the serpentine form of the Daedra of Lust. Before her a facsimile of Charles bent knee, his head bowed, as she held before him an offering that wrenched at Charles' own heart.

She held his son in her arms, his Ladero! She cradled the babe and smiled upon the illusory Charles as if awaiting him to ask for that which he desired.

Wrenching his gaze away Charles stood easily, feeling strangely energized. For all of his trials and tribulations through the hells he expected each would have worn some bit of his away. After Revonos he had felt utterly spent, but now he felt as if he had rested a week. “Where is the bridge?” He asked, falling into step beside the taller Åelf.

“There,” Qan-af-årael waved a hand toward the ground. “And we must make our way there before she sees through my masquerade.”

“What of Loriod?” Charles cast his gaze around. The succubae and incubus still reclined around and upon the fountain of blood dark wine. They regarded the approaching pair with mild interest, too taken with their own pleasures to show much concern for the rat and Åelf drawing near. The rat expected the fat lord to spring out of hiding, hale and whole, at any moment.”

“That one – ah...” Qan-af-årael shook his head. “He is here no more.”

“What?”

“Charles, remember the beasts of Lilith's realm? What happened to the damned who could not escape them?” Glancing back at the stair he quickened his pace, reaching out to take Charles' upper arm in one slender hand.

“Their... essence went to sustain Lilith, I guess?”

“Their potency rather, but verily. She consumes them until only their essence – which none can destroy – remains. Of Loriod there is nothing but that for oblivion to claim. Now, come!” With a tug he pulled Charles forward more swiftly, breaking into a half run as, behind them a startled hiss became a sharper, steamkettle wail. If it could be said that such a sound could have issued from a steamkettle smaller than a warhorse. “She has vanquished your doppleganger.” Charles chanced a glance over his shoulder, not stumbling in his side-crabbing sprint when he saw the great serpent descending the stair with frightening speed. If the features of that rodentine face had once been beautiful they were no longer such; loving eyes had gone the color rubies full of fire and prominent incisors had become terrible, long fangs. Glistening claws extended from upraised hands ready to rend him as thoroughly as he had rent the damned soul of Altera Loriod.

The preternatural perfection of maleness reclining upon the fountain looked on in bemused surprise as the Åelf and rat charged headlong for his burbling throne. The succubae moved aside as if merely perturbed, their attention roving from them to the serpent swiftly closing upon them. “Dive!” Qan-af-årael bellowed when they reached the lip of the fountain, scattering demons and their toys like a bully might the playthings of their younger siblings. With perfect form Charles leaped up, extended his arms, and plunged into the pool of wine, Qan-af-årael a scarce heartbeat behind.

 

 

Despite the choking headiness of wine saturating his clothes and fur as they dived within the fountain, not even the palest scent of it remained when the rat collapsed onto the solid gray line that spanned the layers of hell. Charles felt neither dampness in his fur nor tasted any on his tongue. The necrotic vivacity he'd consumed from Loriod brought him to his feet a moment after sprawling on the bridge. By the time he stood Qan-af-årael appeared beside him, his ancient features comforting. But Charles would not quickly forget the rat queen's touch, nor the mire of the foul lord's desire, and the interminable and unknowable aeons spent in their company.

“Master Åelf, why did it take so long for you to find and rescue me? I feared I was going to surrender to her wiles. I was... afraid I had.” This last Charles admitted with a sullen twitch of his whiskers.

The ageless blue eyes regarded him with warmth and benevolence. “My conquest of the Lord of Rage was but moments after you dived into the bridge and fled his realm and his grasp. But the Queen of Lust knew of our travels and laid a trap for you. The Daedra are vast in power even on our world, but here in their realm they are authors of almost all that transpires. Those few moments we were separated were stretched for you into as long as she desired them to be.”

Charles blinked but after pondering those words was left shaking his head. “I do not understand.”

Qan-af-årael offered him a wan smile. “You were in her realm for only seconds before I found you. But our separation allowed her to make it seem much, much longer for you. Even though she could not persist in this forever, I fear that if we do not bind ourselves even more closely than we already have...” Charles felt that comforting presence touch his mind for a moment, like a brisk wind curling over the lip of high, stone walls. “If we do not bind ourselves, even the smallest separation will leave you at the mercy of the two Daedra yet before us.”

The rat trembled from head to tail and leaned closer to the Åelf. He could still feel the weight of the spiked collar on his neck and the crush of coils about his legs and chest. What cruel devices and temptations were waiting to consume him on the other side of the bridge? He lifted his head, swallowing to hide his fear. “What must we do?”

Qan-af-årael lifted his hands to his chin as if folded in prayer, eyes momentarily lost in thought. And then he nodded as if satisfied with whatever solution had come to him. His lips, thin, smiled with genuine affection, lifting the angular cheek bones and brightening his pearl-gray countenance. “She wanted you to call on her. The Lord of Rage wanted you to grasp the chain. Even Klepnos wanted you to shed blood. Acts pregnant with potency and symbol. To bind ourselves more fully together, it is necessary for you to make an oath.”

“An oath?” Charles felt his whiskers droop for a moment and then lift upward as he gazed at his protector. “What sort of oath must I make?”

The Åelf stretched out one hand and gently let it rest on the rat's shoulder. His voice was rich and full of confidence. “An oath of allegiance, fealty, and obedience. Unite yourself to me as a vassal to his liege lord. I have already sworn to protect you and guide you on your quest to find your son. Such an oath now from you will seal us together and protect you from the control of the Daedra.”

Charles lifted his ears and stood a little taller. “They could no longer tempt me?”

“Temptation will always come. But they will have no power over you unless you forswear me.”

The thought made him recoil. “I would never do that!” He objected with a hiss in his breath.

The strange light on the Bridge seemed to twist about them as they stood staring at each other. The boundaries of reality tightened and Charles felt immeasurably smaller as if the regard of something beyond were laid at this moment. Focus was made, emphasis placed, and all thought contracted to the exchange of this oath. As if caught by an unseen breeze, Qan-af-årael's silvery-black hair lifted for a moment before settling over his white-garbed shoulders. Deep blue eyes ablaze with confidant assurance welcomed him.

“Not long past you made an oath to Baron Avery as a knight to his liege. I can see it come now to your thoughts. Such an oath is more than we need, but it possess the character of nobility that will make every infernal being recoil in disgust. The final oath will be sufficient. Are you prepared to make it?”

Charles took a deep breath, clasping his fists to his chest and nodding. He lowered to one knee. Beneath him only the slender expanse of bridge existed. Their shadows disappeared off the edge of that bridge and were no more. “I am ready, milord.”

The words were not quite the same as Baron Avery had used six weeks past to invest him as a knight of the Glen. But how could they be when it was not the nobly-born squirrel to whom he swore but an ancient amongst ancients, a fount of wisdom and good counsel, a strength against Daedra and all evil, and a veritable Prince amongst the Åelves? Qan-af-årael's voice was quiet, serene, and gentle as he offered the oath. “Do you swear loyalty and fealty to I your guardian and protector, and to serve me with all your strength, with all your devotion, and with all your life?”

The breath he'd been holding came out in a rush with his oath. “I will to my lord be true and faithful; I will love all that he loves and shun all that he shuns. I so swear!”

Qan-af-årael extended one of his hands and laid it palm-down upon the rat's brow, fingers gently pressing against his ears on either side. “Then, as Lord of Colors, I accept your oaths of fealty, loyalty, and obedience, and will treat thee from henceforth as one of my own. I name thee Núrodur Charles Matthias, servant and knight of the Åelf.” His fingers traced a sign upon the rat's brow through his fur and then he held out his slender hand. “Rise, and seal thy devotion with your kiss.”

Charles took another deep breath, feeling a warmth course through him, an excitement that hearkened back to that damp March day when he'd given his oaths to Baron Avery. Nearly the whole of the Glen had assembled to rejoice in his investiture. Who had come to witness this giving of oaths, he wondered.

Standing, he bent forward and lowered his snout to the powerful hand. Lacking true lips he could only press the end of his snout to the pearl-gray flesh that seemed to glimmer with life. A rush filled him, and he felt Qan-af-årael's presence within his mind more deeply than before. Yes, this was the noble, lordly one he would gladly follow. The oath sealed, he stepped back and for a moment marveled at the way their shadows now seemed to lay one atop another.

Qan-af-årael's broad smile lingered for a moment and then a graver cast touched the edges of his thin lips. “I have protected you as much as is possible in this place. I caution you, Núrodur, you are not invulnerable. Vast dangers still lay before us. Stay close and do as I instruct and we shall not falter.” He put one hand on the rat's shoulder and squeezed firmly. The touch felt endearing to the rat who stood a little taller on his crook-shanked legs.

Charles nodded. “I understand, milord. I will follow your instructions. Is there anything else we must do before we quit this place?”

The Åelf shook his head and gestured with his other hand toward the tapered end of the bridge. “Proceed. I am with you, Núrodur.”

Charles turned to face the end of the bridge that led into a yet lower pit of the hells. He took a deep breath, swallowed, and tightened his arms over his chest. He could feel the Sondeshike safely tucked into his tunic and briefly wrapped his fingers about it through the cloth. Perhaps, he hoped, he might not need it this time.

The presence that touched his mind felt so close now that he could almost hear his master chuckle. He chittered under his breath, lowered his hand, and strode forward. The bridge stretched before him, all that existed drawn taut along the gray line. The distortion lasted but a moment and the darkness snapped around them.

Charles stumbled a moment as his paws found themselves on a well maintained road of large, close-fitting stones. Each stone was polished to crisp perfection so that he could feel no grain beneath his toes, and yet his pads gripped it as firmly as packed earth. The road stretched ahead of him along a broad plain beneath a smoke-filled sky that glimmered with the touch of evening bronze. Large buildings of stone and metal were positioned at regular intervals along the road, each of which was covered with chimneys from which the smoke belched. They were not castles, nor were they manor houses of any sort. If they were fortifications, they were the strangest and least effective fortifications that the rat had ever witnessed.

In truth, Charles had no idea what they were for nor where they found the fuel to burn as the land had been scoured clean of any trees. The ground did not appear dead, merely covered as if it bore a breastplate of its own. To the right and the left he saw more strange buildings, but if there was any more to the landscape it was lost to the haze of cloud and smoke. A few of the buildings appeared ornate and bore the suggestion of vast wealth, but no lights glimmered within their windows.

Qan-af-årael laid a gentle hand upon his shoulder and then fell into step beside him. His lips stretched, but no words came from his tongue. Instead, his master's thoughts took shape in the rat's mind. Do not speak to anyone you meet here. They are clever and used to deception. Many mortals have been tricked into selling themselves into eternal misery for a brief glimpse of moth-eaten riches held by those that make this place their home.

Charles nodded as he glanced at the oddly unpleasant buildings and the foreboding sky. The air did not choke him as the red ash did in the Lord of Rage's realm, but the smell turned his stomach. It was not the familiar and pleasing aroma of wood smoke, nor did it carry the heady and pungent flavor of pipe smoke. It lacked the foulness of burning refuse and the allure of smoldering incense. If there was any one particular quality he could ascribe to that smoke it would be the merest hint of sulfur. The searing from that putrid substance only touched the air but did not fill it. Charles still pulled his cloak over his snout, though that seemed even less effective here than it had been against the red ash.

Together they walked down the road in silence. The landscape was still with only the plumes of smoke changing as they eddied in winds perceived more than felt. From the ominous and depressing buildings he could make out the sound of machines grinding in an endless drone. Even that sound felt dull and perfunctory. The rat had the vague sense that he was wandering through a land that operated as did a clock. The weights had been set, the gears moved, but all those who might care what time the hands read had vanished long ago.

The road did not meander but followed a straight course though for a time they did not appear to make any progress. The black-stoned buildings on either side all seemed alike in their drabness and perfidious aura. The ground beyond the road was, if not covered over in sheets of metal, dried and cracked like once fertile earth after a decade of famine. Yet despite the aridity and banality of the landscape, the road itself was fashioned with such precision that Charles felt no distinction between any of the close-fit stones beneath his paws. What had been made here had been made unerringly; all else was left to desiccation.

Just when he thought he would never see anything different he noted something that glimmered with a luminous brilliance at the side of the road beyond the next pair of smoke-reeked buildings. Charles felt his eyes drawn to the warm color that of all things in view was the only one that felt vivacious. It too had a well-proportioned shape as it was arranged in a rectangular stack wider than tall. The shape itself felt perfect, as if no other rectangle was worth looking at; this was the rectangular dimensions that all four-sided things aspired to form.

As they walked past the buildings, Charles finally recognized the burning glow of that perfect rectangle as a stack of bars of pure gold. Each bar appeared to be as long as his forearm and as wide as his hand. Only with his Sondecki strength could he hope to lift even one of those bars let alone carry it along. One bar of such pure gold would be enough to pay a decade's worth of wages to the workmen and craftsmen necessary to build his castle in the Narrows. Two bars would see the castle finished and draw merchants and tradesmen eager to make a living to his new home. He would never need worry about money again. Wealth beyond the depths of avarice was merely the length of an outstretched arm away.

All who touch such things will be their slave, Núrodur.

The rat twitched his whiskers and tightened his arm against his chest. His hand had begun to reach toward the stack of gold, but now he dug his claws into his chest fur and kept it there. He flicked his tail and forced his snout to turn back to the road. Thank you, milord. All the gold in the world does me no good while Ladero is dead.

His thought, sent into the presence of the Åelf bound to him by promise and oath and the ravages of the passage through six realms beneath the misery and depredation of the daedra lords, was met with a warm approval, as of a master recognizing wisdom gained in their pupil. But a warning still came with his thought. Even were it not so, all gold in this place is poison. Do not look at it again for it will tempt you without words and with your own better nature. Your responsibility will entice you to grasp it; your fidelity and love for your family will encourage you to seek it.

I have been trained since my youth to live with whatever I have, be it good fortune or only the clothes on my back, milord. I will not give in.

Do not trust in your strength only.

I do not. I also have you, milord.

Qan-af-årael offered him a faint smile at that thought but gave him no more reply. The stack of gold disappeared behind them, its perfect shape and beautiful luster forgotten in the drab, smoke-choked air. The road continued to stretch before them. Charles felt a sullen emptiness in him at the thought of his family and their needs, but he did not have any time to ponder it as not a minute beyond the gold something else brilliant and burnished with that unparalleled hue flashed into being a short distance ahead.

His master gripped his shoulder tightly and Charles stopped, the hand gripping his chest fur reaching down to grasp his Sondeshike. The golden light ahead rose in a plume of fiery clouds for a moment before resolving into a large shape. To Charles' surprise the figure was, like him, a walking rat, but this one was not garbed in torn cloaks and tattered tunics. The rat before him stood even taller than the Åelf and was garbed in a resplendent doublet and hose of rich burgundy silk decorated with golden filigree, epaulet, and sash. He bore soft boots that glimmered with rubies and rose to the hocks of his crook-shanked legs, while his long tail was accented by a crimson sleeve decorated with golden feathers that with each twist of his tail gave the impression that a bristling fire raged behind him. His face was covered in deep, black fur from which the brilliant golden eyes seemed to protrude. His whiskers were so rich a white Charles thought them fashioned with diamonds. His snout opened in a smile of serene confidence and charisma.

