"I wish I was dead," Owan said. She had no idea how Aerie could manage reconstituted eggs that were runny and burnt at the same time.
Imoen kicked her under the table. "Don't, you'll hurt her feelings." Owan noticed that Imoen was artistically moving around the lumps and goo on her plate to make it look like she'd eaten, and every so often smuggled pieces into the disposal unit with her good hand. Aerie bustled around cheerfully in a flower-print apron, and Owan amused herself by wondering how the apron made its way into the Last Standing's arsenal of weapons and equipment in storage. She couldn't imagine long-ago Bhaal brooding over pancakes on a stove or turning on the blades of a mixer for chocolate cake.
Keldorn and Melissan, old campaign veterans, stoically made their way through second helpings.
"Don't be a barbarian, Monty," Turandot complained, "you can't say thousand-year-old wine tastes like piss and mud. At least, not in decent company."
Ourawang noticed Montaron wasn't drinking much; careful, as he should've been. They were close to the Wolfling World, the Tomb of the Hadenmen, and whatever else lay there. Important to keep your wits about you.
Owan took a dram of the wine herself, just to wash away the taste of the awful breakfast. It might've been good wine once, nine hundred years ago.
Adam paced the room as if he couldn't bear to sit, not with his goal so near. He promised to awaken the Sleepers from their tomb so they would resume their war against the Empire, and Owan didn't doubt that promise.
Melissan was a different story, and she'd stayed vague on what she offered in the Wolfling World no matter how Owan pressed her. She said an old friend of hers lived there, and Owan ought to follow in Bhaal's footsteps; any more than that, she said, would be better explained by doing than talking.
Owan studied Keldorn, who was carefully scraping his plate clean. Legendary Keldorn Firecam. Something of a hero of hers, once. He'd really fought most of the battles that he was given the credit for, and used small groups of rebels to give the entire Empire pause. He bent over his plate as if he were afraid of spilling the food on his clothes, and brought his spoon quickly to his mouth so his hand didn't have time to shake. Owan thought, or hoped, that he wasn't as broken as he said he was. In some way Keldorn's features seemed to have sharpened since she'd first met the shuffling shapeless janitor, giving back the strong lines of his nose and jawbones.
Turandot coughed obtrusively. "We're nearing the Wolfling World," she announced, all but singing the words. Owan stood, and watched it appear across the viewscreen.
It was a dead world, covered in ice to a depth of miles. The orbit was knocked awry by some catastrophe, and it no longer received warmth from the sun. It wasn't possible to pierce the frozen surface by any normal methods, but the Last Standing carried the coordinates of another transfer portal.
"I want to go directly to the tomb of my brethren," Adam rasped. "Is there no portal there?"
"There's not. Besides, it would be rude to bypass my friend." Melissan's smile had no humour in it.
"I'd like to see for myself." Adam's hand manifested a pair of wires.
"As you like," she said.
The Hadenman's unnatural green eyes focused inward, as he probed and pierced the Last Standing's systems. He seemed to believe Melissan, after a moment had passed, and took a place at the back of the group. Ourawang would have almost thought he was nervous.
Montaron was impatient, fidgeting with his foot and glaring suspiciously at the transfer portal. Imoen was quiet, standing next to Aerie. There was eerie singing.
"Lord Bane, Lord Bhaal, Lord Myrkul
"Were the finest lords you'd see.
"Lords Myrkul, Bane, and Bhaal
"Became the Dead Lords Three.
Xzar had regained his manic energy, constantly twitching from his latest Blood hit, shifting from one foot to the other while he sang. Owan grimaced.
"Lord Myrkul was a strange pale lord
"Far from his form his dread soul soared."
The transfer portal activated incredibly smoothly. Owan's footsteps echoed down another stone hall, built this time with black decaying rock. They were deep under the Wolfling World's surface, far below the ice. Xzar's singing echoed in the bare passageway.
"Lord Bane became the fear of men
"He built himself in twain again.
"Beware, beware the Lord of Bhaal—"
"No singing." Adam stood him down, saying what everyone else was thinking. The Hadenman was intimidating by any standards. Xzar looked almost normal without the writhing tattoos on his face, and like a toothpick next to Adam. Of course, there was also his constant twitching, and the unhinged look in his eyes.
"What's wrong with this song?" Xzar protested. "It's an old one. Every aristocrat's child knows it."
"You ain't an aristocrat." Montaron pushed Xzar forward.
"Couldn't be less so! My father was a test tube and my mother an esper. It's all from digging into other people's minds. Owan, have you heard it?
