In Red Rune Canyon

by Richard Lee Byers

Chapter Four: The Master's Table

As more and more sunlight reached the canyon floor, Dron made a steadily increasing effort to keep to the shade. Sometimes, even though raising his maimed hand made his face twist with pain, he used it to shield his eyes.

"I take it," Kagur said, "that ghouls generally hole up during the day."

Dron grunted.

"Does that mean all your fellows will be resting in the same cave where the demon is holding Eovath?"

The ghoul hesitated, as though pondering whether he dared lie or might gain any benefit from doing so. At length, he said, "No. Slaves not rest where Master rests. Might touch Master's things. Might eat Master's prisoner."

If that was true—and to Kagur's ears, it sounded true—it might be a bit of good fortune. Maybe she could at least make her way to Eovath without fighting any more living corpses.

That was assuming the demon wasn't leading its minions against her at this very moment, but she doubted such was the case. The fiend had taken Eovath first because it deemed a frost giant the greater prize. At the moment, it probably wanted to concentrate on turning him undead, not hunting down the human who remained at liberty. It would assume tonight was time enough for that.

Scowling, Kagur vowed to prove that this time, it was the demon that was underestimating its foe.

As the morning wore on, she and Dron began to encounter the unnatural features that figured in campfire tales of Red Rune Canyon. Patches of the walls had turned the hue of blood or obsidian black. In some places, the discolorations had cracked open, and bubbling crimson sludge oozed forth like pus from infected wounds, stinking of sulfur.

At another spot, the creek took on a rusty hue, and the vague suggestion of anguished faces formed and dissolved in the flow. Glimpsing them made Kagur's skin crawl, yet she felt an urge to go on peering, a sense that if she could only make them out clearly, she'd learn something she urgently needed to know.

But she also realized that fascination was irrational and the result of some malign influence. She jerked her head up and spotted a pallid something moving partway up the left wall.

A ghoul perched on a ledge with an outcropping above it for shade, an upward jut of stone at the edge of the drop providing cover like a parapet. Kagur could only see the top of it, and wouldn't have been able to discern anything at all if it hadn't straightened up to blow the curling ram's horn bugle it was raising to its lips.

She snatched an arrow from her quiver, drew, and loosed all in an instant. There was no time to aim properly. Luck was with her, though, and the shaft still punched into the ghoul's head. The creature lost its grip on the ram's horn and flopped back out of sight. The trumpet fell banging and bouncing down the wall.

Kagur waited a moment to see if the ghoul would reappear. When it didn't, she pivoted and aimed a second arrow at Dron's face. Her guide flinched.

"You said," Kagur gritted, "ghouls hide in their lairs when the sun is up. You didn't say there would still be lookouts posted along the way."

"Not know! New! Watching for you!"

Kagur took a breath and let it out slowly. "Maybe. Anyway, you and I are going to keep an eye out for any more of them. You want to spot them before they spot us. Because—"

"If they give signal, you kill me!" Dron snarled. "Understand!"

As it turned out, they didn't come across another sentry. Maybe the one watcher had been a casual afterthought. Perhaps the demon assumed the tangled layout of the gorges would be enough to keep Kagur wandering lost and confused until nightfall. As it might have, had she not pressed a guide into service.

The sun had passed its zenith when said guide halted and waved his maimed hand at the spot ahead where the gorge they were following forked into two. "Go right. See cave."

"We'll see it together."

"Master say, 'Kill,' I kill. He say, I do—no matter what."

Kagur frowned. She was reluctant to dispense with Dron's assistance. But she also saw the sense in not taking him any farther if the demon could compel him to attack her even against his will. Maimed he might be, but he still had fangs and claws.

And if it was time to do without him, should she kill him? A ghoul was unnatural and the enemy of all that truly lived. Every such creature deserved destruction simply for being what it was, and even had it been otherwise, now that Dron was crippled, it might actually be merciful to grant him a fast and painless death.

But she couldn't. Blacklions dealt honorably, even with the undead. "Go, then." If it turned out he'd led her falsely, it would be easy enough to run him down.

She waited while Dron hobbled a little way back down the defile. Then she took a long breath and laid another arrow on her bow. She crept forward and peered around a slimy black- and red-striped outcropping into the right branch of the fork.

As Dron had promised, a cave mouth opened onto the stones and sand of the canyon floor and the creek flowing down the center. Unfortunately, another ghoul lookout, the female with the dangling amber necklace, squatted just inside the entrance. Squinting, the creature had a hood pulled up to shield its head from the sun, but appeared morose and uncomfortable anyway.

The demon must use the table to help it transform prisoners.

Kagur stepped out into the open, drew her arrow to her ear, and let it fly. At the same time, the ghoul spotted her and opened its fanged mouth to shout.

The hurtling arrow plunged into the ghoul's chest. Its cry silenced before it began, the living corpse flopped backward and lay motionless.

Kagur peered about to see if the creature's demise had gone undetected. Seemingly so. She prowled onward to the opening. There she exchanged her bow for her longsword, then skulked into the cave.

It wasn't entirely dark inside. Not at first, anyway. The daylight coming in the entryway shined for a dozen strides before the passage doglegged, and not far beyond that point, greenish luminescence flickered from an opening in the left wall.

Stalking onward, Kagur found the opening led to a side chamber that evidently contained the demon's treasures—or at least a sparse but exotic collection of possessions. A golden quill scratched letters in red on a parchment that somehow unwound more and more of itself without ever reaching an end or making a great pile of used paper. In a sluggishly moving painting, a bloody man and woman locked in a carnal embrace gnawed off and devoured pieces of one another's flesh. The green light danced from an egg-sized gem wreathed in emerald flame and reflected from an oval looking glass floating in midair.

But there was no sign of Eovath. Kagur would have to venture deeper into the cave to find him.

She took a breath, steeling herself to do so. Then a notion came to her, and she turned back to contemplate the mirror anew.

Like any proper Kellid, she distrusted sorcery even when human beings rather than demons were the casters. And a looking glass that hovered in the air was about as plainly enchanted as any article could be. There was no telling what touching it might do. Yet if the demon tried to use its horrible, debilitating gaze on her again, it might just come in handy.

Gingerly, she took hold of the mirror's golden frame and tugged. It moved it easily. When she tucked it under her arm, it made no effort to drift upward or pull away, acting no different from an ordinary object. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Then Eovath's deep voice bellowed, and metal rattled and clashed.

Kagur nearly succumbed to the urge to race in the direction of the sound. But stealth and caution might still serve her brother better, and so she managed to hold herself to a fast stride rather than a sprint.

The light failed as she stalked deeper, until she was groping her way through utter darkness. But fortunately, that was only for a few steps. Then she rounded a bend, and a trace of new light tinged the murk up ahead.

At its end, the passage widened out into another chamber. As she crept up to peek inside, metal clattered once again.

The light in the chamber shined from a scattering of glowing stones and glinted on an upright gray metal slab and the coils of chain that bound Eovath against it. Projections clasping the sides of his head kept him looking straight forward, and little hooks at the ends of thin, bent arms held his golden eyes wide open. At the top of the apparatus, a leering molded face sneered out above the giant's own.

Eovath writhed and struggled against his bonds, producing more rattling and clashing, and the chains shifted and tightened like living things to hold him in place. The metal face clenched its jaw with effort.

The bat demon watched until even Eovath, for all his enormous strength and endurance, had to leave off straining and catch his breath. Then, its clawed feet clicking on the floor, it advanced on him, probably to try again to change him.

Kagur stepped out into the open. "Stop!" she snapped.

The demon hissed and lurched around. Kagur looked straight into its crimson eyes, as though she'd learned nothing from their previous encounter, and felt the power the Abyssal creature had raised to corrupt Eovath stab at her instead. With a surge of triumph, she jerked the looking glass up in front of her face.

Nothing happened.

She was still struggling to make sense of that fact when clawed hands grabbed the mirror frame and ripped it from her grasp. Manifestly unharmed by what she'd imagined to be a masterful ploy, the demon spun the mirror behind it and released it to float.

"That's mine!" the creature snarled, and lashed out at her with its claws.

Kagur dodged aside and whipped out her longsword. When the demon snatched for her again, she cut at its scaly forearm.

She connected solidly, and her blade should have sliced deep and left the limb dangling maimed and useless. But as she pulled the weapon back, she saw it had only nicked the demon. The fiend laughed at her consternation.

Maybe her father had been mistaken. Maybe there were some things that could hurt her and which she couldn't hurt back—at least, not enough to matter.

No! There had to be a way, and she was going to find it.

But it was difficult even to think in the midst of this combat. The demon was strong and tricky, and pressed her relentlessly. In addition to contending with its claw slashes, she had to remember to avoid its gaze, and to stay alert for the slithering, thickening sensation that meant it was trying to seize hold of her with magic.

Even so, she managed to wound it two more times. But those gashes were nearly as shallow as the first, and they stopped bleeding in a matter of moments.

She retreated, and her back foot fetched up against a wall. The demon lunged, claws raking downward, and she wrenched herself out of the way—but not quite far enough. A sting of pain and a spreading wetness told her that the fiend's talons had cut her across the shoulder blade.

She didn't think the slashes were deep, but couldn't stop fighting to check. She could only come back on guard in the increasingly forlorn hope of finally cutting deep enough for it to do some good.

Or perhaps not. She belatedly realized that not all the noise in the cavern came from her battle with the demon. Still chained to the table, Eovath was throwing himself against his bonds again and again in an effort to break free.

A glance was enough to tell her that his efforts were still unavailing. But maybe she could change that.

She faked a sidestep to the demon's right, then charged forward on its left, the trick carrying her past the fiend's talons. It still slapped her with a beat of its wing, but not hard enough to knock her off her feet. She raised her sword high, leaped into the air, and cut at the face at the top of the restraining rack with all her strength.

The metal visage split, and the glinting gray mouth screamed. The lengths of chain whipped and flailed.

At Kagur's back, the demon gave a screeching hiss, and she spun around to face it once again.

It attacked as savagely as before, nearly rending her twice in as many seconds. Then a huge battleaxe whirled at its flank. As she'd hoped, hurting the chain-thing had enabled Eovath to free himself and recover his weapon, and now he was joining the fight.

The demon dodged, and a blow meant to smash into its torso merely tore a wing instead. Worse, Kagur judged that despite her brother's might, the resulting rip was smaller than it should have been—like the gashes cut by her sword, they somehow weren't enough to truly hurt the demon, and would probably heal in a matter of moments. It might be that even she and Eovath fighting together couldn't dispatch the demon in their usual fashion.

But maybe there was a different way to kill it.

Kagur waited for a moment when Eovath attacked hard and obliged the demon to focus on him. Then she darted to the floating mirror and shattered it with her sword. The bat creature pivoted toward the crash and screeched at the destruction.

"Run to the other chamber!" Kagur shouted. "Break everything!"

Without hesitation, Eovath whirled and dashed out into the tunnel.

Kagur's immediate objective was simply to get everybody moving toward the mouth of the cave, and she expected the demon to chase Eovath in the normal way. Instead, the creature paused for an instant—then vanished.

She had a bad feeling about that. As she sprinted after Eovath, she called out, "Don't break things! Just get out!"

When she passed the entrance to the green-lit treasure room, the demon was inside. It had somehow blinked from its former location to its current one, and now it goggled at her, surprised that she and the giant were racing right on by without even trying to make good on her threat.

Eovath lunged out into the sunlight, and Kagur scrambled out after him. Then, bursting into view as suddenly as it had disappeared previously, the demon was before them, crouched and ready.

Kagur darted around Eovath and cut the demon across the ribs. The giant bellowed and buried his axe in the creature's torso, and the bat thing stumbled backward. Judging by appearances, it had finally suffered real pain and shock from a wound.

"Into the creek!" Kagur gasped.

Charging, using the axe still embedded in its body like a handle, the giant bulled the demon backward. The creature snatched and scrabbled but failed either to deter its foe or detach itself from the weapon before Eovath shoved it down into the water.

"Hold its head under!" Kagur said.

Eovath dropped on top of the demon and wrapped his massive arms around it, forcing its face below the surface. Kagur ran up beside the other two combatants and, despite the risk of accidentally hitting her brother, stabbed the bat creature repeatedly.

She no longer had any expectation that the resulting wounds would kill it. But the punishment might keep it too distracted to use any of its foul magic. And in a simple wrestling match, nothing could beat a frost giant.

One and two at a time, ghouls started peering from their hiding places, from burrows like shallow graves in the sandy ground and shadowy depressions in the canyon walls. They might hate the daylight, but the commotion had roused them even so. Kagur wracked her brain for a strategy that would allow her and Eovath to contend with them and their master at the same time.

But then Eovath wheezed, "I think we got it."

He straightened up, gripped the demon by the neck, and hoisted it high, displaying it to the ghouls. The fiend dangled limply as a rag doll, and its many wounds weren't puckering shut anymore.

"You see?" Eovath croaked to the ghouls. "The demon's dead!"

The ghouls exchanged glances. Then they started retreating back into their holes and dark recesses. Maybe they feared to fight folk formidable enough to kill their maker. Kagur supposed it was even possible they were grateful for their liberation.

In any case, their withdrawal allowed her to take a closer look at Eovath, and she caught her breath to see how many times the demon had clawed him as it struggled to break free. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"I will be." Eovath dumped the demon corpse beside the water. "Thanks to my cunning sister."

"Who shouldn't have insisted on coming here in the first place. I'm sorry. I'll heed my elders and be cautious from here on."

He grinned. "Truly?"

She felt a smile tugging at her own lips. "Well, maybe."

Coming Next Week: Andrew Penn Romine takes us to the deserts of Qadira in "The Fate of Falling Stars"!

Enjoying this story? Check out the further adventures of Kagur and Eovath in Called to Darkness, available now!

Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than thirty novels, including the Pathfinder Tales novel Called to Darkness (also starring Kagur and Eovath) and the first book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen series. In addition, he's also the co-creator of the critically acclaimed young adult series The Nightmare Club, and the author of a new urban fantasy series beginning with the novel Blind God's Bluff. He's written one previous Pathfinder Tales web fiction story, "Lord of Penance".

Illustration by Ian Llanas.

In Red Rune Canyon

by Richard Lee Byers

Chapter Three: Divide and Conquer

Kagur's legs turned soft as dough. She collapsed to her knees, banging one on a stone. Eovath dropped beside her, and the ghouls raised a hissing snarl to see the foes who'd humbled them brought low.