His regal attire and bearing made Charles feel even meaner a peasant than Loriod in all his perversity and cruelty ever could. Charles swallowed, pulling his cloak more tightly across his snout and tightening his grip on his Sondeshike. Qan-af-årael's hand never left his shoulder. A plume of violet light erupted from his left hand and the familiar tree blade occupied his grasp. The Åelf's voice was unperturbed and echoed with power. “This one is not for you.”

The black rat twitched his whiskers in a familiar gesture of amusement and then swept one arm outward, encompassing road, strange buildings, barren landscape, and smoke-filled twilight sky. “I am aware of your journey through the realms of my fellow daedra and what you have accomplished. While I am without doubt quite capable of thwarting your purpose through the death of this mortal, I am also aware that it would require the expenditure of a vast quantity of my resources in order to accomplish.”

The daedra rat folded his hands before him in a gesture that seemed more about what didn't move than what did. Charles noted that they were white like his whiskers, with claws even longer than his already long, bony fingers. His voice felt deep and offered with unwavering confidence yet spoken with derisive condescension as if to inferiors who were rather boring but required his attention. Cold eyes stared down along his snout with implacable regard. “The satisfaction in achieving what my fellow daedra could not is not worth so great an expenditure considering that the remainder of the benefit accrued to me – the acquisition of a single, insignificant mortal soul – can be achieved, and is being achieved, in much greater quantities and with far less effort all the time.

“Therefore, I have no intention of engaging you directly. I have instructed my servants to offer no impediment to your progress. You are free to go wherever you wish in my realm.” His fingers gave a swift, annoyed flick outward, indicating the cityscape around them. “You are free to do whatever you wish in my realm. Should you prove a destructive force within my realm I will respond accordingly, but I know that your purpose has nothing to do with my realm except as one more place through which you must pass.”

Qan-af-årael raised the tree-sword an inch. “You are not telling the truth, Agemnos. Your pride and vanity would not allow you to give up any prize, especially one your fellow daedra could not claim.”

The black rat tilted back his head and laughed, a gesture slight in movement but so deep that Charles felt the road tremble beneath him. The crimson-clad daedra allowed only a moment for mirth before turning his head so that they saw only his left eye. “I am telling you the truth, Åelf. I merely have not finished telling you the truth.” He pointed with his right arm down the road ahead of them. “You will find the bridge at the end of this road. It is the only way you can leave this realm without submitting yourselves either in worship or in sacrifice to I and my fellow daedra. There are no guards on this road and at the bridge you will meet a single one of my servants. He will instruct you on what must be done to break the seal over the bridge.”

Charles lifted his ears in alarm, and the daedra met his gaze. He felt in those eyes offers of wealth even beyond what the stack of gold could give him, beyond all the kingdoms of men. The very affairs of all Galendor would be at his whim were he to bend knee to this black rat. Charles stiffened and leaned closer to the Åelf so that he could feel the brush of his master's robes.

“Yes, while you were entertaining yourselves helping plague victims in Tallakath's gardens, I discerned your purpose and have placed a seal upon the bridge that you cannot break. You, mortal, have but four choices. You may attempt to flee this realm either by the bridge behind you or through the Axis; either path will place you in our combined power and you will surely die. You may call upon me to open the seal and I shall do so after you swear your faith to me. You may search in vain all the rest of your mortal life for another exit which you will never find; on your death your soul will be mine. Or, you may open the seal yourself; to do so you will become mine anyway.”

Agemnos extended his left arm toward Charles and the smile he offered was powerful, full of suggestion and confidence. “Your soul will be mine, mortal. The only choice you have is what way you shall give it to me. Swear to me now and you will enjoy plenitude of life, wealth beyond measure, and power beyond price. Every moment you delay in swearing diminishes this offer. And if you don't swear to me, you will suffer and never experience the satisfaction my followers enjoy for their faithfulness.”

His smile, accented with incisors that gleamed like iron in the forge, held no invitation. Charles swallowed, but did not waver his gaze from the daedra rat. Beside him Qan-af-årael stretched out his arm and the purple blade seemed to grow like the tree it resembled, branches of light stretching upward and outward, toward the gold-limned daedra as they would to the sun. “You will not claim his soul. I protect him.”

“Do you think to threaten me with that pathetic blade?” Agemnos laughed and shook his head, whiskers standing perfectly still.

“No,” the Åelf replied even as he swept the blade to one side, the air sizzling in its wake, “because you are not actually here.”

“Very astute,” Agemnos replied and gave a cursory nod of his head as if offering them the barest token of approval though falling far short of recognizing them as worthy opponents. “And as I have said what I came to say, I shall take my leave of you. Enjoy your stay in my realm, little rat. You will spend aeons here until you are nothing but tar.” The words had no more left his mouth than the regally attired rat vanished from sight. The road before them was clear and the golden light that had for a moment suffused everything dwindled into the interminable twilight.

For a moment longer they stood there, Charles holding his Sondeshike so tightly in his right hand that the claws pressed into his palms, and Qan-af-årael brandishing the blade that had protected them in the Lord of Rage's realm. And then the deep purple faded until there was nothing left of the tree blade but a memory. The Åelf half-turned to regard him with a rueful expression. He is arrogant, but he is very, very skilled. We must expect deception. Be on your guard, Núrodur.

He slipped the Sondeshike free from his cloak and extended it with a nod. The presence within him warmed and he felt a surge of approval. Charles clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth and felt his heart begin to beat again. Together the two of them continued down the road, ever watchful and, in Charles' case, anxious.

As they stepped past the next pair of reeking piles of stone and metal, Charles caught sight of something new in the distance. Beyond the stretch of plating covering the ground he saw a patch of rough earth that glimmered with faceted crystals in a profusion of colors. Even in the gloom they sparkled with an inborn radiance that whispered of a magnificent castle for the Narrows and the softest garments, the most succulent delicacies, the finest entertainment, and diversions of every sort to suit any whim. Charles closed his eyes and shook his head back and forth, whiskers drooped, until the images were gone.

When he looked up again he saw more than just the gems valuable beyond all reckoning. There were people stationed throughout the field of jagged crystal. They, like Agemnos, were attired in expensive silks and furs, each showing the wealth they'd once possessed. But now their garments were threadbare and worn from decades and centuries spent swinging picks to break apart the crystals. Other creatures, vile looking things that in the distortion of light Charles could not make out well, struck them with whips even when they were freeing the gems and working themselves into a lather.

Despite how close they appeared at first, Charles realized as he turned his large, scalloped ears to listen, that they made no noise at all. He twisted his head from side to side and saw the image distort as if he were staring at them through an immense lens. They and the field of crystal were out there, but both impossibly beyond his reach to aid. Somehow, Charles knew the gems were not beyond the grasp of avarice, but suffused himself in his master's confident and focused presence to silence such temptations.

They continued on their way and with reluctance Charles turned his focus back to the road. For once the rat wished he were something else so that his eyes could not see to either side. The gems sparkled and the greedy slaved for each and every one that they could never keep. His heart beat wearily and for a moment he wasn't sure which he actually wanted to gather. He grabbed Qan-af-årael's robe in his left hand, tightening so that his claws dug into the soft, white fabric as thin as gossamer but as unyielding as steel, and shut his eyes tight. He would not be tempted by riches. He would not!

He felt his master's hand cup around his back and gently urge him forward. The rat kept pace, trusting that the road would remain straight and that he would not stumble so long as he held the robe. His tail lashed behind him with all of his frustration as he fought and struggled against the allure of wealth. He knew he needed money if he were to support his family. The Long Scouts paid well enough, but had it really been enough? He now had land to tend. In time, with care and good seasons much wealth could be produced from that land, but what of his family in the interim? And how was he to afford the construction of a keep to watch over that land? How could he clear the woods enough to even build a road to carry that potential produce to markets where it might fetch a good price? He needed wealth for this.

No! He needed nothing from this place!

Just a handful from this place and he would have enough and vast sums to aid the poor, hungry, and homeless of Metamor, just as he had once aided his friend James.

Charles ground his incisors together. No! He would not take even the tiniest fleck of gold from this hell!

Without money his wife and children would starve. It was wrong to make them suffer want.

His tongue shaped words and repeated them against the tendrils of greed. Seek ye first the kingdom of Eli, and all these things shall be added unto you.

Into that inner turmoil snapped the crack of a whip. The rat stood upright, swinging the Sondeshike to his right through empty air, eyes blinking open in alarm. On either side of the road, only a handful of paces away, were fields of ghastly rock from which the gems protruded. Not a single one in all their facets, colors, and uncut glimmering was smaller than the rat's head. Between them and the rat were more richly-dressed souls, their faces a mix of callow struggle and toadying cooperation. They stared at the gems they fought to free from their rocky prisons with almost raw need. Bloody welts stained their garments all across their backs.

One of the guards seemed within reach of his Sondeshike. It was a thing of shadows that did not seem to possess substance. It was formed by black veils that shifted this way and that as if covering a body his eyes could not perceive. A whip, long, red from blood, but filled with golden thread, lifted high over the immaterial guard's substance, and then lashed outward to score a young man's back. His mouth opened and face contorted in a scream. But even though the snapping leather was clear, no sound came from the man.

Charles tightened his grip on the Åelf and forged ahead, trembling as the figures seemed to follow him for several steps before the strange lens-like distortion made them appear much further away. The rat swallowed and tried to close his eyes again. The presence at his side touched his mind gently and for the first time he felt as if he could see his friend and now liege in the ephemeral mists drifting over the walls of his consciousness. His white garments, unblemished and simple in their elegance, were a stark contrast to the gaudy wealth that dripped from every mote of fabric in all the beings he saw here. But their wealth was a ruin, and even Agemnos' had been chicanery, a convenient illusion that suited him but would not last beyond the time for which it served.

The rat knew, as he saw within his mind his friend, protector and lord take shape that he had made the right decision.

Their steps continued unerring for what felt several minutes though it could have been hours before he felt Qan-af-årael pause. Charles stopped and blinked open his eyes. Even as dim as the twilight had become in the lee of the massive building stretching high above, he still had to squint after holding them shut for so long. The road ended at the open doors of one of the strange buildings gushing smoke. The iron doors stood twice the Åelf's height and were wide enough for a team of four horses to prance side-by-side as they entered. There was no decoration to the door or the walls of the building, no heraldry to mark its owner, and no windows to permit light; nothing brought any color to the sullen metal and barren stone before them.

Beyond the doors they could hear the grinding of gears and the slow, squeal of iron scraping against steel. Charles flicked his ears back and lifted his right arm to shield his snout and chest. The remnants of his cloak fluttered against his legs and tail though he felt no wind. The rat in him felt as though he cowered before the maw of a giant snake. What little light penetrated the building revealed only that the passage beyond the door was fashioned from the same perfectly smooth stones as the road. There were no walls to support the massive edifice; only the yawning void of shadow awaited them.

Qan-af-årael laid a slender hand upon his back and nodded. Charles glanced up at him and, whiskers drooping, nodded. His master raised his left hand and from the tips of his fingers sprang a quintet of witchlights which raced over their heads to dance in a tight circle, casting a pale, silver glow around them. Charles felt cheered by such a little thing and together they stepped through the massive portal into the building.

He half-feared the doors would swing shut behind them, but they remained fixed in place as if they were contemptuous of all trespassers. The exterior walls did not appear to be supported beyond their own weight and the ceiling was lost beyond the glow of the witchlights. But around them Charles saw many puzzling things. Strange constructions from iron forged into long beams and vast pits surrounded them on all sides and in rows as far as the light penetrated. Bridges thin as a blade and yet perfectly stiff stretched overhead from one vat to another and from one contraption to the next. Cylindrical chambers sealed with the clearest glass Charles had ever seen abounded on every side, and in each of them he saw one of the victims of greed trapped, all still donned in their rotting finery. Their faces were contorted with anguished screams that did not penetrate the glass. At the bottom of each chamber thin tubes descended toward larger vats beneath in which pistons churned a black tar-like substance as if it were butter.

The rat swallowed heavily as he saw the bodies crushed, squeezed, sliced, and pulverized from every side in those vats and narrow cylinders, the essence of their spiritual flesh oozing from them as a thin gruel into which they sank and suffered before it was sucked down the narrow tubes to join the tar beneath. Not a single one of the dark Lord of Avarice's minions was there to mete out punishment. Every ounce and every mote of soul-crushing anguish was administered by soulless machines. These souls who had mercilessly crushed others in their ascent to mortal power and wealth were now in turn reduced to mash by something which was incapable of pity.

Although the road was gone, a path between the machines continued before them and down this Åelf and rat walked. Charles glanced up at Qan-af-årael every dozen paces, but could not keep his eyes from wandering across the vast array of chambers into which souls were ground in misery. Men and women of every race and every age filled the chambers and of that alone there seemed no rhyme or reason. Charles wondered if any of the youths he saw were Keepers but was grateful he did not recognize any.

And then his eyes alighted upon one of the larger vats into which dozens churned and he swallowed heavily, heart tightening in his chest. The first one he saw was a hound of some kind, with short fur and angular features that struck him as somewhat familiar, though no name would come. But after him came a dozen other Keepers, clad in fur, scales, and feather, their bodies shriveled and bent in ways no mortal could endure, twisted and rolled like a lump of dough until they too began to leak the black tar. It surged and pulsed at the bottom of the vat, sucking and sloshing around paws and tails, suffocating and squelching as they struggled against it and to find any purchase from which to escape their unending torment.

His eyes lingered until one of the avian Keepers was thrust against the glass chamber, its black-feathered wings, tipped white beneath, spread outward, while its bald, blotchy head was battered back and forth. For a single moment one dark eye flicked toward them before the Keeper was yanked away by the machine. Charles choked back a cry and hurried on.

Machine after machine lined the passage and in each vessel was a mortal soul in the process of reduction to tar. Agonies and violence abounded on every side. Charles crouched low, huddled next to the noble Åelf who noted all with a disapproving moue in his otherwise inscrutable expression. The path remained straight and turned neither to the right nor the left. And though the building had not appeared so large from the outside, the ceiling was lost in the gloom above, and the walls were only a faint memory. All that there was to see and know was the churning, crunching, gurgling sound of the machines.

So it was that Charles hissed in surprise when the path came to an abrupt end before a wide pit that dropped into a funnel at whose base twisted a series of gears with serrated edges. Only a pinprick of light was visible between them, and it cast a faint shimmering glow upon the gears. The metal screeched against metal, and the rat felt an involuntary shudder cascade through his fur. For several seconds he stood at the lip of the pit staring down in stupefied horror.

A satirical and vile little voice piped from above them. It sounded male, but so strained as if he were speaking while tearing flesh apart with his fangs. “So you are here, the living mortal looking for a way out!”

