choking dust. The crossroads were white with the sun-bleached remains of plague victims. Even isolated intersections such as this held the scavenger-picked leftovers from a dozen or more corpses. During major outbreaks, so many bodies choked the larger crossroads that their moaning, writhing mass halted all but the heaviest wagons. The ways remained blocked until scrounging animals picked the carcasses down to more easily trampled heaps.
Not long after the plague's arrival in Sithicus, superstitious farmers had initiated the practice of tying the sick and dying at the meeting of two roads. The bodies were staked out with each of their four limbs pointing down a different path, in hopes of confusing the plague spirits that supposedly carried the disease. The more sophisticated townsfolk labeled this practice sheer foolishness. They believed that the White Fever spread by sight, since the victim's eyes bulged grotesquely in the hours before death. The townsfolk, too, left bodies at the crossroads, but they didn't stake them out. They beheaded the afflicted, then bundled the head in a burlap sack and placed it atop the corpse's chest. In recent months, the two groups had adopted each others' safeguards, so that now the dying were beheaded and their remains splayed in four directions.
'I'm the only one to survive it,' Azrael said as the trap lurched over a skull. He turned back to grin triumphantly at his captive. Over the grim chattering of the trap, he added, 'I fought the White Fever for three years. It finally gave up back in 'thirty-six. The plague has slaughtered hundreds, thousands, but it couldn't kill me.'
Gesmas only nodded. Scars on the dwarfs face matched those left by the pustules characteristic of the Fever's second stage. A prolonged battle with the Fever might also explain why Azrael had been described as stooped with age in some of the older stories Gesmas had heard. The disease leeched the color from the flesh and the hair, making the victim look ancient before his time. Two decades ago, when the plague was still obscure, its effects might have been confused with old age.
But Azrael had not told Gesmas about his triumph over the White Fever to clarify his understanding of Sithican history. The story was intended to underscore the hopelessness of his situation. The dwarf was really saying: If Death itself couldn't best me, what chance does a spy with a twisted leg have?
The reminder was unnecessary. From the moment Gesmas had come to his senses, he'd recognized the dire nature of his plight. Rust-rime iron shackles clamped his hands behind his back. A rope looped through a metal ring on the carriage floor bound his feet. He could not stand, could maintain his balance enough to sit up only when Azrael slowed the horse-which had occurred only twice in their dash along the lonely road. When Gesmas managed to survey his surroundings, he found the two dead riders trailing at just the right distance to intercept him should he manage to get free of his shackles and the carriage.
The spy's instincts offered no clever vision of escape. The place had blinded his extra-sight, veiled it like the black moon Nuitari veiled certain stars as it made its way across the night sky. The utterly corrupt could view Nuitari's face. For the rest, the only way to 'see' the ebon orb was to seek out what it concealed.
Gesmas stared hard into the velvet dome of the night. The constellations were all strange to him, but after a time he perceived a void where it seemed there should be stars. 'Is the moon full tonight?' he asked, knowing that his captor would offer some sort of answer, even if it had nothing to do with his question. Azrael seemed to dislike silence.
'From the things you confessed in the song,' the dwarf replied, 'you should be able to see for yourself.'
Gesmas could still taste the dirge's poison in his mouth, though he couldn't recall anything clearly from the time the song started to the moment he realized he was a prisoner, already miles from the border. 'I don't know what you're talking about,' he said. 'I told you before, I'm no one. Just a bard collecting local stories.'
Azrael whipped the horse furiously, though the beast could not have traveled any faster had it been graced with wings. 'You'd be better served by a different tale than that,' he said. 'No bard I've ever met believed himself to be 'no one.' Besides, what storyteller is important enough to make Malocchio Aderre appear with a single shriek for help? I don't really care about that. But what I can't tolerate -' Without warning, the dwarf kicked backward with one foot. The iron-soled boot struck Gesmas in the chest. 'I can't tolerate modesty.'
Azrael's voice lacked the faintest trace of anger, which unsettled his prisoner even more than the attack. 'You confessed to some pretty gruesome deeds,' the dwarf continued, as if the conversation were occurring across a cozy dinner table. 'There aren't many with your tolerance for bloodshed. I could have used you. Why, I'll wager you've never lost a night's sleep over any of it-the assassinations, the torture…'
'I've done nothing I'm ashamed of.'