But by the ever-thirsty blade of the Lord in Iron, Kagur refused to be helpless. With a rasping snarl of her own, she pushed chill and weakness—well, the greater part of them, anyway—out of her body by sheer dint of will.

Which was good as far as it went, but instinct told her the improvement would be fleeting if she kept looking at the demon's batlike face. Somehow, it was the fiend's gaze that had debilitated her, and with that still linking them, she sensed the creature focusing its mind for a second assault.

With a fierce twist of her neck, she broke eye contact. She scrambled back to her feet even as Eovath did the same. The demon hadn't succeeded in slaying or crippling him, either. Poised to launch themselves forward, the ghouls balked at their prey's sudden recovery.

Kagur laughed. Her brother spat.

With a scream, the demon clenched its fist with such vehemence that the long claws surely stabbed into its flesh.

Kagur felt as if the air was thickening and sliding around her. She tried to spring clear of what must be some sort of supernatural attack, but she was too slow. Her limbs froze, locked in place as if her whole body were encased in ice. She couldn't even make herself bellow in rage as the demon, wings lashing the air, swept down from its perch toward them. Eovath swung his axe, but the demon jinked nimbly out of range, then curved back to sink its filthy talons into the meat of Kagur's shoulders.

Again, Kagur tried to shout something—anything—but still her jaws betrayed her, leaving her to silently suffer the pain of the intruding claws as they lifted her off the ground and up into the night sky. Below her, Eovath roared curses, and in her mind Kagur matched them.

Yet now she had bigger problems. As the ground retreated beneath her, she felt a sudden surge of mingled rage and fear. Once the creature had lifted her high enough, it need only drop her to kill her. And in her current paralyzed condition, she wouldn't even be able to resist, just fall as placidly as a dropped stone until the impact splattered her across the rocks of the canyon floor.

Yet as the demon sailed over the ridge of the canyon's wall and down into a defile on the other side, she felt a brief flare of hope. If it was descending, then perhaps it meant to set her down safely—no doubt to better enjoy the pleasure of killing her slowly.

Inwardly, Kagur smiled. All she asked was that the demon's plans force it to release its spell over her before killing her. Then she'd show it what a warrior of the Blacklions was made of.

Yet though the demon did deposit her on the ground, in a section of twisting gorge little different than the one from which it had extracted her, it didn't land as well. Instead, it released her from her magical bonds as soon as her feet touched the soil, then flapped back up out of reach.

Quick as a hunting cat, Kagur drew her sword and threw, sending it lancing up into the sky after the creature. Yet the fiend only laughed a grating laugh and rose higher, wings snapping, and the sword passed harmlessly beneath its trailing claws. Within moments, the beast had disappeared back over the canyon wall.

Kagur had no idea why the creature hadn't killed her, but she assumed it had removed her from the battlefield so Eovath would have to fight alone. She ran, retrieved her sword, and then peered about, seeking an opening that would allow her to pass through the wall at ground level.

There wasn't any. There was no way back except to climb.

So this is the ghouls' master.

She did so, without hesitation, finding handholds and ledges to aid her ascent. But despite her resolve, she was no experienced mountaineer, and the darkness further slowed her progress. It immediately became obvious she'd never reach her brother in time to help him.

Still, panting, fingers aching, denying herself all but the briefest of rests, she struggled upward. Dawn found her atop the wall.

She peered down the other side and made out a scattering of ghoul bodies. But Eovath was nowhere to be seen—not from the ridge, and not when she completed a laborious descent.

Her jaw clenched as fury welled up inside her—an admittedly familiar sensation. But it was different, too, because this time she was angry with herself.

Borog had warned her and Eovath not to enter Red Rune Canyon, but she'd been certain she knew better. And here was the result of that brash overconfidence: her brother was lost. It made her want to scream, or pummel her own body.

She took a long, deep breath instead. Now was not the time for self-recrimination. She had to rescue Eovath before the demon had a chance to do whatever it intended to do to him.

She stooped beside the creek, scooped frigid water in her cupped hands, and slurped away the raw, parched feeling in her throat. Then she strode to retrieve her bow and quiver. Her path took her near one of the fallen ghouls, and the emaciated, gray-white thing startled her by hissing.

She drew her sword to kill it, then reconsidered. Last night, a ghoul had spoken. Maybe she could persuade this one to speak to her now.

As she approached it, she saw it was the same ghoul whose fingers she'd sliced off and whose leg she'd crippled. Then she caught her breath as she noticed the blue and green beadwork adorning its deerskin tunic and the two copper rings in the lobe of its pointed ear.

The undead thing was Dron—or what was left of him. Fighting him in the dark, Kagur hadn't realized, but it was so.

Which meant there'd never been any hope of saving him. The realization brought another pang of self-disgust.

Pushing it out of her mind, she pointed her sword at the creature on the ground. "Do you know me?"

Squinting against the morning light even though little of it had as yet reached the floor of the canyon, Dron bared his fangs.

"Talk," Kagur persisted. "I know you can. Or I'll hurt you."

"Know you," the ghoul rasped. "Cut fingers. Cut knee."

"Yes. But do you remember me from before that? From before you... changed?"

The ghoul hesitated. "Kagur."

"That's right, and you're Dron. We hunted together. Tell me what happened to you."

Dron hesitated. "Can't. Master not like."

The living Dron had been loquacious and clever. Repelled by the undead version's ugly form and noxious reek, Kagur nonetheless felt a twinge of pity at his broken speech. His transformation had seemingly damaged his mind as well as warping his body.

But compassion wouldn't get her what she needed, so she set it aside and jabbed at the raw, spongy stumps of Dron's severed fingers with the point of her longsword. The ghoul hissed, snatched the maimed hand back, and covered it with his good one.

"'Master' isn't here," Kagur said. "The demon abandoned you because you were crippled and of no further use to it. I am here, and I swear by Gorum I'll keep cutting pieces off you until you answer my questions."

Dron hesitated. Then: "Killers come. Demon eyes kill some hunters. Make me... this. Other ghouls kill the rest. For meat." The undead creature lowered his eyes. "Not want eat. But did."

Kagur frowned. "So... every time there's an attack, the demon turns one victim into a ghoul. That's why there's always a body missing. But what's the point? What does the demon want with ghouls?"

Dron shook his head, apparently to indicate he didn't actually know. But he did have an opinion: "Little demon. Wants be big demon."

In other words, to be a leader like Kagur's father, or one of the Mammoth Lords who presided over the followings. To command a following, or even a single tribe, one needed followers.

East of the tundra was the Worldwound, a land teeming with demons. People said it was the wrongness of that place seeping through the earth that tainted Red Rune Canyon. Maybe "Master" hailed from the Worldwound and meant to return one day at the head of a war band of undead warriors.

Kagur caught her breath as a ghastly possibility occurred to her. "What about Eovath, then? Is he gone because the demon changed him into a ghoul? You were here watching. Tell me!"

Dron shook his head. "Giant strong. Not change yet." He smirked as though enjoying Kagur's distress. "But Master make him weak. Ghouls drag him off. Master will change him."

Him and me, Kagur realized. That was why the demon hadn't just dropped her from on high. Eovath and she had both impressed it with their prowess, and it meant to add them both to the ranks of its followers to replace the undead they'd destroyed.

She swallowed. "No. That won't happen because I won't let it. Now, you ghouls ambushed Eovath and me without Master's permission. Why was that?"

"Told you. Hungry. Too many ghouls, not enough meat."

"Hm." She took stock and decided she was nearly out of questions. "Where is Master holding Eovath prisoner?"

"Cave. Probably."

"You're going to take me there." It ought to be quicker and surer than trying to track the other ghouls, especially since, by all accounts, the blighted land called Red Rune Canyon was actually a confusing tangle of several interconnecting gorges.

Dron flinched. "No! Tell you the way!"

"And then what could I do about it if it turned out you told me wrong? I need you with me so I can kill you if you try to betray me."

"Can't walk!"

"I can fix that."

Kagur trotted back around the bend, slung her bow and quiver over her shoulders, but left her pack where it sat lest it slow her down. She then planted her foot atop the head of one of Eovath's javelins and pulled up on the shaft until the steel point snapped away from it.

When she returned to Dron, she tossed him the length of seasoned ash. "Your crutch," she said.

Fangs bared, the ghoul struggled up with the aid of the prop. "Can't do this!"

"You can," Kagur said, "or I'll finish you off here and now."

Hobbling, the ghoul turned and led her toward the deeper recesses of the canyon. Alternately watching him for signs of treachery and scanning her surroundings from other dangers, Kagur unbuckled her belt pouch by touch, fished out the last few half-squashed bearberries, and popped them into her mouth.

Coming Next Week: A daring rescue attempt in the final chapter of Richard Lee Byers' "In Red Rune Canyon"!

Enjoying this story? Check out the further adventures of Kagur and Eovath in Called to Darkness, available now!

Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than thirty novels, including the Pathfinder Tales novel Called to Darkness (also starring Kagur and Eovath) and the first book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen series. In addition, he's also the co-creator of the critically acclaimed young adult series The Nightmare Club, and the author of a new urban fantasy series beginning with the novel Blind God's Bluff. He's written one previous Pathfinder Tales web fiction story, "Lord of Penance".

Illustration by Lindsey Wakefield.

In Red Rune Canyon

by Richard Lee Byers

Chapter Two: Among the Dead

Tossing aside her blanket, Kagur sat up and looked where Eovath was gazing, but though she had keen eyes, he generally fared better in the dark. "I don't see anything."

Eovath stood up. "Neither do I, now. It was just a shadow, and it's shuffled back around the next bend. But whatever it was, it had two arms and two legs and was bent over like it was hurt. Dron, maybe, if he escaped."

"Or the bait in a trap." Kagur smiled. "There's one way to find out."

Her longbow was of little use when she couldn't see targets at a distance. She left it unstrung and leaning against the canyon wall and drew her longsword instead. The straight steel blade made a faint hissing sound as it cleared the pewter mouth of the scabbard.

Meanwhile, Eovath likewise forsook his pair of javelins in favor of his battleaxe. Jorn Blacklion had pulled the enormous double-bitted implement from the grip of a giant he'd slain in battle, and it fit the hands of his adopted son better than any little human weapon could.

"Ready?" Kagur whispered.

"Yes," Eovath replied, and they advanced.

The night was as silent as it was dark. Kagur's pulse beat in her neck.

She told herself she wasn't nervous. She was a Blacklion warrior, well schooled in the use of the sword and tested in fights with orcs, wolves, and saber-toothed cats. Still, a ghost... or a demon...

She sneered her anxiety away. Her father had taught her that if something could hurt her, she could hurt it back. That only made sense, and it meant a warrior need never be afraid.

When she and Eovath stalked around the turn, it was only to behold another stretch of gorge that, as best she could judge with only starlight to see by, was as empty as the one behind her. But as she peered about, she caught a whiff of decay hanging in the chill night air.

"Smell that?" she whispered.

"Yes," Eovath replied. "You were right. This is a trap."

"Dron could still be here." Kagur raised her voice: "Dron! It's Eovath and Kagur! We came to help you!" The shout echoed away, the sound bouncing off the canyon walls.

In response, a dark form staggered away from the wall of the gorge. As Eovath had said, it was shaped like a person, hunched over, and had its back to the Blacklions. When Kagur squinted, she could just make out variations in the texture of it that might indicate the layered fur and leather garments of a Kellid hunter. She shifted her grip on the hilt of her sword, and she and Eovath headed for the shadow.

A second black shape plummeted down onto the giant's back.

The dead were not meant to walk.

Clinging to the giant like a child riding his father's shoulders, his assailant ripped at him, maybe with a dagger, maybe with something else. In the darkness, Kagur couldn't tell.

She sprang forward to cut at the attacker, but Eovath reeled around and inadvertently shielded the thing clinging to his back with his own towering body. He dropped his axe to clank on stones on the canyon floor, reached back over his shoulder, and yanked his foe from his perch, smashing it down onto the ground with a bellow.

Kagur's belly tightened in loathing, not because the creature was hideous—although it was—but because she suspected it had once been human. It still had the general form of a man and wore a man's garments. But it was so withered and shriveled that by rights, it should have had no strength at all, and its nails and teeth alike had grown long and jagged-sharp. The dark, slanted eyes in its pale face were featureless, without differentiated whites, irises, or pupils, and its ears were pointed. The carrion stench Kagur had smelled at the site of the massacre and at intervals along the trail emanated from its body.

To her surprise, the creature wrenched itself free of Eovath's grip and started to roll to its feet. She lashed out, cutting through the side of its neck until steel grated against spine. It flopped back down onto the ground, thrashed, and then lay still.

Eovath was swaying, and blood from his claw wounds stained his tunic. "How badly are you hurt?" Kagur asked him.

Nearly pitching forward in the process, he stooped and fumbled for his battleaxe. "Behind you!" he croaked.

She whirled. More shadows were rearing up from the creek. She hadn't realized it was deep enough to hide something the size of a man, but it evidently was.

The things rushed her. So did their comrade farther up the gorge, the lure that she and Eovath had hoped was Dron.

Hoping to surprise them, she charged the gaunt, pale things splashing out of the water. One surprised her instead by throwing a dagger, but she saw the gleam of metal just in time to twitch aside. The blade spun past her.

A creature sprang at her with outstretched claws, and she cut at its head and sliced half its face away. It fell, but as she pivoted to meet the next one, it started to stand back up.

No living man or beast could have shaken off the effects of a wound like that. She realized that if she and Eovath hadn't found ghosts, they'd at least come close. For the foes rushing at her were almost certainly some manner of undead, perhaps the skulking, corpse-eating brutes called ghouls.

She cut into the next one's chest, and it snarled and lunged, driving her sword deeper into itself in its frenzy to reach her. She tried to jump back and yank the blade free, but the ghoul was quick and prevented her from opening up the distance. Its clawed fingers grabbed her leather-clad forearm, and it leaned forward and opened its fanged jaws wide.

Using her off hand, she snatched a dirk from her belt and drove it into the middle of the living dead man's forehead. The creature collapsed with her longsword still embedded in its torso.