Their eyes lifted and reclining on a metal pipe through which sloshed rivulets of black tar as the souls above were pulverized was a blue-skinned imp. His ears were long and pointed, short horns dotted his hairless head and protruded from his elbows and knees, and a curling tail that ended in a series of quill-like spikes flicked back and forth. Cruel nails scraped the metal pipe, sending a shiver of pain through the rat's ears. Rubies and sapphires glimmered in rings set on his fingers, and one even sparkled where it had been drilled into the side of one of his fangs. Apart from those he bore no other garments. Vicious red eye regarded them with hunger.

Qan-af-årael stretched out his left hand and from it sprang the tree blade, its deep, violet sheen making the tar glisten with an eerie light. The imp leaned back from the blade's touch but did not lose his leering smile. “Your master has a message for us. Speak it.”

The imp wrinkled its nostrils and spat on the blade. A wisp of smoke was all that gave evidence to his spittle as it disintegrated. The imp slipped back through the pipes and then spread hidden wings as it descended to the path behind them. The Åelf tracked him with the blade. Charles took a step to the side to put distance between himself and the pit. The imp cackled and stretched its thin lips across its fangs. “The bridge lies beneath the funnel. To get to the bridge you must first remove the gears. The gears are sealed and can only be removed by forcing a mortal soul through them.”

Charles flicked back his ears. “And what happens to the soul? Will it be destroyed?”

The imp dropped his lower jaw in a hungry laugh. “Destroyed? Fool mortal. My master would never destroy a soul when it can harvested. The soul will be processed, of course. The tar will fetch him much in the hells. You will help my master with his harvest on your way out. Or you will be part of his harvest.”

The tree blade swelled in size, the tip jabbing within inches of the imp's face. It scowled at the blade but did not flinch. Qan-af-årael's voice was powerful and full of ice. “Your master already processes more souls than you could count. These machines deliberately prolong the suffering of their victims. You know it is done so to obtain the purest potency of each soul. Your master assured us that passage through the bridge would doom my Núrodur to this place. What lie have you spun?”

The blue-skinned tilted back his head and laughed. His eyes seemed to burn like iron in the forge. “These souls are processed by machines. If your rat wants out of this trap, he must push the soul in himself. He will process the soul. He will take the place of the machines. His hand will be stained in tar, his work in this place begun! No matter where he goes once he leaves, that mark is indelible. He will return and never leave!”

Charles unfurled his Sondeshike and shook his head. “Never! You will never claim my soul!”

“Claim it?” The imp stood taller and spread his bat-like wings. “You will give it to my master!”

Qan-af-årael motioned for Charles to remain where he was. With his other arm he made another feint with the blade. “Is there any more your master bid you tell us?”

The imp took a step back, stretched its jaws wide, bent over at the middle, and vomited up something black and long. It clattered as iron against iron upon the path but did not move further. The creature stroked it with one hand, claws unable to mar it. “My master bid me give you this. With this you can draw a single soul of out the machines. It will only work once. Whichever soul you free from the machine you must push into the pit or you will be trapped here. And that is all my master bid me to say to you!” His eyes glimmered, ravenous as he turned on Charles. “I will enjoy welcoming you back, rat!”

“You won't.” Qan-af-årael flicked his wrist and the tree blade swelled another ten feet in length, its multiple spires reducing the imp to sizzling strips of flesh before it could even flinch. Charles twitched his whiskers and then lowered his head in admiration and gratitude. The Åelf smiled to him and rested his free hand upon the rat's head for a moment, before returning to the pit. “It did not lie about the gears. They will only open if a mortal soul is fed through them.”

“Can you destroy them?”

“I can, but the magical weave that Agemnos has sealed them with is intricate and so convoluted that even Klepnos would approve. I fear any tampering with the gears will destroy you if not the bridge itself.”

“I will not murder anyone for this!”

“I told you not to feel pity for the souls in this place,” Qan-af-årael reminded him. “Agemnos cannot indelibly mark you for this, Núrodur. You have already sworn yourself to me.”

Charles nodded and then his eyes fell upon the black rod on the path a few feet from the meaty remnants of the imp. “What if... what if I didn't push the mortal soul? What if they went willingly?”

Qan-af-årael gestured to the device left for them and offered a wan smile to the rat. “I see what you intend. Try it. But do not blame yourself if it does not work.”

Charles offered his master a grateful smile and bob of his snout before bending down to lift the metal rod. It was stronger than iron but lacked the shine of steel, black as obsidian it was still a metal alloy though he could make no guess as to its composition. The haft was shaped in a square two inches to a side, and it felt heavy in his grasp, the edges digging into the tough flesh of his palms. Apart from its mysterious composition and dark hue there was nothing remarkable about it at all, nor was there any indication as to how he was to use it. Tightening his grip on the rod, Charles let out a sigh and started walking back along the path at the side of his Åelf.

 

A part of him hoped that he would see another soul in those perfidious vats whom he would recognize, but despite the rush of faces in that banquet of souls, not a one of them was familiar. Charles looked to each and even lingered for a moment before the larger vats so that all of the shredded occupants might pass before his eyes. He knew not a one of them and so left them to their torment.

His steps and his attention carried him, despite himself, to the vat filled to overflowing with Keepers. His whiskers drooped as he lifted the rod and tapped it against the glass. It made no sound but there seemed to be a distant rumbling from all around as if an echo. The glass rippled like a fish breaking the surface of a calm lake as it ate a fly. The rat's whiskers trembled as the tip of the rod slipped through the glass; the machine shuddered and the turbulent churning stilled.

For a moment the many Keepers within continued to flinch from their anguish, but after a few seconds of stillness their eyes opened and as one they turned toward the rat and his Åelvish master. Furious clawing, kicking, scratching, and gouging ensued as they struggled one over another to reach the tip of the rod that had pierced their prison. Charles almost recoiled but for a strong, steady hand at his back and a warm assuring presence in his mind.

The struggle lasted only moments before the short-furred hound tore out a ferret's nethers to gain the prize. His hand, short claws beaten and bloodied, wrapped about the end of the rod. The air inside the vat seemed to thicken and the other Keepers struggled vainly to dislodge the red-furred hound from his place. Charles gasped as words flowed through the rod, and both indignation and anger toward so many that despite Qan-af-årael's support the rat still felt his knees begin to buckle. The howling fury of a blizzard seemed to surge through those thoughts, and for a moment the rod they held seemed to be a dark blade limned with volcanic light.

I have a destiny! I was to see him die! I was to be important! But I have been betrayed and cast into this place! Draw me out and give me my revenge!

Charles took a deep breath and shook his head. His thoughts return cold and implacable as stone. No. Not you. I am here for only one of you.

But you must free me! I have been wronged! The fire and ice drove deeper against the rat but he felt a well of strength enter him from his master. He would be as the stone. The Keepers here were not victims of anything but their own greed. His voice swelled with power as ancient and unconquerable as the mountains.

I am here for only one and it is not you. Back in the vat with you, slave of Agemnos! Get back and suffer the fate your misdeeds have purchased!

The hound paled, his eyes wide and white, and then his battered body flinched and he collapsed backward into the midst of Keepers all eager to claim freedom for themselves. But the rat's thoughts stilled them all; none made any move to advance, though the yearning in their eyes and claws was unmistakeable. Charles stared past them, nostrils flaring with breath, until his gaze settled upon the one Keeper who had not rushed forward.

I am here for Baldwin.

The condor shifted, the black feathers of his wings ruffling as he stepped forward. Beady, dark eyes glowered at him down the fat curve of his beak. For several long seconds the Keeper stared at the tip of the rod piercing the glass; contempt filled its gaze but for what was not clear. The other Keepers frothed hungrily, their muzzles opening and closing as if they begged the rat to free them instead. Charles ignored them and kept his gaze on the condor.

The Keeper's wings hunched a moment and his chest sagged as if he were resolving himself to some loathsome task. One wing-claw stretched out and brushed against the square tip. The voice that struck the rat was not the convivial squawk he'd known in those first few months of his life as a Long Scout. Rather it was one filled with acrimony and bitterness, burdened by resentment, and laid over with a veneer of disgust.

Have you come to spew your venom at me too? I am dead! Betrayed by Nasoj's men as I betrayed the Longs! What anguish could you give to me that I do not already receive in this place?

Charles tensed under the acid. One hand gripped the hem of his tattered cloak and pulled it tight across his chest so that the heraldry was plain. His thoughts, once stern and angry, were now quiet, as of a mountain breeze gently disturbing pine branches. I am not here for any of that, Baldwin. I... I know that you had voiced suspicions about my past allegiances and my penchant for secrecy. I had hoped the few times we had been out drinking together could have helped us know each other better. It was a terrible pain to learn that I had not known you at all. I did not want to believe it of you but here I find you.

You have found me. What do you want with me? If you do not speak plainly I will let go and you may as well let this machine reduce us to paste.

I want to help redeem you.

The pause that filled his mind was so potent that he feared for a moment even Qan-af-årael had recoiled from him. But his master's presence was also there; it had never moved. The condor shifted behind the glass, turning his beak from side to side as he regarded Charles with one gleaming, coal-black eye and then the other. The wing claw wavered against the end of the rod before his thoughts finally returned, incredulous and bewildered. Redeem me? I am damned. I betrayed the Long Scouts, men and woman who called me friend, for a pittance that I will never enjoy. I let Metamor's enemies within her gates. You cannot redeem me.

Charles swallowed, but did not allow his thoughts to betray either ire or impatience. I too betrayed Metamor. I too brought one of her enemies within her gates and saw him safely out again. And I did it for no reason greater than my pride.

The condor shifted closer, one wing pressed against the glass, the other touching the tip of the rod but refusing to grasp it. Did you kill a fellow Keeper because of your pride?

Wessex. The name came to him suddenly, but in a way he knew it was true. His refusal to admit what he knew of Zagrosek after Loriod had been cast down had led step by step to the boy mage's murder. He did not thrust the knife but he'd help guide it. He shuddered and shook his head, his thoughts as still as the mountain. I helped kill Wessex.

His wing draped across the rod. And they let you live?

I was exiled. But I also repented and dared not make the mistake that led to my betrayal again. Come with me and I can help you. You don't have to spend eternity being destroyed by this machine.

The condor's eyes narrowed. How did you kill him?

The rat could only grimace. With my secrets.

I always knew your secrets ran deeper than Misha would admit.

Charles twisted his end of the rod in his paws, his grimace descending into a glower that made his whiskers stand out on either side. His eyes narrowed for a moment, and then he released the breath he held and let the anger melt from his face. His thoughts resumed, even quieter than before. And I was a fool to keep them. I do not keep them any longer now. I want to help you. Please, grip the rod and I will free you from the machine.

And if I refuse?

I will not threaten you. If you refuse I will choose somebody else to free. I want it to be you.

The condor sneered, squawking inaudibly with his beak. The thoughts that returned through the rod were angry and full of resentment. Me? So you can prove that you redeemed me? Or to assuage your conscience by proving that I was a lost soul and that there was nothing you could do about it? Or is it merely to believe you can be redeemed as well? You do not care about me!

Charles ground his molars together but kept all other signs of frustration buried deep within. He felt the hand at his back slip up to his shoulder. A certainty, a sense of authority, was conveyed by that touch. You will come with me. I cannot prove to you my intentions here. It is only when you see where I take you that you will know I speak true. Do you wish to spend ages beyond reckoning being mercilessly destroyed by this machine or do you wish one last chance to make amends and prove that you are worth more than currency for dark monsters?

The condor stared at him for a long moment, dark eyes piercing above the edge of his yellow beak. Slowly, but inexorably, they slid down across the glass until they touched the rod upon which only a single feather remained. Those eyed bored into the metal rod as if they could pierce its very substance to the will of its maker. Still hardened and dubious, the condor lifted one of its legs and wrapped a talon about the edge of the rod. The thoughts that touched him were filled with pain. I am worth more. Draw me out.

The other Keepers wailed and beat at some imaginary wall even as Charles pulled the rod out. The glass shimmered and rippled, though now the waves rose and fall as if a vast rock had been tossed within. For a moment Charles felt sure the machine itself would buckle and break, but the metal, no matter how the glass moved, remained fixed and inviolate. Through the glass the condor emerged, the many wounds from which he had been leaking unrefined potency all sealed again.

Behind the condor the glass reasserted itself, bowing inward once before resuming its normal shape. And then all of the furious souls still trapped within were battered about once more as the machine resumed its pitiless course. The bird Keeper glanced back at it and stared for several long seconds before spreading his wings and shaking them out. His red-skinned bald head twisted from side to side as if trying to decide what to preen first. But no bird Charles had ever seen had looked at their own bodies with so much disgust that they couldn't decide.

The rod in the rat's hand and the condor's talon, once so strong and heavy, for a moment became as light as a wooden twig. The next moment it narrowed and withered with little flakes tearing away as if eaten by a gale wind. In surprise both Charles and the bird Keeper dropped their end. The rod did not even bounce, for it had been reduced to a mist that scattered in every direction. Agemnos' dismembered servant had spoken the truth that this was a tool that could only be used once.

Charles rubbed his hands together to wipe the feel of it from his flesh as he lifted his gaze to the condor. He yearned to reach out and embrace him, even as part of him wanted to batter him about the skull with his Sondeshike. All he managed in the mix of such confusion was a long-breathed name. “Baldwin.”

The former Long Scout lifted his beak and backed a single step from him. His voice was coarse and grating. “Charles Matthias. I recognize you even with the scarred face. I recognize you even without that cloak.” He stood and stretched out his wings and for a moment the rat recalled the Raven Queen's nightmarish presence, but it was a fleeting similarity; one quick to flee. There was a measure of insubstantiality about the condor that made him only a pale shadow to the Raven. There was no danger to his soul from this dead thing.

Charles met the condor's stare and then gestured along the road. “The path for your redemption is this way. Come with me, Baldwin. I entreat you as one Long Scout to another.”

The suggestion made the bird sneer. “I betrayed them and no longer bear their emblem. Do not waste such honors on me.”

“You regret your betrayal?”

Baldwin laughed, a horrible screeching sound that grated his ears. He backed his soft, saucer-shaped ears beside his head and drooped his whiskers. But before he could amend his question, the condor took a step forward along the road, curious eyes cast in that direction. “Of course I regret it. It ended with my death! My name is now a curse amongst the Longs; of that I am sure.”

“Your name is never spoken.”

The condor glared forward and folded his wings along his back. His beak bobbed forward and back with each step, dark eyes turned inward, smoldering over those words. Charles walked an arm's length at his side, while his master followed only a pace behind, unobtrusive but ever-present in the rat's mind. No words or ideas were suggested to him to help him; for the moment Qan-af-årael acted only as a confidant bulwark of strength. Against Baldwin no such strength need be assayed.

“Never?”

“Not since your funeral. Your family was told you were killed during the defense of Long House as was everyone else. The Longs all know, as does the Duke, what really happened.”

Baldwin fluttered his wings but said nothing for several seconds. Charles stared past the top of his red-skinned head at a human being driven through a grinder, curls of black mucus spilling forth like sausage. He did not avert his eyes, but let them glide across the scene until they passed to a new machine. The road continued beneath his paws, the distance remaining uncertain before them. How far had they come already? How long had it taken to find Baldwin again?

