Crusader

“I would be honoured if you would accept me in, Axis,” DragonStar said, “but as your friend before anything else.” Caelum had already welcomed DragonStar into the family House. The fact that Axis now wished to do the same meant that the final bridge between DragonStar and his birth family would finally be repaired.

Tencendor could not be rebuilt without it.

Axis stood, and as he did so the door to the chamber opened and Azhure walked in.

DragonStar rose, staring at her. He wondered if it was her womanly instinct that allowed her to walk into the chamber at precisely the right moment, or just her attentive ear at the keyhole. She had changed from the ordinary day gown she’d been wearing when she’d fetched him to this chamber, and now wore a robe of purest black that was relieved only by a pattern of silvery stars about its hem. Her raven hair tumbled down her back to be lost in the folds of her skirt, and her blue eyes danced with love and, possibly, even a little of her lost magic.

DragonStar stared, then collected himself and half-bowed in her direction, acknowledging her as mother, woman and witch.

Axis smiled and held out his hand to Azhure, then held out his other hand for DragonStar. “It seems, my beloved,” he said to Azhure, “that we have a new companion for our faded constellation.”

She laughed, then embraced them both. “I welcome us all back into the House of Stars,” she said.

Chapter 4 WolfStar (#ulink_075336db-0378-5663-8977-ac95bac6d218)

WolfStar rolled over on his back and screamed. Agony knifed through his belly, then ran down his legs in rivulets of liquid horror. He jerked his knees to his chest and hugged them, now gasping for breath, and trying to ride out the successive waves of pain that coursed through him.

Raspu’s poison, he supposed, or Mot’s, or Barzula’s, pumped into him during successive rapes.

“Ahhh,” he groaned, and rolled over, weeping with the pain and the loss and the overwhelming humiliation. Humiliation, not so much from the demonic rapes he’d been forced to endure, although that was part of it, but from the realisation that everything he’d done, and everything he’d thought himself master of during the past few thousand years had been a lie. He’d been a tool and a pawn as much as had the sweatiest and stupidest peasant and now he’d been disposed of as easily.

The Maze — well taught by the Star Dance — was the hardest and cruellest master of all.

WolfStar — Enchanter-Talon, feared by every Icarii in existence.

WolfStar — crazed murderer, loathed by scores of generations of Icarii.

WolfStar — Dark Man, Dear Man, friend and ally of Gorgrael the Destroyer.

WolfStar — lover and ultimate destroyer of Niah.

WolfStar — manipulator of the entire world and all who lived within it.

WolfStar — utter, utter Fool.

A rat ran over his right foot, scratching deeply into his flesh as it went, but WolfStar paid it no heed. Over the past hours (days? weeks? he did not know) countless creatures had scrambled over him, trampled him, urinated on him, nibbled, bit and tasted him, and yet none had done him the kindness of killing him.

All WolfStar wanted was to die … to escape the utter humiliation his existence had become. But no thing or one would grant him death in this world of death made incarnate — this damned, cursed Maze. Bleakness swarmed constantly over him, and madness probed intermittently at his mind: the hours when the Demons raged drove him to the brink of insanity, but never (oh please, stars, let the horror tip me over!), never beyond into the oblivion of total insanity.

Why? Why couldn’t he become one of these mindless creatures that swarmed incoherently and incontinently through the Maze? All WolfStar wanted was to become mindless, because then he would feel no pain.

WolfStar’s fingers scrabbled over his chest, feeling again the clotting blood of Caelum. He gagged, sickened by the feel, as also by the damned persistence of the blood.

He couldn’t wipe it off, it wouldn’t go away. It wouldn’t even dry to a scab that he could scrape off.

WolfStar was marked by Caelum’s blood, and he wondered if that was what protected him.

What had happened to the boy? Why had he walked onto the point of Qeteb’s blade?

WolfStar had turned the horrific moments of Caelum’s death over and over in his mind, and yet he still could not understand them. What had gone so wrong? Why hadn’t Caelum fought back?

Or, at the least, why hadn’t he made an effort to escape? WolfStar could crawl no more. He propped himself up against a wall, holding his belly with one hand, dragging air into his lungs.

Suddenly Caelum walked about the corner and came directly towards him.

He had a beatific smile on his face.

“Caelum StarSon!” Qeteb screamed, and stood in his stirrups and raised his sword.

Caelum, now directly before WolfStar, turned and stared at the horror approaching, stared at the rearing, plunging creature above him, and at the Demon screaming on its back.

“Oh, how I love you,” he said.

“No!” Qeteb shrieked, driven beyond the realms of anger, not only by Caelum’s words, but also by the serene expression on his face.

The Demon drove down his sword.

WolfStar could not believe it. As the sword plunged downwards, Caelum held out his hand and seized the blade. It made not a whit of difference.

The sword sliced through Caelum’s hand and plunged into his chest, driving Caelum back against WolfStar, who grunted with shock.

Qeteb leaned his entire weight down on the sword, twisting it as deep as he could go, feeling bone and muscle and cartilage tear and rip, seeing the bright blood bubble from the StarSon’s mouth.

What had the boy been doing, wandering through the Maze with a beatific smile on his face while all the Demons of Hell rode at his heels?

“There had been magic worked there,” WolfStar whispered, inching his way further down whatever dead-end of the Maze he’d chosen this time. “An enchantment … Caelum was caught in enchantment… but whose? Whose?”

Suddenly WolfStar was angry, and it chased away all his bleakness and humiliation. Someone — not the Demons — had worked an enchantment on Caelum … Who had control of enchantment in this Star Danceless world?

And if someone did have control of enchantment, how could WolfStar work that to his own will?

“Who are you?” he whispered, now dragging himself along with one hand while the other held his ruined belly in vaguely one piece. “Who are you?”

He repeated the sentence, over and over, making of it a mantra. He repeated it for hour after hour, dragging himself through the Maze, ignoring the countless creatures — once-animal and once-human or Icarii — that flowed about and over him. He continued to repeat it through the Demonic hour of dusk that probed at his mind, and he continued to repeat it through the night until it almost drove him mad.

At dawn, as the light broke over the Maze, WolfStar realised something.

He was not mad. And he was not dead. Neither madness nor Demon had touched him, or even taken any interest in him. He had survived, for whatever reason and for whatever purpose.

And he had to have a purpose, because without a purpose he was nothing but a pawn.

A glow of light filtered down through the stone walls of the Maze, lighting the flagstones before him.

A million symbols flowed over and through the stone. The Maze, taunting him.

“Damn you! Damn you!” WolfStar whispered, furious that the Star Dance and the Maze had manipulated him for so many millennia. From the heights of power, the glory days of thinking that all Tencendor danced to his manipulations, WolfStar had fallen to being nothing but a useless puppet crawling through the stone corridors of the Maze.

A Talon-Enchanter with no more power than an ant.