Chainers Torment

PART THREE: DEMENTIST
CHAPTER 18

Chainer and the First both agreed that the shikar should continue as scheduled. Kamahl seemed concerned when Chainer asked him to replace Skellum during the ritual hunt, but he agreed immediately and without comment. Chainer realized how much he relished the barbarian's company. He had been prepared to explain the importance of the ritual itself, how important it had been to Skellum, and how fitting it would be for Chainer's partner in the pits to become his partner on shikar. If Kamahl had been a Cabalist or a merchant, he would have bantered and negotiated and otherwise extended the discussion until he figured out a way to profit from it. The barbarian, however, simply said, "Yes."

The journey was scheduled to begin at dawn, and Chainer spent the final few hours dining with Fulla. Chainer was still too stunned to speak during his meal, and Fulla seemed ashamed of what had happened. She was not good at comforting others, but even in his state of shock, Chainer appreciated her attempts at kindness. He even asked her to accompany him on shikar, but she declined.

"Oh, Skellum," Fulla had said wistfully. She walked around Chainer as she spoke, taking long, straight strides. "Always trying to send people somewhere. 'It's a big special journey, one step at a time, watch where you put your feet.' Always trying to keep it separate." She counted her steps out loud as she walked, then went around again, trying to reduce the count.

"It's an important ritual," Chainer said defensively. "First you learn to perceive, then-"

"Where do you keep your monsters, caster?" Fulla spun on one toe in front of Chainer, drew her sword, and presented it to him, hilt-first. "Where do you go to get them?"

"I keep them in here," Chainer tapped his temple. "In my head. In the place that Skellum showed me."

"That's good." Fulla pulled her sword back and tapped the tip thoughtfully on her chin. "Look me in the eye," she said.

Chainer leaned down and put his face inches from Fulla's. He opened his eyes as wide as hers and stared into her blue-white irises. "Don't look away," Fulla was careful to keep her head still. "But also look over my shoulder. Take your time."

Chainer sighed. Fulla's eyes were wide and bright. He could make out her half smile below them, and below that, the tapping point of her sword. If he concentrated, he could also make out the rows of beads in her hair, so similar to his own, and the space just beside her ear.

"Mine are always with me," Fulla said, and suddenly Chainer could see them. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, lined up behind Fulla and stretching as far back as his mind could see. Monstrous, misshapen, the shades of Fulla's monsters were always half a step behind her.

Fulla broke eye contact then, and the phantasms disappeared. "I didn't learn from Skellum," she told Chainer. "And I can't help you like he did. But I can still do what he does." They finished their meal in silence.

Chainer also spent his time ignoring Laquatus. The ambassador had sent numerous requests to Chainer, asking if he could come by and express his sympathies personally. Chainer left a pile of such requests lying unanswered by the door.

The books Skellum had which described the shikar ritual were more interesting to Chainer but harder to concentrate on. He knew that shikar would be extremely difficult without Skellum's guidance. At least the actual mechanics of it seemed simple enough, and the underlying rationale made sense. He and his partner were going to walk deep into the woods and interact with as many wild creatures as they could find. They would survive on what they could scrounge or hunt down.

The point of the exercise, as Chainer understood it, was to fill his head with fresh ideas. The more brutes he saw, the more beasts he mastered, the more he would have to draw on when he created his own creatures. Some dementists on shikar simply tried to see as many creatures as possible. Some captured the things they hunted or killed and ate them. Others were satisfied to touch their quarry or even simply to make eye contact. Each shikar was as unique as the dementist who took it, but the end objective was always the same, to align the world without to the world within and increase the dementist's ability to bridge the gap between them.

Chainer sat with an open scroll in his lap, Dragon's Blood smoking in his censer, waiting for the sky to brighten. He hadn't slept since Skellum died, and he didn't want to. All he wanted to do was leave the city behind. If Kuberr smiled on him, he might even have the good fortune to run across a pack of wolf-monkeys while he trekked through Krosan. And then, he thought, I will show Kamahl a few things about explosions and fire.