With an indrawn sigh the condor remarked. “Misha was honorable in that at least. He knew I had been estranged from my family and still shielded them.” He squawked and hunched forward. “I don't suppose he is sending them my pay?”

Charles shrugged. “I have not lived at Long House since February of last year so I cannot say what arrangement Misha has made.” Neither said anything for a few paces and so the rat ventured the question that had lain on his heart from the moment he had heard the news almost a year and a half-before. “Why did you do it, Baldwin? Why did you betray the Longs and Metamor?”

The dead Long Scout tilted his head back as if staring into the sky to offer Eli an uncouth opinion. “Arrogance. Greed. They both played a role. I was commander of a company of soldiers at Three Gates. I'd just been promoted a few months before. And then I was turned into this, this...” He thrust out his wings toward the path ahead as if they were an abomination. “I became the condor you see now. Metamor's armies were decimated and my company was mostly dead; my second had died a dog with an arrow through his neck only a moment before the counter curse restored what little of our man-shape it could. Our forces had to be reorganized. A week after Three Gates my command was gone and I was tasked with aerial patrols.”

Baldwin hunched forward again, though his wings were still partly extended, the claws at one end twitching and grasping at the air. “Misha Brightleaf asked me a month later to join the Long Scouts. My combat skills and my bravery at Three Gates marked me as a good candidate. I eagerly accepted. I was the very first he asked – the very first! – and I knew I would be leading my own team once we had enough scouts to make a second. Instead, when the time came, he put Craig in charge. And when Misha no longer led the teams himself, he raised Lisa – a woman born and now a child! – to Team Leader. I who had proved my mettle and proved my ability even before Three Gates was left without any distinction; I was the flier and that's all I would ever be.

“I told Misha many times that he needed to bring more fliers into the Longs but he refused. Mammals always prefer other mammals! So, for all of this, I found myself resenting Misha.” Charles grimaced and nodded as he listened. He recalled Baldwin griping that he was the only flier amongst the Longs one of the few times they had shared drinks together. The conversation had ended not long after when a bunch of dogs caused a ruckus at the Deaf Mule that had everyone fighting and then most everyone singing. Baldwin had been a new friend in those days; simpler days before all of his cares and woes.

But Baldwin did not give him time to reminisce. “Two years before I was killed, I was met by one of Nasoj's spies and offered gifts merely to listen to his offer. It is a hazard we Long Scouts face, but, as angry toward Misha as I was, I did not do what I should have done. I kept the gifts and said nothing of the spy. A year later and the spy returns with more gifts. This time, full of resentment, I listened. And within days I became a traitor. I gave up Craig and Caroline. Honestly, I didn't care if Craig lived or died; I hoped Caroline would die just to make Misha suffer.

“In the end when it was only Craig who suffered death I even thought perhaps now Misha would finally give me what I deserved, command of my own team. I even told myself I would find a way to benefit from such a position, passing more information to Nasoj's men, and from them receiving word of Lutin encampments they did not care about that I could claim credit for routing.” The condor snorted, a disgusting sound that seemed more a retch. “But even that was not to be and that woman Laura was given Craig's command instead. In that moment, when asked to help with the winter attack, I gladly promised to bring Nasoj's men into Long House in exchange for riches and power of my own.”

He swung his head back and glared down his hooked beak at the rat. “And that is the traitor you wish to redeem.”

Charles took a deep breath, the sound of talons and claws striking metal beneath them the only echo in the endless, cavernous building. For several seconds he pressed his tongue against the back of his incisors, pondering how pride had led to resentment and finally to hatred in the condor's soul. This bird, once a faithful defender of Metamor and who had shed blood for her had turned to her enemies for the power and riches he thought he deserved. Could he be redeemed?

His right eye flicked upward toward Qan-af-årael who was already watching him. Deep blue eyes in the midst of his ivory-limned face and flowing black hair never wavered in their regard for him. They were both sentinel and master, seeing into the rat's heart and mind to guide it, but also seeing beyond the rat to all who would threaten him. Charles felt in that intense and yet soft glance a powerful assurance that stilled the nascent anxiety that had crept into his heart while listening to the condor.

Resolute, the turned his snout to fix the bird with a gentle smile. “Baldwin, do not doubt me when I say that all of us can be redeemed from our sins. You have done much that is horrible, but you can still be redeemed.”

The condor offered a guttural squawk. “How, perchance, do you think it possible? I am already in the grasp of the daedra and cannot leave.”

“Not as you are, no,” Charles agreed, one eye noting the lip of the funnel beyond the next stretch of machines. No sign of the demon imp's sliced body remained. “But a truly selfless act done for one whom you have transgressed will suffice. By that you will be redeemed and by that you will be free of the daedra's traps. And when you do this, you will know peace in your heart and love for your fellow Keeper that you once knew.” Charles offered him a genuine smile and added, “My friend.”

Baldwin half turned his head and something burned in his eyes. Contempt? Incredulity? Charles did not have time to ponder before the bird swung his face away. In a low warble the condor said, “We were never friends.”

“I thought we were.” Charles drooped his whiskers and eased a pace away from Qan-af-årael to walk closer to the former Long. “I wanted to be.”

“You were just one more instance of that damn fox ignoring my merit. I pretended with you and with all the others.” A bitterness filled his voice as he half-turned his head to stare at the last machine before the funnel. It was formed by a series of pistons driving down into a narrow chambers. Several humans were crushed together in each chamber, pulverized bones piercing through flesh along arms, legs, and what used to be chests. The black tar squeezed from every pore and what remained of their faces, smeared across the glass or pounded into the hollow cracks of bones and sinew of their fellow damned, were locked in perpetual screams. Baldwin said nothing as he gazed hard at each. Only when they passed the very last of them and the chamber opened up around the funnel into which Charles had to convince Baldwin to fling himself did the condor speak again in a low, reedy tone. “I was your enemy.”

Charles stopped a pace from the lip of the funnel and his master paused two paces further back. He could feel the Åelf's scrutiny with both eyes and mind. The presence within him assured him of one thing; he would not belong to Agemnos. In that he would trust. “Enemy then, perhaps. But now you can be a true friend, Baldwin. We need go no farther than this.” He gestured at the funnel and the turning gears at its base.

Baldwin's beak followed where the rat pointed and his eyes narrowed as he inspected the sloping walls and iron gears, each tooth coming to a sharp point, interlaced with dozens of others in a vicious combination. They turned no faster tan a water wheel in mild current, but no human strength could balk those gears in their course. All flesh that fell to those teeth would be ripped to pieces. And from the look of disgust and trepidation in the condor's eyes, Charles saw that he knew it too.

“What is this place? Why did you bring me here?”

“This is where you will redeem yourself, Baldwin. Beneath those gears is the passage I need to follow to leave this realm. I am searching for the soul of my son who was stolen from my family. If I have any hope of finding him I must pass through that gateway. But Agemnos has blocked it by that machine and the only way for it to open is if a mortal soul passes through the machine first. I was told I could only free one soul and I chose you. If you wish to leave this place and to make amends for all that you have done in your treachery, you need only fling yourself into this machine for my sake. Please, Baldwin, it is my only hope.”

The condor blinked, stared at him, tilted his head to peer down into the funnel, and then stared at the rat again. His voice warbled with incredulity. “I would never have leaped into such a pit even before I turned against Misha and Metamor! I certainly will not do it for you, Charles!”

Charles ground his molars together even though he'd expected such a refusal. “You have no other choice. There is no way for you to leave this place. You can either return to the vats where you will be processed into their soul tar so that nothing remains of you, or you can leap into this pit and while suffering greatly, still retain some part of yourself as you go Beyond. If you remain, you can never be redeemed and will never know peace. You will be nothing but a traitor. But if you go then you will know peace and your name will be spoken of with love and admiration. You must see the wisdom in that.”

Baldwin thrust out his wings, the right catching the rat beneath the snout. “Peace? Peace! There is no peace for the damned!”

Charles winced from the pain but did not show it. “You don't have to be damned.”

The condor glared at him, turning away from the funnel and stepping forward, one talon scratching at the metal floor. The sound grated in his ears and made his whiskers and tail droop. “I. Am. Damned!” His words were uttered with such fire that his whole frame seemed brazen. Shadows stretched across the machines, flashing darkness over the mouth of the funnel. Charles stepped back, his toes resting in the silhouette of his master thrown upon the floor.

His thoughts flew back to the Åelf, a sudden anxiety filling him that needed strength. A single plea flew through his thoughts and into the other. Help me.

The reply, a gentle caress that settled within as a fallen leaf settles upon the surface of a still lake, came without hesitation. I will, Núrodur.

He felt his master's long, slender fingers rest upon his shoulder. A slight push was all it took to drive the rat forward three steps until the long shadow of the Åelf touched the condor as well. Charles extended his arms, palms outstretched, claws spread away as much as he could, a calm resolve overcome his countenance and manner. His voice felt deeper and words seemed to flow from the presence and across his tongue as if he were but a sieve for water.

“Baldwin of Metamor, hearken to my voice.” The condor had begun to turn away in disgust when those words struck him. His wings, spread wide as if he were ready to take flight in the endless building, lowered and the little clawed fingers he bore at the end quivered. His dark eyes in ruddy face paled and remained transfixed. The skin twitched as if he yearned to fling himself into the funnel merely to escape the rat's powerful regard.

“You are full of bitterness. All your life you were denied what you believed should be yours. You let that bitterness turn to hatred and you struck at those you admired and loved. You still, in your diseased heart clamor for Misha's approval. You want it. You need it. And you cannot have it and that rankles you more than any other raving pain these machines do to you. You know I am right. Speak it! Admit it! You hate him because you still want something from him.”

Baldwin almost stumbled backward, but the strange power that filled Charles, Núrodur of the Lord of Colors, held the bird Keeper firmly in place. The funnel yawned a few paces to their right, the gears buzzing as they spun one against another. Dark eyes trembled, and he shook his beak back and forth. “No! I... I cannot... I...” Baldwin tipped back his head and let out a hideous screech that made the air shimmer. The light twisted around them in that moment, but they remained beneath his master's shadow.

Charles reached out and clasped the bird on the shoulder, gripping him tight, his claws digging into his dark feathers. “Tell me. What do you want from Misha?”

Baldwin yanked backward but the rat felt a power, different from his Sondeck, but seemingly endless in its potency, tighten his muscles even firmer than stone. The condor gasped, struggling and heaving his chest, but he could no more lift it than he could his wings. The air felt heavy, and before him the bird began to wither. “I... I want... I...”

The rat relaxed his grip for a moment but did not let go. His eyes brightened and in a soft voice, he said, “Go on. Tell me.”

“I... I want...” Baldwin swallowed and took a deep breath, eyes closing. A tear perched at the edge of one lid. “I want him to see. I want Misha to see that I can do more than just fly. I want Misha to see that I can plan and that I can lead! I want Misha to see that I am worth the coffers of Metamor and worth the rank of captain I was denied! I want Misha... I want them all to see that I am an extraordinary warrior and leader! I want it! I wanted it more than anything!”

Charles gripped the condor on the shoulder, and then pulled him forward. His other arm wrapped about the bird's neck as he drew him into a tight embrace. Baldwin, the words finally free, fell against the rat's free shoulder and gasped a series of squawking cries, weeping for each bitter loss that had curdled his heart. Charles breathed deeply as he held the shaking bird, a tingling energy passing from him and through the mottled and battered feathers of Baldwin's neck and back. Behind him and within him he felt his master smiling.

With one last firm hug, Charles eased the condor back for a moment and then unclasped the cloak from his shoulders. Baldwin still trembled and stared in confusion as if he could not decide if he was more angry with himself or with the rat so he did not notice Charles hold out the torn cloak with the crossed bow and axe heraldry for the Longs face up. “You may have this back and reclaim your honor, Baldwin. Misha will see that you can do more than just fly. Misha will see that you are a leader. Misha will see that you are a great warrior. You will battle your own fear and defeat it. You will battle your own love of your life and defeat it. And you will do it all to come to the aid of a fellow Long.”

Baldwin blinked and his wing-claws stretched out to touch the fabric, dark eyes only beginning to see the heraldry he'd once proudly worn offered to him again. His voice, warbled and subdued, murmured, “I cannot take this. I am not worthy of it.”

“You are,” Charles assured him, extending it closer so that the end of the cloak brushed the condor's chest feathers. “Now come, don this and serve one more time as a Long. Redeem yourself. I will speak of you and what you do this day to Misha. He will praise your name until he has no more breath to speak.”

The power flowed through him from his master, and Charles took the cloak and draped it between the condor's wings. Baldwin, trembling and uncertain, was unable to resist. The rat clasped it around his neck and then unfurled it down until the torn ends reached half-way down the bird's tail feathers. With one hand pressed upon Baldwin's back, he guided him to the lip of the funnel. “Only one thing remains, my friend. Step over the threshold and open the way for me to reach my son. Be a Long Scout again.”

Baldwin gazed downward and his breath caught in his chest. “And there will be peace in my soul?”

“Everlasting peace.”

The condor bobbed his head in a quick nod and then closed his eyes tight. He stretched out one leg over the emptiness and then stumbled in place. He blinked and then trembled, his voice confused. “I cannot... something is there. I cannot go down.”

His master's voice was sure, but for once he did not feel a smile, only a resignation to that assurance. You must push him. Agemnos will not let him go willingly.

Charles pressed down on Baldwin's shoulders. “I will help you.” The condor stumbled at the sudden shove, his talons breaking through whatever barrier had kept him out of the funnel. He tilted forward, wings spreading but smacking uselessly against the metal on either side. Charles tensed his legs to steady himself, but the exaggerated momentum carried him forward until they were both sliding down the funnel. A hand grasped his tail and a squeak of protest escaped his throat before they were brought to a jarring stop, Baldwin's talons scraping the metal cone inches above the serrated gears. The whirring roar of each tooth grinding against one another made his muscles ache.

Baldwin's eyes went wide in terror and he tried to brace his talons on either side of the funnel. The metal was too slick for his wings or wing claws to find any purchase, but his talons did seem to hold him back for a moment. “Wait!” he squawked, shaking his head back and forth as he scrambled. “I... I can't! Not like this!”

Push. I have you, Núrodur.

Charles said nothing as he pressed firmly on the condor's shoulders, shoving him down the last few inches toward the machine. Baldwin shrieked and clawed and scraped but he slid down beneath the rat's paws. For a moment it appeared that his fellow Long Scout had managed to brace himself with his legs cock-eyed a hair's breadth above the twisting maw of gears. But then a tooth clipped one of his talons and his leg slipped out from under him.

Baldwin screamed, wings stretching upward to try and grasp Charles, but the rat pushed his claws away each time, offering his friend a wan smile between gentle presses on his shoulders. The machine chewed on his yellow scaled legs, spitting droplets of black tar against the side of the funnel as it ground the bone and flesh to mash. The condor's eyes were wild and desperate, fixed on Charles with a plea.

He will be at peace when this is over.

