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.

"Perhaps we have underestimated this child," the dyrmagnos observed, cocking her head to regard Alec more closely. "There may be depths within him still to be sounded."

Alec shuddered inwardly under the greediness of her scrutiny.

"Yet these tales of yours said nothing of the Helm?" Mardus continued. "I am not surprised. At the end of that war we were betrayed. Aided by traitors, fawning Aurenfaie wizards, and a pack of ragged drysians, the wizards of the Second Oreska managed to capture and dismantle the Helm before its full power could be invoked. Fortunately, they could not destroy the individual pieces. Our necromancers managed to recapture a few of them; the rest were carried off and hidden. For six centuries my predecessors have hunted for them, and one by one, they have been recovered."

"That's what you were doing in Wolde," Alec said slowly. "You'd been to the Fens, that village Mi—"

"Micum Cavish?" Ashnazai smiled as he broke off suddenly. "Don't trouble yourself. You screamed that name out to us already, just as you did all the rest of it."

Mardus paused as the serving boy brought in platters of roasted doves and vegetables.

"Do try to eat something," he said, serving Alec himself.

Surprised at his own hunger, Alec obliged.

"Now, where was I?" Mardus asked, spearing a dove for himself. "Ah yes. The three fragments guarded by Nysander were the last, and of those, the bowl was the most gratifying discovery. We knew of the others, you see, both stolen from under our very noses by your friend Seregil, as it turns out. But all trace of the bowl had been lost until the two of you led us to it with the theft of the Eye. And only just in time, too. As it is, we've only just enough time to complete the ritual preparations."

"The sacrifices, you mean?" asked Alec.

"Yes." Mardus sat forward as the servant brought in a course of roasted pork. "Each soul taken, each libation of heart's blood, brings us closer to Seriamaius, to his great power. No man could be a vessel for such power, but through the Helm we may partake of some small portion of it. By "small portion" you must understand I am speaking in relative terms. Once restored, the Helm will increase in power as more lives are fed to it until a single thought by the wearer can level whole cities, control thousands. And you, Alec, you and Thero, I am holding in reserve for the final sacrifice of the reconstruction ceremony. A hundred people will have perished before you, allowing you the privilege of watching every death until your own turns come, two last, perfect sacrifices. The blood is to a great extent merely symbolic of the life force given up to the god. The younger the victim, the more years taken, the richer the sacrifice."

Irtuk Beshar patted Alec and Thero on the shoulders. "A young Oreska wizard and a half faie boy—the youth of our greatest enemies! What could be more pleasing to our god than that?"