She yanked the sword free and cut in a single motion, barely in time to hold back another onrushing ghoul, this one discernibly female by virtue of its bouncing, withered breasts and swinging amber necklace. Without pausing, Kagur turned and slashed again at the one with half a face, which had by now regained its feet. It recoiled, and the attack fell short.

Kagur had always imagined the walking dead to be slow and clumsy, but the ghouls were nimble and inhumanly resilient. As she struck repeatedly, whirling and dodging all the while in an effort to keep her foes from surrounding and swarming over her as a group, she came to the uncomfortable realization that they might well overwhelm her.

Particularly if she had to go on fighting alone. Somehow, despite the incessant pressure exerted by the ghouls and the need to respond to the threat after threat, she managed to cast about and spot Eovath in the darkness.

His head bowed, the giant was down on one knee. Plainly not dead, thank Gorum! But why wasn't he fighting? Had the first ghoul wounded him that severely?

Suddenly, Kagur glimpsed a shadow, a ghoul apparently seeking easier prey than she was proving to be, darting in on the giant's flank. She couldn't have reached it in time even if she hadn't had her own foes blocking the way. She could only gasp in a breath and shout, "Look out!"

The frost giant lifted his head, cast about, and swatted the ghoul away with the back of his hand. As it fell and rolled back to its feet, he groped to reclaim his axe.

At the same moment, a charging ghoul forced Kagur to refocus on her own situation. She slashed the clawed white fingers from her assailant's hand and crippled one leg with a cut to the knee. When it fell headlong, she scrambled right over the top of it and cut at the undead brute behind it. The stroke ripped open the ghoul's neck, but that only made it bare its fangs and gather itself to spring.

Eovath fared better. Looming up behind the ghoul, he chopped down at the top of its skull and split the creature all the way down to the breastbone.

Freeing the battleaxe and dumping the ghoul's remains to the ground with a flick of his wrists, he panted, "Don't let them scratch you! It steals your strength!"

"I wasn't... planning on it." Kagur feinted high and cut low, but her target sprang aside from the true attack. "Let's fight back to back!"

Once they did, things seemed less frantic. Kagur had instants when she could consider tactics, not simply react, and her sword struck home more often. She had little doubt that behind her, Eovath's axe was chopping and smashing to similar murderous effect.

"Blacklion!" she shouted. "Blacklion!" Then her brother took up the battle cry as well, their twin roars reverberating off the canyon walls.

After several more exchanges, and another ghoul sprawled maimed and motionless in the sand and stones on the canyon floor, it became clear the undead were attacking less relentlessly than before. It seemed likely they would soon retreat, and, grinning, Kagur resolved to give chase when they did. She wanted to slaughter all the filthy things.

Then, however, two whistled notes, the first short and the second sustained, shrilled down from the sky. Whereupon the ghouls did fall back, but plainly not of their own choosing.

A signal! Judging that locating the ghouls' hitherto unsuspected leader was more important than cutting the creatures down from behind, Kagur held her position. Struggling to control her breathing, sweat stinging in her eyes, she peered upward.

Leathery wings flapped, and a shape swooped down from on high. For a moment, Kagur couldn't make out anything to distinguish it from a gigantic bat. Once it lit on an outcropping partway up one of the walls, however, it was easier to distinguish other features. Though tufted with bristles, its body was mostly hairless and scaly like a snake's, and it had arms as well as wings. Its legs were as long as a man's but bent backward like a goat's and ended in feet with three splayed toes.

"Well," Kagur panted, "you wanted to see a demon." She had little doubt they were seeing one now. The thing certainly looked demonic.

"I didn't ask for a flying one." Moving slowly, Eovath stooped and picked up a stone. Giants were notorious for their ability to throw rocks, and unless the demon descended to the canyon floor, they would have no other way of striking at it.

Although maybe they wouldn't need to, for the fiend appeared to be paying them little heed. Instead, it raked its gaze over its followers, the ones still whole—or mostly so—that had gathered beneath its perch, as well as the crippled ones struggling to crawl in the same direction, and the inert forms Kagur and Eovath had dispatched outright.

When it had glared its fill, it bared its needle fangs and hissed. "Disobedient!"

Most of the ghouls cringed, but one glowered back. "Hungry!" it growled. "Starving!"

The demon sprang from its perch. The defiant ghoul tried to dodge out from underneath, but it was far too slow. The fiend slammed down on top of it, smashed it to the ground, and, stooping, beheaded it with two sweeps of the dagger-long talons on the fingertips of its oversized hands.

Kagur watched to see if the other ghouls would protest the fate of their fellow. But even if they felt any such impulse, their master had them too thoroughly cowed.

The fiend then pivoted and glared squarely at Kagur and her foster brother for the first time. Eovath immediately flung the rock. The missile caught the demon just above its batlike snout, but despite the force with which the giant had hurled it, the stone glanced away without doing any apparent harm. Ignoring the attack, the creature locked eyes with Kagur.

Her vision shifted. Though Kagur could see that the demon was still crouching over the headless ghoul, part of her suddenly had the feeling that it was springing at her. Or perhaps she was plummeting toward it, falling sideways in defiance of nature, into eyes that yawned like pits to swallow her. Cold pain shot through her, and her heart stuttered in her chest.

Coming Next Week: Demons and the dead in Chapter Three of Richard Lee Byers' "In Red Rune Canyon"!

Enjoying this story? Check out the further adventures of Kagur and Eovath in Called to Darkness, available now!

Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than thirty novels, including the Pathfinder Tales novel Called to Darkness (also starring Kagur and Eovath) and the first book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen series. In addition, he's also the co-creator of the critically acclaimed young adult series The Nightmare Club, and the author of a new urban fantasy series beginning with the novel Blind God's Bluff. He's written one previous Pathfinder Tales web fiction story, "Lord of Penance".

Illustration by Greg Opalinski.

In Red Rune Canyon

by Richard Lee Byers

Chapter One: A Difference of Opinion

The wind blowing in Kagur's face smelled of rot. She started running, and the soft earth, boggy with the coming of summer, sucked at her feet. Her five companions ran as well.

Eovath soon pulled ahead of everyone else. Like her, the blue-skinned frost giant was still growing, but he was already taller than any human tribe member, with longer legs and a longer stride.

He slowed down, though, when the several bodies on the ground came into view. It was too late to help them, and prudent to advance with caution in case their killers were still lurking about.

They didn't seem to be, though, which left Kagur free to inspect the corpses. The shredded flesh, glazed eyes, and flies that buzzed up into the air at her approach forced her to swallow away the stinging taste of bile.

Her squeamishness made her scowl. Like any Kellid warrior, she'd seen violent death before, and only one of the dead folk here had been a Blacklion like Eovath and herself. But they'd all become friendly since setting forth to hunt from a gathering of half a dozen tribes.

Borog straightened up from his examination of one of the corpses. A member of the Eagleclaw tribe, he was the oldest surviving member of the hunting party, with deep lines etched in his sun-bronzed face, pouches under his dark eyes, and white hairs speckling a close-cropped black beard. "Like the others," he said.

They'd all heard tales of other hunters encountering the same grisly end. They just hadn't let it deter them from roaming the prairie themselves. No true Kellid allowed fear to rule her, and even had it been otherwise, a tribe that didn't hunt wouldn't eat.

"Not all the others," Eovath said. His adolescent voice broke on the second word, but even then it was as deep as most men's.

Borog frowned. "How so?"

"The way I heard it," the frost giant said, "the first band of hunters fell dead without a mark on them. It was the latter ones that were torn apart."

The Eagleclaw warrior snorted. "And what does that tell you? That the first incident was something different than the slaughters that have happened since."

"Maybe not," Kagur said. Turning, she counted the corpses. "Supposedly, every band, including that first one, had one member carried off. And one of our own is missing: Dron."

Those who try to protect Kagur would be
better off protecting themselves.

One of the other hunters hurriedly checked Kagur's body count with the aid of a jabbing finger. Another touched the beaten silver good-luck charm hanging around her neck.

"All right," Borog growled, "maybe the same thing did kill the first party. At this point, what does it matter?"

"It doesn't," Kagur said. "What matters is picking up the trail." Studying the ground, she prowled away from the corpses, and after a moment, her companions followed her lead.

She hoped it would be easy to find tracks in the mucky earth, and bent blades among the new grass, and in fact, it was only a short time before Eovath called out: "Here! The sign isn't clear enough to tell what the killers are. But they came from the northeast and headed back that way, too."

"Let's see," Borog said. He stalked to where Eovath was standing, squatted to study the sign, then grunted in a way that suggested he agreed with the giant's reading.

"Let's move out," Kagur said, striding closer to the other two.

"No," Borog replied. "Red Rune Canyon is northeast."

Kagur blinked. That particular fact had momentarily eluded her. And while she'd only heard rumors about strange deaths on the tundra since the start of summer, she'd listened to tales about Red Rune Canyon her whole life. Every Kellid knew the place was cursed.

But in the present circumstances, that didn't matter. "We have to rescue Dron."

"Dron's dead," said Zorek, a lanky Eagleclaw of about Kagur's age. Blood had trickled out of his sleeve to stain the back of his hand. Several days previously, a ground sloth had clawed his forearm, and he picked at the scabby gash when no one was watching to slow the healing and make an impressive scar.

"You don't know that," Kagur said. "If the attackers wanted him dead, they could have killed him on the spot like they did everybody else. You don't know they really came from Red Rune Canyon, either."

"They could just be orc raiders out of the Hold of Belkzen," Eovath rumbled.

Borog shook his head. "Smell the rot in the air. Our friends haven't lain dead long enough to stink like that. That's the smell of the unnatural things that killed them."

Kagur scowled. "Maybe, but it doesn't change anything. Dron still needs rescuing, and our dead need avenging."

Borog took a breath. "Look around. There are fewer of us than there were of those who lost their lives already, and you, Zorek, and the giant are young and green. How do you expect to win where a stronger band of warriors already lost?"

"We can make a plan when we know more."

"Here's the plan," Borog said. "We'll return to our tribes, and the chiefs will decide what to do next. Maybe they'll decide to hunt and fight the killers properly, and you can ask permission to join the war party."

"By then, Dron will likely be dead or tortured."

"But you'll be alive, and Jorn Blacklion won't start a feud with the Eagleclaws because I let his idiot daughter come to harm."

"It's not for you to decide what the 'idiot daughter' will do," Kagur said. "You're not my chief, and I'm going after Dron even if nobody else does."

"No," said Borog, "you aren't."

If his voice changed, his eyes shifted, or his hand gestured to give a signal, Kagur didn't notice in a conscious way. But the rest of the hunters had drifted up behind her to listen to the conversation, and suddenly instinct screamed that they were reaching for her.

She tried to spring forward, but hands grabbed her forearms and held her back. She stamped on a foot and snapped her head backward into someone's teeth and jaw. That loosened the grips restraining her, and she wrenched herself free and spun around.

Spreading out to flank her, her three assailants came after her. Backing away, she reflexively reached for her longsword, and they faltered, as well they might. Young as she was, she was skilled with a blade, and they knew it.

But, her anger notwithstanding, she knew drawing a weapon would be stupid. She didn't want to kill folk from friendly tribes, especially when, as they saw it, they were only trying to stop her from coming to harm.

She hitched her foot, faking another step backward, and when they advanced, she threw herself at them. She punched Zorek in the solar plexus and made the breath whoosh out of him, but then her other two opponents grabbed her. One kicked her left foot out from underneath her, and they dumped her onto the ground.

Kagur thrashed but couldn't break their holds. Panting, Zorek came up behind them with a length of rawhide in his hands.

A big blue hand caught him by the shoulder and flung him aside. Then Eovath bashed the other hunters away from her with two sweeps of his fist.

Grateful as she was for the help, Kagur winced. Eovath was stronger than any human, and he hadn't held back.

Fortunately, her assailants weren't seriously hurt, as they demonstrated by scrambling back to their feet. Unfortunately, they too deemed that the confrontation had escalated from a scuffle to a deadly serious fight, and they snatched for the weapons slung from their belts.

Eovath lunged, caught Zorek before he could ready his axe, and heaved him into the air by his throat and arm. The lanky Eagleclaw's face turned red, and he made gurgling sounds.

Borog hefted a javelin. The upper edge of the leaf-shaped steel point glinted in the morning sunlight. "Let him go."

"You might kill me," Eovath said, his yellow eyes gleaming like the spear point, "but not fast enough to keep me from killing your kinsman. One shake snaps his spine. One squeeze crushes his windpipe."

"No!" cried Kagur, leaping to her feet. "I mean, no to both of you! Borog, what's the sense of killing us to keep us from risking our lives?"

"I never threatened to kill you," Borog replied without taking his eyes off Eovath. "Only the slave."

She put her hand on her sword hilt. "Eovath is my brother, and if you hurt him, you'd better kill me."

Borog's jaw tightened. "Fine. Go. Your father must know what a stubborn fool you are. Maybe he won't blame me."

Eovath sneered and tossed Zorek away.

Once Kagur and the giant were on the trail and sure their erstwhile companions weren't following, she asked, "What were you going to do if they called your bluff?"

The giant smiled a crooked smile. "What makes you think I was bluffing?"

"You wouldn't really kill friends of the Blacklions."

"They didn't seem much like friends when they jumped you."

Still, she doubted their father would have approved. But if Kagur and Eovath had offended the Eagleclaws, Jorn Blacklion would make amends with gracious words and gifts. Meanwhile, his daughter and foster son had a hunt to complete. She paused to inspect the ground before them, then pointed at the clearest track she'd found so far: the unmistakable impression of a boot.

Eovath nodded. "You were right. Dron isn't dead. In fact, he's fit enough for his captors to march him along."

For a moment, Kagur was certain that was the way of it. Then she noticed additional tracks a couple paces farther along. "I hope so. But look here. The 'captors' were wearing boots, too."

Eovath grunted. "Then maybe they are orc raiders, despite the putrid smell. Or Kellids turned bandit."

Kagur looked up at him. "You sound disappointed."

"Haven't you ever been curious to see a ghost or a demon?"

"I suppose. Is that why you agreed we should come after Dron?"

"I agreed because no one should be dragged off into slavery."

Kagur frowned. "You're not a slave, despite what Borog said. No Blacklion thinks of you that way. Not anymore. Not for a long while."

The frost giant shrugged his massive shoulders. "We should keep moving."

