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He read her meaningful glance and decided to push the subject further and gauge her response. There was power in knowledge, and he needed to know how much power she had.

"And the Shield?" he asked.

"The Shield? Do you consider the Shield itself a threat?"

"That depends," he answered, though his thoughts swirled with the answer she had truly given him: that she did not know the secrets of Shandaular-and that he was far more alone than he suspected. Looking at her he wondered what her memory of him had become. "Am I to be executed when we reach the Shield?"

For the briefest of moments he saw a glimmer of softness in the eyes behind her mask, a hint of caring that made him feel human again, but she looked away. The hardness in her voice betrayed the glance when she answered.

"The othlor have not passed any sentence upon you," she said. "This journey-this final journey-was at your request. The only danger you face, that any of us face, is the Nar and whatever they hope to accomplish here."

"And the durthan," Bastun said, motioning toward Anilya and Ohriman.

"Yes. The durthan as well," she said quietly, studying the woman who would have been her sworn enemy under normal circumstances.

Bastun took a breath and said directly what she had not. "And me."

She made no show that she had heard him at all. Her eyes remained fixed on Anilya until the durthan returned the stare, then Thaena looked down and returned to her watch for Duras.

"Yes," she finally whispered. "You too."

Time crawled as they waited for the scouts to return. The wind picked up, stirring the falling snow into a dance of whirling particles in the torchlight. Anilya stood impatiently across the road, looking between Thaena and the direction of the Rashemi scouts. Her warriors grumbled and paced, bundled in heavy cloaks. Ohriman sat crouched in the snow, wearing only his light armor and plain clothing beneath. He did not shiver or show any sign that the chill affected him. He made even the stoic Rashemi look frozen by comparison. Smirking, he winked a catlike eye at Bastun and rubbed quickly melting snow between his bare hands.

Bastun had met with and studied beings that had been touched by fiendish blood, commonly called tieflings. Ohriman's ancestry was intriguing in a scholarly sense, but something in the sellsword's eye, the tiny glint of nearby torches, a gleam of cruelty or amusement-or both-troubled Bastun deeply.

Unflinching under Ohriman's scrutiny, Bastun almost missed the faint sound of voices hiding in the wind. Listening carefully, he made out speakers, distant and indiscernible, but different than those of the city's spirits. In a pause between gusts, the faint ringing of steel on steel clattered and echoed down the path. Both groups stopped their pacing and conversations, taking in the noise and looking to Thaena. The ethran's reaction was swift and decisive.

"Quickly! Move!" she shouted, a command echoed by Anilya to her own troop.

The fang surged forward into the mist, followed by the sellswords. Thaena, Bastun, and Anilya fell in behind the warriors, running sure-footed through the snow. The voices and sounds of battle grew louder as they wound through the ruins, echoing as if from a cavern. Voices of pain and anguish mingled with those sounds, cries of suffering unlike anything Bastun had ever heard before. Turning a wide corner, the edges of a large circle of destroyed buildings came into view, and he surmised their location with dawning horror.

Here in the center of Shandaular, down curving stairways to a blackened stone square, lay the origins of the entire city and the reason for its destruction-the Hall of the Portal. They ran down the steps, eyeing the fallen columns and piles of rubble that lined the curved walls of the Hall. Bastun had studied the vague references about what lay inside-and the warnings about approaching the site after sunset. Flickering light painted the stone in shades of blue and green. Dancing shadows on the