that had warped the butler's form had made him immune to all further enchantment.
Uther stalked to one particular bookshelf, a place of honor near the hearth, and paused there. With his usual efficiency, he began to withdraw the tomes and scrolls and maps housed there. Most of the Stalwarts knew whose books they were; those few who didn't could guess.
'Outrage upon outrage!' Sir Hamnet cried, finally jolted out of his shocked silence by Uther's astounding impertinence. 'Leave those volumes alone, you murderous brute!'
'These books have been shelved incorrectly,' Uther noted without looking up from his task. 'The cases nearest the hearth are reserved for histories, Sir Hamnet. Your works are fiction.'
As he closed on the butler, the aged nobleman reached for his rapier and drew it with a flourish. 'I'll run you through unless you put them back.'
'Coward.'
The voice was labored, the word thick and ill-formed, but it was clear enough to draw everyone's attention to the figure framed by the library's massive doorway. Captain Truesilver glared balefully with the one eye left him and started into the room.
The crutch braced under his right arm thudded like a coffin-maker's hammer with every other step. Without it Gareth Truesilver couldn't have walked at all; his right leg was missing from the knee down. Nor was that the worst of his injuries. Angry red blotches patterned his arms where the skin had been flayed away. Incisions held closed with thick black stitches snaked across the back of his left hand. There, the body snatchers' patron had pilfered the muscles and sinews, leaving the hand nearly useless. Similar scars creased the captain's once-handsome face; they traversed the angry purple bruises over his cheekbones, disappearing into both the gap that had once been his nose and the dark circle that had held his left eye.
The butler turned, muscled arms cradling two shelves of displaced books. 'You should rest, Captain. The city guard will be here soon to take your statement.' Uther shifted his gaze for an instant to Sir Hamnet. 'I have spent the past three days aiding the watch in their search for the captain. If you'd told the truth the morning the guards found you screaming like a madman, we might have rescued him days ago, before the butchers had time to cut him up.'
'Gareth,' Sir Hamnet stammered, as if he hadn't heard the accusation. 'We thought you lost. Helm's Fist, but I'm glad you're alive!'
'Liar,' Truesilver managed in a slow, pained voice. From the way he mangled the word, it seemed likely a part of his tongue had gone to power some wizard's spell, too.
Awkwardly the captain hobbled to a stop in front of Uther. With his right hand, he lifted the largest book from atop the pile and pitched it into the fireplace. The flames danced along the spine. With a sharp pop, the tome flipped open, revealing a hand-colored map of the Hordelands. Fire hungrily devoured the page and set to work on the rest of the book.
Truesilver tossed another volume into the fire, and another. Sir Hamnet raised a hand to stop him, but a low and rumbling growl from Uther warned him away.
Helpless, he turned to the others in the library, his friends, his fellow explorers. But Sir Hamnet Hawklin found loathing in the faces of the Stalwarts, and disgust, and anger. They stared at him with open contempt, silently cheering the destruction of his life's work.
He tried to shrug off the contempt and shore up the barricades he'd built around his craven heart. But the walls were crumbling now. The society's shared glories fled him like deadfall leaves abandoning a winter oak. The myriad ceremonial blades and trophy shields hanging on the walls had been his to wield. The slaughtered monsters and conquered dragon had been his trophies, too, proof of valorous deeds beyond imagining. No longer. The Stalwarts knew the truth, and each accusing eye reflected that truth back at the nobleman like a perfect mirror.
Sir Hamnet Hawklin was a coward.
The room began to spin, and the nobleman covered his face with trembling hands. He could block out the sights, but he couldn't deafen himself to the crackle and hiss of the fire as it destroyed his journals and turned his maps to ash.
And in that instant, just before his heart was crushed by those toppled walls of borrowed honor, Sir Hamnet heard it-the low, sibilant laughter in the flames. He'd been right all along. It was the vicious chuckle of Cyric, the satisfied sigh of the Lord of Strife as a man's spirit shattered and his damned soul went shrieking down to Hades.
Vision
The summons brought me out of a meeting in an overcrowded den where the candles had eaten up the air. My clan head grumbled, but he released me and returned to bullying compensation from an opponent over an imagined slight of honor Such wars of words, often punctuated by drawn knives and brief duels that left the cavern floors slick with blood, were far too frequent these days among my people. I was glad to go.
I would have been happier for the freedom, but the warrior who called me out told me I was summoned by Skra-lang, shaman of all our kind. My stomach grew tight at the thought of meeting the old goblin. I was no coward, but I was no fool The warrior hurried off as I bound up my fears and set off myself through the long, narrow tunnels of the Nightbelow, our home under the Dustwalls.
At twenty winters I was a guard captain and assistant to my clan head, a young fist among the many hands of the goblins of the mountains. I had fought on the surface against human intruders on our lands since I was twelve, and had been captured once and held prisoner for a year until I had escaped. My captivity taught me to never let it happen again. I knew humans well and feared none of them, but Skralang was not a human, and some said he was not a goblin, either.
The old shaman's door opened automatically when I reached it at the end of a black, web-filled tunnel. Skralang greeted me with a nod from his bed. He carelessly waved me to a chair at a table on which a lone candle flickered. I steeled myself and entered his den.
I picked my way across the tiny, litter-strewn room. My iron-shod boots crushed bits of bone, bread crusts, and other debris beneath them. Skralang did not seem to care about the filth. The world meant less to him every day, it was said. How he could stand to live in such vile conditions was beyond me, but it was not my place and not to my advantage to say so. Who insults a mouthpiece of the gods?
I sat and waited as the shaman took a small bottle and earthen cup from a box by his bed of rags. He carefully swung his feet off the ruined bed and got up, shuffling over to pull up a stool and take a seat by me. I stiffened and almost stood to salute, but he seemed not to care. His familiarity was astonishing; it was if I were an old and trusted friend.
Even more astonishing was Skralang's appearance at close range in the candlelight. His robes stank of corruption, as if death were held back from him by the width of an eyelash. The skin was pulled tight over the bones of his face and hands; open sores disfigured his arms and neck. Yet even with this, his pale yellow eyes were clear and steady. He gently poured another drink for himself, but did not take it right away. Instead he sat back and regarded me with those cold, clear eyes.
'You are bored, Captain Kergis,' he said. His voice was no more than a whisper. In the silence, it was like a shout, 'life here has no appeal for you. You long to be elsewhere.'
I almost denied it, but his eyes warned me off from lies. I nodded hesitantly. 'You see all, Your Darkness,' I said. I knew that with his magic, the old goblin probably did see all within the Nightbelow-even the hidden places of the heart and soul.
The old one toyed with his cup. His spidery fingers trembled. 'Has the security of our home begun to wear on you? Do the petty ravings of the clan heads lull your blood to sleep, rather than stir it with fire? Or do you have plans of your own for advancing your rank and position, and your boredom is merely feigned to cover your intentions?'
To be accused of treachery was not uncommon, but hearing it fall from the thin lips of our shaman was like
