Pages of Pain p-1

by Troy Denning

  "No – you made your decision," the fiend rumbled. "You cannot take it back now."

  On the steps, the wine woman stretched out her arms. "My love, what have I done to offend you? Why do you abandon me?"

  Theseus snatched the plank up and shoved the end into the water, leaning into it with all Iris weight "We're going back."

  The raft pivoted around the plank, then curved along the whirlpool's edge facing backward. Without the fiend's weight to hold down the front, the surface was pitching toward the Thrasson at a dangerously steep angle.

  "The current has us." Karfhud eased back toward his end of the gate. "There is nothing you can do."

  Theseus looked back to the stairs. The wine woman was growing smaller by the instant, but he could see her well enough to tell she was tearing her clothes and hair in grief.

  "I must try."

  Theseus plunged the plank into the water, pushing against the current with all his strength. This time, the raft pivoted away from him, swinging toward the heart of the whirlpool. The swirling Waters fell away, curling downward in a wild, rushing spiral. The nose of the raft hung above the slope for a moment, then suddenly dipped and caught.

  The deck bucked under Theseus's feet. He dropped the plank and threw himself down, trying to grab hold of the high side of the raft. The surface rose up to meet him, slamming into his face and flipping him onto his back. He started to slide into the whirlpool, then the fingers of his makeshift foot caught the edge of the gate. He clamped them down and held on for his life.

  Theseus looked toward the front of the raft and saw Silverwind lying next to him, eyes closed and clinging to the edge of the gate with both hands. On the other side of the bariaur was Karfhud, the talons of one claw driven deep into the oaken deck, the other hand clamped tight around one of Tessali's wrist stumps.

  The tanar'ri raised his chin and locked gazes with the Thrasson, then his maroon eyes flashed scarlet. He sneered and let go of the elf's wrist.

  If Tessali screamed, Theseus never knew it. The elf simply vanished into the whirlpool, then the raft tipped onto its side and followed the Bleaker into the swirling waters. The Heart Of The Matter

  Round and round and down they twirl, pressed flat as crabs to the raft, arching spandrels and half-sunken pillars and screeching wine woman flashing past: arch-pillar-woman arch-pillar-woman, hearts in their throats like throbbing stones, rushing gray funnel rising up past their heads, ears ringing with the whirlpool's roaring, gloomy maw below, yawning wide, wide, wider until in they go-where only the Lady knows.

  She will be waiting, there in the darkness below. There was never any sense of plunging. Theseus's stomach went qualmish with dizziness and rage, and his pulse drummed in his temples, but he never had that light, upside-down feeling in his belly. The raft only continued to whirl around and around until the vertigo became too much and he shut his eyes. An instant later, the waters bubbled up to swallow the raft and still they swirled, not through the currents, but with them. The Thrasson felt his body starting to float; he clamped the fingers on his foot more tightly onto the edge of the raft and dug the fingers of his own hands into the tiny fissures between the gate's oaken planks. His lungs began to bum for air. He opened his eyes and saw nothing but darkness.

  The twirling seemed to slow, then they burst through the surface. Theseus felt the damp air spiralling past his face and his body longing to fly off the raft, but he could make no sense of what his senses told him. Now it felt like they were spinning on the outside of a swirling column of water, as though they had passed through the whirlpool and emerged in a waterspout. Thinking some light would help matters, he reached for his sword – and was nearly hurled from the raft the instant his fingers left their crevices. He dug in again and waited.

  The air spiralled past his face more slowly, and the force threatening to hurt his body from the raft grew steadily less powerful. At length, the strange current slowed to the point where Theseus heard the purl of water echoing off stony walls he could not see. The sound seemed to be coming from all around, as though they were spinning through a long, dark tunnel. Finally, the Thrasson could draw his sword without being thrown from the raft. He raised the blade over his head and called upon its star-forged steel to light the darkness.

  As the sapphire radiance burst from the tip, Theseus saw that they were indeed floating upon the surface of a swirling column of water, which was spinning like a carpenter's auger down the center of a dark round tunnel. There were no shores or banks; the stream was swirling through midair. At first, the Thrasson thought they must be spiralling straight down a pit, then he saw a side passage drift languidly past. They were moving far too slowly to be plunging straight down.