He continued to stare at the sunless sky. Absently, he created a small, buzzing mosquito with a three-pronged proboscis. With his other hand, he made a long-tongued iguana that dropped to the floor and immediately began circling under the mosquito. Chainer made a black owl with four orange eyes and a face on both sides of its skull, then a large, hissing cobra. The owl settled on the window sill and scanned the room as well as the courtyard outside. The snake coiled around Chainer's chair leg and spread its hood.

"Three," Chainer said aloud as the mosquito buzzed over his left arm, looking for a place to feed. "Two. One. Go."

The iguana's tongue snatched the mosquito out of the air. The owl suddenly swooped down and sank its claws into the iguana, and the cobra struck the owl before it could escape with its kill.

Chainer split his attention between the sky, which was at last starting to lighten, and the cobra, who was waiting patiently for the owl to stop convulsing. As the snake dislocated its jaw to enjoy a meal of bug, lizard, and bird, Chainer wiggled his metal fingers and the entire tableau disappeared.

Soon he would be in Krosan, and they all would discover just who sat at the top of the forest's food chain. And then he would return to Cabal City and teach both the Order and the Mer Empire a similar lesson.

It took Kamahl and Chainer two uneventful days of steady hiking to walk from the city gates to the edge of the Krosan Forest. They made their first camp about five hundred yards inside the forest's border, with another day's hike before the ritual hunt would truly begin.

"Hey, Chainer!" Kamahl called. "There's vermin over here. Are you hunting vermin?"

"What kind of vermin? Where?"

"Up there," Kamahl pointed into the trees. "It's about a foot long, with a big, fuzzy tail."

Chainer thought it over. "You mean a squirrel?"

"Yeah."

The black chain shot up into the tree above Kamahl. The dead rodent fell to the ground with a tiny thud, its back broken. Chainer nimbly pounced on his kill and scooped it up.

"In answer to your question," Chainer said, "no, I'm not hunting vermin. But squirrel aren't vermin. This one, in fact, is going to be dinner."

Kamahl scowled. "If it gnaws things and twitches its nose, it's vermin. And if you don't cook that right now it's going to stink."

Chainer put the dead squirrel in his satchel. He folded his arms and stared at Kamahl.

"What?" the barbarian said.

"You want fresh-killed meat," Chainer said, "you can kill it yourself."

Kamahl opened his mouth to swear at Chainer when the ground beneath them shook. From a hundred yards or so to their right came the sound of splintering wood.

"That sounds bigger than vermin." Chainer slapped Kamahl's shoulder. "Look alive, this is what we came here for." He started running through the woods toward the sound. Kamahl followed him,

"What do I do?" he called. Chainer was lighter and quicker through the thick brush, and Kamahl was falling behind.

"Just back me up," Chainer called. He slowed his pace. "I'll try to… do my thing. You make sure nothing sneaks up behind me. If I freeze up, snap me out of it. If the thing takes a bite out of me, kill it."

Kamahl nodded. They came to the edge of a clearing, and he drew his sword. Chainer was already down on one knee, peering out into the sheltered glade. A huge, elephantine creature rumbled along, seemingly lost and out of its element. When it came upon a large enough tree, it reared up and came down hard with all of its weight, snapping the tree off at the base and crushing the loose trunk into a mass of dirt and splinters.

"It's a gargadon," Chainer whispered. "A young male."

Kamahl shook his head. "It can't be a gargadon this close to the edge of the woods. They need more open space and a different kind of tree to eat."

"All I know is," Chainer said, "I'm getting a gargadon." He unhooked the censer from his vest.

"Tell me you aren't going to use that thing out here."

"Shhhh. It's important." As he spoke, he loaded and lit the censer. "Just back me up, okay? You ready?"

"Always."

