anything.
'Gone,' Riven said afterward, sweating and breathing heavily.
'Stay alert,' Cale said, and he went to Jak.
The spell still held the halfling immobile. The easterner had broken all of his fingers. They twisted and jutted at angles that made Cale's stomach turn. Too, the creature had bared Jak's chest and flayed the skin and muscle above his heart. Cale could see the white of bone peeking through that shredded mass of red. The easterner had done to Jak what Riven had threatened to do to the easterner.
Cale held his breath as he held his ear to the halfling's mouth. There! Breath. Jak still lived, despite the torture he had endured. Cale could hardly imagine the pain Jak had felt, was still feeling. Tears threatened but he held them back.
'I'm sorry, little man. I'm sorry.'
They should have killed the easterner! They should have cut him up and burned him to ash, just as Riven had said. Cale would never make that mistake again. Not with any of them. Two and two were four, bastards.
He had prayed for spells from Mask earlier in the night-at midnight, during his watch-and had requested spells of healing. Mask had granted his request, and had also granted Cale knowledge of another prayer that Cale had never before cast. Fortunately, that spell was not necessary.
Eyes blurry with tears, Cale recited prayers of healing, pouring into them all of his concern for Jak. One spell. Another. Another.
The wounds in Jak's flesh slowly closed, shrank to only white scars. Bone reknit. His breathing grew more regular. His body was healed. His soul…?
'Hang on,' Cale said.
He clutched his holy symbol, and whispered a spell that would free Jak from his paralysis.
The moment the spell took effect, Jak gasped and fell forward. Cale caught him and pulled him close. He could feel the halfling shaking, crying. Cale said nothing, only held his friend and waited for him to gather himself.
Jak could say nothing, only cried and quietly vented into Cale's cloak the pain and rage that his immobility had prevented him from expressing previously.
'I'm sorry, Jak,' Cale said finally.
'What in the gods' names are you sorry about?' Riven said, his tone as cold as Deepwinter. 'If Fleet wasn't so averse to doing what needs done, this never would have happened.'
Cale shot the assassin a look so heated that even Riven wilted. Had he been within arm's reach, Cale would have killed him.
'You keep your godsdamned hole shut or I'll put my blade through it and out the back of your head. Then I'll cut you to pieces and burn you to ash. You understand? Do you understand?'
Riven took a step back.
Jak shook his head and leaned back. He pulled away from Cale, wiped away his tears, and examined his fingers. He didn't make eye contact with either Cale or Riven.
'No, Cale,' Jak said. 'He's right.'
Cale started to protest but Jak cut him off. 'No!' Jak looked Cale in the eyes and Cale saw something in his friend's gaze that he had never before seen there: hate. 'He's right. I put down the pin. I'm not a Harper anymore. It's time I got my hands dirty.'
Cale could think of nothing to say. He didn't know whether to take Jak's change of heart as a good or a bad thing. He remembered that Sephris had called Jak a 'seventeen.' He feared that the equation had just changed.
CHAPTER 12
Dawn did not lift the weight from Cale's soul. The thick clouds kept the landscape cast in a dull gray, which mirrored his mood. The three comrades said little as they walked the road back to Selgaunt. To Cale, Jak seemed conspicuously grim. The halfling had covered his bloodstained tunic with his travelling cloak, but that only hid the damage. Seemingly of their own accord, Jak's hands from time to time went to his chest, to the scars. He often flexed the fingers that the easterner had methodically broken, blinking at the memory of the pain.
Seeing that, and recalling Jak's hard words from the previous night, Cale despaired for his friend. He knew that certain actions, once taken, irrevocably polluted a man's soul. Cale had taken such actions long before, as had Riven. Jak never had, but Cale feared that he soon would. He blamed himself. His own words to Jak haunted him- Sometimes good people have to do hard things. He had known even when he'd mouthed the words that they had been a rationalization, a seductive invitation to walk a gray path. The first step down that path was always the hardest. But Cale knew too well that after that first step it became harder and harder to take another path. Jak seemed to have made up his mind to walk it.
Riven walked a few strides ahead. Cale drifted near Jak.
'You all right?' he asked softly.
Jak looked startled, as though he had not noticed Cale beside him.
'What?' the halfling said. 'Yes. I'm fine.'
Cale nodded, and walked beside his friend for a while longer.
'You're not that kind of man either, Jak,' Cale said. 'You never have been. Don't forget that. Don't lose yourself.'
Jak merely nodded, his mouth grim. Cale said nothing more, only walked next to his best friend and tried silently to offer his support.
They re-entered Selgaunt with only a cursory questioning by the gate guards. Cale explained away their appearance by stating that they had been caught without shelter in the rain and that was that.
Despite their fatigue and hunger, they moved briskly through the streets, already crowded with farm carts and carriages, and headed directly for Sephris's residence. Each grabbed a sweetmeat from a vendor and ate on the run.
When they arrived at the overgrown lot of the eccentric sage and opened the squeaky iron gate, the caretaker priest didn't emerge from the house to greet them. Cale's stomach tightened. He and Riven shared a glance. The assassin put his hands on his saber hilts.
They hopped up on the porch and rapped on the door. Nothing.
'Dark,' Cale softly swore.
He drew his blade. Riven and Jak did the same. Cale held up three fingers and counted them down. Three, two, one-
He kicked the door, splintering the jambs and knocking it from its hinges, then charged into the house. Riven and Jak followed hard on his heels, blades bare.
They rushed through the foyer to the main hallway. Smeared blood, already hardening to a brown crust, covered the walls and obscured Sephris's scrawling. The wild blood pattern reminded Cale of the way a child might gleefully cast pigment on a blank canvas. The perpetrator, Azriim or Dolgan, probably, had reveled in the bloodshed.
In the main living room, they found the body of the caretaker priest, flayed and gutted, with his intestines draped around his neck like a shawl. Cale had to control a sudden rush of nausea. The body was only just beginning to stink. Jak stared at the tortured priest with haunted green eyes. Cale put a hand on his shoulder.
'Come on,' Cale said, and he headed for the library.
He moved without urgency; he already knew what they would find there.
The library looked much the same as the last time they had visited, except that Sephris lay slumped over his desk in a pool of blood. His throat had been torn open by a claw as large as that of bear. Sticky, blood-soaked papers covered the desktop. There was no sign of a struggle. It appeared as though the loremaster had sat at his