  "Now what have I done?" Silverwind gasped. "I have envisioned certain principles, certain laws to govern the multiverse. This makes no sense!"

  "It makes as much sense as anything. We have entered the heart of the mazes – the very birthplace of the Plurality!" Karfhud was staring around in wide-eyed amazement, peering longingly into each side tunnel they passed. "How I need a mapping skin!"

  Theseus swung around just in time to see the fiend reaching toward Silverwind. "Leave him alone," the Thrasson warned. "If you harm another of my friends, I swear on my life I'll find a way to kill you."

  "Another?" Karfhud snorted. He expelled a cloud of red steam from one of his grotesque nostrils, but withdrew his hand. "I have done no harm to any of them."

  "You let the whirlpool take Tessali!"

  Karfhud shrugged and looked away. "I thought he no longer mattered to you."

  Theseus scowled, too angered by the tanar'ri's obvious lie to reply.

  "Tmly!" Karfhud protested. "If you had been thinking of him-or any of us-you would not have tried to go back for the wine woman."

  "You expected me to abandon her?"

  Karfhud rolled his eyes. "We tanar'ri are wiser than to expect – especially from humans. I am only saying that you cannot have matters both ways, hero." He spoke this last word as though it were an obscenity. "You tried that back at the palace gate, and it cost me a wing. From this moment forward, you must choose whether you will please yourself, or do what is best for your companions. I have no care which, but I will have nothing to do with this trying to have things both ways."

  "If that means you'll have no more to do with me, I welcome it," Theseus growled.

  "Truly?" Karfhud glanced back up the tunnel. "Then you have no wish for my help against Sheba? Or have you decided to abandon Tessali, too?"

  "He's alive?"

  "Do you wish my help or not?" Karfhud spoke with an exaggerated air of impatience. "The longer it takes to decide, the more difficult it will be to track her. We are already quite far from where I saw them."

  Theseus thought the fiend might be bluffing, but the claim did make a certain amount of sense. Without a raft to cling to, both the elf and the monster would have been hurled free of the stream soon after emerging from the whirlpool-long before he had managed to light his sword. Assuming Karfhud could see in the dark-

  "I can," the fiend interrupted. "Just the warmth of bodies, of course-but Tessali and Sheba were almost fiery. The excitement of the hunt, I imagine."

  "If this is a trick…"

  "Theseus! Have I ever lied to you?"

  Without awaiting a reply, Karfhud pushed off the raft and landed gently on what Theseus had at first taken to be a wall. Silverwind quickly followed, alighting opposite the fiend on what should have been the ceiling. With the bariaur standing upon it, the surface looked as much like a floor as where the tanar'ri stood. The Thrasson pushed off the raft and landed between them. The stone beneath his feet certainly felt like "down." By all appearances, both his companions were standing on the walls, while the stream was running through the air above his head – which made no sense at all. Even if "down" happened to be wherever one's feet were planted, the water should have been coursing along the walls instead of flowing through the center of the passage.

&
nbsp; "Just accept what you see." Karfhud started up the tunnel, spiralling around the river as he walked. "If you try to figure out the Plurality, you will go as mad as – but I suppose that is not possible. You could never truly be as mad as a baatezu."

  "I fear I already am," whispered Silverwind.

  Theseus followed his companions up the tunnel, twining around the gaping side passages and trying to swallow his anger. Tanar'ri lord or not, Karfhud had no business making lectures. Had the fiend held onto Tessali, the attempt to turn back for the wine woman would have caused no harm to anyone. As far as the Thrasson was concerned, the blame for the elf's misfortune lay not on his own shoulders, but squarely on those of Karfhud.

  Of course, Theseus did not expect the tanar'ri to repent his treachery. Karfhud had his own reasons for hunting Sheba, and no doubt releasing Tessali had somehow furthered the fiend's cause. That Theseus did not understand how only underscored his need to discover what the fiend was really doing: mapping the mazes, certainly, but why?

  If Karfhud was eavesdropping, he neglected his usual admonition for Theseus to mind his own business. Instead, the fiend stopped at a side passage. A faint odor of rotting meat exuded from the dank tunnel, and there were strings of sticky black blood smeared just inside the mouth.