Chainer stepped out into the glade. The gargadon was thirty yards upwind with its back to Chainer, so he was able to get close before it smelled his smoke.

When it turned and trumpeted, Chainer finally realized how truly big it was. A single leg was taller and wider than Chainer's whole body. It pawed the ground with one of those legs and trumpeted again, and the ground shook. It wasn't afraid of Chainer in the least, but it was going to warn him to keep clear.

This was the moment that Chainer had been dreading. He knew that he was supposed to master the creature, but it was too big for him to fight, and he knew he wasn't supposed to create any help. Kamahl might be able to blow a hole in its head with one of his axes, but that did nothing for Chainer's shikar.

He had brought his own dementia monsters to heel with a tight collar and a magical slap on the nose. How was he supposed to collar and slap something that could crush him and not notice? Chainer needed an answer soon because the gargadon was clearly not happy to share its space.

"What's wrong?" Kamahl called. "Why aren't you zapping it?

Chainer continued to spin his censer and stare directly into the gargadon's huge eyes. "Zapping it with what?"

"I don't know. It's your ritual."

"I'm getting an idea now. Just shut up and support me." The gargadon pawed the ground again and stomped gently with both front feet. Chainer was shaken almost to his knees, but he thought he might have the answer.

His dementia monsters were only alive in his mind, and Chainer's mind was his place of power. As long as he controlled his fear, he was the ultimate lord and master of his own dementia space. The gargadon had its own life outside of Chainer's, however, and it didn't know that he was its master. It needed to be shown that fact, it needed to be taught. The best way for Chainer to teach that lesson and gain the kind of control he needed was to take the gargadon out of this world and transplant it into his own.

The gargadon was preparing to charge. "Kamahl," Chainer said. "I need a big explosion, behind the gargadon. Drive it toward me."

"Say when."

Chainer felt a shudder start in the base of his spine and work all the way up to his skull. When his vision cleared, he was standing on a field of black sand under a hole in the sky, facing the exact same gargadon he was facing in Krosan. It had become so easy to take that first step, and Chainer silently cursed the fact that Skel-lum was not beside him to see this.

"When," he said. Kamahl let the axe fly, and the lowest-hanging branches of the tree behind the gargadon erupted into flames and thunder. The massive creature was far too heavy to spring, but it reared and charged. It bore down on Chainer, who continued to spin his censer in its widest arc yet, his eyes focused beyond the canopy overhead.

The gargadon charged into range of Chainer's censer. On its next revolution the smoking cage made contact with the gargadon's massive head, and there was a flash of black light and an implosion so strong it sucked the leaves off the trees nearby.

"Fiers's teeth!" Kamahl ran to Chainer's side. "What just happened? That thing was going to crush you like a bug, but it… ran into you."

Chainer kept his back to Kamahl and stared at his own smoking hands. The censer lay in the tall grass, the stalks around it smoldering. "If it ran into me, I'd be a smear." Chainer's voice sounded odd to his own ears, deeper and more hollow, as if he were speaking through a tube.

"No," Kamahl said. "I mean it ran into you, like a sword goes into a scabbard. It was bigger than you, but then you were bigger than it, and… Fiers's teeth."

Chainer had turned in the middle of Kamahl's sentence, and his friend immediately stopped talking. "What's wrong?" Chainer asked in his hollow voice.

"Your eyes," Kamahl said. "They're black." "Everybody's eyes are black, you-"

Kamahl held his sword horizontally in front of Chainer's face, so Chainer could see his own eyes reflected in the flat of the blade. "Your eyes are black, Chainer. Empty holes." Chainer stared at his reflection while he ran a finger around his eyebrows and cheekbones. His eyes were deep, solid black, like the void of a bottomless pit. Chainer laughed, and the sound was more pleasant arid musical than he had ever noticed before.

"I just swallowed a gargadon whole." Chainer tore his gaze away from the blade and looked at Kamahl. "It could take a while to digest."