Charles could feel the blood rushing to his head as he dangled by his tail. Each time he pressed on the condor's shoulders he felt for a moment as if he were standing on his hands, and then the machine would draw his friend downward another few inches. The jagged gears groaned and strained as they bit through bone, rending the flesh and sending it every direction in a ghastly spray. But even though it seemed as if the fountain were red with blood and bile, when it struck the metal walls of the funnel it was black as ink.

Despite having his legs chewed up to his thighs into shreds by the machine, Baldwin still struggled as if he possessed all of his strength. Desperate, the condor stretched his wings and flapped up and down. But the funnel was too tight and all he managed was to smack his wings against the enclosing walls like a butterfly trying to bore a hole through a stone wall. Each time it seemed as if he had driven himself free of the clenching metal, but then either he would sink back into its jaws, or the rat would stretch out his arms and shove him back down.

The machine chewed through the last of Baldwin's yellow scaled thighs and ripped into his tail feathers, sending a torrent of dander into the air that made the rat's whiskers and nose twitch as if tickled. Charles shook his head once and then pushed down again, even as he felt his master easing him a little further down in the funnel to give him better leverage. Though the Åelf gripped him by the tail, he felt no pain there, nor strain in any of his muscles. He winced only at the spectacle of his fellow Long torn apart by Agemnos' blasphemous machine.

He will be at peace.

The gears lapped at the torn edge of Charles' Long Scout cloak now draped across Baldwin's neck and shoulders. And then the fabric pulled taut as the threads were severed and stretched. The condor started to twist as the machine pulled him in to his waist, the last remnants of his tail torn free and splattered as shadowy ichor on the walls of the funnel, across the axe in the heraldry, and even onto Charles' arms. There it stayed and stained his fur. The rat ground his molars together and ached for something to gnaw upon as he pushed harder, his arms now stretched nearly straight.

Baldwin managed to lift one of his wings and hooked one of his claws in the rat's tunic. His dark, beady eyes locked onto the rat's own, his voice a quivering thing filled with an indescribable agony. Every mote of flesh devoured in the pitiless jaws of the machine still suffered even though severed and pulverized. The black tar now smeared the walls so thoroughly that there was no purchase anywhere. It drained into little openings between the teeth of the gears, but even more slowly than the machine consumed the bird, so that undulating ripples wound their way down, as of layer upon layer of molasses dripping and coursing through itself.

Hoisting himself up a few inches through sheer force of will, Baldwin brought his hooked beak inches from the bottom of Charles' snout. It was enough for his words to be heard. “Charles! Please! Have mercy!”

You are.

The strength in that assurance warmed him ad renewed the strength in his limbs. He straightened his back as much as he could, and nodded at the condor whose lower half was being churned through the black-stained gears that shimmered in the strange light and hummed as they spun. He pitched his voice and though he did not shout, he knew his words would be heard. “I am. You will know peace. Thank you, Baldwin.”

He tightened his grip on the condor's shoulders so that his claws bit into the flesh and shoved downward with all of his strength until his arms could go no further. Baldwin's claw tore through the rat's tunic and cut a rivulet of blood down his right arm as he struggled to keep hold. But his torso struck the gears and his whole frame stiffened as they bent him down, pinching his belly to his spine, and erupting all of the flesh there in a fountain of black. The tar shot upward, smearing the condor's beak and the rat's forearms and hands. No pink flesh was visible anymore. For a moment the slickness burned like lye, but the pain subsided into a vague discomfort within a blink.

Not so Baldwin whose turned his head from side to side attempting to snap his beak at the rat's arms. Charles felt the hard edges of the condor's beak brushing against his arms, but nothing more than that. The gears pulled him downward to his chest, his wings shredded behind him and sucked down into the dark confines, ripped feather by feather apart. The Long Scout cloak tore into four sections as the gears pulled it in different directions, severing the heraldry of bow and axe until even these were swallowed and turned to powdery ash. The clasp about Baldwin's neck snapped from the pressure and the condor gave one more piercing wail.

Charles lost his grip on the bird's shoulders as the machine no longer needed his help in pulling the soul within. Tears streamed from Baldwin's eyes and he murmured words over and over again as the last of his limbs were chewed free and his chest was reduced to a slimy puddle of gore on which his head wobbled. Charles inclined his ears forward and his heart beat faster as he heard the words wept into the fall of night. “I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Forgive me! Forgive...”

The gears ripped into his neck and the condor's head bounced once before falling between two of the spinning gears. The bones snapped and the flesh gave way, folding in on itself until all that was left atop the machine was the mash of flesh and obsidian gore sliding down the rat's arms and the sides of the funnel. The machine whirred a moment longer, now the only voice speaking, until all of the mash and tar was drawn within. Charles dangled, hands clasping and unclasping as he stared at where a moment before someone he had once, long ago, called a friend had been.

And then the gears stopped spinning. A long series of clicks echoed within, and the gears withdrew into the sides of the funnel somewhere out of sight. Beneath them glimmered a silver radiance unmarred by the black tar. Charles breathed a long sigh and trembled. He shut his eyes and tried to hold back the tears that suddenly yearned to blossom there. Baldwin had repented. He had been redeemed. He now knew peace.

I am with you. Agemnos has no hold over you.

Charles grimaced for a moment longer and then stretched out his arms toward the silver light shimmering beneath him. Above him he felt a sudden tug on his tail as his master jumped, and then both he and the Åelf hurtled downward and into the bridge.

 

 

The rat landed on his hands and rolled to his haunches, tail sweeping out around him before bending against his flank when the tip struck the invisible boundary. His master stepped through the gap between worlds behind him, long fingers brushing across the tip of the rat's tail as they let go. Still he felt the warmth of the Åelf's presence within his mind and it helped sooth his trembling heart. The sight of Baldwin's body chopped and chewed dwindled in his thoughts until all he could see was the black coating his arms.

From just above his elbows all the way down to the tip of each narrow claw there was no hue to be glimpsed. The pink flesh of his hands was obscured by the darkness wrenched from the condor's spirit. The brown fur that covered his arms had been swallowed by the tar so seamlessly that it no longer appeared he had fur beneath the black. He flexed his fingers, turned over his arms, and apart from the lack of fur could feel nothing different. He rubbed his hands over his arms and felt a smooth texture to rival silk and a warmth therein greater than his flesh.

Will it come off? Why speak with his tongue when his master knew all of his thoughts already?

When you wake from the dream and your spirit rejoins your mortal flesh, Núrodur. Nothing of your mortal flesh has been harmed.

The rat twitched his whiskers and then grimaced as he stood. Flecks of the tar had struck his chest and snout as well, and as he moved he could feel them with the fur surrounding them. He lifted one hand and found a spot beneath his chin, another streak along his left cheek, and even a splotch on the inside of his right ear. His shoulders and upper chest had been peppered with dollops no larger than one of his claws, but those dollops had burned through his tunic, leaving little holes in the cloth where they had struck.

His dark eyes narrowed at the gray span of stone stretching to an infinitesimal point before him. There is only one more, Master?

Only one more, Núrodur, and then we reach Beyond.

Charles ground his molars together, wrapped one tar blackened hand about the middle of his Sondeshike, and strode forward. With a flick of his wrist he extended the staff, the brass ferrules glimmering in the sullen shadow of the bridge. He felt his master's presence following close behind, his thoughts touching his mind so tenderly that for a moment the rat felt certain he could see his own back, with scalloped ears, brown fur, red vest and beige tunic, long, scaled tail, and crook-shanked legs in a way no mirror had ever shown him.

The bridge narrowed as it always had. He did not hesitate; he anticipated the moment and lifted the staff before him as he crossed the threshold.

Charles recoiled as he saw his hands wrapped about a long stiletto. Before him laying in an exquisite canopied bed were Lord and Lady Avery. He thrust the stiletto into their necks, blood gushing everywhere as they writhed for but moments. He stabbed and stabbed until the entire bedchamber was one large crimson stain.

And then he was standing next to a cistern. His donkey friend James was at his side, drawing out water with a ladle. His hands grabbed the donkey about the shoulders and shoved his head into the cistern. The equine thrashed and kicked with hooves, but Charles pressed him firmly down, ignoring every blow he was able to land. The struggles weakened after several seconds; after several more they ceased all together.

Charles laughed as he swung a massive blade back and forth, chasing down Lutins as they fled before him. The village around him burned and screams were everywhere. He lifted mailed boots and savored the crunch of bones as wailing Lutin children fell beneath him. Their backs bent and broke beneath his boots, and their heads bounced from the tip of his blade. Even the shaman's lithe, ghost white hound shrank away from him in fear before he cornered it and crushed its skull bodily with his gauntleted fists.

He gasped as the images bombarding him were thrust away, and the presence of his master and guardian swelled within him. Piercing stabs of hate, malevolent cries, inordinate pleasure in pain, and all other manner of evil breached the wall for mere moments, and the rat could only flinch from them, trying to find his center, vainly seeking a calm that could never be in this place. He was dimly aware that he collapsed and that hands, but not his own, kept him from bashing his skull against the ground.

Focus, Núrodur! I am here! Focus!

The words penetrated and for a moment shut out the din of crying voices in numbers beyond counting pressing aginst him to show him the sins committed by the owner of each tortured voice. The cacophany crashed against him with the relentless force of a flash flood overtaking a cricket. He was deaf with them, but for the powerful, singular voice within his mind that muffled them finally to silence and bulwarked sanity until he could grasp it once more. Charles blinked and for a moment could see, though there appeared to be nothing to see. He breathed, looked upward, and saw the Åelf shrouded with a nimbus of light, darkened by everything else. Shadow stretched from hm and in this the rat huddled. In every other direction a blackness deeper than death cloaked a world barren, flat, and utterly freakish. Pale embers limned bodies strewn in every direction. Their forms did not move, locked forever within their own minds, sharing with one another their foulest misdeeds until any smidgen of decency was eradicated.

Listen to my voice. See me all around you. They have no hold on you. You have sworn yourself to me, Núrodur.

Charles listened, and swallowed. He felt strength return to his legs and carefully eased himself up. His hands rested in the Åelf's own, the Sondeshike pressed between them. Within his mind he felt the Åelf surround him, his presence a barrier against the evil. Like a watchman at the gate, Charles sensed his mind enclosed within his master's gentle grasp.

I in you. And you in me, Núrodur.

He thought nothing for long seconds as he took several deep breaths. The air felt thin, but it did not choke him as the red dust had, nor did it gag him as the ice of Kilyarnie had. It was not the physical that was impossible to endure here, so, apart from the near absence of any light that made it difficult for even his rodent eyes to see, he felt no discomfort of any kind. Each breath with his mind free to think brought back a measure of strength and composure.

The jarring images still came, but they were mere wisps, and none lasted long enough to unfold their evil. The mere memory of the few he had glimpsed on his arrival was enough to make him yearn to vomit, but what had he consumed in the countless ages he had spent battling his way deeper and deeper into the hells apart from the vicissitude of the unlamented Loriod? Another emotion sprang forward in his heart as his spirit reclined in his master's protection – indignation. How many souls here now in the taste of death still sampled the evil deeds for which they had been damned and felt no sting of remorse? How many took pleasure in endlessly reviewing their crimes?

Where was the contrition? Where was the justice?

Contrition? There was a sadness to that thought that only vivified the rat's sense of disquiet. In this place there will be none. Justice? Is it not enough that they are here? What more would you do?

Charles closed his eyes for a moment as he finally stood to his full height. When he opened them he gazed upward into the face of the Åelf. Ageless and filled with a grace beyond words, it alone of all things was limned by a white light. His flesh seemed darkened like all else, but the radiance was still there, merely inverted as if true colors refused to be shown. His lips offered a twinge of a smile, and his eyes provoked a sense of urgency.

Where must we go?

Nowhere. Our arrival in this realm was expected. Even now, the Lord of all Daedra sends his champion to meet us and bring us. We need only wait for his arrival.

Alarmed, Charles lifted his ears and flicked his eyes to either side. In the perpetual moonless, starless midnight of a burned-out world there was nothing to see. Not even a glimmer or shuffling of shadows to suggest that anything even moved in this place let alone approached. In his fear an image slipped through the walls of his master's presence and he saw for a split second a young hooded rat-child gazing up at him in fear, while his darkened arms grasped the boy's shoulders.

A shifting of the presence within him silenced the vision. Charles breathed a sigh of relief, and then focused his thoughts. Do we want to wait? Surely this champion will try to bring us harm!

The champion will only do as his master bids and no more. I sense the Lord of Daedra's purpose in this. He waits at the door to make his bid for your soul. We must brace him one way or another if we are to reach Beyond and reclaim your son Ladero. It is simpler and brings less anguish to you if we wait for the champion.

What will the Lord of Daedra do?

The Åelf gazed down at him and then stretched out one hand, fingers running across the back of the rat's head and ears as one might pet a beloved dog. He will tempt you.

Charles felt the fire of indignation return. Tempt me? Have they not already tempted me? Klepnos with false visions! Revonos with the glory of battle unending and the veneer of my own life? Suspira with the satiation of any desire I could possess! Even Agemnos offered me riches and power! I spurned them all!

The fire in you is good, Núrodur. The Åelf counseled as he let his hand rest on the rat's shoulders. But do not trust in your own strength. Had not the Beast of Revonos recognized your allegiance you too would be a collared beast entertaining in the pits. Had not I arrived and provided a doppelganger, you would have bent the knee to Suspira. The Lord of the Daedra is stronger and viler than them all. He will strike you where you are weakest. Do not listen to him.

I won't. The anger in his thoughts covered a quivering fear. Could, after all the anguish of the hells, he actually falter mere steps from his goal?

As if in reply he saw his son again, now apparently five or six years in age, a child beautiful with black fur covering his head and down his back and with a white underbelly, struggling to get away from grasping hands that held him tight. Charles flinched at the image, his head turning from side to side as if expecting to see the damned whose yearnings pierced his master's veil.

But neither his eyes, nor his ears, nor even his whiskers spoke to him of any sign of the beast whose thoughts had reached through the Åelf's barrier to quicken his gorge. Frustrated, Charles turned the Sondeshike over in his hands. The familiar motion was a comfort even if his ears turned forward in surprise when the whirling blade made no whistle through the air. Was there even any air for him to breathe? How much of what he saw was merely a vision for his mind?

A warmth touched his heart and for a moment the bleak eternal night of the hell was no longer before him. He could smell the pine needles littering the forest floor and the fragrance of Spring blossoms drifting in the air. He felt the warmth of the sun filtering through the trees and basked in the soft susurrus of a gentle breeze rustling fresh leaves. A soft hand touched his shoulder, and he felt whiskers brushing against his cheek fur. He half turned his head; another rat with soft green eyes and light tan fur gazed at him. His wife, Kimberly. Her muzzle opened, and on her tongue he saw a song spring forth. His ears turned to hear but it was so faint that not even the contour of notes reached him.

A profound sadness struck him in that wordless melody. It was both call and plea though for what he could not discern. To that tune he placed words of his own. Eli, help me to hear. Help me hear the one I love.

