This was the source of the weeping he heard in the night.
This had all been planned in advance, the sacrificial victims packed away in the hold as carefully as the wine and oil and flour.
They were not soldiers, but thin, pale, ordinary-looking souls who blinked and wept as they were herded together near the rail. Most were ragged or dressed as laborers, just innocent victims, he guessed, plucked from the darkened streets of whatever ports the ship had put into before Rhiminee.
"O Illior," Alec whispered as Mardus came to stand beside him, hardly knowing that he spoke aloud. "No, please. Not this."
Mardus slipped an arm around his shoulders and closed his hand over the back of Alec's neck. Giving him a playful shake, he purred, "Ah, but you should savor it. Don't you understand yet how great a part you played in bringing this about?"
Faint with revulsion, Alec made the mistake of looking up at Mardus. For the first time he saw the depths of naked cruelty in his eyes, and in that awful moment he knew as certainly as he'd ever known anything that Mardus had purposefully allowed him to see behind the mask, was delighting in his fear and confusion, savoring it the way another man might savor the first caress of a long-desired lover. And perhaps worse even than this was the conviction that Mardus was nonetheless sane.
Some of the prisoners were staring at Alec, mistaking him for one of their murderers.
He couldn't watch this again. Tildus had moved away when his master had come over, and the rest of the soldiers were watching the ceremony. Jerking out of Mardus' grip, Alec dashed to the rail behind him with some instinctive, half-formed notion of throwing himself overboard, swimming as far as he could toward the shore, giving up if he had to.
He'd gone no more than two paces when a deadly coldness engulfed him, locking his joints, forcing him painfully to his knees. Some unseen power forced his head around to see Vargul Ashnazai holding up a small vial of some sort that hung around his scrawny neck on a chain.
"Nicely done, Vargul Ashnazai," said Mardus. "Move him a bit closer so that he can see."
Unable to turn his head or blink, Alec had no choice but to watch as the ten victims were dragged down onto the deck at Ashnazai's feet. Ten times the blade rose and fell with deadly efficiency and each heart was taken by the dyrmagnos and drained into the reeking cup.
Thero stood just beyond her and through his own helpless tears of rage and impotence, Alec saw tears coursing slowly down Thero's cheeks. It was an eerie sight, like watching a statue weep, but it gave him a sudden thrill of hope in the midst of the nightmare being acted out before him.
The white canvas was scarlet by the time the necromancer had finished. He and the dyrmagnos were smeared to the elbows, their robes sodden, hair matted with it. Blood had soaked across the deck to where Alec knelt, staining his bare knees.
Leaving the soldiers to pitch the bodies overboard, Mardus took Thero below again.
Vargul Ashnazai walked over to Alec and laid one bloody hand on his head, breaking the spell.
Alec doubled over retching. Ashnazai snatched the hem of his blood-soaked gown out of the way with a grunt of disgust, then gave Alec a shove with one foot that sent him sprawling in sticky blood and vomit.
"I look forward to cutting you open," he sneered.
Scrambling back to his hands and knees, Alec glared defiantly back at him. The necromancer took an involuntary step back, raising his hand.
Alec braced for some new agony, but Ashnazai merely turned on his heel and stalked away, snarling something to Captain Tildus as he passed.
Dread returned as a pair of soldiers stripped Alec and washed him down with buckets of cold seawater. When he was clean, they thrust him into a soft robe and turned him back to Tildus, who led him below to a spacious cabin in the stern.
To his amazement, he found Mardus, Ashnazai, Thero, Irtuk Beshar, and the silent, grey-bearded necromancer, Hand, reclining on cushions around a low table. A young serving boy placed another cup on the table, motioning for Alec to be seated.
"Come, Alec, join us," Mardus said, patting an empty cushion between himself and the dyrmagnos. He and the others had also changed clothes and cleansed away all traces of the murders he'd just witnessed.
It's as if none of that happened, he thought numbly, too shocked to protest as Tildus steered him to his place and pushed him down.
Thero sat on Irtuk Beshar's left. At her nod, he raised his cup mechanically to his lips.
Wine dribbled down through his beard as he drank, his eyes locked on some distant point.
The sight filled Alec with a strange guilt, as if he'd spied on something unseemly.
Looking away, he fixed his attention on his cup as the servant filled it with pale yellow wine.
"Come now, dear boy, why so shy?" Mardus coaxed, the mask of gentlemanly solicitude in place once more. "It's an excellent wine. Perhaps it will put some color back in those wan cheeks of yours."
"Strong emotion does so spoil a young man's beauty," Irtuk Beshar added, her coquettish tone as incongruous with her cracked, blackened face as her robes and veil.
The entire situation had such a surreal quality that Alec found himself replying, "I don't care for any, thank you," as if he were Sir Alec of Ivywell dissembling at some noble's banquet with Seregil.
"Such pretty manners, too," Ashnazai noted.
"I am beginning to see your point, my lord. It will be a pity to kill him. He would ornament any gentleman's household."
Alec's sense of dreamlike detachment increased as the grisly conversation flowed around him in polite salon tones. If this was the onset of madness, then he welcomed it as a gift of Illior.
Whatever the case, he suddenly felt a giddy lightness coming over him. He'd experienced this before, though never so intensely. When death was your only option, it made you feel very free indeed.
"My lord," he began. "What is this all about? The wooden disk, the crown? I know you're going to kill me as part of it, so I'd just like to understand."
Mardus smiled expansively. "I would expect no less of a person of your intelligence. As I have said, you and all your misguided friends have been instrumental in a grand and sacred quest. At first even I didn't perceive the significance of it, but Seriamaius has revealed how you were all simply instruments of his divine will."
Mardus raised his cup to Alec in a mocking salute. "You can't imagine the trouble you saved us, bringing so many parts of the Helm together for us to reclaim with a single brief stroke. Not to mention the damage we were able to inflict upon the Oreska in the process. Why, in one night we managed to accomplish what might otherwise have taken months, even years. And we do not have years, or even weeks, now."
"A helm?" Alec asked, seizing on this new reference.
Mardus turned to his companions, shaking his head.
"Imagine! This Nysander, great and compassionate wizard that he is, had his closest friends carry out his thievery without the least hint of what they were being embroiled in. Why, he regarded Seregil and poor young Alec and Thero here almost as sons.
"Yes, Alec, the Helm. The Great Helm of Seriamaius. The coin, as you so amusingly refer to it, the cup, and the crown are all elements of a greater design. When brought together with the other fragments at the proper time, they will rejoin to form the Helm revealed to our ancestors by Seriamaius more than six centuries ago."
"It is the ultimate artifact of necromantic power," Irtuk Beshar told him. "He who wears it becomes the Vatharna, the living embodiment of Seriamaius."
"The legends from the Great War. Armies of walking dead," Alec said softly, thinking of the ancient journal he and Seregil had discovered in the Oreska library.