Kamahl sheathed his sword. "I don't like it. Is this going to happen every time you catch something?"

Chainer held his metal hand in front of his face, concentrated, and slowly curled the hand into a fist. When he looked up again, his eyes were normal.

"Not if I learn to control it." Chainer lowered his hand and looked around the empty glen, breathing deeply and evenly. Kamahl nudged him.

"You okay?"

"I feel great." Chainer took one last deep breath, then nudged Kamahl back. "Come on. If there's gargadons here, imagine what we're going to find in the really deep woods."

"I can't," Kamahl said. "That's sort of what worries me."

The second day of hunting started with scorpions in their bedrolls. Chainer took his into dementia space, and Kamahl crushed his beneath a heavy boot. The further they went into the Krosan forest, the more creatures they encountered. The more creatures they encountered, the more they captured.

Chainer picked up a coal-bellied razorback near a rocky ridge, and then killed a second for its meat. Kamahl cooked his share immediately. In a marshy riverbed, Chainer took on a huge snapping turtle, a small, blue, poisonous frog, and a six-foot freshwater alligator. A deadfall yielded a sharp-clawed badger, a three-foot beetle that emitted clouds of choking spray, and a two-hundred-pound wildcat. But it was the snakes that interested Chainer most.

This section of Otaria was thick with both venom hunters and constrictors-from the small but lethal jade adder to the medium-sized razorback rattler to the enormous rock python that could swallow a man whole. Chainer's face lit up every time he saw one, and he abandoned less interesting prey the moment he spotted a forked tongue. When Kamahl asked him about it, Chainer said he admired their speed and their grace, their aim and their muscular control. He felt some kind of kinship for the sleek reptiles, and Kamahl had seen Chainer fight often enough to know that it wasn't just a flight of fancy. Like the snakes, Chainer often waited until his prey was within range, then struck so quickly that the contest was over before his victim realized it had begun.

Chainer took one of each type of snake into dementia space. The rest he killed and shared with Kamahl. Kamahl wasn't sure what his friend was doing with the half-dozen rattles he had taken from his kills, but he seemed almost reverent about preserving them in his satchel, so Kamahl left him to it. There was much he didn't understand about this trip, but at least Chainer wasn't so intensely morose anymore.

The Cabalist was sitting against a fallen tree, counting the rattles in his collection. Kamahl sniffed the air, and for the fiftieth time felt that something was going wrong. "We're not very deep in, are we?"

"No," Chainer continued to count, transferring the rattles from his hand to a neat line he had arranged on the ground beside him. "Don't you think it's odd that we're seeing so many creatures this far out?"

"It's odd," Chainer agreed, "but not remarkable." "But there are tribes in the forest," Kamahl said. "Druids and Nantuko. We should have seen more of them and less of the things we've been hunting."

"Maybe they heard we were coming and fled," Chainer said. He began to put his rattles back into his satchel.

"That gargadon wasn't fleeing. It was milling around, lost, as if it had just been put there."

Chainer cinched up his satchel. "So?" "So who put it there? And why?"

Chainer stood up. "You're never happy, are you? Either there are too many creatures or not enough. Things are either too close to the edge of the woods or too far in. Don't get all anxious on me now, Kamahl. We'll start seeing the really big stuff soon, and I'll need you at your best."

"I'm always at my best," Kamahl said. "And when you say big, do you mean bigger than a gargadon?"

"I mean bigger than a wildcat or a crocodile. Centaurs and wurms. Maybe even a pack of monkeys." The eager look in Chainer's eye did nothing to address Kamahl's concerns. "I still say this feels wrong. It feels like a trap." "It feels like a trap because you barbarians are constantly pouncing on each other. If I got jumped every time I went to the privy, I'd see traps everywhere, too." He threw a handful of dirt on the embers of their campfire. "Come on. We've got one more day to get to the heart of Krosan. If we don't see any leaf-eaters or dirt-farmers by then, we'll ask the First about it when we get back."

