Her mood was soon quelled by the walls around her. They were carved with horrible bas reliefs interspersed with lines and lines of engravings of archaic runes. The carved figures depicted heroes suffering deadly tortures at the hands of leering humanoids, torn apart by chaotic beasts, and fried, frozen, dissolved, and poisoned by dragons and beholders and other deadly creatures.
The ugliness of the walls seemed to go on forever and, with each twisting and widening of the passageway, the scenes grew larger as well as more obscene and gory.
Alias felt a growing revulsion which turned her stomach sour and tightened her throat. She kept her eyes forward and tried not to look at the walls anymore.
The passage widened further one last time before ending abruptly in a wall twenty feet ahead. This wall was completely different from the disturbingly carved stone passages Alias had come through. Constructed of blue glazed brick, it was bound together with a red-tinged mortar. Down the center of the mortar work were great gouges, as if a giant claw had been scratching at it. At the base of the wall lay the crumbled figure of Dragonbait.
The swordswoman rushed forward and knelt at the lizard’s head, laying the finder’s stone on the ground.
“Dragonbait! Are you all right?” she asked. She’d whispered the words, but the corridor caught and amplified them so that her echo boomed back at her.
As Alias knelt beside him, the lizard turned his head to look up at her. The change in him was horrifying. He was completely emaciated. His scaly flesh hung about his frame as if his muscles had been eaten away by months of starvation. Wear and exhaustion were etched deep into the lines of his face. His tongue lolled out the side of his mouth, and he panted heavily in the dusty air. His eyes, normally a dead, yellow color, now looked even worse—their clear sparkle had turned to a murky gray.
A deep, violet perfume rose from his body, something Alias had never noticed before. Forgetting he could not really answer, she asked, “What happened to you?”
The lizard pointed his finger back down the way they’d both come, and he tried to push her away from him in that direction, but his shove was far too feeble to budge her. A low snarl escaped his lipless mouth.
Alias stood up. “All right, I’m going,” she agreed, understanding his signals perfectly. “But not without you. Come on, I’ll help you up.”
Dragonbait pulled heavily on her arm and rose to his feet. His legs looked too spindly to support his weight. He leaned on his sword like an old man with a cane.
What could have done this to him? Alias wondered. She felt reluctant to leave without exploring this place, but she was too frightened by the lizard’s condition to delay getting help for him. Maybe, she thought, I can find a cleric to heal him in one of the army camps.
Then she noticed that many of the backward-curved teeth at the end of his sword were damaged—chipped off or curled askew. Realizing the sword had caused the scratches in the brick wall, she joked, “If you wanted a slegehammer for a weapon, you should have asked back in Shadowdale.”
Dragonbait tugged on her arm, anxious to hurry away.
Alias had never seen him frightened before, but she had no wish to meet whatever had done this to him either. She stooped to retrieve the finder’s stone.
As she stood up with the goatherd’s gift, Alias felt a throbbing curiosity about the blue and red wall. She reached out to stroke the blue-glazed bricks with her fingertips.
The wall glowed. For a single pulse of a human heart, the bricks shimmered and then became translucent. From behind the wall, a bright blue light shone, silhouetting the lines of red mortar and turning the passage where Alias stood an eerie aqua. Then the bricks returned to normal and the light faded.
Alias stood, staring at the wall in amazement. It was some moments before she became aware of the writhing sensation on her arm. The sigils were wriggling and twisting like maggots nesting in her flesh, and the unholy sign of Moander seemed the most vibrant. The fingers of the hand appeared to clench and flex, while the mouth in the palm snapped its fanged teeth open and closed.
Fascinated, Alias reached out to stroke the wall again. Dragonbait’s hand snatched at her wrist and pulled her back. Then some pain forced him to release her and clutch at his chest. He fell forward, his sword clattering to the stone floor, making a ringing noise down the passageway.
“Dragonbait! What’s wrong?” Alias gasped, kneeling again beside him. Then she saw it—a bright, blue light, pouring out between the weave of the lizard’s shirt, escaping even through the flesh of his hands held over his chest.
“Gods!” the warrior whispered. “No. It can’t be.” She shook the lizard by the shoulders, dropping the finder’s stone to the floor. “What’s on your chest?” she demanded.
Dragonbait took a deep breath and held his head up. He untied the fastenings that held his shirt closed.
Alias gasped. The same sigils. In a different shape, but the same sigils. The same blue, gemlike, writhing, azure-lit brands. The scales over the pattern were translucent just as the flesh covering the pattern on Alias’s right arm was.
“Why? Why didn’t you tell me? Are you one of their pets, too?” she growled angrily.
Dragonbait met her angry eyes with his own, but there was neither shame nor triumph in his look, only sadness. Now he smelled to Alias of roses. It brought to her mind the morning in Shadow Gap when he’d buried the barbarian’s sword. The sword he’d used to destroy the kalmari.
“Oh, Dragonbait. I’m sorry,” she whispered. Of course he wasn’t an enemy or a traitor. He was her friend and probably another victim like her. That had to be the reason she felt such a kinship with him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered gently, reaching up with her right hand to touch the markings that scarred his body. Energy crackled through her fingertips and over the lizard’s chest. Dragonbait drew a deep breath. The lines smoothed from his face, his shoulders straightened, and his eyes widened in surprise.
Alias gasped and drew back her hand, uncertain what she had just experienced. She didn’t feel any weaker, so she didn’t think Dragonbait had sucked the energy from her. But she couldn’t possibly have healed him. She had no training as a cleric. Could the sigils know how to help someone else branded the same way? It didn’t seem likely, but Dragonbait’s awful condition had been corrected by the mere touch of her hand.
Dragonbait retied his shirt fastenings and stood up easily. Shouldering his sword, he offered her his arm. Alias accepted it with a smile and used it to balance herself as she rose to her feet. The warrior woman shifted her sword to her left hand as she reached down to scoop up the finder’s stone.
Alias gasped. Her fingers reached of their own volition, not for the light, but for the wall. She broke out in a sweat in her effort to pull her hand away from the blue bricks. She hadn’t actually felt the wall this time; her hand seemed to pass through it as though it were an illusion. The wall reacted in the same extraordinary way it had before.
Again, the bricks seemed to go clear and the passageway was bathed in blue light. The effect lasted a few moments longer this time. The sigils on her arm grew brighter.
Dragonbait knocked her to the ground, away from the blockade, and whatever lay on the other side, beckoning her hand to turn traitor to her body. Dragonbait stood over her, his muscles taut, ready to keep her from reaching out for the wall again. The smell of violets wafted from his body even more strongly now, and Alias wondered if that was the scent of his sweat or his fear.
Out of nowhere came the chant of a magical spell, and a sparkling dart slammed into Dragonbait’s body. The lizard was propelled backward into the brick wall.
Alias gasped again. The wall remained solid and unaffected by contact with the lizard’s body. She leaped up and spun about, sword raised to defend against the attacker.