With a jubilant shout, Verminaard brought the mace shrieking down at his pressed opponent, who scrambled free of the blow at the cost of a shattered shield. Reeling, his left arm limp and useless, the swordsman backed from the violet darkness and staggered up the rise once more, seeking the vantage of higher ground.

Now! the Voice urged again as the spiked head of

Nightbringer swirled, its stone surface roiling like black lava. He's yours if you strike now!

"Who are you?" the wounded knight rasped, weaving from pain and exertion.

Don't tell… don't tell. He will entangle you in honor___

"Verminaard of Nidus," the young man announced proudly. "I have come far to meet the lord of this castle and demand from him what is rightly mine."

The knight dropped his sword and fell to his knees. With his one good arm, he removed the helm and aven-tail. His blond hair was streaked with first gray, but his eyes were brilliant and young, as resolute as they had appeared nine years ago across the Bridge of Dreed.

Verminaard gasped. It was his own face, thirty years older.

"You!" he cried. "Laca Dragonbane!"

The man met his stare serenely. "What would you have from the lord of the castle, Verminaard of Nidus?"

Verminaard took a tentative step toward his blood father, then another. Laca rose slowly to his feet, turned his back on the approaching warrior, and walked calmly, almost casually to the side of the wounded knight.

"I would have the castle." Verminaard replied. "I would have the rest of my inheritance, Laca. And I would have vengeance on you for your years of silence, for my years of suffering at the hand of Daeghrefn for your deed."

Laca knelt silently by the blinded man, cradling the fellow's head in his lean, long-fingered hands. He glared up at the monstrous young man before him and spoke to him coldly, as though across a great chasm.

"You're a creature apart now, Verminaard of Nidus," he pronounced. "And you have made your choices." He lifted the helm from the face of the injured man. The clouded eyes rolled back in the head of the hapless man, who lay stunned and moaning in Laca's arms.

"Abelaard!" Verminaard roared. "No! No!"

The wounded man blinked pathetically at the sound of the voice, raising his bruised arm vaguely.

"No!" Verminaard shouted again, and fell to his knees, Nightbringer black and glittering in his hand.

He would strike something. Rock and wind … Laca … himself. He would end everything, here at the borders of Estwilde, and there would be nothing but night, and night upon night….

And a darkness rushed over him, and he saw and remembered nothing.

Laca watched the young man vanish in a swirl of black, engulfing fire. Clouds broke over the landscape, and for the first time in hours, sunlight spread over the bailey walls of Castle East Borders. Wearily the Lord of East Borders took the reins of the shivering Orlog and led the stallion back toward the injured Abelaard.

"Who . . . who was it, Uncle Laca?" the young man asked, rubbing his vacant and useless eyes.

"I don't know," Laca replied.

In the Khalkist Mountains, overlooking the Nerakan plains, overlooking Nidus and the razed forest to its south, Verminaard received a new and stern discipline at the hands of nature.

He awoke in a sunlit grotto high above Castle Nidus. The shriek of a raptor wakened him, and he sprawled blearily, painfully on the stone floor of the little cavern, breathing in the moist air, the odor of guano and mildew,

and a dark, alien stench that underlay all these-something profound and fierce and reptilian.

He could not figure how he had come there, but he knew he was far from East Borders and close to home.

Nightbringer lay beside him, glowing with a cold, ebony fire. He shuddered at the memory of those flames on his arm, of the black oblivion, and most of all at the prospect of wielding the weapon again.

"No more," he whispered, his voice as dry and desolate as the vanished plains of Estwilde. "I shall bear you no more, fight no more."

And yet as he said the words, his hand reached for the handle of the mace and closed about it.

He did not know how he had come to that spot. He had knelt in Estwilde, raging and mourning, and the darkness had swept him away. And now he was miles from the fields of East Borders, where he could see the smoke rising from the hearth fires of his childhood home.

Though Nidus was in full view below him, it was a week before he considered returning there. He stayed in the grotto, in its deepest recesses, faring to the mouth of the cavern only at night, and then only when the hunger became overwhelming. Though the sun would not harm him, daylight was strange to him now-alien and unnerving, like darkness to a child.

Far better to stay in the dark awhile, he told himself as the red moon passed sullenly overhead on his second night in the cave. Better to abide here and mend and recover strength.

He ate what bitter roots he could forage from the spare highland terrain: knol and dioscor and the foul-tasting purple betys-chastise root, old Speratus had called it. And by night, the brown madfall beetles were sluggish and unaware. Their flesh was cold and slippery, but it was nutrient enough as long as he did not eat the poisonous tail.

Once he stood at the edge of a precipice, bathed eerily

in the red glow of Lunitari, and tried to drop Nightbringer into the obscure and rocky darkness. It seemed fitting, as though dropping it into the darkness would make retrieval impossible if he was weak and returned for the mace. But the weapon fastened itself to his hand, glowing and droning, twisting like some monstrous black leech, and he told himself, Not yet. I can rid myself of it anytime, once my strength is returned. But not yet.

Yet he mistrusted his own thoughts, and so he tried once more. A shadowy pool lay in the nethermost reach of the cavern, so far from light that only the green glow of the vespertile bats lightened its black waters. The madfall beetles who dwelt by its banks had evolved for generations in the near-total darkness, eyeless now, their shells a pale, translucent pink. It seemed like the spot to leave Nightbringer, and for a moment, his heart leaped. There would be rest from all of this-from hunger and cold and from the consuming presence of the mace. He would find peace in the depths of this darkness.

But though Verminaard plunged his hand in the icy water and tried to release the weapon into the calm, deep pool, still the mace adhered to the skin of his hand. It glowed beneath the water, if glowed was the word, a deep, velvety blackness within the abject shadows of the pool.