Despite the fury of their uncontrolled rush down the canyon wall, the barbarians were disciplined fighters. Without Vor, Kauth and his allies were crippled—they couldn’t coordinate their attacks or cover each other’s defenses. They were hedged in, unable to maneuver into favorable positions, slowly forced apart until each was an island in a sea of enemies. Kauth fought fiercely, mustering all the magic he could to ward himself from the barbarians’ attacks and to make his own weapon strike harder, but he knew it was a futile effort. Zandar was the nexus of a storm of eldritch energy, but Kauth saw the storm drift farther and farther away from him and slowly wane in fury. Sevren growled and roared as he cut around him, tearing flesh and splintering bone, but he soon disappeared under the raging sea.
Kauth saw the Traveler leering at him from the faces of the enemies surrounding him, mocking the foolish convictions that had turned him back from his mission. It was what many people would call the perfect gift of the Traveler—a sudden attack of conscience, an attempt to do the right thing, that immediately ended in disaster. By deciding to save his friends, he somehow led them to their deaths.
His body and his will were flagging. His mace was a heavy weight in his hands, blood ran from a dozen small cuts, and drawing breath wracked his chest with the pain of broken ribs. Using a wand to restore his strength would mean dropping his guard and inviting a killing blow from one of the barbarians pressing in on him. If he didn’t keep his weapon in constant motion, he felt, he would die.
He had one last, desperate hope—a trick worthy of the Traveler herself. Smashing his mace into the nearest barbarian, he changed. He didn’t have time for more than a quick sketch—paler skin, longer hair, scarred cheeks in place of his beard, a thinner nose, a bit shorter and slimmer. He tore off his cloak, threw off his leather cap, and dropped his mace, then scooped up the club of a fallen foe. Kauth died in that instant, and the Carrion Tribes gained a new member.
The barbarians who saw him transform shouted and lunged at him. He barreled into the midst of his foes, let the chaos swallow him, and then completed his transformation. He was one of them—shouting his alarm at the apparent disappearance of his enemy, staring at every nearby face to find the imposter.
“There he is!” The barbarian who had been Kauth pointed at a man about his height and build, and watched as the other barbarians bludgeoned him to death. As he watched, he changed his features again, making his face an exact duplicate of the dying man’s. While his new allies stared at the corpse and struggled to make sense of what had happened, he stooped to pick up another dead man’s heavy iron helm and put it on his head.
A name—he needed a name. What sort of names did the Carrion Tribes give their children?
“Aric, look.” A man next to him hit his arm and pointed. Aric, then—that would be his name.
Aric’s stomach sank as he saw a long pole rise erect in the midst of the barbarians. An iron ring at the top of the pole held a heavy chain, and Zandar hung by his wrists from the chain. A cheer went up from the barbarians, and Aric joined in, celebrating the death or capture of the warlock who had been his friend—in a different life, under a different name. He wanted to vomit.
A second pole went up beside the first, and Aric saw Sevren’s broken body hanging from the chain at its end. Another cheer. Aric remembered riding the Orien coach to Varna and spotting the shifter for the first time.
No, he told himself, that was Kauth, not me.
Both men were still alive, as far as Aric could tell. The gift of the Traveler was complete—in addition to leading his friends to their deaths, the changeling would complete his mission as soon as he decided to abandon it. He cursed the goddess’s ten thousand names.
Two strong barbarians held each pole upright by handles at the bottom, and they started moving at the front of the horde, carrying the prisoners like battle standards. Aric fell in among the mob as the barbarians began a hasty march toward whatever sinkhole they called home.
* * * * *
The barbarians jogged through the Labyrinth for the rest of the day and through the night without stopping. Aric’s muscles burned, but he dared not fall behind the mob or attract attention of any kind. Aric recognized morning by the vague brightening of the blood red sky as he emerged from the narrow canyons of the Labyrinth into the expanse of the Demon Wastes.