They did, loping across windswept tundra and past ponds surrounded by patches of yellow-green moss and stunted diamond-leaf willows. When the trail led near ripe red bearberries, they gobbled some and picked more for later. Gray-white hawks with crimson beaks floated in the sky, and wild mammoths trumpeted in the west.

Animals grew scarcer, though, as the terrain became hillier and the trackers drew near to Red Rune Canyon. By the time the sun was sinking toward the western horizon, and the notch between two stony walls came into view, Eovath and Kagur were the only moving, breathing things in sight.

"It's nearly dark," Eovath said. "We could camp here and head in come morning."

Kagur shook her head. "Let's cover as much ground as we can."

Unfortunately, that wasn't a great deal more, for when, peering about for lurking orcs and other dangers, they prowled into the mouth of the canyon, they found it was already twilight inside. They had to stop not long thereafter lest they risk losing the trail.

They camped beside the creek that ran down the center of the gorge and supped on more bearberries and bison jerky. Kagur had swamp tealeaves in her pack as well, but it would be foolish to build a fire to brew a beverage. Someone or something might spot the light. So far, however, Red Rune Canyon had done nothing to justify its sinister reputation.

Later, when Eovath was on watch and sleep continued to evade her despite the day's exertions, Kagur came to a decision. "It's just orcs. Orcs bold and cunning enough to hole up where humans are afraid to go."

"What about the rotten smell?" Eovath replied.

"How many clean orcs have you fought?"

"What about the first hunting party, slain without a mark on them?"

"I don't know, but—"

Eovath suddenly peered farther down the canyon. "Something's there."

Coming Next Week: The dark secrets of Red Rune Canyon in Chapter Two!

Enjoying this story? Check out the further adventures of Kagur and Eovath in Called to Darkness, available now!

Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than thirty novels, including the Pathfinder Tales novel Called to Darkness (also starring Kagur and Eovath) and the first book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen series. In addition, he's also the co-creator of the critically acclaimed young adult series The Nightmare Club, and the author of a new urban fantasy series beginning with the novel Blind God's Bluff. He's written one previous Pathfinder Tales web fiction story, "Lord of Penance".

Illustration by Eric Belisle.

Called to Darkness Sample Chapter

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

In Called to Darkness, Kagur, a warrior of the Blacklion tribe in the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, is horribly betrayed by her adopted brother, a frost giant named Eovath. Driven insane by the whispers of the mad god Rovagug, Eovath slaughters his adopted family and heads down through the Earthnavel into a strange cavern forgotten by time, inhabited by primitive peoples and enormous saurian beasts. There, in the darkness, Kagur must slay him and take vengeance for her lost kin—or die trying...

Chapter One: The Last Feast

For a moment, everyone fell quiet at once, and Kagur heard the wind howling outside the Blacklions' meeting tent, a long, peak-roofed shelter pieced together from the tanned hides of mammoths, giant sloths, and other enormous beasts. Then the wood burning in one of the fire pits cracked. Yellow flame leaped, sparks flew upward, and as if that had broken a spell, the whole tribe resumed its clamor.

Annik struck up a fresh tune on a harp shaped from caribou antler and strung with reindeer gut.

Grinning like one of the snow foxes that had given its fur to make his tunic, Roga told a joke. Kagur couldn't catch it all, but like most of Roga's pun-laden humor, it must have been awful. It elicited groans and prompted Taresk to peg a well-gnawed elk bone across the trestle table at him.

Zonug held up his silver-chased drinking horn, and eight-year-old Dron came scurrying. When the boy failed to fill the vessel all the way to the brim, Zonug made a show of peering inside it, mock scowled, and bellowed, "By Gorum's blood-red eyes! Who's pouring here, Ganef of the Fivespears?"

That sally did make people laugh. The chieftain of the Fivespears tribe was much disliked for his stingy, conniving ways.

In fact, Kagur reflected, Ganef was the antithesis of all that a proper Kellid chieftain should be—which was to say, the antithesis of her father. Sitting straight and tall, the gray eyes of a Blacklion keen and his mane of hair raven-dark despite his advancing years, Jorn turned and told Eovath to tap another cask of Tian brandy.

Even more than their generous, valorous leader, or the preserved skull of the gigantic man-eating cave lion their first chieftain had slain generations before, Eovath was the emblem of Blacklion pride, for only the bravest tribes captured and adopted frost giants. Twice as tall as a man but with a build so thick and muscular he nonetheless looked squat, Eovath had long, straw-colored hair, eyes to match, and skin the blue of the sky at dusk. To Kagur, his features looked less brutish and more intelligent than those of other frost giants, and she sometimes wondered if the love and care of humans had so improved him that the benefit even showed in his face.

How could Eovath do such a thing?

For much of his life, Eovath had sat by Jorn at the head of the table. He needed to be where the ceiling was highest to keep his head from bumping against it. Still, when he rose in response to his foster father's command, it did anyway, even though he didn't straighten up all the way. Moving with care so as not to jostle anyone or anything, he picked up the brandy cask. His prodigious strength and enormous hands managed it easily.

Kagur considered staying and sharing the brandy. After all, the liquor and wine that came over the Crown of the World were rare treats. If the tribe hadn't fared exceptionally well hunting this past season, amassing fine wolf and bear pelts and caribou hides in abundance, her father couldn't have afforded to trade for it. It would certainly warm the blood on a frigid winter night.

But she didn't actually need drink to warm her, or the flames in the fire pits, either. Stroking her thigh beneath the table, Dolok's hand was more than sufficient.

She liked Dolok. He had a quick, crooked smile, and was nimble and clever enough to make her work at sword practice. He obviously saw something to like in her as well, and they'd grown amorous in recent weeks, kissing and fondling until she made him stop.

She'd already decided that tonight would be the night they wouldn't stop. Once the feast was in full swing and everyone was tipsy, they'd slip away unnoticed.

She'd just as soon avoid the bawdy jokes of the rest of the tribe, good-natured though they would be. And as for her father, well, it was one of the great mysteries of life how he knew perfectly well that she was a grown woman—indeed, one of his ablest warriors and hunters—yet could only see her as a fragile little girl whenever lovemaking was in the offing.

She nodded toward the nearest exit. Dolok grinned in response. They rose and made their way toward the end of the tent.

As Dolok untied the rawhide knots that secured the flap, Kagur glanced around to see if their departure really was going unremarked. Pouring brandy into the leather wineskins in the hands of Dron and the other child servers, Eovath looked back at her.

She might have expected a smirk, a wink, or even a reflection of their father's characteristic frown of disapproval. Instead, he looked ...relieved? About what?

Dolok pulled back the flap, and a blast of cold wind and swirling snowflakes blew the question out of her mind. She hastily followed him out into the night.

The snowdrifts were halfway to her knees and crunched as she waded through them. Clouds covered the moon and stars, and the other tents were merely shadows in the dark. So were the mammoths standing shaggy and stolid, impervious to the worst the blizzard could do.

Kagur took Dolok's hand and drew him into a supply tent. "Whew!" he said, smiling. "It's not much warmer in here!"

"I know what to do about that," she said.

They clung together and kissed for a while. His mouth tasted of the bison he'd eaten and the ale he'd drunk.

She started unlacing and unbuckling his clothing of fur, hide, and leather, and he did the same for her. When their garments were open, and they could touch in ways they hadn't before, they lay down together.

At that point, he took the lead, kissing and caressing. Content for the moment to be passive, she closed her eyes and enjoyed it.

Someone screamed.

"What was that?" Kagur gasped.

Dolok lifted his head. "What?"

"Someone cried out."

He grinned. "That was you, honeycomb."

"Someone else cried out."

"Then it was the wind. It's howling like a pack of wolves."

He was right. Perhaps her imagination was playing tricks on her. Surely no enemy would come raiding on a night like this, and if one did, the mammoths would trumpet a warning.

She smiled. "The wind. Yes. Sorry." She settled back, inviting him to resume his attentions. But as soon as he obliged, she heard another shriek.

When she tensed, Dolok frowned. "What now?" he asked.

"You must have heard it that time."

"No."

"Then my ears are sharper than yours. Get up!"

"Curse it, Kagur!" But he did as instructed.

When they mostly had their garments refastened against the cold, she hurried back out into the night, and he followed. On first inspection, the meeting tent looked no different than before.

"See?" Dolok said. "Everything's fine."

"Maybe." But she led him onward anyway.

Another scream shrilled, louder and unmistakable now that they were closer.

"Lord in Iron!" Dolok said.

Floundering in the snow, they ran to the tent flap. Kagur tugged the edge back, and they peered through the crack.

Every human in the tent was down, either slumped across one of the tables or sprawled on the ground. Some moaned or stirred, barely, like swatted flies still clinging to a trace of life. Some were utterly still, and a number of the latter group lay hacked and dismembered in pools of blood.

Grinning, his yellow eyes shining like molten gold in his blue face, Eovath was doing the chopping with a huge axe the Blacklions had taken as a trophy on the same day they'd seized the giant himself. Gore dripped from the weapon's edge and stained his arms all the way to the elbows.

This is a dream, Kagur thought. He couldn't do this. He's my brother.

Then Eovath turned toward Annik, who lay on her side with her fingers still tangled in her harp strings, and raised the axe. Kagur's incredulity shattered. This horrible thing was happening, and if she didn't intervene immediately, Eovath would murder Annik and then move on to another victim, and another after that, until no human in the tent was left alive.

But what could Kagur do? Kellids were a warrior race, and none more than the Blacklion tribe, but even so, neither she nor Dolok had carried weapons to the feast.

The only option was to talk to Eovath. Talk, stall him, and hope that, as she'd always believed, he loved his foster sister.

"Arm yourself," she whispered to Dolok. "Take him from behind." She gave him a shove to start him moving.

Then she yanked the gap between the flap and the rest of the tent wider and squirmed through. "Wait!" she shouted.

Eovath pivoted and looked her over. Then he sighed and lowered the axe slightly. "When you left without drinking the poison, I thought you were out of it," he rumbled in a voice deeper than any human's. "I thought the Rough Beast had granted me a favor."

"'The Rough Beast?'" That made no sense, either. The Blacklions had raised Eovath to revere Gorum and, to a lesser extent, Desna, the same as they did. Only the worst and maddest people worshiped Rovagug, god of annihilation and wrath—a being so mighty and infinitely malevolent that, at the dawn of time, both good and evil deities had combined forces to imprison him, lest he destroy the world. Even that hadn't rendered him entirely powerless, and from time to time he still created earthquakes and terrible beasts to ravage the lands of men.

The frost giant nodded. "He talks to me. In my dreams, mostly, but sometimes I hear him even when I'm awake."

"How could that be?" Kagur asked. Blood dripped from the edge of a table. Across the tent, someone retched. "You're not a shaman."

"No," Eovath said, "but I will be. It's part of his plan for me."

"Listen," Kagur said. "You're confused, and it's making you do bad things. You're killing your own tribe. Your family."

Eovath spat. "My family died a long time ago."

It took her a moment to guess what he meant. "The other giants? Your blood kin?"

"Who else? You've heard the story often enough. How your father and the rest of the Blacklions slaughtered my tribe and carried me off into slavery."

"You're not a sla—"

"Don't lie to me!"

She took a breath. "All right. It's true, that's what they call it. But Father raised you like his own son."

"To make me forget my real father and turn me into a traitor to my own kind."

Kagur felt like she was saying all the wrong things. What did she know about reasoning with lunatics? Where in the name of keen iron was Dolok?

"Eovath," she said, "brother ...humans raid giants, but giants raid humans, too. It's just the way things are."

"But not the way they have to be."

She hesitated. "I don't understand."

"Down in the depths, a sun shines in the darkness, and a pyramid rises under the sun. That's where I'll find what I need to do my work."

"What does that mean?"

He grinned. "I don't know. But the Rough Beast will guide me, through the Earthnavel and beyond."

"Can't you hear how crazy you sound? But if you want to go on a journey, just do it. You don't need to kill all the people who love you."

"Yes, I do. Rovagug wouldn't help me if I didn't sacrifice to him, and even if he would, the spirits of my real tribe are calling out for vengeance. They won't be satisfied until every human is driven from the tundra."

She stared into his yellow eyes. "Even me?"

He winced. "I told you I wanted to spare you. I still do. Just go to one of the other tents and don't come out till morning."

"You know I can't do that."

"I suppose I knew you wouldn't." He lifted the axe and advanced on her, stepping over the dead and the helpless, leaving footprints in the pools of blood.

Kagur reached past a corpse with a smashed skull for a wooden platter. The grilled ribs of an aurochs tumbled off as she grabbed it up and skimmed it at Eovath's head. Not even breaking stride, he knocked it aside with a flick of the axe.

She grabbed a stool and flung that. He chopped and again prevented the blow, but he ended up with the stool stuck on the blade of the axe. With a scowl, he started to shake it loose.

At that instant, when he was at least partly distracted, Kagur grabbed a knife smeared with grease and flecks of bear meat. It wasn't a proper weapon, just the kind of tool every Kellid carried for eating, mending harness, and whittling tent pegs. But it was a length of steel with a point, and she hurled it at Eovath's heart.

It only had a short distance to travel, but even so, he jerked to the side, and the spinning knife only pierced his left biceps. He bellowed, shook the remains of the stool off the axe, and charged.

With the walls of the tent hemming her in, Kagur only had one place to go. She sprang and rolled over the tabletop, upsetting trays and dishes in the process. For an instant, she found herself gazing into the glazed gray eyes of Roga's severed head, and then momentum carried her onward. She tumbled off the other edge of the table into someone's lap—she didn't see whose, or if he was alive or dead. He toppled backward, and they crashed to the ground together.

It knocked the wind out of her, but she didn't dare let it slow her down. She scrambled to her feet just as Eovath grabbed the long, heavy tabletop between them. With a grunt, he flipped it up off the trestles and sent it spinning at her.

She flung herself backward, and the makeshift weapon just missed her. Unfortunately, it couldn't miss all the incapacitated Blacklions sprawled on the ground. A woman cried out as the weight smashed down on her.

Kagur resisted the urge to look down and find out who it was. She kept her eyes on her foe.

Who, intentionally or not, had just cleared a larger space for the two of them to fight in. With bodies, severed limbs, benches, trays, drinking horns, and chunks of roast meat strewn about, the footing would be treacherous. But that was true of the rest of the tent as well, and maybe with a little more room to maneuver, Kagur could use her speed and agility to at least hold out until Dolok returned.