But Kimberly closed her mouth, placed her hand over the purple stone at her heart, and stepped backward into the trees. Charles stretched out his arm even as shadows closed over her form. Her green eyes met him, vibrant as jade, a wordless promise within, and then they too disappeared. The forest with all its scents and sounds, faded into black. In its place he saw his son again. The boy screamed and squirmed, tail lashing, head whipping form side to side, little claws digging at the arms holding him down. Charles thrust his own head side to side to escape the vision. One hand clasped Ladero by the neck as the other roved down.

The Åelf pushed his shoulder, jarring him from the vision. Charles snarled, swiping the Sondeshike into the darkness, incisors grinding together deep and painful. Only one thought filled his mind. Where is he?

His master understood. The one whose sin you see? He is not far.

Master, take me to him.

For a moment he feared that his master would refuse him this, but after a second of quiet regard, the Åelf nodded and gently turned the rat by his shoulder. The long-fingered hand, once pearl gray but now a dark silhouette like everything in the realm, remained on his shoulder. Ware your step, Núrodur.

Charles walked forward, gripping the Sondeshike with both hands. The metal felt malleable beneath his tar-coated hands. The ground beneath his paws crumbled like hardened dirt with each step. Beneath him he could see the outlines of human and semi-human shapes. Several lay in his path; he stepped over them being careful not to touch them. The bodies did not move and as his eyes traced their contours he wondered if they were even capable of movement. A presentiment assured him that to even brush their form with his claws would join their thoughts to his regardless of the barrier his master had erected. He moved slowly, determined to touch none of them.

His steps proved true. But as he walked images continued to jab him. Always it was of a rat Keeper as he imaged one of six or seven years to be. Most of the time the rat was hooded like his lost Ladero. Other times the fur patterns resembled his other two sons, little Charles and Erick. Always one of these three, and each time they were struggling in vain, for the arms that always seemed to be his own over-powered them. Each vision lasted but a moment but even so short a time was enough to steel him. His fingers tightened their grip on the Sondeshike. The fiery warmth in the tar seemed to glow a red deeper than the blackest crimson. No muscle moved in his face; fixed and set the rat had become on the direction his master had pointed him.

And then the hand on his shoulder drew him short. Charles did not blink, but listened for the presence in his mind to speak. The one you seek is at your feet, Núrodur.

Charles glanced downward and even though there was no light to illumine features, he recognized the outline limned with the faintest effulgence from the smoldering tar on the rat's arms. The man beneath him bore no clothes to mark the rank he'd once possessed in life. Nothing remained but for his handsome features locked in perpetual gloom. This man who had been servant to Nasoj, Suspira and Lilith but had betrayed them all for his own ends, now locked in constant reenactment of his disgusting predilections, this man who had once gutted a wolf Keeper and smeared himself with his body fat to survive the cold, this man who had led the Long Scouts into a trap that had nearly cost them their lives, this man who had brutally murdered thousands of innocents without the slightest twinge of conscience was now immobile at the rat's feet.

Baron Garadan Calephas.

For all this I now give you my justice.

If the man heard his voice there was no indication of it. No slight twitch of his body showed that he was aware of the rat's presence at all. Charles lifted the Sondeshike above him and then drove it downward into the body. The form collapsed beneath him and sporadic images of agony, murder, and other sins he refused to give name to flickered like a storm bolt through his mind. Charles smashed the ferrules down again and again and again. Each strike brought fresh images, of sins that had long ago passed beyond counting, all committed or directed by the dark figure before him. He felt splatter across his legs and arms, sizzling against his flesh as the tar had already done. The outline buckled, breaking into pieces. He crushed these too.

After but seconds he dropped the Sondeshike and tore through Calephas's spirit with his claws, rending every mote of flesh from every other. The images of his sons became disjointed and finally ceased altogether. Charles drove his snout into what remained of the flesh, tearing with his incisors as well. All he could think were four words over and over again. My justice for you! My justice for you!

At some point the rat realized that he was kneeling with nothing before him. With a rush of elation he tilted back his head an unleashed a wordless shriek of satisfaction that echoed from his throat only to be lost in the endless expanse of night. The presence stilled the ever circling ravings with a single clear thought. He is gone. Even Oblivion denies that one; his soul has been riven from existence entire. By you, my Núrodur, and no other.

Charles took several deep breaths as he knelt in the cold dirt. He could feel the tar covering his legs and chest, soaking into his fur and burning through his trousers and tunic. They each clung to his body by narrow strips which had escaped the fountain of processed soul. One hand lifted to his face which simmered, and he felt the smooth blackness stretched across his snout, both cheeks, and over his eyes. The scar the Shrieker had left around his right eye had been smoothed over by the tar so that he could not feel a difference between either side of his face.

He lifted that snout, hands falling to find the Sondeshike at his knees. Do I have any flesh left, Master?

Yes, Núrodur.

His hands rove across his shoulders and felt both his tunic and vest and the fur beneath. Most of his chest was lost to the tar, though a thread of both tunic and vest circled beneath his shoulders. His back where he could reach, and the half of his tail nearest his spine, were still free of the tar. He grimaced but could not bring himself to lament. After he had his son he would have flesh again too. It would not be the first time he had lost his flesh. He would endure.

Where is the champion?

He is nearly here. Stand close to me.

Charles, hands wrapped about the Sondeshike, stood and shifted his paws on the barren ground until his shoulders brushed against the Åelf's middle. A heat suffused his front as if he were sitting by a roaring fire. His tongue and the inside of his mouth also felt the strange heat, and as he ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth he discovered the smoothness of the tar coating the inside as well. Had he eaten Calephas like he'd eaten Loriod? He could not recall.

The champion is here, Núrodur.

He saw nothing, but as the rat turned his head to one side he caught sight of the first bit of light that did not seem obscured in the realm. A column of glittering radiance that seemed no color and every color at once approached from their left. It was tall and narrow and moved without care for the souls of mortals strewn in its path. The rat pulled the Sondeshike closer as if guarding it with his blackened flesh.

The figure stopped a dozen paces from them and Charles could see that the light shimmered from a hooded cloak he wore. The rat's eyes could not linger on any one spot of the cloak for more than a moment; there was no pain in trying, it merely shimmered with such irregularity that his eyes naturally skimmed around its surface in vain hope for an anchor. The features beneath the cloak were darkened but visible in the shadowed light of his garment. Angular cheeks, pointed ears, pale skin, and almond eyes tilted upward at the outside illumined the face of an elf, cousin race to his master.

The champion's hands gripped a diamond-studded pommel. The sword was perfect in every way. Charles felt a menace in its existence more palpable than the champion himself. He hissed, crouched and swept out his tail behind him. Only his master's stilling hand and assuring thoughts silenced his tongue.

“You are the Champion of Ba'al,” the Åelf said with disinterest as if the figure were no more notable than stars on a moonless night. “What errand brings you?”

“The rat beast,” the champion replied with an elegant voice, haughty and cultured. “Lord Ba'al has granted him an audience and bids him come. I suppose you are also invited.” And with that the champion turned around and started back the way he came. Charles did not move until he felt the Åelf's hand gently press on his still-furred back.

They will not harm you, Núrodur. Come.

Charles kept as close to his master as he could without tripping over his feet. He eyed the champion warily, his eyes ever drawn to the sword whose immaculate silver tip seemed, if it were impossible, incomplete. The rat felt certain that the sword wanted to be dripping blood. There was a palpable sense of menace within its luminous perfection.

The champion kept a quick pace that the rat had difficulty matching. The elf's long legs allowed him to easily step over the prone souls that were strewn about the endless wasteland. His master also showed no difficulty in navigating the treacherous maze of silhouettes. But Charles, with his short crook-shanked legs, was forced to stretch to step over the damned.

Each soul appeared no clearer to him even in the glimmering radiance of the champion's cloak and the quicksilver glamor of the diamond-encrusted sword. The rat could only discern the outlines of arms, legs, heads, and even tails or wings for Keeper souls or the souls of other beastly races. He would not allow himself to look at their faces, but noted only what he needed in order to step past them. Not that he had the time to study their faces or any part of them with the pace the daedra elf set.

Charles avoided more souls than he could count as they followed the path set by the champion, but the haste was too much for his short legs. One particular soul had his elbow thrust upward, and Charles caught it with the bottom of his paw. Into his mind, through the barriers placed by his master, shared that soul's vision. He saw Gibson counting coins in his webbed hands as his googly eyes surveyed a row of Glen children shackled hand and foot and threaded to a long chain. Swarthy men dragged the children up a plank onto a corsair slick with muck.

The rat drove his Sondeshike downward into the soul, crushing bones and sinew. He kicked and clawed with his paws, tearing and gouging the flesh, as a shriek erupted from within him. For a moment he felt his black flesh blaze with the evisceration. More splatters of tar sizzled through the remnants of his attire to join the rest already coating his flesh.

“Do not destroy the crops,” the champion said with the clipped tone of a command. Charles looked up from his effort and briefly met the elf's gaze. His master's hand rested on his shoulder and the rat straightened. “Oh, I see.” The elf's thin lips stretched ever so slightly though not into a smile. He extended the sword toward the rat, but more to show him the flat of the blade than to brandish it. “You no longer share the sins of the damned.”

Even through the all-encompassing barrier within him where he felt his master's presence, Charles could sense a change. The pinpricks of vision that had found a way through were no more. What the champion had said had come true. Startled, the rat leaned into the Åelf and sucked in his breath. Before he could form a thought, the elf champion lowered the blade and turned around, casting only a single command over his shoulder. “Do not keep Lord Ba'al waiting, rat beast.”

They resumed their walk in the silence of the vast emptiness. Charles clutched the Sondeshike close to his chest, trying to corral his thoughts. He stepped over another five souls before he could finally express himself to his master's presence.

What are we going to do?

We will follow the champion to his lord and master, Núrodur.

Is that wise? What will he do to us?

He will tempt you, Núrodur. Even I cannot see the manner in which his temptation shall come. But I do not believe that he will threaten you. Tallakath, Revonos, and Agemnos all threatened you but it availed them nothing. The temptation of desire and greed has been laid before you but you turned aside from it already. You conquered Klepnos's madness. He will know all that has transpired in its fullness. What he lays before you will leave all before but pale imitations.

I'm not sure, master.

Trust in my strength, Núrodur. He cannot touch that. Remember your oath of fidelity to me. I will see you through.

Charles allowed that comforting thought to fill him as he kept walking. Whether they walked hours or days he could not tell. Nor could he recall how many more souls he stepped across, kicked with his claws, or otherwise scrambled over to follow after the champion. But eventually he sensed a change in the world around him. The air which he did not feel in his breath felt cold against his still-furred back. A power dwelt before them, immeasurable and ancient, touching everything living or dead in the realm.

The ground dipped into a hollow and the gloom, if possible, deepened. The only light that still shone was the glimmer of the champion's cloak, and the corona limning his master. None of these were sufficient for Charles to even see his own blackened skin anymore. He feared tripping over the souls, but the ground was bereft of any damned, and apart from the uncertain slope Charles had no difficulty walking

Beyond the champion he could sense the power coalesce. A towering form stretched above them, darker than pitch even in the moonless gloom, it nevertheless had a shape he could discern. As they neared, its height dwindled until it stood no taller than his master or the champion. The daedra elf fell to one knee before the figure, and at last the rat could see its eyes. They glowed a blue-white light as pure and as vibrant as an alchemist's flame. Those eyes captured him in their regard and Charles felt as if he were no larger than a normal rat. He put his left hand on his master's middle to steady himself, while the right lowered the Sondeshike. It would do no good here.

The figure shifted, and what seemed an arm stretched forth. The voice that came from the face which seemed only to have eyes was suffused with a power that trembled in his bones, but was nevertheless soft and genial. He could do nothing but listen to that voice. “Welcome to my realm, Sir Charles Matthias. You have undertaken a very long journey to reach me here. You have faced many dangers, many threats, and still here you are, more or less as you once were. I am Ba'al, Lord of the Daedra. I am pleased to finally make your acquaintance.”

Charles, in his anxiety, tried to press his tongue against the back of his teeth, but the slickness of the tar coating each made his tongue slip from his jaws instead. He gasped, drew it back, and stammered. “I have no business here. I seek to pass Beyond.”

“That is possible for you,” Ba'al admitted; he seemed to shrug but Charles couldn't be sure. “The way is here. Allow me to be a gracious host and show you where the door is.”

To the rat's surprise everything around them in the hollow grew a shade brighter. The light seemed to come from nowhere, and at the lip of the hollow it simply stopped. The depression reminded the rat of a dried-up lake bed, with hard uninteresting dirt beneath their feet and nothing else. They, along with Ba'al and his champion, stood on one slope of the hollow. At the center, behind the figure still dark with only the brilliant blaze of his azure eyes to give any light, was a deeper depression whose bottom he could not see. His gaze elided from its surface in much the same way he could not see beyond the sides of each bridge. Was it too an edge of reality through which they must break? Could it even be done?

It can and it will.

Charles stretched out an arm, and then grimaced as he stared at the blackness of his own flesh. The tar was wholly indistinguishable from the outline of his body, so that he did not appear to possess any depth; it seemed more akin to the shadow of his arm than to his actual arm. He withdrew the limb and pressed it against his chest. He was very grateful in that moment that Ba'al had not provided him a mirror.

“Now that you can see it, Sir Matthias, I am going to tell you why you do not wish to take this door.” Ba'al stepped forward, and in an amorphous arm grasped the sword, claiming it from the champion's outstretched arms. The daedra lord seemed to glance at the weapon for a moment, as if intrigued by the craftsmanship of a device he had not been familiar with, before he set the point at his feet. It did not rest on the ground, but fixed firmly in place an inch above as if wedged in solid rock. “I am going to tell you why what you truly wish is to become my disciple.”

Even through his anxiety the rat snorted and shook his head. His left hand tightened its grip on the Åelf's robes. “Your disciple? Never!”

Ba'al tilted his head to one side in the manner of an affable elder amused at the antics of the young. “Sir Matthias, you malign me, but I do not take offense. It is understandable that you would refuse. But you have mistaken my offer. I do not wish you to be as my champion here. I see the thirst for justice in you. I see the light that even soul tar cannot wholly hide. You are, despite much that you have done of late, a good man. I admire you for that, and would not change it.”

Suddenly confused, Charles could only blink and shrink further against his master. Ba'al's face and eyes seemed to smile in a familiar way despite lacking any feature save that unwavering gaze. “Yes, I ask you to be my disciple, but that does not mean I wish you to be evil. I have my champion for such. I seek you rather as a knight, one to do good to balance the evil. We daedra are the natural balance to the aedra. Good and evil, not in conflict with each other, but in balance. Harmony. Light and dark, day and night, hot and cold, dry and wet, Winter and Summer, Spring and Autumn, predator and prey, and many, many others.” Briefly that gaze lifted away from Charles. “Creation and entropy,” he intoned, flatly, before his gaze came back to the rat before him. “You know them all, Sir Matthias. You know them all. Opposites which require each other.”