Later that afternoon, they heard more rumbling in the distance, as another elephantine creature stomped through the forest.

"Could be another gargadon," Chainer said. "Which we already have. Even if we were able to kill this one, we don't have time to butcher and eat it."

"So we're letting it go?"

"Hells no. Not until I see what it is." Chainer smelled something familiar, and his heart began to quicken. Kuberr, he thought, smile on me now. They jogged for a while, until they came across the thing's tracks in the loose dirt and mulch that covered the forest floor. The prints were deep, but narrow, as if the creature were walking on the balls of its feet. There were extra tracks scattered alongside the regularly spaced ones where the creature had either gone down on all fours like a bear or propelled itself forward with its arms like an ape. Chainer followed the tracks as he ran, scanning ahead to make sure of his footing and behind to make sure Kamahl was keeping up. From around a thick copse of trees in the distance, Chainer heard a terrifying but familiar roar that made the blood pound in his ears.

"It's a grendelkin," Chainer said. He stood still, staring at the copse of trees. As Kamahl came up behind him, Chainer said, "This one's for Skellum. Ready?"

Before Kamahl could answer, the rampant grendelkin burst through the trees. It was even bigger than the one Chainer had seen in the alley outside Roup's, and this one's legs were whole and healthy. With a tree in each massive paw, the grendelkin spied Chainer and Kamahl and roared a challenge. It threw one tree at them, then another, missing by a wide margin but impressing them nonetheless. It thumped its chest and then the ground.

Chainer handed the loaded censer to Kamahl, and with a snap of his fingers, the barbarian ignited it. He tossed it back to Chainer, who lashed a chain into it as it flew. He immediately began spinning it around his head, spreading Dragon's Blood smoke all around them. Kamahl readied a throwing axe.

Then a strong gust of wind blew out of the copse, carrying a wave of greenish-yellow pollen. Chainer was breathing shallow and was partially protected by the smoke from his censer, but Kamahl took in a huge lungful of the pollen and immediately doubled over in a fit of uncontrollable coughing.

"Kamahl! Are you okay?"

The barbarian waved Chainer off and dropped the rest of the way down to the ground, trying to evade the pollen. With his face half-buried in mulch, Kamahl coughed the pollen out and tried to suck clear forest air in.

Chainer hesitated. He didn't want to leave Kamahl in the dirt, and he didn't want to face the grendelkin without support. The huge monster took a step forward and casually snapped the top off another tree. It used the tree as a crude club, and it shambled forward, slamming into the ground and other trees with each step.

"Poison," Kamahl choked. His eyes were wet, but he had stopped coughing and was struggling back to his feet. "There aren't any poisonous plants in this part of Krosan, Chainer. We're being set up."

Thirty yards behind the pair, a long, legless wurm slithered onto their tracks. It opened its square reptilian head and hissed, displaying the foulest and most jagged set of dragon's teeth Chainer had ever seen. A huge, burly centaur with spotted markings and a crude wooden club trotted out from behind the grendelkin, and a crimson night tiger growled from the trees above, its brilliant red hide almost glowing under its black stripes.

"All they've done," Chainer said, "is line themselves up for us." From above, a screaming wolf- monkey dove at Chainer. It became fouled in the censer chain, tearing it out of Chainer's grasp as the monkey itself sprang away with the chain tangled around its leg. Chainer sent a sharpened weight screaming after the retreating monkey but missed by a hair's breadth. The dementist glared at the mandrill with awful fire in his eyes.

"You're mine," he said darkly. "You are all mine." He kept his eyes locked on the monkey as he bent to retrieve the censer. A long vine whipped out of a nearby tree and wrapped itself around Chainer's wrist, and he felt an uncomfortable tingle. Moss was growing across his human hand, spreading outward from the vine. Chainer slashed his wrist loose with his dagger and scraped off the moss before it could spread any farther. The dagger took off the top layers of skin along with the moss.

