Keith Decandido: Under the Crimson Sun

Without Fehrd and without Rol, Gan had absolutely no idea what he was going to with his life now.

First, obviously, he was going to have to heal. But Gan had always followed the lead of the other two. Somehow he doubted that the emporium would be willing to let him stay on-and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to. Tricking people out of money really wasn’t Gan’s thing. He preferred to take it more honestly.

But the choice wouldn’t be his for a while. Certainly not until he healed up. Attempts to move his limbs had sent pain slicing through his body, pushing against the power of Karalith’s draft, and he thought it best simply to stay still.

As he faded into sleep, he wondered what the frip he was thinking playing that damned frolik game …

Templar Tharson strode through the winding corridors of the dungeons beneath Destiny’s Kingdom.

Tharson had never had much use for the place. Since becoming commander of the Imperial Guard, he’d had to spend far more time there than he was comfortable with. He preferred the simplicity of the soldiers’ barracks. None of the ostentatious lion architecture that infested the city-state like a disease, just simple beds, simple walls, simple doors.

A simple life.

His life had become anything but simple, of course. The higher he got in rank, the more politics entered into it.

Tharson hated politics.

At least at his rank, he got paid more. A few more years in service to Hamanu, and he’d have accumulated enough coin to retire.

And if he could bring a victory to the king, he could retire in luxury.

The creature that he and Drahar found in the arena was the first step toward realizing that goal.

Of course, there had been setbacks.

The worst was yesterday’s debacle at the Pit of Black Death. The creature Rol Mandred had turned into went mad, killing several of the court’s top psionists, including Drahar. In the chaos, the new owners of the Pit disappeared with three thousand gold.

Tharson had already sent a garrison of soldiers after those owners, but they had a large head start-it had been hours before anyone at the palace even knew that something bad had happened at the arena-and the templar didn’t expect them to be caught.

There would be no helping them if they came back to Urik, though …

But Tharson did not despair. Drahar’s death was tragic, but he had done his part in identifying this new resource that they could exploit.

It was up to Tharson to exploit it.

He arrived at the dungeon that was occupied by a fighter named Daj Douk.

Looking into the barred window of the dungeon door, he saw that Douk was covered in reddish bumps all up and down his skin just like Mandred had been.

Tharson smiled. Soon he would have an army of unstoppable creatures at his command. And then he would be able to conquer Tyr in King Hamanu’s name.

The Voidharrow had lost its form.

The plan had been given a brutal setback. The weakling human Mandred had proven a perfect host, feeble minded and easily taken over. True, he prattled, but after millennia alone in the destroyed universe, the Voidharrow had to admit to not minding that so much. Perhaps that was why he had let Mandred retain a fraction of consciousness-which was foolish, in the end, for that had enabled those little beings to stop the Voidharrow, preventing him from spreading glorious chaos in Tharizdun’s name.

The Voidharrow required another host.

Around him were mostly corpses.

The only one still breathing was the minion. But his mind had been shattered by the effort of destroying the Progenitor’s host.

Which was fine, as the Voidharrow did not need his mind. In fact, the lack of it would save him the trouble of having to destroy it.

Slowly-ever so slowly-the Voidharrow gathered itself. The red powder on the stone floor of the arena near the shoulders of the former host started to quiver and coalesce and liquefy.

It took some time-the Voidharrow had been greatly weakened by the minion and the woman and that strange half-breed who had distracted him on the physical plane-but eventually, he was successful in returning to his natural state.

Then it was simply a matter of oozing across the floor to the prone form of Chamberlain Drahar.