She glanced at a table next to the open space. She grabbed a long carving knife—it verged on being a proper weapon, even though it seemed like a bad joke compared to Eovath's axe—for her right hand and somebody else's eating knife for her left. Then she edged forward.

Her foster brother snorted. "Truly?" he asked.

She didn't bother to answer with words. She simply rushed in, and the axe whirled to meet her. She ducked the horizontal stroke and kept coming.

The low ceiling was already awkward for Eovath, and getting in close seemed the best way to further turn his size into a handicap. At that distance, big warriors had difficulty hitting smaller ones.

Or at least that was how it was supposed to work. But Eovath was an expert combatant, and after the hundreds of times they'd practiced together, he understood exactly what she was doing and why. He strove to keep his distance and, when she got close anyway, met her with elbow strikes and jabs with the butt of the axe. Meanwhile, his vest of boiled leather stopped her stabs and slashes from reaching his vitals. As often as not, the attacks failed to penetrate at all.

Eovath chopped at her head. She stepped back out of range, caught her ankle on something, and staggered, struggling not to fall.

The giant charged. The axe flashed at her, she twisted, and the weapon passed so near that it snagged in her mantle and ripped free.

Eovath hesitated, as if he imagined he'd actually struck her. Kagur recovered her balance and darted in. She stabbed his hip where the vest didn't cover and lunged on by.

He roared and whirled with blood already welling from the puncture. They glared at one another, circled, and then he let go of the axe with his left hand and gripped it with the right alone.

Evidently, Kagur decided, the knife still jutting from his left forearm was bothering him. At first, he'd scarcely seemed to notice the wound, but now it must be painful enough that he needed to let the damaged limb dangle.

Which meant Kagur should attack his left side. It would be harder for him to swing the axe across his body to hit or block her there. Only a little bit harder, but little advantages were all she had.

Pivoting, fixing her gaze on the crook of his right arm, she raised the carving knife as if for a throw. He sneered but also poised himself to bat the blade out of the air.

Instantly, she charged at his left flank. She'd cut even lower this time, hamstring him and dump him on the ground, then slash his throat as it came within reach.

She could see the sequence of events so vividly it was like it was already happening. Perhaps that was why it caught her so completely by surprise when Eovath's left arm, the one she'd thought useless, snapped into motion.

She tried to stop short, but it was too late. Looking like a sliver in his enormous hand, Eovath's dagger drove into her midsection. It didn't exactly hurt, but she felt a kind of shock all through her body, like she was made of shattering ceramic. She stumbled back and fell with the blade still buried inside her.

She struggled to understand what was happening, but it didn't make any sense. She was supposed to outwit and outfight Eovath, and he was supposed to fall down. Everything was the wrong way around.

She looked at the hilt of the dagger and realized she knew it well. Her father had fashioned it himself, carving it to look like a crouching cave lion and staining the pale bone dark. Then he'd presented it to Kagur to give to Eovath as a token indicating that the tribe now trusted him with weapons.

The giant gazed down at her with tears running down his cheeks, washing away the specks of gore that had splashed that high. "I'm sorry," he said.

She could see he meant it, that he truly did love her. Insane though it might be, she felt a surge of love in return. Somehow the emotion managed to well up inside her without in any way diminishing her horror, grief, and rage. She'd never known it was possible to feel so many different things at the same time.

She was still marveling at it when she glimpsed Dolok creeping up behind Eovath. Her lover had armed himself with a longsword and a round shield of wood covered in leather.

The sight of him cut through the daze her injury had engendered. She struggled to control her expression lest it change and so warn Eovath of the peril at his back.

Apparently, she managed it. Her foster brother just kept looking down at her and weeping. She felt a kind of vicious eagerness—another emotion to add to the stew—to see Dolok cut him down.

But the toe of Dolok's boot bumped a wooden cup lying amid the gory litter on the floor. The cup rolled and clicked against a platter.

It was a tiny sound, and Kagur insisted to herself that Eovath wouldn't hear it over the wail of the wind outside the tent. But he plainly did, for he started to pivot.

Dolok charged, and his sword flashed yellow in the firelight. Eovath finished turning just in time to parry the cut with his axe.

The giant struck back, and Dolok blocked with his shield. He had it angled to make the axe glance off, yet even so, Eovath's strength knocked him backward.

Eovath advanced and struck again immediately. Step by step, he pushed his opponent back. The relentless pressure kept Dolok from making many attacks of his own, and when he did, the axe deflected the sword with a clang of steel on steel.

I have to help, Kagur thought. I have to! But when she tried to stand, agony ripped through her middle and paralyzed her.

With his back nearly against the wall of the tent, Dolok finally landed a cut to Eovath's wrist. Then, at last, the frost giant faltered. At once, Dolok bellowed, feinted to the knee, then spun his sword up for a slash to the torso.

Undeceived, Eovath stepped in and brushed aside the true attack. Then, not even bothering to chop with the edge, he simply rammed the top of the axe into Dolok's face. Bone crunched, and the human flew backward into the wall of the tent, bounced back, and collapsed. Blood flowed out around his head.

When Eovath turned back around, his face was once again a mask of malice, without a trace of the love, regret, and perhaps even guilt Kagur had seen there previously. He was ready to finish off the rest of the tribe, and she was helpless to prevent it.

Or nearly helpless. She couldn't save anyone else, but if she played dead, perhaps he wouldn't feel the need to hack her to pieces.

She tried it, and rather to her surprise, it worked. Eovath didn't hurt her any further. But she still had to endure the thuds of the axe striking home, to listen to the occasional truncated cry or whimper without crying out and giving herself away.

She felt like the slaughter would never end. And in fact, she passed out before it did.

Want more? Check out Called to Darkness in paperback or ePub format!

Coming Next Week: A brand new, standalone story featuring the earlier adventures of Kagur and Eovath!

Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than thirty novels, including the first book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen series. In addition, he's also the co-creator of the critically acclaimed young adult series The Nightmare Club, and the author of a new urban fantasy series beginning with the novel Blind God's Bluff. He's written one previous Pathfinder Tales story, "Lord of Penance."

Illustration by Eric Belisle.

Lord of Penance

by Richard Lee Byers

Chapter Four: Under Siege

For a moment, nothing made sense. Then Sefu realized that he and Leyli were lying twitching and entangled on the floor. She looked sunburned in spots and patches, and bits of her robe were smoking.

His spastic, helpless shuddering subsided, and to his relief, hers did too. "Are you all right?" he croaked.

"I think so."

"Stay down." Following his own advice, still shaking a little, he looked around for Olhas. The gillman was drawing himself to his hands and knees. Behind him, the window frame was gone, and little flames danced around the splintered hole where it had been. There was a similar hole in the ceiling.

"Lightning bolt," Olhas groaned.

"I know," Sefu said. He'd seen the effects of such spells during naval combat, when mages tried to blast each another's ships to pieces.

Plainly, Domitian and his followers had somehow tracked Leyli, Olhas, and him to the tenement. Spotting his quarries through the window, the rakshasa had hurled the thunderbolt. Fortunately, since he was on the ground and the flop was on the third story, the angle was bad. The lightning hadn't hit any of its targets squarely.

"Can Domitian throw another one?" Sefu asked.

Olhas shook his head. "I don't know."

Sefu turned back to Leyli. "How many ruffians does Domitian have working for him altogether?"

"Maybe a dozen?"

"We shouldn't stay here," Olhas said. "That door won't keep anybody out for more than a moment."

"I know," Sefu said. "Give us some cover."

Olhas faced the remains of the window and rattled off a rhyme. On the final syllable, he flicked his fingers like he was flinging drops of water. Thick gray fog puffed into existence in the center of the space.

"Now, up there." Sefu pointed at the hole in the ceiling.

Olhas flashed a grin. "Right." He jumped, caught hold of the ragged edges, and hauled himself up. Sefu lifted Leyli up to his friend, then jumped and clambered through the hole himself.

At the moment, this flop was unoccupied. Good—they had enough to worry about without a terrified tenant demanding explanations.

"They'll know where we went," Leyli said.

"But they'll need a moment to think about it," Olhas replied, "and during that moment, they'll be vulnerable. Step back from the hole."

Sefu hurried to the door and pressed his ear against it. On the other side, rushing footsteps thudded on the stairs, and then something crashed. Someone had kicked in the door to the room below.

Behind Sefu, Olhas whispered. After all the battles in which they'd stood together, Sefu understood what the gillman had in mind. At the moment their foes gathered underneath the hole and peered up, he'd step up to the edge and drop an attack spell on their heads. It would work if his timing was good.

Meanwhile, Sefu drew his sword, eased open the door, and stalked down the stairs toward the third floor landing. When the screaming started, he broke into a run, bounding down the remaining risers three at a time.

He burst back into the flat he and Olhas had rented to see that Domitian hadn't ascended the stairs himself, nor had he sent every ruffian at his command. The first wave consisted of five half-orcs. One was on his knees shrieking with his hands clapped over his eyes. A second was rolling on the floor in an effort to extinguish the yellow flames leaping up from his clothing.

That left Sefu to contend with the other three. The first one was easy enough. He was still turning around when the Wave Rider dropped him with a cut to the head.

But Sefu wasn't fast enough to kill the others before they came on guard, and as they did, he recognized Red Eyes and the Runt. Maybe they'd volunteered to break into the flop because they wanted to finish what they'd started on the Avenue of the Hopeful.

"Come on, then," Sefu said, retreating toward the landing. If he made it out the door, the half-orcs would have to come at him one at a time.

But they didn't let him get that far. They bellowed and rushed him.

The deceptive, evasive footwork, alternately gliding and explosive, that was a mainstay of many a swordsman's game and had served Sefu well in the Irorium was impossible here. The flop was too cramped. Fortunately, he'd learned a less elegant but still effective style of fighting on the decks of pirate ships, squashed in among dozens of other frenzied combatants with scarcely room to shift an inch. He parried Red Eyes's head cut with his blade and, not caring if he cut himself, grabbed the Runt's scimitar just as the latter was starting his attack. He snap-kicked Red Eyes in the knee, and the larger half-orc stumbled backward.

The Runt pulled on the scimitar. Sefu had to let go, otherwise the edge would have sliced his fingers to the bone or severed them entirely. But he cut while the ruffian was still yanking his weapon backward. The broadsword sheared into the Runt's chest. The half-orc's knees buckled, and he collapsed.

By then, Red Eyes was limping forward again. Sefu met him with a feint to the flank that drew a sweeping parry, then slashed his throat. The half-orc fell backward.

That should have been the end of it. But amazingly, the ruffian who'd been rolling on the floor had succeeded in putting himself out, and he was still game. He rushed Sefu with an axe raised high. Sefu half-severed the half-orc's weapon hand with a stop cut to the wrist, then braced himself to keep his foe from knocking him over when they slammed together. He succeeded in bulling the tough backward instead, and dropped him with a cut to the flank.

Making sure they were all really dead or incapacitated, Sefu took another look at the half-orcs. Then, blood dripping from his off hand, he strode back out onto the landing. Nobody else was coming up the stairs, not yet, but after a moment, Olhas and Leyli hurried down.

"Your hand!" his sister said.

"It's nothing." Sefu looked at Olhas. "That was a good start. But there are still only two doors in or out of this building, and you know Domitian's watching them both."

"So what do you think?" Olhas asked.

"Take the fight to them. Before they realize the lightning bolt didn't do any serious harm to either one of us, and that we killed the first troupe of clowns they sent in after us."

Sefu grinned. "We're still outnumbered and have no idea what other tricks the rakshasa can play. But those petty quibbles aside, I like it."

"Let's go, then."

"Wait." Leyli scurried into the flop and returned with a dirk, no doubt pilfered from one of the fallen half-orcs. "I know I don't know how to fight," she said, "but just in case I have to."

"Just try to stay away from them," Sefu said. He led his companions down the stairs.

He half expected more foes to intercept them before they reached the ground floor, but nobody did. "Front door or back?" he asked.

"They may be expecting the back," Olhas said, sliding a scroll from his sleeve.

"The front it is, then. Start reading, and I'll yank it open."

When he did, no one was in view. But when Olhas recited the final syllable of the trigger phrase, the two half-orcs who'd been pressed against the exterior wall to ambush whoever stepped through both flopped to the ground, overtaken by magical slumber. Sefu stabbed one of them in the chest as he rushed outside.

A voice bellowed, "They're here!" The call almost covered the clack of a crossbow, but not quite. Sefu threw himself to the ground, and the quarrel whizzed over his head.

He cast about, spotted the half-orc who'd shot at him, scrambled up, and charged. Realizing he couldn't cock and reload in time, the ruffian drew his sword. Sefu beat it out of line and cut to the chest. The half-orc dropped.

Sefu looked for the tough who'd shouted, and found him just as Olhas's darts of green light plunged into his torso. The half-orc fell, and he was the last foe in sight. Sefu wondered if he and his companions might actually be able to get away without any more fighting, and then, summoned by their comrade's cries, more enforcers ran around the corner of the building.

Sefu saw with a pang of dismay that there were at least half a dozen. Leyli's estimate had been low.

Despite the magic he'd already expended, Olhas proved to have enough left for at least one more potent attack. A red spark flew past Sefu into the midst of the half-orcs. There it boomed into a burst of flame that tore one of the men apart and flung two more through the air with their forms ablaze.

The rest faltered, and unwilling to let them recover their nerve, Sefu went for them. As he moved, he felt a sort of tingling rawness in the air around him, and caught a smell like the advent of a storm.

	"In Domitian's case, two heads just means twice as ugly."

He leaped to the side. Another lightning bolt blazed past him while he was still in the air. Standing with his arm outstretched at the thunderbolt's point of origin, Domitian popped into view, the charm of invisibility that had hidden him until this moment dissipating with the force of his attack.

Sefu slammed down onto the ground. Hot pain burned his skin, and his muscles jumped and clenched. Refusing to let that stop him, he floundered to his feet.

"Get Domitian!" Olhas called. "I'll handle the others!" He chanted words of power at the top of his lungs, drawing the half-orcs' attention, making sure they understood he was about to cast a spell.

Sefu lunged for the rakshasa.