"This is spellcraft." Kamahl was on his feet, standing behind Chainer. He had drawn his sword and stood with a weapon ready in each hand, his eyes darting from the copse to the wurm to the centaur to the tiger.

"Druid magic?"

Kamahl nodded. "Someone's pulling their strings." He blocked another lashing vine with the flat of his blade and chopped the offending tendril off with his axe.

"That copse of trees seems to be the center of it." Chainer flexed his bleeding hand, testing it. "Somebody's setting its pets on us. Kamahl, I want those monkeys and the grendelkin. The rest can burn, for all I care." He smiled at Kamahl and picked up his still-smoking censer. "You ready for some burning?"

Kamahl coughed the last of the pollen out of his lungs and spit. "Right now, I'd torch all of Krosan just to clear a pathway out of here." His eyes kept traveling back to the centaur. Chainer thought his friend looked disturbed, distracted by something other than the pollen or the attack vines or the platoon of wild beasts that had gathered to kill them.

"Start with the biggest one?" Kamahl asked. Chainer nodded, and the two of them charged forward dodging vines and screaming monkeys.

"Okay if I kill a few of these screaming, hairy buggers?" Kamahl shouted. A wolf-monkey had pounced on him and was resisting his efforts to throw it off.

"As many as you need to," Chainer said. He didn't even make a chain, he simply reached out and crushed the monkey's skull with his metal hand. The body shimmered and disappeared into Chainer's arm. "I've got the one I need." His eyes were black, and he touched his clenched fist to his forehead. "For Skellum."

Another monkey threw itself at Kamahl. The barbarian chopped it in half with his broadsword without breaking stride. He turned and channeled a blast of fire through his blade at the wurm. The legless dragon screeched in pain, but the blast did little more than singe its skin. It held its ground however, unwilling to risk another blast from closer range.

Chainer rolled away from the centaur's club and whipped a collar around its neck. The man-horse reared up and jerked the chain out of Chainer's hand, and the collar faded as soon as Chainer lost contact with it. Chainer sprinted past the centaur to engage the grendelkin as Kamahl was keeping the tiger and the wurm at bay with blasts of flame. The man-horse galloped after Chainer as fast as the underbrush would allow, with his club raised high overhead.

Chainer had a bigger problem with a bigger club, however. The grendelkin would not move away from the edge of the copse, and he was waving his tree trunk like a scythe in front of him. Chainer couldn't get in under the tree to attack, and the centaur was bearing down on him from behind.

Chainer jumped as high as he could over the grendelkin's next wild swing and latched himself onto the end of the tree with a collar chain. The grendelkin waved its club with Chainer trailing behind it like the tail of a kite. At the apex of the grendelkin's swing, Chainer sent a sharpened weight into the organic seam between two of the armored plates on the grendelkin's back. Chainer let go of the chain that linked him to the tree, and hauled himself onto the grendelkin.

"Eat this," he snarled at the centaur, and unleashed the death bloom directly into the back of the grendelkin's skull. The monster choked in mid-roar and froze with its hand poised to crush Chainer like a stinging fly. Except for the monkeys, who were in constant motion and never stopped screaming, every sentient thing in the area stopped and stared at the dead grendelkin, waiting to see which way it would topple.

Unfortunately for the centaur, Chainer's plan of letting the grendelkin fall forward worked perfectly. Killing the grendelkin removed Chainer and Kamahl's main adversary. Letting its body fall removed five more as the centaur, the tiger, and three of the wolf- monkeys were crushed by the three-ton carcass.

Chainer rode the grendelkin through all obstacles as it crashed to the forest floor. He spiked a short chain into the top of the creature's spine, shuddered, and the giant corpse disappeared up into Chainer's body like liquid through a sucking straw. Instead of falling, Chainer floated, surrounded by a whirling cloud of dust and black light. He felt a bomb go off in his head, and he felt a body-wide sensation similar to when the justicar fried him. Chainer screamed.