  "I believe this is the one." Karfhud sat down on the edge of the passage and dangled his legs inside, then cast a wistful glance toward the swirling waters above his head. Although the stream was spinning past at breathtaking speed, it made only a soft gurgling and did not interfere with the fiend's voice. "How I wish I had a mapping skin!"

  With that, he stepped onto the wall of the side passage – and promptly plunged headlong into the darkness. A short, gravelly curse rumbled up the shaft, then he was gone.

  Theseus dropped to his belly, reaching down with his sword to illuminate the pit. Perhaps ten paces below, the shaft started to bend away, but he could not see where it went.

  "Karfhud?"

  When no answer came, Silverwind suggested, "Maybe he was killed."

  Theseus shook his head. "We can't be that lucky."

  The Thrasson tried again to call the fiend. When he received no answer, he dangled his own feet over the edge, then turned around and slowly lowered himself into the pit. The passage walls were as rough as those of any cavern; he had little trouble finding a foothold, and, having found it, even less difficulty dinging to it with the fingers of his borrowed foot. Although the stones were damp and slimy in his grasp, Tessali's hand made Theseus feel so secure that he did not even bother to pass his sword to Silverwind before descending the shaft.

  With four split hooves and two hands, the bariaur was even more sure-footed than the Thrasson, and he followed close behind. The damp air grew thick with the reek of decay and spoiled meat. Theseus knew the stench well enough; he had smelled it in the lairs of more man-eating monsters than he could recall.

  At the bottom of the shaft, they found Karfhud waiting just beyond the bend. The fiend's maze-blighted flesh looked rather scuffed and his remaining wing hung crumpled and broken on his back, but the fall seemed to have caused him no other harm.

  "Why didn't you-"

  The fiend spun around, one talon pressed to his black cracked lips. "I see a heat glimmer up ahead." So low was the tanar'ri's whisper that Theseus had trouble hearing it over the rush of blood in his ears. "About ten paces away. It's coming from around a comer."

  "Then she's seen our light by now." Theseus twisted his sword hand back and forth, sending rays of sapphire radiance dancing across the entrances of half a dozen adjoining passages. "We may as well go."

  Silverwind pulled a handful of white sand from his satchel. "I am ready."

  Karfhud nodded and started up the passage, but the Thrasson caught hold of the fiend's shoulder and took the lead himself. In the cramped confines, it would be easier for the tanar'ri to reach over his head than for him to strike around the fiend's dark bulk. Theseus sprinted ten paces up the tunnel and turned down the first side corridor, where he stopped so suddenly that Karfhud slammed into his back and sent him tumbling across the floor straight toward what had caused him to stop.

  Me.

  I am standing, as I have been since Karfhud tumbled down the chute, waiting in the darkness as I promised to wait, my halo of blades scratching at the tunnel ceiling, my gown hanging limp and still in the damp air, my feet flat on the stone, invisible, a spider awaiting her prey. He should have rushed headlong into my arms, the smell of old death thick in his nose and worry for the elf pounding in his breast, his blood boiling with battle fervor, his nerves prickling with watchfulness – but when he rounded the comer, his mouth fell open, he stopped, and the tanar'ri hit him in the back. Now here he lies, upon my very feet, gaping up at my countenance and white with fear.

  How he can see me, I wish to know.

  The Thrasson's mouth starts to work, and he lifts himself on his foot and three hands and scrambles away backward. "The-the-the Lady!"

  The tanar'ri and the bariaur scowl at his terror and look straight through me and show no sign of fear, and so I know they cannot see me.

  "She's only in your mind." The bariaur pushes past Karfhud and goes to shake the Thrasson. "Stop imagining her – before we see her too!"

  The tanar'ri pulls the old cleric back. The fiend cannot see me directly, but he knows what is in the Thrasson's mind, and so he supposes me to be some new trick of Sheba's.

