"So do I." For once, the Amnesian Hero had no answer for the tanar'ri to pluck from his mind.
The ground was not churned up, as was to be expected after a fight, and, while the eddies had dusted the entire area with ash, the two depressions where the Amnesian Hero and Jayk had sat talking were completely filled, yet the basins where the amphora had rested and the monster's knees had pressed down were covered by only a light coating.
"You are right, Thrasson." Karfhud gazed up and down the blind. "This battle site makes no sense."
"Will you allow me the privacy of my own thoughts?"
"Why do you need privacy – unless you're trying to hide something?" Karfhud hung his sagging face over the Thrasson, curling the swollen black lips of his muzzle just enough to bare the tips of his yellow fangs. "Certainly, you do not concern yourself with proprieties. The thought has not crossed a human mind that could offend tanar'ri sensibilities."
"I doubt the tanar'ri have sensibilities," grumbled the Thrasson. "And I certainly have nothing to hide. You can read minds. You must know my opinion of you by now."
The Amnesian Hero turned away to see if he could learn more about what had happened to his companions. Given how often eddies spun into the blind to coat everything with a fresh layer of ash, he knew better than to think he would find many hints on the ground. Instead, he walked along the wall in both directions, searching for anything to suggest there had been a battle: stray weapon marks, blood-soaked clods, indentations left by huried bodies.
The Amnesian Hero found nothing, which, he decided, meant nothing. The battle could easily have been fought without leaving its mark on the wall. His companions might have escaped without a fight. Or, when they reached the mouth of the blind and found him missing, they might have fled before the monster arrived.
"No, that cannot be what happened."
Karfhud's intrusion startled the Amnesian Hero so badly he jumped. He landed with his sword half-drawn and spun on the fiend, angry enough that he felt flames licking in his eyes.
Karfhud showed no sign that he noticed the Thrasson's fury. "Your friends were in a hurry, or they would have taken the amphora with them."
"Not necessarily." The Amnesian Hero did not know why he bothered speaking, except that it made him feel a little less like a fiend in the making. "To them, the amphora was nothing but trouble."
Although the Thrasson did not bother to elaborate, Karfhud nodded. "Ah, yes: the giant."
The Amnesian Hero grated his teeth, but dropped to his hands and knees near the place he and Jayk had been sitting. Karfhud had given him an idea. He began to sweep his hands through the ash, searching for the wineskin he had left lying on the ground. Presumably, the skin would still be there if his companions had left in a hurry.
The Thrasson brushed something cold and much too smooth to be Silverwind's wineskin. He lost contact with it, then spread his fingers and raked both hands deeply through the ash. This time, he caught the thing squarely. His pulse raced in his ears. He half-expected whatever it was to bite him and squirm away, but the object remained dead in his grasp. It had a strange texture, with a soft exterior wrapped over a hard, lumpy core. From one side protruded several long, flexible appendages…
The Amnesian Hero's stomach went hollow and qualmish, then he found himself shouting in revulsion as he pulled a rather fine-boned hand from deep beneath the ash.
"Foul Hades!" The Thrasson dangled the thing by its thumb. "There was a fight!"
A sick, guilty feeling welled up inside him; while he was off chasing his wine woman, the monster had come and devoured his companions.
"Do you have to be so maudlin? It is only a hand!"
The tanar'ri snatched the thing from the Thrasson's grasp, then wiped the ash off the severed wrist and raised it to his muzzle. From the fiend's mouth snaked a long, pointed tongue coated in white fungus. The tip flickered over the stump several times and when Karfhud began to rub it back and forth over his taste buds, the Amnesian Hero forced himself not to look away. The cut was uncommonly clean; even his star-forged blade could not have cleaved the bone so smoothly.
Several nauseating moments later, Karfhud lowered the hand and sighed, deeply satisfied. "Elf – a little old, but elf nonetheless."
The Amnesian Hero nodded. "Tessali. One of our party."
Karfhud dropped to all fours and snuffled along the ground, allowing the Thrasson his first good look at the enormous back-satchel the fiend had fetched after their exchange of oaths. Secured snugly by heavy leather straps buckled around the tanar'ri's powerful wing joints, the sack was fashioned of some smooth, lightly colored hide that might have once belonged to either a pig or a man. It was large enough that the Amnesian Hero could have stood inside with Tessali at his side, although they would have been covered only to their chests. The top was drawn closed by a sturdy cinch strap, but several open pockets had been sewn onto the side to hold odds and ends.
"If you find my rucksack interesting, you would do well to remember that it is my rucksack." Karfhud pushed himself into a kneeling position and, before the Amnesian Hero could ask the reason for the threat, displayed Tessali's second hand. "This is not the doing of the monster."
The Amnesian Hero had already reached the same conclusion. The cut was far too clean, and, cunning as the beast was, the Thrasson could not imagine why she would leave both hands behind. "Then who?"
Karfhud shrugged, then lowered his face into the ash again. Still carrying Tessali's hands, he began to snuffle toward the back of the blind, raising a great cloud of gray dross each time he exhaled. The Amnesian Hero limped along behind, trying to puzzle out what had happened. Something-he could not even guess what-had come along and cut off Tessali's hands, then chased away the elf and the others. Sometime later – and not long ago, judging by the thin coating of dust in the knee depressions – something else, probably the monster, had come along and taken the amphora.
Karfhud reached the back of the blind and started to sniff up the wall, then suddenly stopped and cocked his head, nearly hooking the Thrasson's cheek with a black horn. "You have a marilith in your party?"
"Marilith?"