Kamahl had blinded the wurm with his broadsword and was preparing to behead the floundering thing when Chainer cried out. He hesitated, then brought his sword down and leaped away from the thrashing coils. As Chainer continued to float and scream, Kamahl felt something angry shift inside the copse of trees. A half-dozen wolf-monkeys still howled on the battlefield, and the trees themselves were starting to move, stretching their branches down and reaching for Chainer and Kamahl. From inside the cluster of trees, a bald human figure came forward. The chanting druid held a crude pine torch in one hand and a thorny bough of red berries in the other. He was painted with bright yellow markings, and a crown of ivy spread from his head down past his shoulders.

As the first tree limb touched the nimbus around Chainer, his scream grew higher and more shrill, building to a crescendo of transcendent agony. Inside the cloud, Chainer turned his black eye sockets toward the encroaching branch. He crossed his arms over his chest, then snapped them down his sides and thrust his head back.

A half-dozen chains leaped from all parts of his body, each lashing straight into the throat of a jabbering wolf-monkey. With his body rigid and his eyes unseeing, Chainer brought all of the monkeys together in front of him with a nauseous splat. He leveled his eyes at the horrid sight he had created and smiled.

The six wolf-monkeys were mashed together like soft clay figurines. Limbs, tails, torsos, and heads were all bent and mashed together, merging into one giant gob of flesh and teeth with no dis-cernable top, bottom, inside, or out. The ones with functioning mouths wailed piteously. Chainer's smile grew savage and cruel under his hollow eyes. Then the entire mass of monkeys burst like a balloon and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

The druid's chant grew louder, and he hurled the thorns into the air. With no animal defenders left, the trees and vines redoubled their efforts to take hold of the intruders.

"Kamahl," Chainer's echoing, musical voice called. "Do it!" Kamahl raised his axe and charged it. He held it by his ear until steam started rising from his hand, and then he cast it high overhead, dropping it into the middle of the copse. Two seconds later, the entire copse was engulfed in bright orange flames, and the druid vanished in a cloud of flame and soot. Debris rained down all around them, and Kamahl took shelter behind the dead wurm. Chainer was less fortunate. A jagged chunk of wood slammed into him, knocking him out of the air and onto the ground.

He heard Skellum's last words again. Remember how I died.

"Always, Master," Chainer whispered, tears falling from the black space where his eyes had been. "I will always remember." And then he fell unconscious to the forest floor.*****

Chainer awoke under the mustard sky. He knew he was dreaming, he could see his body from the outside as he scanned the landscape. The hole in the sky had run almost dry, only releasing an occasional drop. The red sea broke on the shore, driven by storm winds and earthquake rumbles.

Monsters milled around him in their hundreds, stretching out in all directions. They did not react to Chainer's presence but seemed to be in a state of torpor as they shuffled and bumped into one another.

There was a new addition to the landscape in Chainer's mind. The horizon was now broken by a broad, squat mountain whose peak glowed like a star. Chainer shielded his eyes against the glare and tried to focus on the peak. He must be dreaming, for the mountain was shrinking down to meet him, bowing its peak like a servant bows its head.

An indistinct figure sat on a throne at the mountain's peak, backlit by a sphere of harsh purple light. Dazzled by the mad perspective as much as the purple light, Chainer could not determine how far away the figure was, if it were humanoid, male or female. He could see the mountain, however, and he saw that it was not made of rock or mounded earth, but of currency. Huge piles of golden coins and silver markers were heaped on top of one another to create a single pyramid that stretched impossibly high into the sky. The figure leaned forward on its throne.

"Kuberr?" Chainer whispered. Was this what Skellum had wanted him to see? His mentor had sworn frequent oaths to Kuberr over the years. Did he have a vision of the wealth god as part of the shikar ritual?

