may break it,' Azrael used to taunt me with that during our little… chats. He set up the wards so not even he could break them.' He wiped the gore from his face with his cloak. The damage was not as great as it had seemed. 'I'm certain he never imagined there was someone who could.'
Ganelon looked down at his feet. The dead man's soles made him more than 'merely' alive but not truly dead.
The Cobbler sat up. 'I'd stitch myself up if I had time,' he said absently. He lifted one of his needles from the ground, frowned at its sorry state. 'There's little of that left for any of us, though.'
'Then, it's over,' Ganelon said.
The Cobbler gestured toward the late afternoon sky, just beginning to dim with the first hints of twilight. 'No,' he said. 'We are finally ready to begin.'
Ganelon followed the Cobbler's crooked finger with his eyes. There, marring the boundless blue overhead, hung a small crimson smudge. A red moon, Ganelon realized after a moment.
'They made it back to the Rose,' the Cobbler offered. 'Helain and the others.'
'Is she-?'
'The Beast kept his word.' The Cobbler laughed brightly. 'As if he could even imagine breaking it! No, Helain's madness has been lifted.'
As the Cobbler stood, it was clear to Ganelon that his wounds were already healing. Even his clothes seemed to be mending themselves. The pale-clad man extended a hand to Ganelon. In it he held a silver knife, the least damaged of his tools. 'Take it,' he said. 'I would stay to help you, but-'
'Your path leads elsewhere,' Ganelon concluded. He gratefully took the blade and tucked it into the small duffel he carried slung over one shoulder. 'After all,' the young man added cryptically, 'he needs you.'
The comment baffled the Cobbler for an instant. Then he nodded gravely; the Invidian spy had asked him his identity just before he died. Ganelon share that knowledge.
With a smile and a flourish of his broad-brimmed hat, the Bloody Cobbler disappeared into the Engine House's lengthening shadow.
As he made his way to the mine entrance, Ganelon thought about the reunion that awaited the Cobbler, about the reunion he imagined for himself and Helain. It seemed unlikely, but then, so many impossibilities had come true in the past few weeks he could not let the hope die. Even now, a second new moon struggled to be seen in the sky overhead, one as red as the rose Helain had given him when last they parted.
Ganelon carefully dug the bloom from his duffel. He'd armored it in a tin cup to keep it safe, but he saw now that the effort was wasted. The crimson petals had, like all others of their kind kept too long on Sithican soil, turned black.
He let the wilted rose slip from his grasp. After a moment, he followed it into the pit.
Sixteen
Ganelon knew by the screams that he was headed in the right direction.
The shrieks and moans welled up from deep in the pit, much farther down that he'd ever gone. There were scores of abandoned tunnels in the depths of Veidrava, some that had been flooded, others that had stopped yielding enough salt to be worthwhile. One of those deserted shafts supposedly housed a chapel. Ganelon knew almost from the moment he'd begun the long, tedious process of lowering himself from level to level with emergency ropes that the chapel was his destination.
He came at last to the tunnel from which the unearthly sounds originated. Human voices were not making the clamor, of that Ganelon was certain. He'd heard the cries of the dead and damned enough in the past few days to recognize them now. He was not surprised to find the uncanny sounds so close to the place he'd called home. Rather, he marveled that he'd been so blind to it before.
Cautiously, he started down the tunnel. Before long, a faint blue glow suffused the rubble-strewn passage, and Ganelon extinguished the lantern he'd taken from the surface. He left it, still smoking, in an empty niche hewn into the wall.
Ganelon did not notice the flowers carved around the niche, barely recognized the elaborate statuary of hounds and harts and other creatures that stood to either side of him as the tunnel opened into a broad hallway. The ceiling, which reflected the light of the torches in the hall as a sky-blue glow, scarcely drew his eye. Once the workmanship of these objects would have filled him with wonder. Now he only saw them as places to conceal himself from his enemies or places from which those enemies might strike at him.
The weird cries echoed all around Ganelon as he crept from statue to statue, ever closer to the fire-lit room at the hallway's end. Through the open arch, he glimpsed shadows wheeling across the walls. He expected to find a hundred men in there, all dancing in anticipation of the grim rite Azrael intended to perform. When he got close enough to get a better look at the room itself, though, at the melted benches and the scarred altar, Ganelon realized that these shadows had no mortal anchors. They were darkness incarnate, salt shadows, and they were celebrating the strife to come.
It was only their sheer number, the combined clamor of hiss upon hiss that made the shadows' voices heard. That same quality made it impossible for any of them to speak above the din or to raise a discernible alarm when Ganelon stepped into the Black Chapel.
The floor was dark with massing salt shadows, but Ganelon's footfalls sent them splashing back like so much fetid water. As in the Vistani camp, the lost souls recoiled from the dead flesh on his feet. They whirled about the vaulted room, curling over the repulsive statues lurking in the corners. In some places the most agitated shadows forced their bodies off the floor. They scurried toward Ganelon like misshapen spiders. Yet they could not bring themselves to envelop his death-tainted flesh.
The altar stood ready for Azrael's ceremony. A black cloth covered the stained and profaned block, while a chalice carved of ebony stood at its center. Around the cup were arranged bits of plants and animals. Ganelon opened the small bag of poppy seeds Malocchio Aderre had given him. Carefully he emptied a few into the cup, then secreted others among the bits of greenery and grue. He had returned the bag to his duffel and was considering what to do with the large vat that stood before the altar when a familiar voice made him stop short.
'What are you doing here?' asked Ambrose.
Ganelon turned to find the pudgy shopkeep standing in the mouth of a rough-hewn tunnel, which led from the chapel deeper into the earth. His face was pale, his eyes devoid of any of the good humor that had once shone in them. 'What are you doing here?' Ambrose repeated.
As Ganelon started forward, arms outstretched to embrace his old friend, he noticed the shadows teeming at the shopkeep's feet. The darkness slithered up Ambrose's legs and reached out with tendrils to caress him. 'You've been touched by Death,' Ambrose said in a voice only vaguely like the one Ganelon remembered so fondly. 'I can smell it on you.'
'What happened?' the young man asked. A fist of grief closed around his heart at the sight of his friend so changed, so defiled. 'How-?'
'I claimed this body a long time ago,' the thing within Ambrose said. 'It just took me some time to drown the last bits of that fat slob's personality. He lusted after Helain, you know.' 'No. I don't believe it.'
A vapid smile quirked Ambrose's mouth. 'It doesn't matter what you believe. He lusted after her all the same. I tried to goad him on-Helain would have been quite a conquest-but he was too cowardly to let me guide him.'
'You can't even tell love from lust,' Ganelon said coldly. 'No wonder Ambrose kept you at bay for so long.'
The youth reached into his duffel for the crystal orb. Before he could close his fingers around it, Ambrose was at his side. The shopkeep's quickness startled the young man, as did the savagery of his attack. The bag slipped from Ganelon's grasp as the blows began to fall. Soon he was on the chapel floor beside it, curled tight against the relentless hail of punches and kicks.
'What's going on here?' Azrael snarled as he emerged from the tunnel. In his wake came Kern and Ogier. The two men carried a massive bucket filled to the brim with water from the Lake of Sounds.
'A spy,' Ambrose said. 'I don't know who sent him.'
Azrael took one look at the leg brace and snarled, 'He's Malocchio Aderre's man, but he's supposed to be dead.' With his iron-shod boot, the dwarf rolled Ganelon over. 'Wait,' he said when he saw Ganelon's face. 'This fellow