"Female tanar'ri! Six arms, serpent's tail." Karfhud cupped his hands beneath his chest. "Three or four big-"
"No! Not among my companions."
Karfhud managed a real smile. "Well then, I think we know who cut off these." He displayed Tessali's hands, then reached around behind his wing, bent his arm in a direction it should not have bent, and slipped the appendages into one of his rucksack's exterior pockets. "I am fortunate indeed."
"Fortunate?"
Karfhud attempted a wink, momentarily hiding one maroon eye between the folds of his blighted face. "You cannot imagine the centuries that have passed since last I did the fray upon a female tanar'ri!"
With that, the fiend grabbed the crest of the wall and pulled himself up. The Amnesian Hero looked back toward the mouth of the blind, torn between following Karfhud and going back to search for the amphora. His promise to Poseidon – and, in truth, his curiosity about his own past – obliged him to pursue the jar; his duty to his companions obligated him to go after them. He could not do both. Once he climbed over the wall, it would prove difficult to find his way back here, and every minute that passed before he started hunting the amphora slashed his chances of success.
"I may have misjudged you, Thrasson. I took you for the sort of fool who might regard the lives of his companions more highly than his own desires." Karfhud, already sitting atop the wall, swung his legs to the other side. "Make your decision soon. I won't wait for you."
The fiend pushed off and, even before he dropped down the other side, vanished from sight. The Amnesian Hero snorted his frustration, then jumped up, caught hold of the crest of the wall, and pulled himself to the top. As much as he relished the thought of being free of Karfhud – though he suspected that could not truly be while the tanar'ri's heinous face remained tattooed on his palm – the Thrasson knew the fiend had judged him correctly. No man of renown could abandon his companions in a time of such dire need-even if it meant breaking his word to a god. He pulled his chest atop the wall, then swung his legs to the other side and pushed off.
It is not like passing through a conjunction.
The Thrasson's stomach does a flip. His body rotates, his feet drifting up over his head. He is falling, he thinks; then no, he realizes, he is floating; an instant later, he decides he is suspended like a beetle in amber, in the syrup of nothingness. In his nostrils, there is nothing, not even the reek of his own unwashed body. His ears roar with silence, his skin prickles with the touch of emptiness, his tongue craves the taste of his own teeth. He sees what dead men see: not darkness, but an ocean of endless, colorless depths. Something goes slack, and the Thrasson feels himself uncoiling inside; his spirit and his mind and his body all drift toward their own separate peace.
Then a terrific jolt drives his knees up to his chin. He finds himself squatting on his heels, his ears ringing as though someone had boxed them, his bones shuddering from the impact. It would be wrong to say the Thrasson has landed; that would imply falling in the first place. It is closer to the truth to say his paradigm has shifted. Now he sees himself crouching between two rows of brambly hedges with dagger-length thorns, watching in morbid astonishment as Karfhud snuffles about searching for the marilith, harrowing the sandy floor with his blighted face.
It is clever, is it not, how the Amnesian Hero avoids thinking, even to himself, what a buffoon is that lust-struck tanar'ri? The Thrasson knows, better than any of us, that there is no marilith; would not his Hunter's nose have scented her spoor back in the blind? Would not those special eyes have seen beneath the top layer of ash to pick out her slithering trail, or those fingers have sensed the slimy dampness of her passing? The blood that has so roused Karfhud's passions belongs to Jayk, who was conceived at death and spawned from a marilith's leathery egg, but the Amnesian Hero is careful to think of none of this. He watches the tanar'ri sniff, his thoughts full of concern for his companions and strategies for fighting snake-women. Wiser to play the fool, to hide his nature until the time comes to betray his new keeper and make the fiend his.
A dangerous game, to be certain – and the only way to defeat the monster of the labyrinth – but how does the Thrasson know all this? Certainly, I did not tell him. And who else could, but you? Someone has a loose tongue, I fear, and they will pay.
But do not trouble yourself now. It will change nothing in the end, and what good is punishment if it comes expected? Even now, Karfhud has changed directions. The fiend is sniffing back toward the Amnesian Hero, who stands in the middle of the passage, somehow not thinking about the faint rasp of Jayk's breath whispering down the passage from the intersection, somehow pretending that his Hunter's ears don't hear a thing. What happens when Karfhud stops at the Thrasson's feet, it would not do to miss.
"This cannot be right!" The fiend has jerked his face from the sand and pointed down the passage, away from the intersection. "The blood trail leads around that comer, but the marilith went the other way – with a human!"
The Amnesian Hero scowled. "That can't be. I was the only human in our party."
"My nose may look blighted, Thrasson, but it does not lie."
Karfhud turned to stomp up the passage, leaving the Amnesian Hero to clump behind as best he could. Though it was only a short distance to the intersection, the tanar'ri reached it several paces ahead of the Thrasson. The fiend stopped and looked first left, then right. His great wings flared, drawing a curtain of darkness across the corridor; from his throat rumbled a sonorous growl, so low it felt like an earth tremor.
"Tiefling!"
Jayk's voice came around the corner high and shrill, cracking with fear as she uttered her incantation. A tremendous crackling bounced down the passage, and Karfhud's huge wings folded over his back satchel just as a cloud of fire boiled out of the side corridor to swallow him. The passage filled with a yellow smoke that stank of brimstone and charred flesh. The Thrasson stopped and turned away, shielding his face, daring to hope the tiefling had freed him from the fiend.
The heat of the flames continued to build. The Amnesian Hero flattened himself on the sand and tried to hold his breath. The foul smoke had already filled his longs, and he could not keep from coughing; with each gasp, he swallowed more of the fiery fumes, which caused more convulsions, and he thought he would suffocate.