"Bhaal, worms feast on bitter bile and gall,
"Of his children brought up to—"
His accent was much more aristocratic than Owan's own. "Never," she said. And who the hell was Lord Myrkul? she thought. Bane, Bane, the Hadenman—she knew that name; it was the Hadenmen's battlecry. Did her ancestor Bhaal once walk with Hadenmen? Maybe it was all a folk tale. She scraped a hand along the wall and saw it covered in moss.
"How is this powered?" she demanded from Melissan. They were breathing air, and now there were plants growing inside this dead world.
"There's a power source. A little like that new stardrive you mentioned," Melissan said.
"Alien?" Owan asked. The moss had started to spread into vines, green strings eroding small tunnels in the stones and destroying them little by little. There was even a light at the end of the tunnel, a steadily pulsing orange like a dying sun. Heavy scents began to ripen in the air, coriander and cilantro and honey and citron.
Aerie lifted her head as the passage widened into a forest. She thought there must be a roof over it, somewhere, a barrier before the dead ice above, but the trees were too tall and the canopies too wide to tell. Fir needles crunched under her feet. Insects buzzed, and caterpillar coccoons nestled between thick bark. The spreading trunks and roots carried the weight of centuries, thicker than a grown avariel's wingspan. It had been a long time since Aerie had moved through anything like this place, spreading plants everywhere her eye could see. But this forest was nothing like Faenya-Dail, without the clear open sky and jagged heights and depths that made Aerie's home beautiful. It spoke to something older in her, she thought, a savage spark of humanity that existed long before her ancestors changed themselves. The woods are dark and close and deep, where the wild things wait. There's bloodstained teeth and a howl lurking in that shadow. Lay a trail of white stones, or you'll not live to find your way out again.
The most unnerving thing about it was the way the light didn't come from any source whatsoever. Owan pointed it out aloud, as if she wasn't even scared of what might hear her.
The bees were black, here. Aerie stared at a large one, its wings moving madly. Life was different on each planet; the Empire liked to terraform so many planets with their own familiar species, but the native adaptations still thrust their way through. But it wasn't at all certain that any of this was natural at all.
Aerie stumbled on a tree root. Her hand scraped past sap as she fell. She didn't notice Xzar reaching out to help her up, because she saw what lay beyond that tree. She screamed.
"It's dead," Montaron said. He dared to poke a sword toward the beast's eye. The glassy eyes looked real, and the fanged mouth was open as if it was in the middle of snapping up prey. It was covered in dark brown fur, and had a long lupine muzzle. Most of it wasn't even there, but the head mounted on a stick was terrifyingly large. Here there were wolves.
Aerie stumbled on, past more of them. More stuffed wolves, lying in the forest as if they were about to wake up and hunt. Maybe they'd been under stasis too. She shuddered and whirled from one to the next, not sure why she was afraid. She was no good at walking on unsteady ground, and tripped again. Xzar steadied her, his fingers clutched around her sleeve. He returned a wolf's wide grin to a severed head, and reached out a hand to grab the ear.
"Don't do that." Melissan slapped him down. "He's nearby, and he gets touchy."
Aerie walked behind Imoen, and stopped when she stopped. In a clearing was a huge shape she would have sworn wasn't there before. Another wolf, a living one, standing two-legged and upright, broader than Adam and taller than Xzar. The huge tree he stood by looked fragile next to him. Only Melissan dared to walk forward.
"It's been a long time," she said.
"What gave you the right to interrupt my peace?" The voice was low and measured, smooth and burred like wild honey.
The wolf was a man and the man was a wolf. The dead wolves had looked too fearsome to be sapient, but Aerie could see the truth now. As they approached she could see his eyes, human and limpid and gentle, a strange contrast to his ferocious body. Close up, he smelt of patchouli and cannabis.
"Rights aren't given, they're taken," Melissan said. "What have you been doing with yourself, these last nine hundred years?"
"I garden, and tend to my fallen. They're still mounted where you left them," he said.
"So it's as powerful as ever. I expected as much."
"You brought your children here?" The wolf-man's eyes flickered across all of them the same, as if even Owan were lowly and weak.
"We're not her children." Ourawang stepped forward, her shoulders tense and her hand on her sword. "And you are?"
"Cernd here is a Wolfling," Melissan said. "One of the Empire's first attempts at gengineered soldiers, unstoppable killers. They turned out a shade too unstoppable, and so the Empire terminated the project and ordered mercenaries to destroy them all. Only one survived."
"I never read the mind of anyone who'd even heard about Wolflings," said Xzar, shifting quickly from one foot to the other as if he couldn't bear to stay still, not with Blood rushing through him and his own restlessness. "Or not that I remember. They found a way to completely reverse senescence, at least not without cutting your heads off? And even halt the decay of corpses? Can Aerie see what's left of their minds? Questions abound!"
"Ignore him. He's mad," Melissan said, echoing everyone else's thoughts.
