Finally, the thing’s efforts ended. Aric was himself again, weakened by the experience, soaked with sweat that chilled him in these subterranean depths. But himself, just the same.
“I’m fine,” he said. “But … that was strange.”
“What happened?” Ruhm asked. “You were lost.”
“Yes … wait, where’s Damaric?”
“He went on ahead,” Amoni said.
“By himself?”
“I hope so. I don’t think there’s anyone else down here.”
“Do you … feel anything strange? In your heads?”
“Nothing in mine,” Ruhm said.
“I don’t,” Amoni said. “What are you talking about, Aric?”
Aric got to his feet. His head still swam, and the ground beneath him seemed unstable, shifting moment by moment. But an overpowering urge to get down the stairs filled him, to get to that metal. “Come on,” he said. He hoisted the broadsword and started down the steps.
With every spiral of the staircase he grew stronger. The metal no longer sang to him the way it had, and the visions had already faded, like memories of some event that had happened to him years before.
The cavern’s floor was uneven, but a path had been worn smooth between the bottom of the staircase and the great mass of metal. Before the metal, his hands resting against it, stood Damaric.
Aric reached the bottom first and ran toward the looming bulk. He heard Amoni and Ruhm close behind.
“Damaric!” Aric called.
The soldier didn’t respond. Damaric just stood there, looking at the mound of piled steel. Aric shouted his name again, once again earning no response.
In the gentle glow of the rock walls, the steel gleamed, its varied tints and hues reflecting colored light back at the observer. As he neared it, Aric felt a strange sense of familiarity, as if seeing home after a long absence.
Damaric still hadn’t turned. Aric put a hand on his shoulder. “Damaric?”
Now Damaric whirled about, his face a twisted mask of rage. He lashed out with a clenched fist. Aric, taken by surprise, raised no defense, and the fist caught him on the cheek. Aric crumpled to the cavern floor, dazed. The broadsword flew from his hands.
“Damaric!” Ruhm shouted. “Why—”
Damaric stepped past Aric and toward the goliath, spinning his singing stick in his hands. Its whirling, musical tones were loud in the quiet of the cave.
Aric pawed the ground for the dropped sword. Amoni shouted at Damaric, but Ruhm had already dropped into a defensive crouch, raising his greatclub to counter the singing stick. Damaric attacked once, the stick flashing faster than the eye could follow. Ruhm blocked with the club. The stick swept upward from below. Ruhm got his club in place just in time, and the stick clashed against it, bounced off, came back toward Ruhm’s left. Ruhm tried to swing the club, but was a fraction of a second too slow, the club harder to wield than the slender stick, even with all his might. The singing stick hit Ruhm’s shoulder, drawing blood and driving the goliath to one knee. He swung the club in a great arc toward Damaric, but the soldier stepped back and the club whistled harmlessly past.
Aric found the sword and regained his feet.
He had liked Damaric. Liking anyone came hard for a half-elf, trusting harder still. But he had seen the slave soldier as a friend, and he didn’t want to hurt him.
Damaric, however, was clearly no longer himself. He was trying to kill Ruhm, and Ruhm truly was a friend. Aric held the sword in both hands, ready to strike. “Damaric,” he said, giving the man one last chance.
Damaric turned, singing stick moving so fast it was nothing more than a blur.
And Amoni took advantage of that moment to charge in, her cahulaks swinging at the farthest extent of their rope. When the blades met Damaric’s neck, his head was sheared off, landing somewhere off the smoothly worn path. Damaric’s body sank to the ground, singing stick clattering and bouncing for almost a full minute before it stilled.
In the sudden silence, Ruhm stood up, holding his right hand over his injured shoulder.
“What got into him?” Amoni asked.
“Don’t know,” Ruhm said. “My thanks.”
“I felt something too,” Aric said. “It tried to get into my head. I blocked it, but I guess Damaric couldn’t.”
“I hated to kill him,” Amoni said.
“You had no choice,” Aric assured her. “He would have killed us all if he could have.”
She looked at the soldier’s fallen from. “All he wanted was to live free, if only for a day, before he died, right? I understand that desire completely.”
“It wasn’t him,” Aric said. “Something else was in him, possessing him. Damaric would never have turned on us like that.”
“What should we do with him?”
“He’ll have to be brought out of here,” Aric said. “But not now, not by us.”
“Why not?” Ruhm asked.
“Because we need to tell Kadya about what we found,” Aric replied. “This is what we’re here for. The sooner we let her know where it is, the sooner it can be loaded onto the argosies and we can go home.”
“Home has more appeal for some than for others,” Amoni said, glancing once more at Damaric. “At least here, on this journey, I have tasted from time to time the flavor of freedom.” She smiled. “Besides, I was brought along to help with the heavy labor, so once we tell Kadya, then my real work will begin.”
“Those dune reapers might be waiting,” Ruhm said.
“If Kadya and the others haven’t defeated them by now, then we’ll all die here,” Aric said. “I say it’s time we find out.”
On the surface again, it was immediately apparent that Kadya had defiled the land with her magic. The road was littered with the corpses of insects, and what few hardy plants had tried to grow there since the shifting dune exposed part of Akrankhot to the sun had turned to ash.
Amoni swore. “There are better ways,” she said. “Kadya doesn’t understand the forces she’s playing with.”
“Or does,” Ruhm countered. “And doesn’t care.”
“In either case, I see no reapers,” Aric said. “That’s something, anyway.”
“Something, I suppose.”
On the way back to the main avenue, they came across the corpses of several dune reapers, blackened as if burned by terrible fires. Amoni frowned at them as they passed by. “I don’t want to know how they died,” she said. “It’s too terrible.”
“They would have killed us, given the chance.”
“That’s in their nature,” Amoni said. “There’s nothing they can do about it. They have to feed their queen. And it’s in our nature to fight back, not to consent to being sacrificed. But we have minds that can overcome our instincts.”
“You’re not saying we should have just let them kill us.”
“I’m not,” Amoni said. “Just that if we’re to be better than unthinking beasts, we have to take into account the cost of our decisions.”
Aric let the matter drop. He didn’t understand quite what Amoni was driving at. Most people hated defiling magic, as did he. But that hatred was a gut reaction—much, he supposed, the same as the instinct that drove dune reapers to hunt and to take their prey back to the nest to feed their bloated queen. Those few occasions he had seen defiling magic at work, he had been disturbed by the effect it had on living things around it—in the case of the halfling attack on the caravan, even sucking the remaining vestiges of life from wounded soldiers. He didn’t know enough of preserving magic to know, except through stories, how different it could be.
Kadya had destroyed the reapers before they could kill every member of the caravan. That was a good thing. Rather than argue with Amoni about it, he scanned the streets they passed for the rest of the expedition.