Mazeura. The figure's voice was deep and sonorous, and it blasted Chainer's secret name through his head so violently that he felt blood trickling out his ears. It's a dream, he reminded himself. It's all a dream.

The mountain peak swayed to and fro, allowing the regal figure to survey the landscape and population of Chainer's mind. Well done, dementist.

The figure opened its arms wide, beckoning Chainer in. The mountain bowed further, and Chainer felt the ground beneath him rise up to carry him into those outstretched arms. He had pledged his life to the Cabal, and now he knew for whom he had pledged. There was power in the salt flats, power in Cabal City, power in the personage of the First. The expanding figure before him, however, was beyond power. It was that vast and nameless energy the Cabal had been created to harness, to use according to its consumptive nature. If black mana was the fuel, then the regal figure welcoming Chainer was its source.

Delirious with joy, Chainer closed his eyes and let himself be swallowed up by the dark figure that had expanded to fill the entire sky.

When the flaming shrapnel slowed, Kamahl rose and surveyed the battlefield. The flames were still raging in the copse of trees. The wurm and one of the wolf-monkeys lay dead at his feet, victims of his sword. The crimson night tiger and the centaur were little more than colorful smears on the grass, and Chainer was unconscious between them. There was no sign of the grendelkin or the other wolf-monkeys. It seemed he and Chainer had won, but he didn't feel much like a victor.

Kamahl sheathed his sword and crossed the field to his partner. The fight and the explosion had driven every other living thing within earshot as far away as they could get, and the forest was remarkably still. Chainer was breathing normally, but he was unrouseable. Kamahl half-carried, half-dragged him clear of the fire and tucked him safely behind a large, mossy boulder. Then he returned to the crushed corpse of the tiger.

Regret was not a common emotion for Kamahl's tribe. They spent most of their time in combat or training for it, and they tended to live short, brutal lives with little time for reflection. As he looked down on the magnificent red and black hide of the tiger, he regretted that he hadn't seen the creature hunt. It would have been beautiful in motion, a study in grace and power.

Kamahl turned, experiencing another unfamiliar rush of emotion. Kamahl had made two great friends on his first visit to Cabal City. One lay unconscious by a nearby boulder, and the other looked almost exactly like the dead centaur at his feet. Kamahl remembered Seaton clearly, his huge, apelike brow and his fierce protective streak for his home. He remembered how Seaton had become enraged when describing the poachers who raided his home, taking from the wild to stock the pits. Seaton's crusade was not Kamahl's quest, but he respected it, and he respected the centaur. Only now did Kamahl realize that he himself was one of those poachers.

Kamahl knew the shikar was only a small portion of the problem, but he was now part of it. He let himself be blinded to it because he had never had to defend his home from invaders. There was nothing in the Pardic Mountains worth taking, so invaders were completely unheard of. All the tribes Kamahl knew of, including his own, spent the greater part of their adulthood roaming Otaria looking for ways to improve their skills and their fortunes. Kamahl had spent so much time fighting in other people's homes that he'd forgotten not everyone welcomes such company. This dead centaur could have been Seaton's father, or brother, he thought. It could have been Seaton.

The fire in the copse of trees had died down, so Kamahl went in as far as he could. He found the druid's body crushed against a blackened tree. He had been a short, broad-shouldered male of about twenty. He had constructed a small stone altar in the center of the copse, which was half-disintegrated by the blast. Whatever spells or summonings he had been performing were long gone. He still held a fragment of pine wood in his charred fingers.

Kamahl's emotions had retreated. Now he felt only the clarity of the choice in front of him and the determination to see his decision through.

While Chainer slept, Kamahl built pyres for the druid, the centaur, and the tiger. He built another fire for the camp near Chainer's boulder, and then one-by- one he ignited them all with a snap of his fingers. Then he stuck his sword tip-first into the ground and waited for Chainer to wake up.