Ba'al spread his free arm wide and his eyes seemed to sweep across all of reality even though the wan light only brought the narrow hallow into relief. “If you have no night, then all your crops will wither and die from the unending heat. And then all the animals and all the races of the world will die with them. If you have no day, then none of your crops will grow and everything will die again. If you have neither heat nor cold, neither the dry nor the wet, you suffer a similar fate. Balance must be maintained or all of life is threatened. So too must it be with good and evil. You know this. The Sondeckis and the Kankoran exemplify it.”

Charles shook his head at that. “No, we'd be better off without them!”

“Come, Sir Matthias, Sondeckis of the Black. You know the histories of your clan better than most. You know the times when your efforts to ensure justice have served to destroy the very people you are meant to guard. But think on it. Can you truly say that there is a difference between this and any other necessary opposite? You can serve to help restore the balance amongst the Pantheon by becoming my disciple. And with balance amongst the Pantheon, there will be balance amongst all your kind. When was the last time your world knew harmony and peace? Do your histories ever record such a time? No, they do not.”

Charles tried to raise his right hand to make the sign of the Yew, but he still held the Sondeshike there. Ba'al still noticed his effort and offered a sad shake of his head. “Sir Matthias, why do you waste your time on a god who does not answer you?” The blue eyes flared and his voice took on an enthusiasm the rat recalled hearing in the voice of his fellow writers when the muse struck. “Let me present you with a proposition. I propose that there are no true Patildor in the world. Every Patildor at his heart still worships the Pantheon even if they will not admit it. Consider your home, Metamor Keep. How often do the Patildor there, when their prayers go unanswered, seek some other remedy, be it magic or the intervention of the Pantheon? You yourself have born the marks of both Velena and Akkala. You too are already a Lothanasi. You seek the aid of others when you do not believe your Eli will help you.” He thrust out an arm once more to encompass the blackness about them. “Cast your gaze about! Where exactly are you, Sir? Through whence have you passed to stand before me? Not in the Heavens of the Patildor, and most certainly not their Hell. Can you dispute this, Sir Matthias?”

Try as he might, Charles could not force himself to reject it. He tried to look away but the lord of daedra was mesmerizing. Every mote of darkness seemed to swirl about every other mote in his shape so that his eyes were ever lost, swirled this way and that, until finally they returned to those fiery blue-white coals. Vivid and resplendent, they pierced through to his soul. Had he any secrets from this one?

“I... It was the only choice! I would have been stone forever!”

Master, please help me!

Remember your oath.

“Expediency, Sir Matthias. Your Eli was not responding and so you turned to the Pantheon. You can hardly be blamed for that. In fact, I applaud you for it. We have always been dutiful to your race, solicitous to our disciples and generous with our power. I make no distinction between the aedra and my own daedra in this. We need each other to keep the world in balance, even if the aedra do need to be reminded of this. What is important is this: you sought the aid of the Pantheon and received what you asked for.”

Charles felt his tar-coated body simmer with an inner fire. “And they did nothing for my child! They let my Ladero die!”

“Yes,” Ba'al agreed, a note of sadness touching his voice. “Yes, they did. I am deeply grieved for your sorrow. They do give as they should – sometimes – but I fear their power has made them more arrogant than they must be. Until you have done something for them, they do nothing for you. I do not believe my communion with my disciples should flow but one way. I am a generous suzerainty, Sir Matthias. You have already received the benefit of my largesse.”

He backed his ears and scoffed. “How?”

Ba'al's smile seemed a crescent moon. “The Curses of Metamor. Nasoj thought I would help him conquer the Midlands. He thought to make a third of you animals, but I always intended that the transformation would only be part-way. They provided you with a place to hide, Sir Matthias, and have since brought you a wife and a family, all of you rats. That was my hand guiding the Curse. If not for that, you would have continued to flee and hide from your clan and in the end you would have been found, brought back, and faced their judgment. Would Brothus, the White you fled from, have been merciful?” Ba'al shook his head, ever so briefly closing his eyes as he did – insomuch as they momentarily faded into the greater darkness of his visage only to reappear a heartbeat later. The gesture, despite his appearance, seemed sympathetic, as of a father fondly counseling his son. “No he would not. Would he?”

He didn't want to listen, but Charles could not help but remember that time. To betray the Sondeckis was an act of gross injustice. He had fled, unable to murder for his White, Brothus, any more. For two years he had fled, running from place to place, first around Sonngefilde, and then into Galendor. He had even gone into the Åelfwood to hide from the Sondecki sent to find him, his childhood friend Jerome Krabbe. He had lived in near constant fear, sleeping but rarely and often in filth, eating only what he could scrounge and sometimes beg, and calling himself by whatever name could be forgotten. He had been a nobody, seeking some place into which he could disappear forever.

And then he learned of the Curse and Metamor Keep. In that place he had gone, and into that place he had found safety. He had rebuilt his life, reclaimed his name, and had hidden his powers behind imaginative stories of a kind he would never have told amongst the Sondeckis. And there he met Kimberly, and because of her and his love for her Jerome had chosen to join him in exile even if not at Metamor.

The Curse Ba'al had arranged for Metamor had saved him and blessed him. The alternative...

“No,” Charles admitted with a sigh, black claws tightening their grip on the Åelf's robe, nearly tearing through it. “No, he would not have. The Curse of Metamor saved my life and so much more.”

Ba'al nodded, his smile thinning but ever present. “You see it is as I say.”

He did not intend to help you. His aid was given to the creator of those curses, who failed in its dispensation, not in benign direction of its results

“But,” Charles managed to say, his voice almost a squeak, “you did not create the Curses to help me. Any help I received was unintentional.”

Ba'al chuckled, a strangely bright sound. “Of course I did, Sir Matthias. Even you will intend benefits to more than one person by your actions. You even intend different benefits to come to different people by the same action. Your people have a saying, 'Catching two fish with one lure'. I have accomplished this for multitudes with one deed. Not only have I helped you, but I have helped all the Midlands and even the Giantdowns by this act. Nasoj's rule is broken. His lieutenants are scattered or dead. Metamor has now become a beacon of hope to all who suffer sickness and disease or who seek a new life. My hand has accomplished this, Sir Matthias.”

“But all the death...”

“Balance; death comes from nature, is a part of nature, and must come to pass. I wish to bring that back, Sir Matthias. You wish this as well which is why you will become my disciple.”

“No, I will not!”

“You will be and you are already.” Ba'al's faceless visage adopted a mien of understanding and patience, while his voice unsettled the rat with its certainty. “But I would be remiss if I did not provide you with more intimate reasons to be my disciple.”

Now he will tempt you.

“I am Lord of the Daedra. All of my kind you have encountered on your journey answer to me. They can act only with my permission. I have, it is true, given them broad latitude in how they pursue their spheres, but I retain the privilege of restraint and direction. At my command they will act. I can use this authority to help those whose lives are important to you. Let me show you what I intend to provide my newest disciple.”

Ba'al extended his left arm and from the darkness within sprang an illusion that framed the space beside them. Charles only watched with his right eye that his left could still glimpse his master who had not moved a muscle since the hollow's illumination. He felt as if he stared through a window into an abandoned home as everything was dark and cluttered within. He could see trees, rocks, and the suggestion of a larger forest, but there was only a vague twilight to reveal each. The rat only realized that what he saw was the dense forests of Lilith's realm when a familiar groundhog and a quartet of loosely clad humans crept into view. The scene shifted to follow them as they tracked in silence, eyes ever wary for attack from any direction.

“Your friend and fellow Long Scout, Craig Latoner,” Ba'al announced with a suggestion of fondness in his tone. “Before him stretches aeons unending of life like a true beast. Hiding beneath the earth. Scrounging for everything. His only hope is not to end up sacrificed on one of Lilith's altars. He lives every moment trying to find newly dead souls and rescue them before they are captured by Lilith's servants. He will never know rest. Struggle unending is all that he has. A mere word from me and he will be plucked from Lilith's demesnes and brought to the abode of the just who find peaceful rest beneath the moonlight sky of Nocturna's abode.

“Do not think my generosity stops there.” The image faded and then sprung to vibrant life. Charles sighed as he saw the vast enclosed gardens of Tallakath's realm. He could see the pits into which victims were subjected to all manner of disease and suffering. Wessex walked between them seeking people to help. “Wessex ard'Kapler hoped at his death that he would receive rest with his family already dead. Instead his soul never knows rest. Rather he endures the anguish of bearing witness to uncountable suffering, the merest fraction of which he might alleviate for a time. But Tallakath knows of Wessex and others like him, and the time will come when Wessex himself will be captured and subjected to the horrors you tasted the merest vapors of. For my disciple he too shall find rest with the just.”

The window flared baleful red and Charles' grip on the Sondeshike tightened. The black-armored daedra lord held the massive dire wolf pinned with one hand around its throat, swords driven through each shoulder and hip into the stone table beneath, while the other hand ripped back layer after layer of flesh, peeling the beast open like a dissection. The wolf screamed and writhed, its voice gone hoarse with prolonged agony. Blood gurgled in its lungs and dripped like rain from its fur onto the thirsty bloodstone ground. Arcs of crimson light slashed from Revonos' fingers into the wolf's flesh, searing it with intricate runes, each inscription wrenching forth another anguished howl. Gone were any glimpses of intelligence. This was a tortured animal begging for death.

Ba'al offered him a sardonic smile. “Revonos was quite distressed at how you provoked defiance in his pet. You know who this one is, the friend of the master of the Long Scouts, Edward Snow. He tried to follow you down the bridge but could not enter it. You nearly wore a collar like his. Would a good man such as yourself truly leave him pet to the Lord of Rage? For my disciple I will break that chain and return him to the mortal world where he belongs. If you refuse, then there will be none to help him and soon there will be nothing left of Edward Snow to return.”

Charles closed his eyes for a moment, unable to bear seeing the wolf's torture. “Nocturna already asked me to bend knee to her in exchange for a glimpse of my dead son. I refused her. I will bend to none save Eli!”

“Eli?” A gleaming blue-white coal flickered with the impression of a brow sharply raised with incredulity. “Eli has done nothing for your friends. Edward Snow believed in Eli and you see where he is now. You and your wife believe in Eli and yet your son is dead. Do you know how long your wife prayed to Eli to save Ladero? From the first day your son showed signs of illness until the moment his flesh was sundered she prayed. Not one of her prayers was answered. Not one of her prayers was even heard. Eli! You swear to a being who is not there for his followers. Your Eli did not keep you from turning to stone. Your Eli did not protect Edward Snow. Your Eli did not protect Caroline Hardy from being raped even as Craig Latoner was murdered. Your Eli did not protect Jerome from the hands of Gmork who has turned him into a beast. Your Eli did not protect the life of your son, one innocent and not even six months of age when his life was snatched away! Your Eli did nothing to prevent these tragedies and offers nothing to heal those pains. Your Eli did not spare your child the chill of the Raven's altar to beget your quest!

“But I will.” Ba'al swept his arm at the window and the image changed. Charles saw a dank chamber of stone covered in slime and mold. In the center of the chamber was a vaguely humanoid figure that bore no clothes apart from badly torn trousers. Along his back he had a stripe of black fur running along his spine from neck to a short tail. His legs were lupine in shape from haunches to sharp-clawed paws that dug into the stone. His arms were mostly human in shape apart from patches of fur and another set of black claws. Triangular ears covered in black fur rose from either side of his head, and a red tongue dangled between cleft lips and long fangs, but no other beastly features obscured the face that the rat recognized immediately. It was his friend and fellow Sondecki Jerome.

Behind Jerome lurked a shadowed figure that seemed more beast than man. Golden eyes glimmered from its wolf-like head, and its jaws moved as if speaking. He heard no words but he could hear Jerome whining like a beaten dog. The sound burned in his heart.

“Jerome is no longer a physical captive to Gmork, but his mind and his will are still enslaved. You can do nothing to break the bond between them. Your friends at Metamor can do nothing to break that bond. But I can. Gmork is a creature of Lilith, and I am lord of Lilith. If it is the desire of my new disciple then I shall break the chain binding Jerome to Gmork and I will restore his humanity. Your Eli will do nothing. Why would you serve a god who does nothing? You are a good man, Sir Matthias. You are a reasonable man, Sir Matthias. I know that you understand.”

Ba'al swept his arm through the window and it dimmed until only the boundary of the hollow was visible. His other hand turned the diamond-encrusted sword about. Its radiant edge made the rat blink and stare. The lord of daedra's voice seemed to swell and he could only lean into the Åelf. “You are a good man, Sir Charles Matthias. You do not want to see those you love suffer. You have hated every injustice and every anguish you have experienced in your journeys through our realms. If it is within your power to act to save another, you act. And now, it is within your power to bring rest to the dead. It is within your power to rescue your friends Edward and Jerome. How many others do you know suffer that you wish to help? The moment that you admit that you are my disciple all of this will be done.

“You can become an avatar of light in my service instead of the shade you are making yourself. Together we will restore balance amongst aedra and daedra. Harmony between us will bring harmony in the mortal world. There is none whom you love who you cannot save, Sir Matthias. Come, know yourself as my disciple and all this will come to pass.”

Charles swallowed and breathed a single word. “No.”

“No?” Ba'al spun the blade again and left it spinning. It did not slow but remained spinning as he had set it. “No? Do you still seek to pass Beyond? Do you understand what that means?” He half-turned and gestured to the blankness at the bottom of the hollow. Charles flicked his gaze there, and then back to the ground. “Beyond is a myth. There is nothing else but what you see here. The mortal realm and the axis is all that there is for your soul. Should you step Beyond, you will step into a place from which you can never return.”

“I must go where my son is.”

Ba'al's eyes lowered and he shook his head. “That is the one thing you cannot have. He was not Lothanasi and so his soul is lost to us. You will never have him back and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. But,” Ba'al lifted a single finger, and a faint smile glimmered in the darkness of his face, “I can promise you that you will have another child who is Sondecki. I can promise you as many such children as you wish to have. But you cannot go Beyond.”

“No,” Charles shook his head, his words firm with conviction but as flat as the daedra's. “I live, you do not. I can pass Beyond, for the fire of life burns within my breast. Only death claims you, and death cannot travel Beyond.” Squaring his shoulders he raised his eyes from the blade to look into the dark lord's simmering blue gaze. “I cannot abandon my son. No matter what you promise.”

Ba'al put one hand on the sword hilt and it stopped spinning so suddenly the world seemed to tilt. In the flat of the blade Charles could see a rat whose face, arms, legs, and most of his chest were completely black with no variation so that no contours could be glimpsed. Neither eyes nor nose were distinguishable from the rest of his face; only his mouth could be discerned. He looked away.

“You have already abandoned your eldest to Nocturna. Be my disciple, Sir Matthias, and I will revoke her claim on your eldest child. Rebuff me and you shall lose him as well.”

He felt a stab in his heart and yearned to weep. Could the daedra lord be speaking the truth? Could there be any hope if that was true?

A warmth suffused him from the skin downward, and in his mind he felt his master's thoughts fill him. Your eldest is still yours. Nocturna cannot fulfill her agreement and can make no claim on your son. Beyond waits for you, and your youngest waits for you there. Ba'al only cannot go Beyond.