He half expected Domitian to throw a third lightning bolt, but perhaps that magic needed a moment to renew itself, or maybe the rakshasa had simply lost faith in his ability to kill this particular foe with magic. For instead, he lifted his scimitar into a high guard and dropped his mask of humanity.

With its bared fangs and four glaring, slit-pupiled eyes, Domitian's true form was even more hideous than Sefu had imagined. But if the rakshasa expected the sight of it to make him falter, he was doomed to disappointment. It only made Sefu angrier.

He sensed Domitian's mind trying to pierce and twist his own, but that didn't work either, not anymore. It never had, really, and now it was just an annoyance, like a buzzing fly.

Sefu plunged across the distance and cut at the cat head on the left. The broadsword rang and rebounded from an invisible shield. Domitian's curved blade whirled at the Wave Rider's midsection. Still in the lunge, Sefu parried, then cut at the rakshasa's groin. Again, an unseen something interposed itself between the sword and its target.

Sefu gave a snarling cry, more expressive of determination than frustration. He recognized this magic as something Olhas sometimes used. And so Sefu understood that the conjured defense wasn't impregnable. It could be penetrated just like the guard of a common warrior.

Recovering forward, he feinted high, then low, then slashed at the cat face on the right. This time, the shield failed to jump in the way.

Unfortunately, it didn't have to. A stroke with all Sefu's strength behind it, a blow that should have sheared through bone to cleave the brain inside, merely sliced a shallow gash on Domitian's low, broad brow and skipped aside.

Domitian riposted with a chest cut. Sefu just managed to parry, then slashed at the rakshasa's extended sword arm. The broadsword tore the creature's sleeve but glanced off the skin beneath without leaving any mark at all.

Domitian laughed, his mirth ghastly in the high, inhuman voices of the cat heads. Then, perhaps deciding that he'd now taken Sefu's measure, he came on the offensive.

Though competent, Domitian wasn't as able a swordsman as his foe. But with his invisible floating shield and his innate resistance to harm, he didn't need to be. Screeching and spitting, contemptuous of anything Sefu did to try to stop him, he attacked relentlessly.

Sefu had to retreat one step, then two, then another, while rage burned hotter and hotter inside him. He would not let this loathsome creature win. But he also had no idea how to prevent it.

The scimitar flashed at his lower leg. Sefu jumped back, but a hair too slowly. He felt a sort of thump and fell on his side.

Domitian yowled and raised his blade to deliver the killing stroke—and went rigid instead. As Sefu scrambled to his knees and jerked his sword into some semblance of a guard, he saw Leyli behind the rakshasa, and the hilt of her dirk protruding from the creature's shoulder. Though it had by no means delivered a deathblow, the knife had penetrated the thing's hide.

Sefu's mind raced. Sailors' tales were full of mythical monsters that could only be killed in certain ways, or by specific types of weapons. Despite his own strength and a career soldier's barrage of pricey charms, his broadsword had done nothing—yet Leyli's dirk had bit through.

Well, if the edge of his blade couldn't slay a rakshasa, maybe the point could do the job.

Domitian whirled toward Leyli. She was too close for him to use the scimitar, so he raked at her throat with the talons of his off hand. She flung herself backward. The claws missed with barely an inch to spare.

"Get away!" Sefu gasped. "I can take him!" He heaved himself to his feet.

He discovered at once that his wounded leg didn't want to bear its fair share of his weight. He was going to limp.

He was also going to be using his heavy blade in a manner for which it was ill designed. A broadsword was a cutting weapon. Many warriors never used the point at all, except to administer the mercy stroke to a fallen, helpless foe.

But to hell with all of that. He now knew how to kill his adversary, and that was the only thing that mattered.

Trying to look like he could barely stand, Sefu exaggerated his hobble. Domitian took the bait and cut. Sefu parried; the blades clanged together, and the jolt shivered up his arm. He feinted low, then extended and exploded into a lunge.

The tip of the broadsword pierced Domitian's chest, at the spot where a human carried his heart—and, if the gods were kind, a rakshasa did, too. Then something clipped the underside of the blade; it was the rim of the invisible shield, which was jerking upward in an effort to knock the sword away. Pain stabbed up Sefu's lead leg—the wounded one—as his foot came down on the ground, and he toppled sideways.

But neither Domitian's attempt at defense nor the loss of balance mattered, because the broadsword drove deep. Once Sefu finished falling and lifted his head to look, he saw the rakshasa sprawled motionless with the blade sticking up out of him and swaying slightly from side to side.

That meant it was safe to look around the rest of the battlefield. Just visible in the dark, a half-orc was running away down an alley. The other ruffians lay dead or incapacitated with Olhas standing in the center of them. Sorcery alone hadn't been enough by the end. The gillman held his own bloody sword in his hand.

"Are you all right?" Olhas called.

Sefu inspected his leg and clamped a hand over the gash. Leyli came scurrying to help him, tearing a bandage from her robe. "I need a healer," he gritted, feeling the gnawing pain in a way he hadn't before, "but I'll live. What about you?"

"Fine." The gillman grinned. "No thanks to you. You did notice that there at the end, I was heroically fighting twenty foes while you diddled around with one."

Sefu snorted. "'Twenty?' I suspect it'll be a hundred, the next time you tell the tale. Why don't you make yourself really useful and go hire a litter? Or at least borrow a wheelbarrow."

"A wheelbarrow?" Olhas laughed. "Who do you think you are, the Primarch?" Positioning himself beneath one of Sefu's shoulders, he directed Leyli to take the other, and together they lifted Sefu until he was standing precariously on his good leg.

"Come on, soldier," Olhas said, "let's get out of here before anyone starts asking questions."

Together, the three of them limped down the road, and off into the night.

Coming Next Week: A long-awaited sample chapter from Winter Witch.

Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than thirty novels, including the first book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen, and the co-creator of the critically acclaimed Young Adult series The Nightmare Club. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. For more information, visit his website.

Art by Colby Stevenson

Lord of Penance

by Richard Lee Byers

Chapter Three: The Temple By Night

The waning moon had passed its zenith and was slipping westward, and although a city like Absalom never entirely slept, only a few scattered lights glowed amid the darkness, while the perpetual background drone had subsided to the faintest of hums.

Olhas peered down the silent street that led to Domitian's manor, rolled tension out of his shoulders, and said, "Ready?"

"If you are." Sefu hesitated. "You know, you don't have to do this."

Olhas raised his eyebrows. "Are you planning to work the magic yourself? That should be interesting."

"I mean, maybe I can bring her out just by being stealthy."

"And then what? Look, I understand all the ways this can go wrong. We could get killed breaking in or end up with the Graycloaks hunting us afterward. But if we stick together, we should be all right."

"All right, then. I owe you."

The gillman grinned. "You certainly do." He pulled up the black scarf around his neck to mask the lower half of his face. The rest of his clothing was just as dark and thus well suited to housebreaking.

Sefu tied on his own improvised mask. Then he and Olhas crept down the street toward Domitian's manor.

Olhas raised his hand for a halt, drew a vellum scroll from his sleeve, and unrolled it. Like the Wave Riders' somber clothing, the parchment repository of magic was something they'd purchased specifically for this enterprise. Though Olhas was a competent sorcerer, his innate power had its limits, and he wanted to conserve it to cleanse Leyli of Domitian's influence.

Eyes that could see deep underwater could also make out a trigger phrase even in the gloom, and Olhas read it in a whisper. The ink made a tiny crackling sound as the magic bound in the words discharged, and the writing crumbled into powder.

Meanwhile, Sefu peered at the window under the gable. He couldn't see the lookout at all, let alone discern whether or not the half-orc had succumbed to the spell. "Is he asleep?" he asked.

Olhas rerolled the scroll and slipped it back into his sleeve. "I guess we'll find out."

They sprinted toward the wrought-iron gate. Sefu didn't hear anyone shouting an alarm, and when they climbed over into the courtyard, it took them out of the lookout's field of vision. He hoped that when the half-orc woke, he'd imagine he'd simply drifted off naturally.

Keeping low, the Wave Riders crept on to the front door. Olhas squatted and whispered into the keyhole. The lock clicked, and the door swung ajar.

Sefu peered through. The foyer was unoccupied and, with the oil lamps extinguished, even darker than the night outside.

He and Olhas prowled up the stairs. They were proceeding on the assumption that Domitian's followers slept in the bedrooms, although Sefu actually wouldn't have been surprised to discover that the god-to-be kept his poor abused flock in the cellar.

It turned out that he didn't, although he apparently required them to lie on the floor instead of in the beds. The worshipers tossed, jerked, twitched, and moaned in their sleep. Squint as he might, Sefu often found it impossible to make out their features in the gloom, but he trusted Olhas to recognize Leyli when they came to her.

	"Olhas may not be the most attractive Wave Rider around, but he's a good man to have on your side."

A floorboard creaked. Sefu pivoted. A half-orc was leading a woman—Sefu thought it was the cultist who'd been made to pull her own teeth, though he wasn't sure—down the hall toward him, Olhas, and the room they'd just finished inspecting.

Sefu nearly snatched out his sword before realizing the ruffian wasn't showing any sign of agitation at the Wave Riders' presence. Apparently, thanks to their black garments, he's mistaken Sefu and Olhas for two of his fellows.

Sefu gave him a little wave. Then he and Olhas stepped into the bedroom and closed the door behind them. He hoped it was an unremarkable thing for one of the half-orcs to do.

Apparently it was, because the tough didn't come in after them or shout for help, either. Footsteps padded by, and then, farther down the corridor, another door opened and closed. Sefu suspected it was the one that he and Olhas had decided likely led to the master bedroom.

As they moved on, he tried not to imagine all the special degradations to which Domitian might be subjecting the woman in his private chamber in the middle of the night. Then a pair of high, perhaps inhuman voices began to yowl. The eerie cries echoed through the dark house, but if they woke any of the cult leader's followers, Sefu couldn't tell. Perhaps the magic that trammeled their minds kept them from hearing.

"By the Eye," Olhas whispered, sounding unsettled for once, "what is that? What's he doing to her?"

"I don't know," Sefu answered. "But our task is still to find Leyli and get her out of here."

And eventually they did find her, after climbing up to the third floor. Leyli lay sleeping beside another female cultist in a room that had evidently once belonged to a child. Ghostly in the trace of light shining through the open casement, clowns juggled, ropewalkers balanced, and bears danced in the mural on the wall.

Whispering, Olhas cast a second spell of slumber to make sure Leyli's roommate didn't wake. Then Sefu picked up his sister and set her on her feet. The gillman's magic had taken hold of her as well, and she slept on obliviously. Sefu supported her with one hand and covered her mouth with the other.

"Ready?" he asked.

Olhas removed the preserved tongue of a serpent and a bit of honeycomb from a hidden pocket in his belt. "Go."

Sefu shook Leyli. Meanwhile, holding both magical foci in his left hand, Olhas swept them through an S-shaped pass and whispered sibilant words of power.

Leyli stiffened in Sefu's grasp, then started to squirm and struggle. Olhas reached the end of his incantation and said, "Listen! Domitian sent us. He wants you to go with us and cooperate with us in every way."

Leyli stopped fighting. Sefu cautiously uncovered her mouth, and she didn't scream.

"Let's get out of here," Olhas said. He smiled at Leyli. "Quietly, please. Domitian doesn't want us to disturb the others."

She nodded slowly, in a dazed way that gave Sefu a pang of guilt. He'd come to restore her mind, not add yet another level of confusion and compulsion. But Olhas had assured him the effect was only temporary, and it really was the easiest way to sneak her out.

They all crept back down the staircase into the foyer. With the door to the outside world in view, Sefu felt himself relax at least a little.

Then a shaggy lupine beast stalked through one of the doorways on his right.

Sefu was more familiar with the creatures of the sea and coast than those of the forest and plain. Yet his instincts shouted that the creature was something more than a dog or even a wolf, and an instant later, it proved them correct by speaking.

"What's this?" it snarled.

The beast was a worg, then, a man-eating predator of near-human intelligence. And if it was serving as Domitian's watchdog, that was yet more evidence—not that Sefu needed any—that the god-to-be was a dastard of the vilest sort.

What Sefu did need was a way past the brute. Maybe he and Olhas could bluff it like they'd bluffed the half-orc in the hallway.

"Somebody wants to play with this skinny bitch," he said, trying to sound as coarse as any half-orc ruffian. "The Reaper knows why, especially at this hour. But he sent gold, so Tsadok and me have to deliver her."

The worg grunted, then snuffled. Sefu realized it was taking his and Olhas's scents. But before he could do anything about it, it lifted its head and howled.

Sefu whipped out his sword and rushed it. The worg broke off its cry to spring back and avoid his first cut. Maybe, if the Wave Riders were lucky, that bit of ululating wailing had blended in with the yowls still issuing from Domitian's bedchamber, and no one had noticed it.

In any case, Sefu had to deal with the beast, and quickly. He slashed at its head, but it sidestepped the stroke, then sprang.

Its front paws slammed into Sefu's chest and smashed him to the floor. Slavering jaws plunged at his throat.

Behind him, Olhas rattled off a word. Darts of green light stabbed into the worg's muzzle and shoulders, and it faltered at the shock. Sefu let go of his sword's hilt and grabbed it partway up the blade, so he could stab with it at close quarters. He thrust it between the creature's ribs.

Blood spurted. The worg shuddered, then collapsed on top of him. He lay panting under its rank, dead weight for a moment, then rolled the carcass to the side.

Leyli blinked. If she truly understood that a fight to the death had just taken place, no one could have told it from her demeanor. "Did you call me a name?" she murmured.

"No," Sefu said. He rose and yanked his sword out of the worg's body.

"We need to go now," Olhas said.

They boosted Leyli over the wrought-iron gate, and then the three of them hurried away down the street. Sefu kept glancing over his shoulder. As far as he could tell, no one was in pursuit, so after a time, he and Olhas took off their masks. There was no point in looking like thieves to whomever they might meet along the way.

Of course, he couldn't do anything about the worg's gore staining the front of his clothing, but fortunately, he and his companions didn't have far to walk. He and Olhas had rented a flop in a tenement just a couple blocks from the manor. The flop was a squalid little room, with a dank smell hanging in the air and roach droppings crunching underfoot, but it was a place to go to ground while the gillman did his work.

The flop contained a sagging cot with a no-doubt-flea-infested straw tick and a single rickety chair. Olhas set the latter in the middle of the floor and motioned for Leyli to take a seat. "Please," he said.