Aerie reached out, cautiously, to read Cernd's mind. Not because Xzar suggested it; it was because Uncle Quayle taught her to use her powers when she needed to. The Wolfling's emotions were calm, but it was the calm of careful discipline rather than innocence. Beyond that, Cernd felt like a steel wall. He was even more impossible to read than Adam, private and shielded. He knew what she was doing, and gave her a look. There was no malice in him, but his calm dignity was terrifying. Aerie stopped as if she'd been caught with her hand in the biscuit jar.
"Do these children know you've brought them here to be murdered?" Cernd asked, his voice neither raised or lowered.
"I have faith in them," Melissan said. "They found me on Tyranthraxus and fought their way this far."
"You've brought them to their death. Or have you forgotten that the Madness Maze birthed the Darkvoid Device, Melissan?"
"If this can bring out the Darkvoid Device ..." Owan said. She held herself straight, and spoke with the familiar strength Aerie knew. "The Empress would listen to us if she even suspected we had the Device. We are desperate. The Empire is vast and powerful as it was in your time, and it's grown far more corrupt. A tiny number of aristocrats hold power, espers and clones are slaves, and ordinary people fear death and worse if they speak out.
"We'd be as bad as the Empress if we used the Device, and Melissan says that's not possible, anyway. But we need something behind us."
Cernd's voice was still quiet and gentle, but Owan stopped talking when he started. "The Empire has always been that way," he said. "But you don't need to convince me. I'm only a gardener, for the Maze.
"The Madness Maze is an alien artefact, from aeons before the Empire. Before humanity. The Empire never created it, only discovered it. Out of the first humans who went in, a scant few survived. The scientists who created the Wolflings, my kind. Melissan knows how many of us were allowed to survive, afterwards. The Maze tests you, and even if you live, others will see you dead."
A shiver ran up Aerie's spine at the cold words.
"Their cause is just, their hearts pure, and they are resolved to continue," Melissan said.
"Speak for yourself. The odds are crap," Montaron said.
"No one came through while I was in stasis, did they?" Melissan asked.
Cernd looked at her. "Who would find this place, nestled in the heart of the Darkvoid?"
Imoen raised a hand. "The Hadenmen. Adam says they used this world as a base."
"The Maze is, and was, too dangerous to meddle with," Adam snapped. His muscles were coiled into knots, and if Aerie hadn't known better, she'd swear he was sweating and afraid. "Our Tomb is on the other side. We stayed away. No one else knew."
"You're wrong," Ourawang said. Her eyes pitilessly swept across all of them. "Turandot says the Last Standing's sensors have an Imperial starcruiser. The same one from before. They've already caught up. Anyone want to stay behind and welcome the Empire?"
"How—" Adam began.
"We'll answer that later." Owan turned. "Let's go."
They walked through the last Wolfling's garden, behind Melissan, through the forest's depths. The light seemed dimmer, and the trees darker. The Madness Maze, an alien artefact that created the Darkvoid Device, death to a thousand suns. Lord Bhaal went through, long ago, but what happened to him wasn't really clear. They could see the Madness Maze now, a vast structure beyond the forest, at first looking like just high steel walls. Then it started to resolve into subtle narrow overlapping passages, as intricate as the human brain. Aerie brushed away a low-hanging branch, her fingers catching on the thorns, and met another's hand, helping her. Xzar was smiling.
"I don't understand you," she said. "You lost everything. Your esp was part of you, all your life, and I took it from you. You need the Blood to be here. I lost my wings and I—I don't mind if the Maze, or the Empire, lets me die. How can you be happy?"
"Some things we both understand." Xzar looked ahead at the Maze, grinning widely as if it were only an interesting puzzle to him. "Curiosity. A sense of wonder. You've seen espers fly and walked on two lost planets."
"Or else—you could go back," Aerie said. "You're human now, not an esper, not property. People wouldn't hate you any more. You could live like a normal person," she babbled.
"My face has changed," he said dryly, looking down into her eyes with bare skin rather than bizarre black designs criss-crossing him, "but I put a lot of effort into my criminal record. Making a splash in the holos. And now I want to know what happens next."
The Maze had approached unexpectedly quickly, steel-like walls twelve feet high, shining and shimmering with a light all their own. Aerie's heart beat quickly. The forest abruptly stopped next to the steel walls, like a dissector's knife had cut through the planet. She thought of Irenicus, and then Xzar. She wondered exactly how the Maze had killed everyone else.
They all looked at each other, but there was nothing more to say. Owan was bravest, Melissan unreadable. Adam and Keldorn were afraid, and Imoen and Montaron already on the lookout for hidden traps. They crossed over from the wood to the Madness Maze, and there was only silence.
—