Peace numbed his mind and threatened to carry him off to unwaking sleep. His soul was a separate entity from his body, towed on a string carried by the bloodthirsty raven.
The raven waiting in the kindling tree … A drifting soul …
Not yet.
Ashok lurched awake and sat upright. His head swam as his spirit slammed back into the corporeal and tried to hold on. Shivering violently at the displacement, the weight and weightlessness, he dragged in breath after breath, his hands clawing for the dagger on his belt. It wasn’t there.
Wildly, Ashok felt around for something sharp, anything that would cut. His skin went numb, first at the fingertips, then up his arms. Everything was soft, blunt edges, nothing that could hurt him.
“Not yet!” Air hissed through clenched teeth, with a whimper like that of a dying animal.
Ashok put his hand to his mouth, his teeth finding the soft flesh of his inner wrist. Biting down, he sighed in light-headed triumph when the skin broke and pain shot up his arm. Blood filled his mouth, making him gag, but Ashok didn’t care. As soon as the pain took over, the numbness went away, and focus returned.
Not yet. He wasn’t going to fade. Not yet.
When he’d taken in enough of the pain, Ashok dropped his arm and spat a bloodstain on the stone floor. Wiping his mouth, he tried to get his bearings.
He was in a narrow chamber, lit faintly by lanterns fastened halfway up the walls. His vision adjusted to the low light, and he could perfectly see the line of beds that filled the chamber. A few were occupied with sleeping forms, including the bed next to his, but the majority sat empty.
Ashok looked down at himself. A thin blanket covered the lower half of his body. The cloth and the bedding underneath him were the softness he’d felt. He’d been stripped to the waist, and his weapons were gone. He didn’t even have his boots.
The wounds in his thigh and shoulder had been bandaged and treated with herbs. Ashok could smell them when he touched the wrappings, and he felt a slight heat. He touched his forehead and realized he was sweating, yet the chamber was cold. The bites were infected.
Whoever brought him here had taken pains to treat him, and had probably saved his life. His captors obviously didn’t intend to kill him.
Not yet.
Ashok slipped from his bed and moved around the room, thankful for his bare feet in that he stepped, without sound, right up to the other beds. The sleeping occupants were bandaged as carefully as he was, and none of them had any weapons to hand.
All were shadar-kai.
He’d been captured by another enclave. Ashok cursed his ill fortune at not having bled to death sooner out on the plain. The only reason he was still alive was to provide information. His captors would torture him, to start. And when he refused to break, they would bring a wizard in to tear open his mind and take from it every bit of information on the strength of his enclave, its numbers and resources. He had to find a way out or a quick death before that happened.
The chamber had only one door. Ashok went to it and put his ear against the wood. He heard muffled voices, at least three.
“Three guards,” Ashok murmured. He tapped the door in soundless contemplation. “Any chance you have my weapons, faceless friends? Or can I borrow your own to kill you?”
Behind him, Ashok heard a gasp. He spun, his hand going for a chain that no longer hung at his hip.
The shadar-kai in the bed next to his was sitting up, half hanging over the side of the bed. He clutched the frame, his body jerking in spasms, one leg held at an unnatural angle, as if he wanted nothing more than to shed the appendage. He’d been wounded in the thigh, like Ashok, and the wound had reopened, filling the bandage with blood and sickly yellow pus.
“Help … me,” he whispered.
Ashok glanced at the door. The voices were still speaking, but he couldn’t make out the words.
“I ask you!” The shadar-kai’s voice rang against the walls. Outside the door, the voices fell silent.
Ashok backed quickly away from the door and went to the shadar-kai. He pushed the man back onto the bed. “Be quiet,” he hissed. He didn’t want the guards to investigate the noise. They would see he was awake, and the interrogation would begin. He needed more time.
“Who … are you?” the man said. His glazed obsidian eyes searched Ashok’s face, but Ashok could see his concentration fading in and out. Only the pain kept him conscious.
Only the pain, always the pain.
“I’m the one you begged for aid,” Ashok said. He touched the edge of the man’s wound, probing skin that was on fire. “Your leg is rotting. You need a prayer, or you’re going to die.”
“Only She … can help … me,” the man said, his teeth chattering. “Lady Beshaba! Hear me!” he called.
Ashok kneeled by the bed and grabbed the back of the man’s head, pressing his other hand against his mouth to form a vice. “If you don’t stay quiet, you won’t draw your next breath. Do you believe me?”
Dazed as he was, the man nodded. A hint of fear worked its way through the fever pain.
“I’m going to uncover your mouth,” Ashok said, “and you’re going to answer my questions. Convince me you’re telling the truth, and I’ll let you live. Understood?”
Another nod.
Ashok removed his hand from the man’s mouth but kept a grip on his skull. “Are we still in the Shadowfell?” he asked.
“The Shadowdark,” the man replied.
“Near the Aloran Tor?”
Confusion. “I don’t know what that is.”
Ashok jerked the man’s sweat damp hair. “You’re lying. The black mountain-a yawning maw pointed to the west.”
“Y-Yes,” the man said. “We call it Dark Crest.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Ashok said. “Where is this place?”
“Ikemmu,” the man said as his shoulders jerked. His mouth twisted in a smile that stretched uglily over his teeth. Ashok thought he was on the edge of delirium. “You’re in … Ikemmu,” the man said. “The Watching Blade … sees all.”
He raised his hand and swiped the air as if reaching for something. Ashok followed the fevered gesture and saw, above the lanterns, an enormous sword carved into the wall. He hadn’t noticed the sword at first, but looking upon it fully, the weapon seemed to fairly swallow the room with its presence. It drew in the shadows and light, forcing Ashok’s eye to focus on it wherever he stood in the room. Everything else diminished in its presence.
The wall around the carving had been bricked in faint red and shaped to form a shield beneath the sword. The brick and the lantern glow combined lit the whole scene afire. A strange, disturbed sensation crawled along Ashok’s spine. He had an errant thought: the sleeping shadar-kai weren’t alone in the room. They never had been. Someone else was there watching, waiting.
Ashok shook off the feeling. The man’s delirium was starting to affect him. He was wasting time.
“How big is this place?” he demanded. “How many guards?”
The man tried to speak, but his teeth were clamped so tightly together that gurgles and foam were all that came out. The shadar-kai’s eyes rolled up in his head, and his body jerked in violent spasms that rocked the bed. Ashok could barely hold him.
The door opened. Before Ashok could react, a slender, bald shadar-kai entered the room and walked briskly over to them. He wore a black tabard embroidered with a smaller rendering of the carving on the wall. Ashok went into a defensive crouch, but the cleric ignored him and took the spasming man by the shoulders. The wounded shadar-kai stared past him, his eyes eaten up with the sword on the wall.
“Arnare, do you hear me?” the shadar-kai said. “Arnare, we’re losing you. You must reconsider your decision. You must let me heal you.”
The man tried to jerk free, but he had no strength. “She will come.”
Impatience ticked the cleric’s face. “We’ve sent for the Beshaban clerics once a bell for the past day. They’ve not responded. By the time they come it may be too late.”
The man’s head lolled to the side, as if he couldn’t support its weight. “Then that … is my fate. Beshaba’s