She sat.

The gillman murmured a rhyme, crooking and uncrooking his fingers all the while. Then he walked around and around Leyli, peering at her from every angle.

After what felt like a long time, Sefu asked, "Are you doing anything?"

"I'm learning everything I can about what Domitian did to her, so as to have the best possible chance of undoing it. If I'm working too slowly to suit you, my abject apologies."

"I just want you to get it done before the spell that's making her biddable wears off."

Leyli slowly rubbed her temple with her fingertips. "What? A spell?"

"It's nothing," Olhas said. "Just relax." He looked at Sefu. "I believe I'm ready." Shifting his hands from side to side like he was placing stones in an invisible mosaic, he chanted a longer incantation in a language Sefu didn't recognize. On the final syllable, he planted his right hand on her forehead.

She gasped and bucked at his touch. Then she went limp.

"Did it work?" Sefu asked. "Is she all right?"

"Let's ask her," Olhas said. "Leyli, how do you feel? Do you understand what's been happening to you?"

Blinking, she looked up at her rescuers. Then she jumped up and threw her arms around Sefu. "I'm sorry!" she sobbed. "I'm sorry!"

"It's all right," he said, patting her back. "I know you weren't in your right mind."

"And the Graycloaks need to know it, too," Olhas said. "If they understand that Domitian uses magic to enslave his 'followers,' they'll move against him." He grinned. "As opposed to arresting your brother and me for breaking into his house and killing his dog."

"But I don't know if the Graycloaks can stop him," Leyli said. "I don't know if anyone can."

"I can understand why the man seems powerful to you," Olhas said, "but—"

"You don't understand," Leyli said. "He isn't a man. I know because sometimes he let me see him as he truly is, to terrify me, and then made me forget it later."

Sefu frowned. "Then what is he, really?"

"A demon! He has two heads, each the head of a cat, and his hands are twisted around on his wrists."

"That's why we heard two voices crying out," Sefu said. Imagining the creature Leyli described forcing himself on the woman the half-orc had taken to his bedchamber made him feel sick to his stomach.

"Yes," Olhas said, "but he's not exactly a demon. He's a rakshasa."

"A what?"

"An evil spirit given flesh," the gillman said. "A kind that takes particular pleasure in degrading and defiling people. The backward hands are a giveaway. And actually, this is good. The Graycloaks may not like to interfere with actual religious leaders, even unscrupulous ones, but they'll certainly—"

The world blazed white.

Coming Next Week: Strange fiends and desperate measures in the final chapter of "Lord of Penance."

Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than thirty novels, including the first book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen, and the co-creator of the critically acclaimed Young Adult series The Nightmare Club. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. For more information, visit his website.

Art by Colby Stevenson

Lord of Penance

by Richard Lee Byers

Chapter Two: The God-To-Be

Unlike most of the gods-to-be, Domitian didn't actually live on the Avenue of the Hopeful, or anywhere particularly near. Sefu and Olhas had to walk across a goodly portion of the Ascendant Court, passing such landmarks as the raucous wooden mead hall sacred to Cayden Cailean and the red limestone statue known as the Iomedaenne before reaching the quiet side street where the cult reportedly occupied a manor, at which point Olhas held up his hand to signal a halt.

"What?" Sefu snapped.

Olhas arched an eyebrow. "You might want to watch your tone. If that's how you snarl at a friend, how will you speak to Domitian?"

"Sorry," Sefu said. "I'm in a hurry."

"I noticed. But I want to talk before we come under observation. When we're about to head into the charlatan's presence, I'm going to cast a spell. Something that may give us some insight as to why Leyli holds him in such regard. It would be nice if no one noticed me casting it."

Sefu nodded. "I'll make a distraction. Was that all you wanted?"

"Except to recommend again that you hold onto your temper. You're still glowering like you want to kill somebody."

"Because I do."

Olhaus sighed, but resumed walking.

Domitian's manor was a large three-story house built around a central courtyard, a fitting residence for a prosperous merchant or aristocrat. Perhaps a worshiper had donated it. Black bunting painted with obscure white symbols draped the facade, marring the structure's otherwise handsome appearance.

"Apparently a fellow can make a good living off misery and guilt," Olhas murmured. "Notice the lookout in the window under the gable?"

"Yes." The sentry in question was a half-orc watching the street.

"Maybe you're not the first brother or father to pay a call with murder in his heart."

Yet even if Sefu wasn't, Domitian didn't have an armed ruffian tending the wrought-iron gate that opened on the courtyard. That duty had fallen to another black-robed worshiper, a skinny, unwashed wretch with a receding hairline and the eyes of a dog that spent its days tied up and ignored.

As with Leyli, though, that appearance of dull-witted suffering was in one respect misleading. The gatekeeper proved himself capable of judgment and decisive action when he studied the visitors and then said, "I'm sorry. The Lord of Penance isn't receiving petitioners today."

Staring the gatekeeper in the eye, Sefu unbuckled the pigskin pouch on his belt, took out a silver weight, and held up the coin for the man to see. "I recommend you accept this offering and let us in. Otherwise, we'll come in anyway, and give you something new to regret."

The cultist swallowed. "Wait here." He retreated into the house.

Sefu waited as long as he could bear it. Then he said, "To Hell with it." He gripped the top of the gate and lifted his foot to climb, and then the door on the far side of the courtyard opened again. Somewhat to his surprise, it was the gatekeeper who emerged and not the household guards.

The functionary conducted them into the courtyard, a garden of sweet-smelling red and yellow roses with a gurgling white marble fountain in the center. Bees droned among the flowers.

Sefu glanced at Olhas, and the gillman gave him a slight nod in return. Sefu clapped his hand to his neck and shouted, "Ouch!"

Startled, the gatekeeper jerked around. "Sir?"

"Something hit me!" Sefu snarled.

The balding man cast about and drew the obvious conclusion. "There are bees. Perhaps one of them—"

Sefu lunged and grabbed him by the front of his shapeless, grubby garment. "Or perhaps one of you idiots is throwing stones."

"Sir, I swear, no one would do that. Our master has agreed to see—"

Sefu interrupted by shouting in the other man's face, and on every beat of that cadenced bellowing, he gave him a bone-rattling shake. "I do not be-lieve you!"

It unquestionably riveted the gatekeeper's attention. Sefu hoped it was holding the interest of any other observers as well, so no one would notice Olhas hurriedly whispering his incantation.

He kept up the bullying for another moment, and then the sorcerer gripped him by the shoulder. "Stop," Olhas said. "I saw it. It was a bee."

Sefu grunted like he was reluctant to let the matter drop. That wasn't so far from the truth, even though the rational part of him knew the gatekeeper wasn't to blame for Leyli's predicament. But he shoved the man away and said, "Take us on in, then, and be quick about it."

Most manors had a great hall, and that was where the gatekeeper appeared to be leading them. As they crossed the foyer with its imposing staircase and lesser doorways, Olhas glanced around. The action looked casual, but Sefu assumed his friend was taking in every detail like the expert scout he was.

Sefu peered around, too, but saw nothing that seemed particularly revelatory. The space just looked like the entryway of any rich man's home. It sounded different, though. Somewhere on one of the upper floors, someone was weeping, and leather slapped flesh with a steady smack-smack-smack. Sefu told himself Leyli was still out begging. It wasn't her crying or taking the beating, either.

The great hall smelled of sandalwood incense, and there were votive candles burning. A pair of half-orc toughs flanked a high-backed, ornately carved wooden chair on a pedestal, and on this throne lounged an exceptionally handsome, muscular man with shoulder-length white-blond hair, vivid blue eyes, and a silver goblet in his hand. He was naked except for a red silk robe loosely tied with a sash of the same material.

To that extent, the place was pretty much what Sefu had expected. But the two worshipers who'd apparently been receiving their fledgling deity's personal attention constituted more of a surprise, and not a pleasant one.

A pretty, middle-aged woman sat cross-legged on the tile floor with a pair of pliers in her hand and several teeth lying in front of her. Bloody drool streaked her chin.

Across from her, a man even skinnier than Domitian's average worshiper slumped twitching and trembling at a little table set with a cup and a plate laden with apples, figs, grapes, and pears. He clearly yearned—and needed—to drink and eat, but wasn't doing either.

The acts of self-mortification brought an insult to Sefu's lips. But when he looked Domitian in the eye, the obscenity faded away unspoken, along with the spasm of outrage that had drawn it forth.

He'd noticed before that Domitian had the kind of good looks and commanding presence that no doubt helped a fraud dupe the vulnerable. But now, as though his eyes had just finished adjusting after coming into this shadowy place from the summer sunlight, Sefu felt like he was truly seeing the man for the first time. And what he beheld was a piercing kind of perfection. A flawless face radiating compassion and wisdom so profound that they might well partake of the divine.

Suddenly Sefu wondered what right he, a simple fighting man, had to barge into a holy place with malice in his heart and judge this noble spirit and his teachings. Maybe Domitian would pass the test of the Starstone someday. Maybe the path he offered, stringent though it seemed, was the way to peace and clarity for some. Maybe Leyli—

But the thought of his sister walking that path, going dirty and hungry, whoring, submitting to beatings and maybe doing even worse things to herself, brought him up short. Prompted by sheer instinct, he reached down through the confusion that had overtaken him to the anger still seething underneath and sought to feel it in full measure. Afterward, he realized he was breathing as heavily as he had after brawling with the half-orcs. But his thoughts were clear, and his resolve restored.

Domitian smiled sardonically, like a fencer might if an inferior but lucky opponent avoided an attack that by all rights should have scored. Or maybe he didn't. The expression, if had been there at all, came and went in an instant, and then his face was grave and kind.

"Sefu and Olhas," he said.

"Someone ran home and told you to expect us," Sefu said.

"No," the cult leader replied. "Nobody had to. I'm only a shadow of what I will one day become, but already I'm more than a man. I don't mean it to sound arrogant, but it's a fact. I have ways of knowing what others lack. Even you, sorcerer, with your magic poking and prying at me. Is it telling you anything you can understand?"

Olhas smiled. "I take it that despite our attempt at misdirection, someone spotted me casting a spell in the garden."

"No, but I don't blame you for assuming that. Darkness is false comfort, but until we're ready to face the light, it can be the only comfort we have."

"We didn't come here to listen to your gibberish," Sefu said.

"No," Domitian said. "You came to take Leyli away from the only source of comfort she's found since her life turned to grief and despair."

Once again, there was something in Domitian's gaze, and in his deep, rich tones, that eroded Sefu's certainty like waves washing away a drawing in the sand. What if—

No, curse it! No, no, no! He closed his eyes for a moment, shutting out the sight of Domitian's magisterial face with its expanse of forehead and long, narrow nose, and that made it easier to think.

"Her family can comfort her," he said.

"Clearly not," Domitian said, "or she would never have sought me out in the first place, and if you did somehow succeed in taking her away, she would only return at the first opportunity. Such being the case, surely it's better to leave her to the life she's freely chosen. That way, you won't poison the love she feels for you."

It made an ugly kind of sense. Sefu hated admitting it, but it did. He might even have said so, except that just then, with a sudden, spastic flailing, the man seated at the table overturned it. The cup clanked and spilled the water inside, and fruit tumbled across the floor. The cultist buried his face in his hands and sobbed.

Domitian turned to one of the half-orcs. "I believe Ioseph has tested his willpower sufficiently for one day. Help him back to his room, and give him his usual supper at sundown." He looked back at Sefu and Olhas. "Where were we?"

The interruption had startled some of the unaccustomed defeatism out of Sefu's head. He took a breath and exhaled the rest of it. "You were saying that if I took Leyli away, she'd just run back. But she couldn't if you refused to take her back."

"Why would I do that?" Domitian asked.

"Because I'll pay you. I have some savings, and my mother does, too. It won't be a fortune, but it will be more than Leyli brings in begging and... doing whatever else on the street."

Once again, if Domitian smiled a mocking smile, it was the merest flicker of an expression, too ephemeral for Sefu to be sure of it. "But I don't care about money."

"Then why send your followers out to get it?"

"Supporting the faith is a part of their purification."

"I don't believe you. You don't want to shut Leyli out because it might cause the rest of your victims to doubt you. Or because it gives you too much sick enjoyment to mistreat her."

	"Domitian may call himself a god, but nobody crosses a Wave Rider and gets away clean."

"I suggest, my friend, that it is you who have found joy in hurting others—first your opponents in the Irorium, and then the pirates you've hunted across the Inner Sea. I hope you understand that just because the latter task is necessary doesn't mean your motives for performing it are pure."

Sefu faltered, uncertain, but this time only for an instant. "Maybe you're right. Because I'd certainly like to tear out that lying tongue of yours and—"

"Enough!" Olhas said.

Sefu blinked. "What?"

"This conversation isn't serving any purpose," the gillman said. "The man is scum, but the Graycloaks have apparently decided he isn't breaking the law, and you evidently can't bribe him to force Leyli out. So she'll have to decide for herself that she wants to come home."

"Indeed," Domitian said, "and I promise she will when the time is right."

Sefu glared at him. "You—"

"We should go," Olhas said, and though he hadn't raised his voice, there was an insistence in it that made Sefu heed him and keep walking even when he thought he heard Domitian chuckle at his back.

"What was that all about?" he demanded once they were away from the manor. "Were you worried I was going to attack him and bring every ruffian and cultist in the place down on our heads?"

"A little," Olhas replied, "but I mainly wanted to get you out of there because of the notion that would inevitably have occurred to you after that one."

Sefu cocked his head. "What do you mean?"

"Domitian asked if my magic was telling me anything, and actually, I did perceive arcane forces at play around him. But I already knew something unnatural was going on because I could feel him trying to tamper with my mind. Couldn't you?"

"I... think so. There were moments when I couldn't help being impressed, and feeling half persuaded, even though I had those two poor, suffering fools right in front of me to show what kind of bastard he really is."

"Fortunately, your anger armored you, and a sorcerer's will shielded me. But Domitian wasn't just trying to manipulate us. He was reading our thoughts. It's the only way he could have known my name. It was never spoken during our altercation on the avenue, and Leyli has never heard of me, has she?"

"No." Much as Sefu loved his family, he'd never been much for writing home.

"There you are, then. I needed to get you out of there before you hit on the idea that I knew would come to you. Your anger might have kept Domitian from seeing it in your head, but we couldn't count on it."

