Together, they strapped the wicker basket to Halfman’s back. There were thongs that wrapped around each shoulder and his hips to help him bear the great weight of the clay pot full of sewage. Hopper promised to have another pot ready by the time Halfman got back.
Halfman trudged through the cold basalt hallways. It was always dark in the slaves’ passages, with only enough torches burning so the slaves could avoid colliding.
“I’m tired of banging toothless slaves,” a voice said around the next intersection of hallways. “I hear the new girl’s in the Tygre Tower. They say she’s beautiful.”
“Tavi! You can’t call it that.” Bertold Ursuul was Dorian’s great-grandfather, and the man had gone mad, believing he could ascend to heaven if he built a tower high enough and decorated it solely with Harani sword-tooth tygres. His madness embarrassed Garoth Ursuul, so he’d forbidden the tower to be called anything but Bertold’s Tower.
Dorian stopped. There was a torch at the intersection and no way he could retreat without being noticed. The aethelings—for no one else spoke with such arrogance—were coming toward him. There was no escape.
Then he remembered. He was Halfman now, a eunuch slave. So he slouched and prayed that he was invisible.
“I talk how I please,” Tavi said, coming into the intersection just as Halfman did. Halfman stopped, stepped aside, and averted his eyes. Tavi was a classic aetheling: good-looking if with a hawkish nose, well-groomed, well-dressed, an aura of command, and the stench of great power, despite being barely fifteen years old. Halfman couldn’t help but size him up instantly—this one would be the first of his seed class. This would have been one Dorian would have tried to kill early. Too arrogant, though. Tavi was the kind who needed to brag. He would never make it through his uurdthan. “And I can fuck who I please, too,” Tavi said, coming to a stop. He looked down each of the halls as if lost. His indecision froze Halfman in place. He couldn’t move without possibly moving into the aethelings’ path.
“Besides,” Tavi said, “the harems are too closely guarded. But the Tygre Tower’s just got two dreads at the bottom, and her deaf-mute eunuchs.”
“He’ll kill you,” the other aetheling said. He didn’t look pleased to be having this conversation in front of Halfman.
“Who’s gonna tell him? The girl? So he’ll kill her, too? Fuck! Where are we? We’ve been walking this way for ten minutes. All these halls look the same.”
“I said we should have gone the other—” the other aetheling began.
“Shut up, Rivik. You,” Tavi said, speaking to Halfman. Halfman flinched as a slave would. “Khali, you stink! Which way is it to the kitchens?”
Halfman reluctantly pointed back the way the aethelings had come.
Rivik laughed. Tavi cursed. “How far?” Tavi asked.
Halfman would have found some other way to answer, but Dorian couldn’t help himself. “About ten minutes.”
Rivik laughed again, louder.
Tavi backhanded Dorian. “What’s your name, halfman?”
“Milord, this slave is called Halfman.”
“Ooh hoo!” Rivik hooted. “We got a live one here!”
“Not for long,” Tavi said.
“If you kill him, I’ll tell,” Rivik said.
“You’ll tell?” The disdain and disbelief on Tavi’s face told Halfman that Rivik’s days as a sidekick were numbered.
“He made me laugh,” Rivik said. “Come on. We’re already late for lecture, you know how Draef will try to turn that on us.”
“Fine, just a second.” The vir rose to Tavi’s skin and he began chanting.
“Tavi …”
“It won’t kill him.”
The magic was a slight concussion inches from Halfman’s chest. It threw him back into the wall like a rag doll. The wicker splintered and the clay pot shattered, geysering human waste over Halfman and the wall behind him.
Rivik laughed louder. “We’ve gotta remember this next time we’re bored. Khali’s tits, it reeks! Imagine if we could break one of those pots in Draef’s room.”
The aethelings left Halfman gasping on the floor, wiping ooze from his face. It was five minutes before he stood up, but when he did, it was with alacrity. In the fear and in the miming of fear, he had almost missed it. The newest concubine could only be one woman. His future wife was at the top of Bertold’s Tower, and she was in danger.
9
The pit wyrm tore through the hole in reality and went for Kylar. The great wyrm was tubular, at least ten feet in diameter, its skin cracked and blackened, fire showing through the gaps. When it lunged, its great bulk heaved forward and its entire eyeless front opened as it vomited its cone-like mouth. Kylar leapt as each concentric ring snapped out. Each ring was circled with teeth, and when the third ring caught a tree, teeth the size of Kylar’s forearm whipped around into the wood. The pit wyrm sucked itself forward, its lamprey-like mouth inverting as the rings bit into the wood in turn, shearing a ten-foot section out of the tree trunk before Kylar landed.
Instantly, the pit wyrm lunged again. It had no visible means of propelling so great a mass. It didn’t gather itself to strike like a serpent, but moved instead as if this were but one head or arm attached to a much larger creature crouched on the other side of that hole. Again, it went for Kylar.
He flipped through the air as the tree the pit wyrm had cut fell, crashing to the ground, throwing up dust in the misty morning light. Kylar grabbed a tree and spun, the ka’kari giving him claws enough to sink into the bark and throw him back over the pit wyrm’s back. His sword flashed as he flew over the pit wyrm, but the blade bounced off the armored skin.
There was something white in the corner of Kylar’s eye. He dropped to the forest floor and saw it: a tiny white homunculus with wings and the Vürdmeister’s face, grinning at Kylar under an enormous nose. It clawed at Kylar’s face.
Kylar blocked. The homunculus’s talons sank smoothly into Kylar’s sword.
The pit wyrm lunged again even as Feir hammered its side, his sword ringing in the mists but doing no damage, not even slowing the wyrm. The pit wyrm couldn’t be distracted, wouldn’t stop until it reached its target.
Its target wasn’t Kylar. It was the homunculus.
Kylar dropped the sword and flipped once more. He landed on the side of a tree, thirty feet up, fingers and toes sinking into the wood. The pit wyrm slammed into Kylar’s sword on the ground, the cone of teeth slapping around the homunculus, digging deep into the soil as each ring of teeth slapped forward, devouring the white creature and everything around it. The pit wyrm pulled back, shaking dirt and roots and dead leaves through the air. Satisfied, it began to slide back into whatever hell it had been called from.
Then it shivered.
Feir was still striking the creature. For some reason, he wasn’t using magic. The mountainous mage struck again, a mighty hammer blow—with no effect.
By the time Kylar’s eyes found the real reason the pit wyrm had shivered, Lantano Garuwashi was halfway through its body. He was hacking at it near the hole in reality. But he wasn’t hacking. Wherever Garuwashi cut with Ceur’caelestos, the pit wyrm’s flesh sprang apart, smoking. The look on the sa’ceurai’s face told Kylar that the man was enrapt—he was the world’s best swordsman, wielding the world’s best sword, facing a monster out of legend. Lantano Garuwashi was living his purpose.
Garuwashi’s sword moved with Garuwashi’s speed. In two seconds, he had cut through the entire pit wyrm. The thirty-foot section of wyrm crashed to the forest floor, thrashed once, and then broke apart in quivering red and black clumps, dissolving in putrid green smoke until nothing was left. The stump writhed bloodlessly until Garuwashi slashed it with six slices in blinding succession and whatever was controlling it yanked it back into hell.