  We know better, do we not? Someone warned the Thrasson I would be waiting, just as someone also showed him how to see the Pains. For this second betrayal, I should kill him on the instant. The matter would be simple now, with his god-forged armor lying crumpled and useless back in the mazes, with him groveling on the ground before me like any common bloodblade vain enough to think I care – and what punishment more fitting than to rob you of your hero so close to victory or defeat? To never know whether he could have slain the monster, saved Tessali, won back his memories, and – doubtful though it seems – learned the meaning of his maze? That punishment you deserve, for betraying my trust, and for so much, much more.

  I push a fingernail toward his torso, and a hole the size of an arrow shaft appears in his chest; dark blood spurts out in a great, throbbing arc, spattering the walls and imparting a faint, coppery tinge to the passage's fetor. The Thrasson does not scream or thrash about in agony; all his golden husks have long since ruptured, and only the black ones remain. I have been expecting them to burst for some time now, but in that, too, I have been disappointed. He only gasps in astonishment and stanches the flow by sticking a finger into the wound.

  The insolence! No mere man of renown may refute my will. I drag a finger up through the air; a red seam opens along one side of his throat, pouring a curtain of blood down over his chest.

  The astonished tanar'ri grabs him under the arms, thinking to pass him back to the bariaur for healing. I step forward, lifting first one foot, then the other off the ground, and I show myself to the Thrasson's would-be rescuers.

  Karfhud allows a groan to slip his cracked lips. We have met once before, longer ago than. I can count, when the Blood War spilled into Sigil and made the Slags, and I am the one thing in the multiverse he dreads more than he hates. He drops the Thrasson and sprints from the passage without looking back. What happened to the bariaur, I cannot say. He is gone even before the fiend.

  The Thrasson is quick to his feet and turns to follow, but him I must show no mercy. I blink, and when he takes his first step after the fiend, it is into my arms he runs.

  Angry as I am at your betrayal, I do not kill him. I have seen that the Thrasson is a man fated to cany the Pains, and it is not my place to rob destiny, only to punish you. I hug him close to my breast, as a mother would a child. He thinks to raise his star-forged sword, but he is too late; no mortal alive has the strength to free himself from my embrace. I hold him until I feel the Pains rising from that void in my chest; until my flesh tingles and flushes and shudders with delight; until my ec
stasy fills me to glutting, sates me with honeyed rapture and bliss rolls into sweet agony; until my body nettles with scalding anguish; until I boil in my own sick regret, and still I hold him. The well pours forth, fills me with anguish as fire fills a forge, and still I hold him. I have but one chance, and now all Sigil's hope lies with the Amnesian Hero.

  Yet, do not think I have forgiven your betrayal. You have made yourself a part of this, and so I give you the same privilege that I gave Karfhud: go and wander the mazes alone, never look upon the Thrasson again, leave him bleeding and friendless in my tender arms, the Pains rooting deep down in his soul-or remain loyal; continue along with him and suffer the same as all who call Theseus their friend. The choice belongs to you, and that is vengeance enough for me. Reprisal

  Who can say how long the Thrasson has been cringing there in the fetid damp murk, his knees and his elbows and his face all cold upon the floor? Long enough for the stink of fear to fill the tunnel, long enough for the welts to become blisters, long enough for the blisters to swell into pods and the pods to start their throbbing, long enough for the husks to stretch out their black waving spines and curl their tips into barbed, man-catching hooks.

  Check yourself. You know what to look for: a welt, a blister, a rising boil or red pimple, an abscess, a sore you wish you did not have. You're part of it now, one of the damned and the damning, one of the wayfarers who brings a little something extra back from his trip, one of Sigil's bright-shining angels of pain. You will ask yourself, when you happen on some glassy-eyed derelict wandering mad in the streets or hear an injured friend wailing in agony, if it was you who passed him the pod; you will suffer a little with each poor wretch; you will be quietly grateful the husk was not on you when it burst.

  Blame me if you will, but these Pains you have earned. I hope you will bear your few better than the Thrasson his thousand.

  Still he cringes there on the floor, a blob of spiny pulsing pods, looking more like the egg sack of a bebilith than a man. How long has it been? More than minutes, maybe more than hours, perhaps even days. He may mean to starve himself, though I doubt even he can say: never has a whirlpool spun so fast as the one in his mind is spinning now.