The gravelly soil of the Labyrinth gave way to a broad expanse of blackened sand and jagged obsidian, broken here and there by geysers of fire reaching toward the belly of the red clouds. On this desolate plain, an army was encamped, a horde that dwarfed any single military force Aric had seen during the Last War. Campfires shone like stars in an obsidian sky, far too numerous to count.
Despair threatened to swallow Aric. Here was a barbarian horde already poised to scour the Labyrinth and spill over the Shadowcrags into the Eldeen Reaches. The work Kelas had sent him to do was done already—Vor had died for nothing, Zandar and Sevren were about to suffer torture and die for no reason, no pretense of greater good. Kelas sent him into the Demon Wastes, into the path of this horde, to die.
“Prisoners!” the men carrying the poles shouted as they approached the camp. “Prisoners for Kathrik Mel!”
That cry sent the camp into a frenzy of motion, the main effect of which was to increase the size of the mob sweeping Zandar and Sevren forward. Aric rode the tide, terrified of what lay ahead but seeing no avenue of escape.
“Prisoners for Kathrik Mel!” The mob took up the cry and turned it into a chant. Here and there, Aric heard a nearby barbarian shout “sacrifice” rather than “prisoners,” and dread clenched his chest.
Aric felt himself jostled as the mob in front of him came to a stop and the people behind continued to push forward. Peering over shoulders and between heads, he caught sight of an enormous black pavilion adorned with banners of blood red and bone white. To one side of the tent was a high platform built of bone, and Aric saw three people climbing makeshift stairs to the top. Two of them looked like the barbarians around him, with unruly black hair and pale skin, though their armor was dirty scale armor rather than hide, presumably scavenged from the Ghaash’kala, and they both wore cloaks of black fur.
The one in the middle, though, was not of the Carrion Tribes—he was not human. He stood taller than the people to his front and back, and he wore the plate armor of a knight, stained red-brown with blood. Two long horns swept back from his forehead, and a bony ridge jutted from his jaw as if it were a beard. His skin was brick red, and a long tail twitched and coiled behind him as he walked. His right hand gripped the haft of a wicked-looking glaive.
As this man reached the top of the stairs, the mob’s chant changed to a simple repetition of his name: “Kathrik Mel! Kathrik Mel!”
This, Aric knew at once, was the warlord Kelas had described. His hold over the barbarians was unmistakable, the sheer force of his personality palpable even from this distance. This was a man who could unite even the warring Carrion Tribes. He held up his clawed left hand, and the mob fell instantly silent. His voice was low and loud.
“You bring prisoners before me?” he said. “A blood sacrifice to me?”
The barbarians raised a shout of “Kathrik Mel!”
Kathrik Mel strode to the front edge of the platform and examined Sevren. “A shifter, a brave explorer from the Eldeen Reaches, no doubt.” His voice dripped with scorn—and so powerful was his hold on the crowd that Aric found himself loathing Sevren, pitiful and broken in his chains. The warlord took a few steps and looked down at Zandar. “And a human from the soft cities beyond the forest.”
He traced a finger below Zandar’s jaw in what seemed at first to be a gentle caress. Zandar gave a weak cry, though, and blood welled up in the wake of the warlord’s claw.
“See how soft they are!” Kathrik Mel shouted. “The cities of the east will fall before our might as easily as these two fell before our smallest band!”
The mob howled its approval, and Aric joined in.
* * * * *
The scratch on Zandar’s neck was only the first of many small cuts the prisoners suffered. The barbarians toyed with them as if examining how much pain they could endure before finally dying. Aric heard Zandar confess that he was an Eldeen spy sent to scout the Demon Wastes, and he heard Kathrik Mel promise the utter annihilation of the Reaches. The barbarian horde would burn the Towering Wood to the ground, the warlord said, until not a single tree remained standing.
Mission accomplished, Aric thought bitterly.
And rather than watch Zandar and Sevren endure any more torture, he slipped through the bloodthirsty mob and lost himself in the Labyrinth.