“What’s that?” Neeva demanded.
“I’m not sure,” the mul lied. “After I killed Umbra, I passed out for several days. When I woke up, it was in my chest.”
Though Rikus did not like lying, he intended to tell Neeva the truth later. With Caelum present, however, the mul thought it best not to mention the wraiths-especially since they wanted him to recover the same book that he was supposed to be returning to the dwarves of Kled.
“You woke up and it was there?” Caelum asked, incredulous.
“That’s what I said!” the mul snapped, pulling his robe closed.
Caelum calmly reopened the robe, then began poking and prodding at the sore. His fingers were quickly coated with rancid-smelling yellow goo. Rikus winced in pain and pushed the dwarf’s hand away. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“I believe it to be a sort of magic vex,” Caelum explained, cleaning his hands on Rikus’s robe. He raised a hand toward the sun. As his fingers turned red, he said, “With the power of the sun, perhaps I can rid you of the stone.”
“You’d better know what you’re doing,” Rikus growled. He did not know which appealed to him less: remaining at the mercy of Tamar, or being indebted to Caelum for ridding him of the wraith.
Instead of replying to the mul’s threat, Caelum laid his hand to the glowing wound.
Where the dwarf touched him, Rikus felt a brief sensation of burning. An instant later, Caelum’s face went pale and he let out a terrified shriek. A gray shadow crept from the mul’s festering wound and moved over the dwarf’s hand, darkening the glowing flesh. The blotch slowly spread up the cleric’s arm, slipping onto his shoulders and up over his head until only the dwarf’s red eyes shone from the shadow. Even they quickly faded from view, rolling back in their sockets as Caelum toppled over.
Rikus screamed, feeling as though someone had shot a flaming arrow into his heart. The inside of his chest erupted into a shattering agony, and tongues of searing pain ran down into his legs and out into his arms. With each passing moment, the raging anguish grew worse, until the mul feared that a fire was consuming him from the inside out. In Rikus’s mind, smoky tendrils of blackness rose to cloud his thoughts, and his ears were filled with a loud, pulsing roar.
Tamar’s voice came to him over the throbbing in his ears. Your dwarven ally cannot save you, she hissed.
The fire inside Rikus’s body grew unbearable. He rolled away from Neeva’s grasp, then lay on the ground thrashing in pain until, at last, his thoughts turned to smoke.
The mul did not die. Instead, Rikus saw himself inside his own mind, walking blindly through an endless bank of mordant gray fumes. As he moved onward, choking and gasping from the caustic haze, his possessions slowly disappeared: first the robe he had been wearing to hide Tamar’s gem, then his sandals and the Belt of Rank, and finally even his breech-cloth. He found himself completely naked and without equipment, save for the Scourge of Rkard floating at his side as if sheathed in an invisible scabbard.
The mul continued to wander through the hazy landscape of his mind for what seemed like hours, but may have been days or merely minutes. Occasionally he shouted for Neeva, and even for Caelum, but there was never an answer. Rikus’s stomach began to churn with anxiety, for he had seen a similar haze before.
Once, after losing a gladiator fight with a horrid beast brought in from the desert wastes, Rikus had hovered near death for several days. During that time, he had found himself standing atop a distant cliff, overlooking an endless curtain of gray nothingness. That ashen haze had looked exactly like the dingy fog that now enclosed him.
A shiver of dread ran down the mul’s back. In retaliation for letting Caelum try to destroy her, the wraith may have killed them both.
“Tamar! What did you do to me?” Rikus yelled. With his scream, the mul’s fear gave way to anger. He set off through the gray haze at a sprint, reaching for his sword and shouting, “Come out, wraith!”
No sooner he had grasped the Scourge’s hilt than the gray haze disappeared. He saw that he was standing in midair, upside down with an even surface of granite many feet below. In the next instant, he crashed to the polished floor, barely tucking his chin in time from keep from landing on his head.
A roar of raucous laughter sounded all around him. He found himself in a vast room smelling of unwashed men and lit by dozens of opened-hearthed fireplaces. Around each fire whirled the lithe silhouette of a tall dancing girl, singing and shouting ribald invitations to the drunken men watching her. Serving slaves wandered the crowd, making sure that each spectator had a full cup of potent, foul-tasting broy.
At Rikus’s back, a silky voice called, “See, you’re not dead.”
The mul scrambled to his feet and turned around, where he saw an unclothed woman with a dark complexion and long black hair. She stood before a soft bed of sleeping furs. Her dark eyes narrowed to mere slits, and a wicked smile crept across her wide, full-lipped mouth.
“Tamar?” the mul gasped.
The woman nodded, then beckoned him forward with a single long-nailed finger. “You’re learning to use the Scourge,” she said. “Good. You can trust it when you cannot trust anything else-even your own thoughts.”
As the mul stepped toward the woman, he saw that she stood nearly as tall as he did. Her voluptuous body was sinuous and strong, but she smelled of must and decay. She opened her arms to the mul. “Come. I will teach you to use it against the mindbender.”
“Why?” the mul asked, stopping short of her embrace. “You must know that after I defeat Maetan, I’ll never give you the Book of Kemalok Kings.”
Tamar’s smiled turned ominous. “I think you will, when the time comes,” she said, motioning for him to step into her arms. “Now, come here-if you wish to learn more about your weapon.”
Rikus stood his ground, acutely aware of his own nakedness. “I’ve no wish to couple with you, wraith-even in my thoughts.”
Tamar’s eyes flashed fiery red, but her voice remained calm and silky when she spoke. “And I have no wish to lie with you, half-dwarf.”
Nevertheless, she reached out as if to grasp him. Long claws sprouted from her fingertips, and glistening fangs grew from beneath her full lips.
“Stay away!” Rikus cried, slashing his sword across her stomach.
The wraith jumped away, but the blade grazed her abdomen and opened a long gash. Tamar cried out, but not in her own voice. Her hair changed from silky black to blonde, her eyes from ruby red to emerald green, and her body from sinuous to powerful.
The honey scent of chiffon blossoms came to Rikus’s nose. With a sinking heart, he realized that what he saw before him was not inside his mind. He was looking at Neeva, and they were standing under the same chiffon tree beneath which K’kriq had laid him earlier that morning.
“Why?” asked Neeva.
She held her hands across the cut Rikus had opened in her stomach, blood seeping through her fingers. Her face did not show pain or anger, only shock and bewilderment.
“It wasn’t you!” Rikus cried. Such a feeling of remorse washed over him that he felt sick to his stomach. He tossed his sword aside and dropped to his knees. “Forgive me!”
The scent of mildew and rot returned, and before the mul’s eyes, her face became Tamar’s. Gray smoke rose from the ground, and once again Rikus was trapped in his own mind.
The wraith stepped toward him, her ruby eyes glowing like hot coals. As before, she was naked, and there was a long gash across her stomach in the same place Rikus had wounded Neeva.
“Fool! Never let go of the Scourge!”
She slapped the mul with an open palm. The blow rocked his jaw as though she had been holding a warhammer. Unprepared for the attack, Rikus fell over backward, his ears ringing. He closed his eyes and shook his head in an attempt to regain control of his thoughts. Finally, the sound in his ears faded, and he opened his eyes once more. Tamar still stood before him. Keeping a careful eye on her, he returned to his feet.