Stalking Darkness

with it. Blood had soaked across the deck to where Alec knelt, staining his bare knees.
    Leaving the soldiers to pitch the bodies overboard, Mardus took Thero below again.
    Vargûl 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, Harid, 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 Orëska 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.