How is it that the Light can make man, then permit him to wield powerful auguries, only to strip him of the mortal flesh that binds him to this world? It was that question that had begun turning him from the teachings of the Zakarum Church almost twenty years ago. Since that time, he had turned his pursuits to demons. They, at least, gave immortality of a sort with the power they offered. The struggle was to stay alive after receiving it.
When the weakness had abated to a degree, Cholik opened his eyes.
Nullat hunkered down beside him.
An attempt to make himself a smaller target if there are any vengeful rats left, Cholik felt certain. The priest gazed around the chamber.
The magical fire had swept the underground chamber. Smoking and blackened bodies of rats littered the debris piles. Burned flesh had sloughed from bone and left a horrid stink. Only a few slight chitterings of survivors sounded, and none of them seemed inclined to come out of hiding.
“Get up, Nullat,” Cholik ordered.
“Yes, master. I was only there to catch you if you should fall.”
“I will not fall.”
Glancing to the side of the trail as they went on, Cholik gazed down into the abyss to his left. Careful exploration had not proven there was a bottom to it, but it lay far below. The excavators used it as a pit for the bodies of dead slaves and other corpses and the debris they had to haul out of the recovered areas.
Despite the fact that he hadn’t been down in the warrens beneath Tauruk’s Port in weeks, Cholik had maintained knowledge of the twisting and turning tunnels that had been excavated. Every day, he scoured through all manner of things the crews brought to the surface. He took care in noting the more important and curious pieces in journals that he kept. Back in Westmarch, the information he’d recorded on the dig site alone would be worth thousands in gold. If money would have replaced the life and power he was losing by degrees, he’d have taken it. But money didn’t do those things; only the acquisition of magic did that.
And only demons gave so generously of that power.
The trail they followed kept descending, dipping down deep into the mountainside till Cholik believed they might even be beneath the level of the Dyre River. The constant chill of the underground area and the condensation on the stone walls further lent to that assumption.
Only a few moments later, after branching off into the newest group of tunnels that had been made through Ransim’s remains, Cholik spotted the intense glare created by the torches and campfires the excavation team had established. The team had divided into shifts, breaking into groups. Each group toiled sixteen hours, with an eight-hour overlap scheduled for clearing out the debris that had been dug out of the latest access tunnels. They slept eight hours a day because Cholik found that they couldn’t be worked any more than sixteen hours without some rest and sleep and still stay healthy for any appreciable length of time.
The mortality rate had been dimmed by such action and the protective wards Cholik had set up to keep the rats and undead at bay, but it had not been eradicated. Men died as they worked there, and Cholik’s only lament was that it took Captain Raithen so long to find replacements.
Cholik passed through the main support chamber where the men slept. He followed Nullat’s lead into one of the new tunnels, skirting the piles of debris that fronted the entrance and the first third of the tunnel. The old priest passed the confusion with scant notice, his eyes drawn to the massive gray and green door that ended the tunnel.
Men worked on the edges of the massive door, standing on ladders to reach the top at least twenty feet tall. Hammers and chisels banged against the rock, and the sound echoed in the tunnel and the chamber beyond. Other men shoveled refuse into wheelbarrows and trundled them to the dumpsites at the front of the tunnel.
The torchlight flickered over the massive door, and it inscribed the symbol raised there for all to see. The symbol consisted of six elliptical rings, one spaced inside another, with a twisting line threading through them in yet another pattern. Sometimes the twisting line went under the elliptical rings, and sometimes it went over.
Staring at the door, Cholik whispered, “Kabraxis, Banisher of the Light.”
“Get him! Get him! He’s up here with us!” Orphik screamed.
Glancing up, not wanting to leap into the path of the little man’s knives as he came at him on the cliff ledge, Darrick watched the pirate start for him. The hobnailed boots scratched sparks from the granite ledge.
“Bloody bastard nearly did for me, Lon,” Orphik crowed as he made his knives dance before him. “You stay back, and I’ll slit him between wind and water. Just you watch.”
Darrick had only enough time to push himself up on his hands. His left palm, coated in blood from his sliced finger, slipped a little and came close to going out from under him. But his fingers curled around a jutting rocky shelf, and he hurled himself to his feet.
Orphik swung his weapons in a double slash, right hand over left, scissoring the air only inches from Darrick’s eyes. He took another step back as the wiry little pirate tried to get him again with backhanded swings. Unwilling to go backward farther, knowing that a misstep along the narrow ledge would prove fatal, Darrick ducked below the next attack and stepped forward.
As he passed the pirate, Darrick drew the long knife from his left boot, feeling it slide through his bloody fingers for just a moment. Then he curled his hand around the weapon as Orphik tried to spin to face him. Without mercy, knowing he’d already been offered no quarter, Darrick slashed at the man’s boot. The leather parted like butter at the knife’s keen kiss, and the blade cut through the pirate’s hamstring.
Losing control over his crippled foot, Orphik weaved off-balance. He cursed and cried for help, struggling to keep the long knives before him in defense.
Darrick lunged to his feet, slapping away Orphik’s wrists and planting a shoulder in the smaller man’s midsection. Caught by Darrick’s upward momentum and greater weight, Orphik left his feet, looking as if he’d jumped up from the ledge. The pirate also went out over the dizzying fall to the river below, squalling the whole way and flailing his arms. He missed Mat and the other sailors by scant inches, and only then because they’d all seen what had happened and had flattened themselves against the cliff wall.
Dropping to his knees and grabbing for the wall behind him, clutching the thick root from the tree on the next level of the cliffs that he spotted from the corner of his eye, Darrick only just prevented his own plunge over the cliff’s side. He gazed down, hypnotized by the suddenness of the event.
Orphik missed the river’s depths, though. The little pirate plunged headfirst into the shallows and struck the rocky bottom. The sickening crunch of his skull bursting echoed up the cliff.
“Darrick!” Mat called up.
Realizing the precariousness of his position, Darrick turned toward the other pirate, thinking the man might already be on top of him. Instead, Lon had headed away, back up the ledge that led to the passable areas on the mountains. He covered ground in long-legged strides that slammed and echoed against the stone.
“He’s makin’ for the signal fire,” Mat warned. “If he gets to it, those pirates will be all over us. The life of the king’s nephew will be forfeit. Maybe our own as well.”
Cursing, Darrick shoved himself up. He started to run, then remembered the rope tied around