'Who mentioned anything about shame? Pay attention,' Azrael said flatly, then kicked Gesmas again. 'Shame is even more useless than modesty.'
Gesmas groaned and shrank back as far as his shackles would allow. The burning ache in his side told him that the last blow had cracked a rip.
'You should realize that you've put yourself in this sorry position. Calling on Aderre got Soth's attention, which is no small feat these days. What really grabbed his interest is this.' Azrael used the butt of his whip to rap the worn saddlebags at his side. The leather satchels still bulged with the notes Gesmas had gathered.
'They're only stories,' Gesmas said, wheezing softly from the pain.
'Only stories-ha! That's all that matters in Sithicus! Soth has barely moved his armored ass off his throne for fifteen years. All he does is brood about the turns his story has taken. And the more he brood, the more marvelous this place becomes.'
Gesmas could hardly agree with Azrael's choice of adjectives to describe the current state of Sithicus. As Soth retreated into his own mind, the domain and its inhabitants suffered greater and greater torments. The White Fever was only the first, most persistent trouble. Within a year of the plague's arrival, the wild elves of the Iron Hills began to stage raids against their civilized kin, sowing chaos for its own sake. Even now, the horizon to the east flickered red from a huge fire; yet another farm on the outskirts of Har-Thelen had fallen to the feral elves.
If the tavern talk Gesmas had heard in his travels was to be believed, a leader had gathered together the Iron Hills bands into an army set on driving Soth from Sithicus. This warlord was known only by a symbol: the White Rose. Some within the domain saw the White Rose as a savior. Most understood that commoners would little concern a warrior powerful enough to threaten Lord Soth. These wise folk kept to their own business and hoped any war that broke out would be a brief one. Each new day of Soth's neglect undermined those hopes a little more.
The mere presence of Azrael's escort, dead men astride decaying mounts, marked Sithicus as different from all the places Gesmas had explored on his missions for Lord Aderre. Necromancy and creatures that cheated the grave were factors to be countered in all those places. There were wild, disreputable yarns in some of the kingdoms hereabouts that identified a particular nobleman or general, or even the domain's ruler, as a monster- a vampire, werebeast, or sorcerer of the most vile sort. The world, at least according to these macabre tales, was full of malevolent powers and corrupt souls.
Some of these legends were true, though few who knew their veracity lived for long. Enough were obviously false-drunken inventions or misinformation spread by the tyrants themselves-to allow the peasants in most domains to delude themselves about their strange and sinister environs. In Sithicus, though, the unnatural was so conspicuous, so brazen in announcing its existence, that Gesmas wondered how anyone slept at night.
If Azrael were to be believed, the only thing Sithicans truly feared was him. 'I'm their only nightmare,' he said whenever the conversation touched upon the horrors of the place.
The third time the dwarf offered up that bit of braggadocio, Gesmas couldn't hold his tongue.
'What about the Whispering Beast?' he asked. 'Or the Bloody Shoemaker?'
'Cobbler,' Azrael corrected with a snarl. 'The Bloody Cobbler. They're both bogeymen, children's stories.'
Gesmas almost repeated Azrael's own comment about the importance of stories in Sithicus, but thought better of it. It was foolish and unnecessary to provoke a response. The tension in the dwarf's shoulders, his white- knuckled grip on the reins, told the spy that his captor was lying. It was the same sort of fearful reaction the names had provoked in all but the most reckless locals, and even they would not offer much about the creatures beyond a line or two of fractured verse. That the Beast and the Cobbler frightened a thing like Azrael, a bogeyman in his own right, was reason enough for Gesmas to wonder at their power.
Before the prisoner could summon the courage to ask again about the two horrors, Azrael slowed the carriage to a relatively sane speed. Gesmas levered himself to a sitting position. Groaning at the pain from his ribs, he peered out of the trap.
The road here skirted the Great Chasm, so close that the wheels kicked stones into the rift. The vast scar ran for nearly one hundred miles, north to south, through the heart of Sithicus. It gaped as wide as five miles across in some places, narrowing to less than a mile only at its ends. Light wouldn't penetrate the chasm, even when the sun