"The idea that you knew would come to me." Sefu shook his head. "Which would be... if Domitian uses magic to control his followers, then Leyli really isn't there of her own free will! And if we carry her off, you can use your own powers to restore her to herself!"

The gillman nodded. "It's at least worth a try."

Coming Next Week: The fine art of kidnapping in Chapter Three of "Lord of Penance."

Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than thirty novels, including the first book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen, and the co-creator of the critically acclaimed Young Adult series The Nightmare Club. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. For more information, visit his website.

Art by Colby Stevenson

Wave Riders and Would-Be Gods

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

In the wake of last week's absent web fiction—an unfortunate necessity, as I was sprinting out the door to a truly excellent World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio—it's my pleasure to bring things back with a bang, introducing the first chapter of Richard Lee Byers' new story, "Lord of Penance."

Many of you may already be familiar with Richard's work—he's written more than thirty novels, many of them high-profile gaming tie-in books—and I'm proud to say that he's really come up with something special for this one. In "Lord of Penance," Richard brings us the story of Sefu, a member of Absalom's Wave Riders, and his gillman companion Olhas as they struggle against one of the would-be gods of the Ascendant Court in order to save Sefu's seemingly brainwashed sister. But nothing in Absalom is ever quite as simple as it appears, and the two aquatic cavalry men may soon find themselves swimming in the deep end of the pool...

Check out the first installment here, and stay tuned all month as we explore the ins and outs of crime and faith in "Lord of Penance"!

James Sutter
Fiction Editor

Lord of Penance

by Richard Lee Byers

Chapter One: Reunion

Sefu studied the gaunt, shuffling girl in the shapeless black robe, and when he was certain, he winced.

"Is that Leyli?" Olhas asked, his brown hair plastered to his long, narrow skull. Wary of the dehydration that could mean debilitation and even death to his race, the lanky gillman had just moments ago paused at a fountain to dunk his head and hands.

"Yes," Sefu said. She was horribly changed from the grinning, teasing imp of a little sister he remembered, but still, yes. "Maybe I should talk to her by myself."

"I wish you would," Olhas said, the ruddy slits in the sides of his neck dilating and contracting. "Nothing's more boring than other people's family problems." Which hadn't kept him from insisting on accompanying his friend on this particular errand.

Dodging camel-drawn wagons and a fat man bouncing along on an axebeak, Sefu headed across the Avenue of the Hopeful, named for the self-proclaimed gods-to-be who preached, worked dubious miracles, and generally made pests of themselves along the busy thoroughfare. Meanwhile, Leyli took up a position in front of a market stall offering religious medallions to worshipers of every stripe, from folk who venerated the Dawnflower to those who abased themselves before the Prince of Darkness. As her brother neared her, she held out her bowl to passersby and started chanting in a monotone for alms.

Just seeing her at a distance pained Sefu. Up close, it was worse. The raven hair she'd once spent endless hours tinting and curling hung lank and greasy. She had the yellow remains of a bruise on one sunken cheek, and seemed to stink not just of sweat but also of infection. Worst of all was the deadness in her eyes. For a moment, he wondered if she even recognized him.

Then she sighed. "Sefu."

"Yes," he said. "This..." He waved his hand at the begging bowl, her dirty winding sheet of a robe, and everything else. "I don't understand. What are you doing?"

"Didn't Mother tell you?"

It was at least a little encouraging that she realized their mother must have written to him and implored him to come home to Absalom. It meant that—despite her blank, somehow hollowed-out appearance —her mind was still working.

"She said you're worshiping one of the charl—I mean, the folk who claim that when they're ready, they're going to take the Test of the Starstone and become gods."

"Yes," she said. "Domitian, god of penance."

"Well, as far as I'm concerned, you can worship anyone you like. But you don't have to do it like this. Come home. Mother needs your help in the bakery."

"No, she doesn't, and I do 'have to do it like this.' All of the master's followers live in the temple. It's the only way we can undertake the rituals of atonement."

"What do you have to atone for?"

She stared at him. "Don't make me say it."

"You're going to have to if you want me to understand what you're talking about."

She grimaced. "All right, then. The deaths of my husband and unborn child."

He felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. "Leyli! Tell me you don't believe that. How could either of those be your fault?"

"I was greedy. I had spiteful thoughts. I lusted for other men."

"And you think the gods punished you for it by pushing Melaku off the scaffold and making you miscarry? If the world worked like that, there wouldn't be a person left alive." He put a hand on her shoulder. "You're not thinking straight, and small wonder after what you've been through. Come home for a day or two—"

"Hey," someone growled.

Sefu turned. Three tattooed half-orcs, with the burly frames, greenish hide, and protruding lower canines of their kind, were sneering at him. Intent on Leyli, he hadn't noticed their approach. Unlike her, they were dressed in decent clothing, but its somber color suggested that they too followed Domitian.

	"If Domitian's really on his way to godhood, why does he need half-orc thugs?"

Trying not to look obvious about it, Sefu shrugged back the short sea-green cape of his Wave Rider uniform, exposing the bronze sword pin underneath. He'd won it fighting in the arena when he was a foolhardy adolescent, and in his own estimation, it was a trivial thing compared to the honors he'd earned since serving in Absalom's sea cavalry. But to ruffians from the city's gutters, it might convey a good deal more.

It didn't cow the half-orcs, though. They looked like they still thought they were the intimidating ones. "You're keeping her from her work," said one with crimson eyes. "Drop a coin in her bowl and move along."

"Or, if you want her," said a second, whose badly broken nose resembled a swinish snout, "we can talk price."

Sefu's mother hadn't warned him that Domitian had turned Leyli into a streetwalker as well as a beggar, probably because she hadn't known. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I'm Leyli's brother," he said.

"That's all right," said the smallest and most human-looking of the three. "We don't judge." His companions laughed.

Sefu supposed it would be a mistake to start a brawl. He felt on the brink of launching himself at the half-orcs anyway.

Behind him, Olhas's pleasant baritone voice said, "Something's plainly funny. How about letting me in on the joke?" He gripped Sefu's shoulder, silently urging him to stay calm.

"You're going to be the joke," Red Eyes said. "You and your friend, if you don't run along."

"That's possible," the gillman said, stepping forward to stand beside Sefu. "I can do some funny things. Let me show you."

He murmured three rhyming words and swept his hand in a slow horizontal pass. His fingertips left a trail of gray vapor swirling in the air.

Hoping that the minor display of sorcery had daunted the half-orcs, Sefu said, "We are leaving. But Leyli's coming with us." Without taking his eyes off the ruffians, he reached out to her.

But she didn't take his hand. And the half-orc runt—who was nonetheless as tall as Olhas and as broad-shouldered as Sefu—said, "I'm going to be nice one more time. Go away. Otherwise..." He reached down and pulled a length of ash—a cut-down spear shaft, perhaps—from his boot. His companions produced their own clubs.

A cudgel could kill, and Sefu would have felt justified in drawing his broadsword. But those who'd paused in the midst of their own business to watch the confrontation might think there was a significant difference between a civilian's blunt hardwood and a soldier's sharp steel.

"Think about what you're doing," he said to the half-orcs. "There are people looking on."

"To Hell with 'em," said the Runt, and then he and his comrades charged. The gawkers scurried to distance themselves from the imminent violence.

Sefu sidestepped and hooked a punch into Red Eyes's kidney. The half-orc grunted, stumbled to a halt, and turned. Meanwhile, Sefu had time to see the other two ruffians spreading out to flank Olhas, who hadn't drawn his blade, either. There didn't seem to be any strange glimmerings, writhing shadows, or other telltale signs of magic around the gillman, but Sefu hoped his friend had managed to cast a charm of protection anyway.

Then Red Eyes came at him again.

The half-orc advanced more warily this time, feinting with his club—virtually a mace with an iron knob on the end—in an attempt to draw reactions and learn how his opponent preferred to defend. Sefu was sorry to see that. It was unfortunate that the cultist had a weapon, a longer reach, and, by the looks of him, superior strength. It was worse that the brute knew how to use them.

Red Eyes raised the cudgel as if to strike Sefu's head. Sefu lifted his hands as if to protect it. The half-orc made the same threatening action a couple moments later, then whirled the club down to smash his foe in the ribs.

And if Sefu had reacted as he had the first time, opening up his lower body in the process, the trick might have worked. Instead, guessing what Red Eyes intended, he lunged, and though the half-orc's arm thumped his flank, the club only cut through the air behind him.

He drove a punch at Red Eyes's throat. Red Eyes flinched, and the blow caught him on the jaw instead. Pain flared in Sefu's knuckles, but the cultist reeled backward, too.

As he did, Sefu caught another glimpse of Olhas's part of the fight. The Runt was floundering on the cobblestones, trying and failing to stand back up in the midst of a patch of glistening gray grease. Meanwhile, Snout drove Olhas backward. But as the gillman retreated, his mouth moved—reciting a spell, almost certainly. When it was done, he stopped retreating, and, caught by surprise, Snout blundered into striking distance. Olhas punched him in the chest.

The gillman wasn't much of a boxer. The art was useless in his undersea home, where water cushioned every blow. But magic must have compensated for his lack of skill, because Snout's knees buckled, and he collapsed.

Red Eyes recovered his balance, bellowed, and rushed Sefu. The club lashed back and forth in wide arcs that left him open at the end of every swing. As Sefu gave ground, he smiled. Anger had made the half-orc sloppy. He simply had to pick his moment—

Weight landed on his back and nearly pitched him forward into the Red Eyes's next blow. Arms wrapped around him, seeking to pin his own limbs to his sides.

Sefu threw himself backward and down. It kept the club from bashing in his skull and also slammed his new foe against the pavement. The arms around him loosened. He wrenched himself free, rolled away, and saw that it was Leyli who'd grappled him.

It amazed him that she'd actually tried to help someone hurt him, but he didn't have time to fret over it. He was on his knees, and Red Eyes was already looming over him. Hoping he could manage it before the club hammered down, he gathered himself to tackle the cultist.

"Stop!" someone shouted. "In the Chamber's name!"

The bass voice carried the ring of authority, and, furious though he was, Red Eyes backed away from Sefu. A few feet away, Olhas and the Runt, who'd finally escaped the patch of slippery ground, also stopped fighting. Everyone looked at the half-dozen guardsmen in the gray woolen cloaks, for of course it was their glowering corporal with his close-cut salt-and-pepper beard who'd shouted the order to desist.

Breathing heavily, Sefu drew himself to his feet. His knuckles throbbed, and he tried to shake the ache out of them. "I'm glad to see you," he told the corporal. "These bastards attacked my friend and me."

"That's a lie!" snapped the Runt.

Olhas waved his hand to indicate the ring of spectators. "Here are witnesses to say what really happened."

For a moment, no one seemed eager to do so. Then a boy with a satchel of rolled-up prayers for sale, prewritten supplications the illiterate could lay on altars, burn in ritual fires, or toss into the chasm surrounding the Starstone Cathedral, said, "The half-orcs started it." Other folk muttered in agreement.

"All right," said the Runt, "I admit that one of us may have struck the first blow. But only to defend this young woman. The Wave Riders meant to kidnap her."

"That's ridiculous," Sefu said. "Leyli is my sister."

"Whoever she is," said the Runt, "she's of age, and she didn't want to be dragged away. She even fought the Wave Riders alongside my friends and me."

The corporal looked at Leyli, who, like Snout, was picking herself up off the ground. "Is that true?"

Leyli looked down at the cobbles and swallowed. "Sort of. I told Sefu I didn't want to leave, but he wouldn't listen. And then, when people were fighting, I had to try to help my brothers in penance."

"Your 'brothers' who struck the first blow," Olhas said. "Your 'brothers' who fought with weapons while our hands were empty."

"You used magic," said the Runt. "That's a lot more dangerous than a couple sticks."

"All right," the corporal said. "I'm not going to arrest anybody. This time. But I want to see you Domitian people walk off in one direction and you navy boys go in the other."

"You must be joking!" Sefu waved his hand at Leyli. "Six months ago, she was healthy and happy. Normal! Look at her now!"

The Graycloak shrugged. "She says she's where she wants to be."

"Olhas and I serve Absalom, the same as you do—"

"That's why I haven't arrested you already," the corporal said. "Now, all of you, clear out."

The half-orcs grinned in a way that made Sefu's fists clench again. Olhas took him by the arm and hauled him away, past vendors of incense, idols, and other religious paraphernalia, as well as a god-to-be demonstrating his alleged divinity by eating fire and swallowing swords.

"Well, you tried," said the gillman after a while. "I suppose you'll need to spend some time with your mother before we head back to Escadar."

Sefu scowled at him. "This isn't over."

"My friend, I understand your feelings, but the Graycloak had a point. Leyli has a right to follow this Domitian if she chooses."

"She's not in her right mind! Grief already had her teetering on the brink of craziness, and then he or his cultists did something to push her over."

"Maybe. But still, if she won't listen to you—if she believes those stinking half-orcs are her real brothers—what can you do about it?"

"I can go see Domitian himself."

The sorcerer sighed. "Then I suppose that means I'm coming, too."

Coming Next Week: Arguments with a would-be god in Chapter Two of "Lord of Penance."

Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than thirty novels, including the first book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen, and the co-creator of the critically acclaimed Young Adult series The Nightmare Club. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. For more information, visit his website.

Art by Colby Stevenson

Pathfinder Tales Webfiction Will Return Next Week

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

With our industrious Fiction Editor out sick this week and then whisking his way off to Ohio for the weekend to talk up Pathfinder Tales and Planet Stories at World Fantasy Con, we've decided to postpone posting the opening installment of Richard Lee Byers' awesome new novella, "Lord of Penance," until next Wednesday. I know, I know... it's a downer for all the folks who anxiously wait for the week to roll around to get a new, free slice of Golarion, and I promise you we'll serve you up some Pathfinder Tales next Wednesday.

But there is a silver lining: You can now spend the next week catching up on or delving back into the webfiction we've already published, compliments of the brand-new ebook compilations we've recently made available on both the Paizo webstore and Apple's iBookstore (or just browse through the stories in the Pathfinder Tales archives ).

Cover illustration by Eric Belisle	Cover illustrations by KyuShik Shin			Cover illustration by Gerald Lee

Christopher Carey
Editor