“You... you are evil. Good can never serve evil.” The fire of his conviction burned deeply, and an energy bristled in all of his veins. He felt the fur on his back stand on end and sizzle, and the black of his skin began to glow like iron heated in a forge. He stood taller, hands clenched so tight that if not for the coating he would have drawn blood from his palms. “Never. Good does not balance evil, it defeats it! And you are evil. I can never serve you, no matter what you promise me. I can never trust you, no matter how many truths you use to hide your lies. I will not be your disciple. I am not your disciple. I am sworn already, Ba'al. I am sworn to Ya...” He cast his gaze upward at the Åelf and he smiled. “I am sworn to Qan-af-årael!”

Ba'al said nothing for a long moment. The champion appeared to take no interest and seemed just as likely to yawn as he was to grasp the sword and strike them down. The realm and all in it felt utterly still. And then the lord of the daedra handed the blade back to his champion and stepped to one side. “Be on your way then. But know one last thing. You have no idea what it is you are doing, what it is you are saying, and whom it is you serve. Should we meet again, you will be utterly destroyed. Nothing but sorrow awaits you.”

The air snapped with the boom of thunder and the hollow was empty. Ba'al and his champion were gone. Charles exhaled a long breath and looked for them, but they were alone. He lifted his gaze to the Åelf and smiled. We've done it.

Indeed, my Núrodur Nuruhuinë. We have endured the hells. Come, Beyond awaits. The dangers we shall face, and the opposition we shall encounter, will be different but no less intense. United together we shall reach your son. Do as I instruct at each step and it will be so.

I will master.

Then together let us leave this place.

Master and Núrodur stepped as one toward the emptiness at the bottom of the hollow. The emptiness stretched outward as they neared until the hollow appeared as nothing more than a thin, bleak corona. His heart burned with gratitude and hope as they took the final step.

And then together they stepped into the world Beyond.

 

 

Tuesday, June 22, 724 CR - Midnight

 

Staring through a narrow casement window; more an arrow loop than a true portal through which anyone was expected to gaze, it took Charlie a few moments to realize the silence that had descended upon the choir. He turned to find the room swathed in deep shadows that cast his sire as a form of stark lines pale in the waning light and dark shadows.

“It grows late, son.” Charles said at length with a long sigh. Leaning forward from his seat he stood with a push upon his knees with both hands. “Our families are very likely worried after us.”

Charlie spared a brief glance through the stone slot, wondering where the hours had gone. When he first came to his sire the sun had been a few handspans above the western mountains and now its passing was no more than a darkening blue to the sky. Metamor had already surrendered to darkness, save for torches, and the din of the day had given over to a different celebratory din for of the night. With an upward glance Charlie saw stars twinkling in the deepening blue of the evening sky. With the cooling of day into night, so too had the worst of his wrath. But not its kernel.

“With some wrath, I wager in my case.” He observed ruefully with a swish of his tail across the long bench behind him. “And moreso from your good wife, the Baroness my mother, on the morrow.” He laced his fingers behind his back and walked over to stand next to his sire. “After the ill dreams I fear this story might bring upon you tonight.”

His sire gave a grunt of humor and nodded before shrugging, “It is she who can quiet the plague of dark dreams when they come upon me. Leastwise she has become accustomed to my occasional nocturnal thrashing.” Reaching up he clasped Charlie on the shoulder to lean close, “I know this story is seemingly overlong and circuitous, but you will understand why I am simply not plunging to the heart of it swiftly when it is complete.” The baron tilted his head to one side and murmured, “I am not even describing most of what I saw there; I couldn't.”

Charlie nodded slowly, mollified by his sire’s willingness to delve back into memories that had to be unpleasant, but still reserved in offering him immediate amnesty for what he had witnessed in the Baron’s own dreams, and heard admitted by his namesake and now Charles. There was much yet to be said before Charlie could consider the whole of the matter resolved.

“On the morrow, then?” Charles stepped to the door and drew it open, the soft light of votive candles spilling across the floor surprising Charlie with just how dark it had gotten while Charles wove the tapestry of personal – very personal – history.

A young woman polishing a nearby banister looked up curiously, mildly surprised at their sudden appearance. She smiled softly and bent to her task once more as they padded by on unshod, rodentine feet. “I shall not be early.” Charlie admitted, “Tomorrow is the final day of the festival so I will have to attend some of the ceremonies. And deal with the disruption I caused today.”

“As well progress with the last battle of the tournament.”

Charlie shook his head, “I already lost at the tilt, and the semi-finals of foot should have been settled this evening; only the final bout remains for tomorrow, as do the last of the jousts and the presentations of masterworks from the journeymen of the mage guilds. I will not participate in any of that.” Reaching the heavy doors of the Cathedral, which stood open to let in a cool night breeze that swept the candle smoke toward the clerestories above, they stepped through into the arcade of a small bailey yard.

“I was disqualified!” Charles chuffed, “You should have advanced!”

“Disqualified, how? I forfeit, regardless.” Charlie shrugged with the equanimity of youth.

“I used my stone magic during the match. No magics were allowed; I disqualified myself.”

Charlie snorted and kicked an errant pinecone with one foot, “Better to do that than get brained by a child throwing a tantrum with swords.” He groused in a self-deprecatory tone. Charles clapped him on his upper back with a strong hand.

“Knowing now why you were angry… I understand.” He touched his own doublet, still rent by the injury that his son’s anger had caused, “Though it still smarts.” They came to another door on the far side of the bailey yard, “But worry not, son. Go now, I will find you tomorrow and we shall complete this lamentable tale.”

 

All that stood between the demesnes of Metamor and the demesnes of House Sutt were an intricately worked pair of doors that towered the height of two tall men – or one particularly tall animorphed Keeper – at the end of a broad corridor that was this night lined with the statues of the Keep's past lords. All save the last were human while the man-like equine statue of Duke Thomas seemed not quite finished; still a work in progress. Charlie felt one corner of his muzzle draw back in a rueful half-smile, his whiskers twitching as he gave the silent marble figure a brief salute. The doors to House Sutt were intricately worked in scenes of forests. Those often changed according to the whim of the Keep's benign spirit, Kyia, but always favored settings of nature over civilization.

Unchanged, however, was the Sutt crest in the center of the doors, bisected on each leaf.

And, as unchanged, was the fact that the hinges were expertly crafted and oiled so that the heavy doors were easily moved with one hand and made not the slightest squeak. Charlies slipped through one side and let it drift shut behind him, catching it only enough to silence the soft thud it would make upon closing.

A single candle had been left burning in a hooded sconce just within the door. It provided enough light to navigate the short foyer, past the cloakroom and waiting room for the servants of visiting nobles. Beyond the foyer was the main hall for receiving guests or hosting gatherings. Tonight, not needed, the room was modest in scale – for a Noble's hall – but not grandiose. Charles passed through it quietly, his claws clicking softly upon polished stone where it was exposed between lavishly woven Sondesharan rugs. Beyond the parlor a narrower corridor led to the Sutt residences proper, both doors standing open. The room beyond was lit as dimly as the foyer and, where the far wall would be from his vantage, the doors to the balcony had been thrown open to the cool evening air. Only the torches of the watch on the inner bailey wall marred the majestic vista of the mountains rising beyond, swathed as they were in the night's cloak of darkness.

“It is nice that you still know where you live,” a quiet voice intoned from one of the large chairs scattered about the common room of their residence. Charles stopped two steps within, a grimace flattening his ears and drooping his whiskers. A soft warble of strings added to the quietude of the room, seeming to echo the distant susurrus of Metamor's nighttime revelry rather than climb over it.

“I am sorry, father,” Charlie groused, though quietly, altering his path toward the chair that Malger usually chose. True to form, he found his adoptive father ensconced within, leaning into the corner of the throne-like chair with an indolent slouch, his feet kicked out upon an ottoman. Polished brown toeclaws glistened in the muted light of a single candle burning on a table nearby. In his hands was a small lyre which he strummed with equal indolence.

Only his father, a minstrel by habit rather than birth, could efface such a lazy appearance without apparent sloth or loss of noble decorum.

“For?” The marten raised a furry brow over a dark eye as he turned his gaze from lyre to son. “Missing the Duke's feast? For leaving Maysin standing a fool, bedecked in tack and bridle, at the tourney field gate? For nearly twisting your neck from your shoulders leaping from a second floor midden door?”

Charlie's muzzle contorted into a moue of consternation and he could not meet his father's inscrutable dark stare. The lyre's soft melody was a strange counterpoint to the calm rebuke. “For being an ass.”

“For a rat, I must commend you on a believable facsimile of such breed,” Malger chided softly. “Your mother is a touch more irritated with your decorum, my son. Hassan was... confused at your display and sudden disappearance. I begged the angst of youthful rebellion and, to my surprise, King Peleath laughed most heartily. He was a rebellious youth, and had many colorful tales to tell in that regard. He volunteered to stand in your stead for the last melee bouts, by the by.”

“He chose to champion me?” Charlie's ears sprang up in surprise. “I had imagined my disqualification!”

“You – should have been, son.” Malger dipped his muzzle in a curt nod. “I, in fact, did speak of it in light of your rather pointed lack of chivalry on the field. The judges could not disqualify you, for you used no magic and did not strike with un-warded weapons. Baron Matthias' shield caused him to use magic when it broke, and they ruled in your favor there.”

Charlie scoffed and looked at his paws for a moment before letting his eyes drift to the distant torches of the night watch adorning the wall beyond their balcony. “He became stone that I not bludgeon him into the ground, Father.”

“So said, so truth.” Malger leaned forward slightly and tilted his head, his muzzle couched in an expression of curiosity. “I was informed that you found your sire?”

“I did. He was under Father Felsah's watch in the cathedral.”

“I will assume you apologized appropriately. Concerning of what we spoke in the tavern, what then did you broach of your sire?”

Charlie laced his fingers behind his back, his long tail lashing back and forth with a quiet hiss on the rug upon which he stood. He looked at his naked paws; the long digits and serviceably dangerous claws pale against the intricate patterns of the foreign fabric. “Anger. Loss. A bargain that still leaves my heart aching and me... lost.” He looked up at the last, to meet his father's gaze.

“Confused.”

“Very. But the tale he tells...” His voice faded and he shook his head as if to cast out the dark thoughts. “Has he told you aught?”

Malger shook his head as well, more slowly. “Not the first word. I know nothing past his escape into Shadow.”

“It was a ruse, his petition to Nocturna.”

“Exactly so.” Malger let his fingers tickle over the strings of his lyre, individual notes floating through the air, a slow dirge spun one pluck at a time. “Exactly so. And she knew that it was.”

“And yet she made this bargain?” Charlie gasped, aghast.

“Aye, that she did.” Malger flattened his palm against the strings, returning silence but for the distant noise of revelry. “Full and well knowing what would come of it.”

“Why?”

Malger looked to his son for several long seconds, the memory of a gazelle's soft words in his ears returning afresh. Why? “That is for her to say.”

Charlie scoffed with a lash of his tail, whiskers and ears backed as he looked to the steady flame of the candle behind its polished glass chimney. “Such that she would? I doubt that very much.”

“She will, son.”

“I am but a disciple, yanked willy nilly into the fold. Why would she deign answer my inquiries?”

Malger once more shook his head, setting aside the lyre and resting his folded hands upon one knee. “You are her son, Charlie, not merely some churl begging a night without omens or dark dreams.”

“Her son?” Charlie snorted incredulously, shifting his gaze to his father. “I am a chit in a game where the rules are beyond my ken.”

“Has she ever treated you thus?” Malger's voice rose slightly, touched to defend his Dreamtime love by his son's surly anger.

Charlie could only shake his head. “No.”

“You are not flesh of my flesh, Charlie, but she dotes upon you as much as a grandmother or aunt might. Or mother.” He paused, pondering, long whiskers drooping as he pursed his lips for a long moment. “It pains her, too.”

“Pains?”

Malger nodded soberly. “You know – what it is I do, on occasion?”

“Oh, aye.”

Malger raised a slow hand to touch a finger to his own temple lightly. “Pain shared, taken, and kept. Unknowing I claimed the pain of a deity, son, and selflessly done for what I thought her sake and nothing more. And I keep that which pained her, never to surrender it away. That pain is the loss of a child, and as much the pain of seeing others – Myself, Misanthe, even your dam Kimberly – with the love of a child in their hearts where she has none.” Leaning back into his chair, lost in the shadows of the candle light, Malger flexed his fingers, claws briefly glinting in the wan light. “And thus, by me she cherishes you, as a son.” He leaned forward again, left restless by the admission of a truth given to none in all the years he had carried it. “So, ask her, son to mother; Why. And she will answer.” He paused, then chuckled ruefully. “And, but oh, the jealousy she sometimes feels for Misanthe. And the love. I feel as a moth beholding an inferno.”

“An – interesting tale, Father.” Charlie paced away from the chair, crossing to the open doors to feel the night breeze riffling his short fur. “I will ask. But this thing that my sire did, between you and she, still confounds me. Like some complex games that toss my fate about like a gambler's stones. He never said aught of it?”

“To none, that I know. But I have known that it was a dark undertaking. When he awoke he was very much a changed man. To the foundation of his very soul, I think, that night touched him. And since that day he had been plagued by the darkest of nightmares.”

Charlie turned his head slightly to glance back over his shoulder. “And you took them not away, as you did for so many others?”

“I – could not. Though I can share without Sharing, as I have learned to do, one must ask and desire. He does neither.” Malger shifted forward to his paws, moving to stand beside his son at the doors and look into the darkness. Euper and the outer bailey of the Keep glowed with witchlight and torch, shifting shadows high on the walls of the buildings testament to the revel still occurring beyond the quiet conversation taking place in a noble house. As a minstrel Malger should be out there entertaining, or sharing the festivities. Not talking of painful histories with a wayward son. “And I cannot touch those dark dreams. The centeredness of his faith blocks me as soundly as a door of iron.”

“I can...” Charlie protested, but then fell silent. What had he seen? How deeply into Charles' dreams had he delved? Directly he had witnessed only the Bargain that set him on his course to become Malger's adopted heir. He shook his head. “Nor have I, in truth. I know only that which he tells me.”

Malger's hand rose to rest warmly upon his shoulder. “Then let him tell it, as he may. Perhaps in releasing it he will find peace from his nightmares.” With a squeeze he pushed gently at his son. “Seek your bed, Charlie. You must arise early. Do not seek Her counsel tonight; wait until you have heard your sire's tale unto its completion.”

Charlie scowled across at his father. “Rise early? To what end? The tournaments will not resume until the sun is a span above the mountains.”

Malger chuckled and raised his brow. “First, to break your fast and apologize to your mother. And then attend Sutt and Hassan for the culmination of the Festival. And congratulate, or commiserate, King Peleath's combat in your stead.”

“Ah, and Maysin.” Charlie's shoulders slumped. As much as he was aware that Maysin was merely a servant, she was still one of his closest friends and, most certainly, the closest of his female friends. “I have much to atone for.”

Malger chortled warmly and nodded. “As in youth do we all, son. Find your rest.”